Vanguard Exiles Early Access Review

Magic the Gathering's designer is back with a clever take on auto-battlers, but needs time during early access to improve on the formula

Vanguard Exiles isn’t just another auto-battler—it’s a tense, mind game-heavy war of strategy and deception, where every move is a gamble and every skirmish can turn in an instant. Designed by the legendary Richard Garfield and developped by industry veterans The Tea Division, it mixes auto-battler mechanics with the calculated risk of a poker match, and the cutthroat area control of a strategy board game, all wrapped in a gritty dieselpunk-fantasy world.

When Vanguard Exiles is firing on all cylinders, it delivers some of the most thrilling, unpredictable battles I’ve played in the genre. But its rigid economy, squad imbalances, and a handful of frustrating mechanics might keep it from fully capitalizing on its best ideas.

The theme and design is cool from the get-go

A War for Survival

Vanguard Exiles plunges you into a post-World War I dieselpunk fantasy where magic and technology collide in explosive ways. Following the cataclysmic Day of Ash, fractured factions are thrown into a desperate war for survival, and as a General, it’s your job to lead your squad to victory by sending your vanguard to battle. With squads randomly generated from two out of three distinct factions, you’ll navigate a constantly shifting battlefield, making each skirmish, and game, a fresh high-stakes challenge to reclaim a shattered world.

Strategy Meets Chaos

At its core, Vanguard Exiles is a unique spin on the auto-battler formula. Unlike games where units fight automatically in a single lane (TFT, Auto Chess), this one focuses on zone control. Each round — or skirmish as the game calls it — you’ll deploy units across different zones, claim these if there's no enemy unit, fight for it if that's not the case, and earn Victory Points. The game ends when one or multiple players have more than 80 victory points, the winner being the player with the most points at the end.

But that’s easier said than done. The hidden deployment system means you never know exactly where your opponent is placing their units until the auto battle begins. That creates intense moments of mind games, but it can also feel frustrating, especially when combined with randomized unit pathing — but we'll talk about that later.

Good deployment of units is paramount to increase your success, and the game does a great job at showing your units and their attack range as you deploy them.

The map is also randomly generated, with different zones having specific victory points and special effects, as well as corridors between zones that can create interesting choke points. For example, you can deploy slow units in corridors so they can later in the turn move to an adjacent zone and ruin the initial progress your opponent has made on claming a zone. It's interesting and fresh, and every game is completely differen.

As the game progresses, the map changes enough that you cannot use the same strategy you used on the previous skirmish. Some zones will become unaccessible, sometimes splitting the map in two, and more zones and corridors will appear.

Zones might also appear with special effect tied to them, like having gold, which rewards you with +1 gold at the end of the skirmish, or have a minefield that has 50% chance at the end of the turn of dealing a massive 5 damage to all units in the zone.

It's fun and really tests your ability to outthink and outmaneuver your opponent!

The starting map is quite small and simple...

By the later stages, deployment options become wildly diverse, with special zone effects, strategic choke points, and even inaccessible areas adding layers of complexity.

And the action being spread across multiple zones, you'd expect the auto-battler aspect to feel disjointed. However, thanks to The Director system, the camera seamlessly transitions between battles, keeping the action fluid and the fights tense and gripping. This is one of the things I wouldn't have thought about from seeing trailers, but it's actually amazing in action, making the battles entertaining and clear to understand.

A Late-Game That Keeps You on Edge

Where Vanguard Exiles really shines is its final round resolution. Instead of ending the game the moment a player reaches 80 Victory Points, the battle continues through that final round, allowing for dramatic comebacks. It’s a brilliant decision that leads to some incredibly tense endgame scenarios, reminiscent of Terraforming Mars, Blood Rage or Andromeda's Edge tabletop experiences, where a last-minute power move can steal victory from your opponent.

The Resolver is a fantastic post-skirmish tool that breaks down the odds behind each round. In this case, it revealed that I had only a 28% chance to win—yet I pulled it off!

Although sometimes it doesn't go my way :(

Like the board games mentioned, I think it could benefit from similar bonus scoring mechanics tied to personal objectives. Right now, victory is purely about controlling zones, but introducing secondary objectives—such as bonus points for unspent gold, or only deploying a maximum of 2 units per zone for a skirmish—could open up more strategic paths and alternative playstyles. Heck there could even be public objectives for each skirmish that could reward a few extra points. In most of these boardgames, these additional objectives are also usually a good way to have some light catchup mechanics that this game otherwise severly lacks.

