Sleeping Gods

Designer: Ryan Laukat
Artist: Ryan Laukat
Published: 2021
Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 60-1200 Mins
BGG Rating: 8.2
BGG Ranking: 54
Publisher: Red Raven Games
Mechanisms: Action Points, Campaign Game, Cooperative Game, Hand Management, Push Your Luck, Storytelling
Sleeves: MED 43x67, EUR 59x91mm, BST 70x120mm

Game Description:

In Sleeping Gods, you and up to 3 friends become Captain Sofi Odessa and her crew, lost in a strange world in 1929 on your steamship, the Manticore. You must work together to survive, exploring exotic islands, meeting new characters, and seeking out the totems of the gods so that you can return home.

Sleeping Gods is a campaign game. Each session can last as long as you want. When you are ready to take a break, you mark your progress on a journey log sheet, making it easy to return to the same place in the game the next time you play. You can play solo or with friends throughout your campaign. It's easy to swap players in and out at will. Your goal is to find at least fourteen totems hidden throughout the world. Like reading a book, you'll complete this journey one or two hours at a time, discovering new lands, stories, and challenges along the way.

Sleeping Gods is an atlas game. Each page of the atlas represents only a small portion of the world you can explore. When you reach the edge of a page and you want to continue in the same direction, you simply turn to a new page and sail onward.

Sleeping Gods is a storybook game. Each new location holds wild adventure, hidden treasures, and vivid characters. Your choices affect the characters and the plot of the game, and may help or hinder your chances of getting home!

Welcome to a vast world. Your journey starts now.

Quick play overview:

Players will play in turns:

• Activate an action on the ship which will give them command tokens (used to play actions later in the turn) AND heal/repair/fish for food/remove action tokens from the crew/…

• Player will spend 2 actions to actually play the game:

Most of the actions will be spent for exploring the locations where the crew will be hit with challeneges and fights. To successfully pass the challenges, crew members will have to participate (and get a fatigue token that will have to be removed somewhere down the line) to add their stat to the total value. Add to this number a random card's fate value (think of it like rolling a die but with a bit more control) and then players can spend command tokens to use items to increase the stats. If you got enough value to match or surpass the challenge, you will read the good stuff, otherwise something bad or at least less good will happen to the crew and the ship.

Fighting is a bit more complicated but still a fun excercise of back and forth between monsters and crew members.

Once the event deck runs out, you read some main story part and continue until the main story tells you that you are done with the game. At this point you will check what you managed to collect during the game and read one of the MANY possible endings.

Is the game done? Yes.. and no. Players will see 20-25% of the game with the first play and will probably want to play the game again going on different routes. This game is a sandbox and each play will also open up some new stuff for the next campaign.

Final thoughts:

It was a long time that a game captured my attention that much. We didn't play anything else until we finished the campaign… 20 hours in 10 days.

The game is fantastic. The game surprised us from the start as we encountered some monsters WAY stronger that we barelly survived. With the lesson learned, we read the story carefully and searched for any warnings in the text before willy-nilly jumping into a dangerous situation.

We plan to play one campaign each year until we will see most of what the game has to offer.

If you like the idea behind this game but you know that you won't be able to put 20+ hours into each campaign, there is a smaller version PRIMEVAL PERIL that should give you the same filling with fewer choices and gametime. We didn't try it yet, but it's definitely in the plans.

FINAL SCORE:

Gameplay & How often I want to play it: 10/10

I loved every minute of this game and I want to play it so bad. We limited ourselves to 1 campaign per year just so that we can play other games as well.

Art & Graphic Design:

Red Raven Games have their visual style that can be a hit or miss with players. I like it well enough that I would say that it's a beautiful game. 

Rules & Complexity:

There are plenty of rules and some tiny ones that can be forgotten from time to time (especially in the beginning).. but it's a coop game and the game won't be ruined if you fix the rule a bit later.

Once you get used to the ruleset, it will all flow naturally and you can use all your brainpower for the story bits.

Theme & Mechanism fit:

Using different crew members for different tasks, getting fatigue so that you cannot use always the same guys/gals is great for the theme of the game. You will build the crew for different tasks and they will be hardly missed when they are too tired to help.

Fun & Replayability:

Stories are very well written and each small island will call you to explore it… but you only have a limited amount of actions in a campaign. Of course you can check this hidden temple but should you?

This game has a limited replayability as once you have read all the stories, you can only replay it for a high score… but if you spent 60-100 hours to explore most of the game, you got more than enough out of the game.