Ruined plans are a nightmare

In Vanguard Exiles, deploying units into various zones is just one part of the strategy. The squad you have selected to play with is composed of randomly assigned units from two factions, alongside a random set of special actions that can either enhance your deployed units or affect the zones themselves with special effects. These actions can be a game-changer—but they’re also unpredictable, with some leaning towards being overpowered to the point of feeling broken.

Take the Purify Station zone action. It’s a neat tool that lets you play it on previously claimed zones, adding the Toxic 1 trait, causing all units—ally or enemy—to take damage at the end of each turn. It’s effective, but not too flashy. And then there’s Ruin, a zone action that destroys a zone and turns it into an unclaimable, 0 Victory Points area. This single action can completely derail your opponent’s strategy, and while it costs a mere 1 gold, its impact feels wildly disproportionate to its price.

Sure, choosing Ruin means you can’t buy a new unit for the next skirmish, but the time your enemy spends scrambling around the ruined zone can change everything. I’ve experienced the thrill of being 23 Victory Points behind, only to snatch victory in a single skirmish by utterly wrecking my opponent’s carefully laid plans with Ruin. It’s like holding a Blue Shell in Mario Kart when you’re hopelessly behind—it feels satisfying, but imagine holding the Blue Shell while being ahead… broken right?

The AI played two Ruin zone actions (ping smoke) on a section of the map isolated by a greyed-out zone, trapping three of my units with no way to escape or score. This left me helpless as the AI steamrolled the other side of the map.

Add to that issue that you can have multiples of the same actions in your squad. and with infinite squad re-rolls, I was able to get three Ruins in my "deck" without much effort, all while having solid units to play with. When it feels this easy to break the game’s balance, it’s hard to shake the feeling that something’s off—especially when you're able to stack this kind of advantage without much risk. This randomness, while exciting, may lead to a few too many “feel-bad” moments in the long run.

The Shop & Economy Need Work

If you've ever played Teamfight Tactics, or any other more traditional auto-battler for that matter, you know these games are actually more about the strategic depth of economy management more than anything else.

Whether you’re pushing for 3-star units or saving for rare late-game powerhouses, deciding where to spend your gold adds layers of tension and decision-making. The beauty of TFT’s income system is the variety: you can hoard gold and grind out 3-star units, spend it on XP to level up and unlock rarer units, or even strike a balance between the two. Each path offers unique challenges and rewards, and knowing when to pivot is often the difference between victory and defeat.

In Teamfight tactics, an incredible amount of depth is due to how we manage our economy. Being able to spend money on units, on refreshing the offereing or buying xp to level up faster and get rarer units is incredibly important.

In Vanguard Exiles, however, the income system is much more straightforward—and, unfortunately, feels a bit one-dimensional. After each skirmish, you’re given one gold automatically, as well as a limited selection of units and actions, with one free option that is one of the three (unlimited) units you have in your squad, and two paid ones which are selected from the action and limited units pool. The twist? Gold is pretty tight, with the only way to earn more being a few +1 gold zones that can really change the flow of the game. Sure, you can have a huge payday from a well-fought battle, but if you’re sitting on 8 gold with no good options, the frustration is real.

Here I was unlucky enough to have 7 gold and no real good option to spend it. The fact that I can't at least reroll, unlock new slots or spend it on ranks or xp means it's basically dead income. And because you can only ever buy one unit per skirmish, that means that I might be stuck with gold for a while.

In its current state, income management lacks the satisfying complexity of its competitors, and while the gold system is functional, it feels like a missed opportunity to add more layers to the strategy.

What’s missing here is that crucial level of choice and strategy with your gold. Unlike TFT, where you can manipulate your economy to build towards specific goals, Vanguard Exiles doesn’t give you the same flexibility. The shop feels limiting, and the lack of a way to refresh the available options makes you feel stuck with whatever the game hands you. Imagine if you could unlock additional buying options with gold or refresh your shop for a cost—it would go a long way toward adding some much-needed depth.

There’s also no XP system to unlock higher-rarity units on the shop, and while rare units pop up occasionally, their availability feels entirely too random, with no way to influence the drop rate. I feel like the game could really benefit from a system where you can earn ranks or levels that increases the likelihood of seeing rarer units. It would alleviate those moments where you have more than enough gold but can’t get the one unit you need, and make it possible to strategically invest money to rank up faster and get more chances of drawing that important rare unit.

Teamfight tactics does that perfectly by showing the current chances of getting a specific unit rarity based on the level you have, which can be manipulated by buying XP sooner or later in the game.

And speaking of rarity, there’s barely any here. Units only come in two rarities: normal or rare. And unlike traditional auto-battlers, where stacking copies of a unit creates a stronger version of it, the game doesn’t allow you to do this at all. No matter how many times you draw the same unit, it stays the same power level. This removes a lot of the fun, strategic element of building up your units over time, and leaves you with a more static experience.

Vanguard Exiles stuck in Board Game Design?

The game often feels like a digital version of a board game in some ways — Richard Garfield is a veteran board game designer after all, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it does come with some of the typical baggage. The game’s economy, for example, is very restrictive. You earn small amounts of gold after each skirmish, which makes sense in a physical board game where tracking resources and components can become a hassle. But in a video game, there’s no reason for the same limitations to apply.

A more fluid, dynamic economy would open up a lot of strategic opportunities and give the game a more modern, digital feel. Right now, it feels like the game is holding itself back, constrained by design decisions that work in tabletop settings, but don’t necessarily translate well to the digital format. It’s as if Vanguard Exiles is still trying to follow the rules of a physical game, but as a video game, it’s time to move past those limitations.

I still think it makes sense that the game feels like it does, as I would wager Richard Garfield has spent most of his time prototyping the game and testing it in paper format. With the release of the Early Access, maybe that would change, but I'm not sure it's that easy for the designer to prototype new mechanics directly in the game, so I wouldn't bet that this feeling will go away anytime soon.

Here's what Richard Garfield's first sketch looked like.

Randomized Pathing - A conflicting mechanic

Randomized pathing is one of Vanguard Exiles’ most puzzling design choices.

Once your units claim a zone, they don’t march toward valuable objective you've selected —they just go… somewhere. This decision is entirely out of your hands, meaning your forces might split up and head to a zone you don’t care about, or even worse, fail to concentrate their strength in a contested zone, costing you the fight and valuable victory points. It’s a level of unpredictability that can feel like a battle against the game itself. This is a standard design practice for standard auto-battlers, but I am not a fan of how it works for this game in particular.

And if history is any indication, this kind of randomness can be a death sentence for strategy games. Take Artifact, Richard Garfield’s ill-fated collaboration with Valve. Despite its innovative ideas, one of its most hated mechanics was how units randomly chose their attack direction at the start of each turn. Sometimes they’d go straight for the tower—the win condition—but other times, they’d veer off to hit a random adjacent enemy, throwing your entire plan into disarray.

Here's an example of Artifact where my red hero could have attacked the tower this turn, but randomness decided that it would be attacking the opposite heroi on the left instead...

The key difference? In Artifact, that randomness was what’s known as “input randomness”—it happened before the player’s turn, giving them a chance to react and adapt. Vanguard Exiles, on the other hand, takes it to an even more extreme level by offering no way to influence unit pathing at all. You just have to sit back and hope for the best.

The brilliant skrimish analysis tool — The Resolver — will at least tell you after the fact whether luck was on your side, but that doesn’t change the fact that you had zero agency in the moment. Sure, sometimes randomness works in your favor, leading to an unexpected victory—but when it doesn’t, it can feel like you lost not because of a mistake, but because the game decided you should. A huge game like Hearthstone had to tone down some of its more RNG-heavy mechanics to maintain a competitive balance, and this game may need to do the same. Strategy games thrive on giving players control over their fate, and right now, Vanguard Exiles feels like it’s stuck between being a traditional autobattler and a strategy game, without fully committing to either.

The good news? This isn’t necessarily set in stone. Richard Garfield has already expressed that he wants the game to evolve through player feedback during Early Access, and if there’s one thing veteran designers understand, it’s that games should grow alongside their audience. In a recent podcast, he talked about his philosophy of putting a game in players’s hands as early as possible, letting players shape the design's direction. That kind of flexibility is promising, and it gives Vanguard Exiles a real chance to refine its identity. But right now, the game doesn’t quite seem to know what it wants to be—but if the right tweaks are made, it could evolve into something truly special.

Can I Have More Randomness My Good Sir?

And as randomized pathing insn't enough, there is also a randomized initiative and targeting system, that adds to an already quite unpredictable game.

You might sometimes lose battle because initiative was unfavourable to you, or worse, sometimes units will target a full health unit, when they had a unit with 1 health left right in their own zone, ruining what was seemingly a good fight. And let's not even speak about ranged units, that sometimes attack units in other adjacent zones instead of first attacking units in their zone.

On top of all that, there is even a dodge value for most units, usually around 10% but I've seen as high as 25% for some specialized units, that can spell disaster or save you from a certain death.

Sometimes all these random factors just mean you can have the worst luck possible and hit the worst end-of-skirmish scoring possible...

It feels like the game wants to be an exciting game to spectate and experience, but for a more strategy-focused player, these could well be deal-breakers. I expect a divide in the community playing the game, some will be happy with how entertaining it is to watch, other might wish for more predictable outcomes.

Superb Faction Depth… Hidden Behind Broken Menus

Vanguard Exiles boasts three factions (with more on the way), each offering a distinct playstyle, keywords, and unique mechanics. This variety creates exciting opportunities to experiment with combos, unit abilities, and map placement to pull off powerful chain reactions. The factions also shine visually, with a ton of personality and style—I'm personally in love with Berserker Bears or a Griggs? The designs are wonderful!

The big issue is that the game buries this depth and visual information behind a frustratingly incomplete UI.

One of Vanguard Exiles’ biggest missteps is how little information it gives you upfront. You can’t fully inspect the units and actions of a squad before the game actually starts and you see that card in your hand or in the shop…

There is no way currently to inspect a unit or action from this screen, which would be helpful given the great number of options available for each faction.

There's a simple fix really! Let players see each unit and action cards they have available when selecting a squad before the game. If you're unfamiliar with each unit and action, early matches become more about trial and error than strategy. It’s not really fun guessing whether your random faction combo and unit / action selection is even viable.

Also some squads can be generated with twice as many rare units as others, but there’s no clear explanation why.

The last squad I generated had 6 rare units as well as 3 Ruins. Absolute destruction for the AI bot I'm playing against who can't keep up at all haflway to extreme difficulty!

This is probably going to be fixed either by the time the Early Access version gets out, or quite fast when it comes out, as this is incredibly frustrating right now. The overall UI and UX will need to be improved for sure.

Algorithmic Squad Generation: A Love It or Hate It Feature

Richard Garfield’s recent tabletop designs, like Solforge Fusion and Keyforge, used algorithmically generated decks, and Vanguard Exiles follows suit with its squad system. This feature does keep things fresh and unpredictable and makes sure that players can't optimize fully their squad themselves, so they can't come up with THE perfect broken squad. But it's also something that could rub some players the wrong way. Some will love the chaotic, pre-built nature of these squads, while others may feel stifled by the randomness.

One thing to note though, is that even in his previous designs, we've seen unbalanced units that were quite stronger than others, and people would be paying a lot for a chance to find those in their randomized physical decks.

You can have up to 4 squads saved for you to play anytime, and by pressing new squad you can infinitely generate a new one, with different units, starting unlimited units, and actions.

Players will optimize however they can, and a meta will still exist whether the designer likes it or not. As the game progresses, it’ll be fascinating to see if this system finds its sweet spot, balancing unpredictability with meaningful strategy.

Verdict

After 20 hours of playing the game, I’m not ready to put it down anytime soon—and if you’re a fan of area control games it’s absolutely worth checking out. Auto-battler veterans, however, might find the lack of familiar mechanics a bit of a hurdle.

For now, it’s a fun but somewhat frustrating strategy game that rewards careful play—but punishes mistakes a little too harshly.

It’s worth giving the demo a shot, take some time to learn its intricacies, and see if its unique blend of mechanics clicks for you. And with Early Access set to launch on March 11th, it’ll be exciting to see how the game evolves with community feedback.

If the developers fine-tune the shop and economy, the faction balance, the user interface, and revisit some of the systems in place, I can definitely see Vanguard Exiles stand alongside the best in the genre.

Vanguard Exiles is innovative, comes with a great setting, and interesting faction variety. The zone-based battles, mind game-heavy deployments, and tense final rounds make every match feel different. But unpredictable mechanics, a rigid economy, and a lack of transparency during squad selection currently holds it back from being truly great.