Sleeping Gods Review: 3 BIG reasons to avoid

Sleeping Gods Feature

There’s no getting around it, Sleeping Gods is a fantastic game.

It won the 2021 Golden Geek for Best Thematic Game and has won over critics like Space-Biff, Player Elimination, and No Pun Intended. It’s currently sitting as the fourth-best board game from 2021 on Board Game Geek

Despite all of this, Sleeping Gods still took me by surprise with how good it was.

At its core, it’s Dungeons and Dragons. Not the old school Everyone vs the Dungeon Master version of D&D, but the new school D&D like Critical Role and Dimension 20. Where the game tells a great story through role-playing and doesn’t focus too hard on adhering to the letter of the law.

And great storytelling it does.

In Sleeping Gods, you’ve been Bermuda Triangled into a fantasy world, and immediately get captured by a group of ruggedly good-looking minotaurs. After freeing yourselves, you find the only way back to the real world is to wake the Sleeping Gods, who reside in this world.

Only by collecting totems scattered throughout the islands of this new world will the gods awake and allow you to return to your normal life.

To find these totems, you will spend turns travelling from island to island on the steamship Manticore. Performing ship actions such as searching for food or resting in your quarters, all before travelling the open waters and exploring islands through the use of the storybook.

Now, here’s what I wish I knew before going into it.

The HMS Manticore miniature sitting in the open sea.
There once was a ship that put to sea…

1. Let me be me, and you be you

I read a thread on Reddit recently where one user claimed that Pandemic was the king of quarterbacking – the act of one player dictating all other players’ moves in a cooperative game.

Well, the king is dead.

In Sleeping Gods, outside of combat, almost all decisions need to be made by a council of players. There’s only one ship, a limited supply of materials, and dangers around every corner. Because of this, there’s a lot of pressure on making the right decision, and that decision has to be in line with everyone else aboard the Manticore.

You are as tightly coupled to them as the Power Rangers were piloting Megazord. Where if even one Ranger was out of sync, they’d be piloting an oversized robot with multiple personality disorder.

This will certainly frustrate those who enjoy thinking for themselves but feeds nicely into the idea of playing Dungeons and Dragons. Where it’s usually better if the party decide together on which way to go, rather than splitting the party up.

However, it’s also why, despite having the components for more players, I’d never play it with more than two.

But that’s not the only reason.

The time to take turns is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes I’d travel to an island, find some chickens to eat and be back onboard the Manticore before you could say: finger lickin’ good. Other times, my wife would go investigate some ruins and would still be exploring thirty minutes later.

All of the cards within Sleeping Gods, divided into quests, items, and events.
To give you a sense of size, all those cards are quests to complete.

2. Sleeping gods is fricken hard, man

Sleeping Gods is not just hard, it’s frustratingly so.

Whenever we entered combat we left licking our wounds… if we left at all.

Combat works like this:

First, you choose who’s attacking and the target, and then you draw a card from the fate deck – which simulates rolling a die. Then you add that number to your character’s accuracy, and if it’s equal to or above the target’s defence you hit and then deal your character’s damage. If you don’t hit, you miss and deal only 1 damage instead.

Hit or miss, the enemy gets to counterattack. Usually dealing a large amount of damage to your characters.

In our third battle, our fresh-faced characters with no weapons, items, or experience faced an enemy with seven defence. Our more accurate characters started the battle strongly but quickly succumbed to the counterattack damage. Leaving us with the remaining characters who with their combined accuracy couldn’t hit a barn door with a banjo.

We eventually managed to draw a six from the fate deck and win that encounter. There were several frustrating and non-interactive turns before we got there. Unfortunately, this was indicative of the rest of the combat we faced. Having fun at the start of the battle, spending our command points, and hitting with our accurate characters. Then doing nothing but draw fate cards and wait for the fight to be over.

Thankfully, death in Sleeping Gods isn’t so punishing you want to put the game in the dumpster and set it on fire. You just end up at the nearest port, refreshed, restocked and ready to continue your journey once more.

The first two enemies of the game, a pair of minotaurs
Don’t let these guys fool you into thinking this game is easy!

3. Ease of experience

For a game as successful as Sleeping Gods, I was bewildered that more thought wasn’t put into the user experience. Especially, when the rest of the game is so brilliant.

It’s simple things too.

For instance, the icon for accuracy is a minotaur skull. My brain hurts itself in confusion whenever I look at it. There’s no logical connection I can make between accuracy and a dead cow head. I just can’t. And this lack of connection makes the game harder to learn, or at least harder to remember.

Another peculiarity with the graphic design is the ship board, where the phases go clockwise around the board. However, given we read left to right, you’ll often miss the second step until you’re familiar with the turn structure.

Then – and maybe I’ve been spoiled by Root and the Arkham Horror series of games – but I found the rulebook isn’t laid out well for finding missing rules. It’s great for the initial teach, but when you need to dive back into the rule book to find minutiae I had difficulty finding the rule that I needed.

For a game as large as Sleeping Gods, this was a frequent occurrence and it noticeably affected my playthrough.

While we’re at it, I’ve got to question only including one player aid.

There should be a minimum of two, but at least four – one for every player. As it stands, our table became a game of flag football, where everyone tried to get a hold of the singular sheet.

All of the paperwork that comes in the game box
Lots of reading material.

Quibbles aside Sleeping Gods is fantastic

What makes Sleeping Gods stand out from the other board games in this genre is how well-connected everything is. Instead of leaving it to you to piece together random story bits like Tales of the Arabian Nights, everything is handcrafted and part of a larger quest compelling you to move forward. Even if that quest is only to visit a town further on.

Forgotten Waters does this as well, giving you a narrative carrot to chase after like you’re a board-game-playing horse. But unlike Forgotten Waters, Sleeping Gods has a more complex underlying system, where you’ll have several quests at once, and will have to make choices that change the world around you.

This complexity allows for some fantastic character modification. While equipping skills and abilities, and juggling fatigue, health won’t be the difference between living and dying. It will be the difference between dying now or dying later.

Despite its faults, Sleeping Gods is now my favourite story game. Its rich world is easy to get lost in both literally and figuratively, and I can’t wait for it to hit the table, so I can enjoy my next adventure in the uncharted isles.

Sleeping Gods

Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 60-1200 min
Designer: Ryan Laukat
Publisher: Red Raven Games

Sleeping Gods takes your breath away with its grandeur in your first playthrough. The narrative elements combine with interesting gameplay decisions to produce a heck of a game.

Pros

  • The world of Sleeping Gods is large and full of mystery
  • Combination of story-telling and pretty interesting combat mechanics
  • Not too many rules and easy to pick up for a game of this size
  • Ryan Laukat’s artwork is always a joy to behold
  • Great solo board game

Cons

  • Takes up a lot of table space
  • On repeated plays, it doesn’t keep the momentum of the first
  • Best with one or two players – otherwise there is lots of downtime
  • Fights are difficult and can kill you without warning

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More storied campaigns

How does it compare?

See where this game falls in our board game rankings.

8 thoughts on “Sleeping Gods Review: 3 BIG reasons to avoid

  1. Thanks for pointing out some pros and cons. I have never played, but I have thought about buying. However, I have learned that the replay-ability is not infinite. Without adding expansions, once you find all of the totems the game is pretty much done. I am looking for something similar to this game, with nice artwork like this one, that can be solo (as well as multi) and more than a 30 minute play, can you recommend any?
    Thanks,
    Shannon

    (please do not add me to any email lists, please do not sell or give my email to any third party for any reason)

    1. Hi Shannon,

      Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment. Even though replay-ability isn’t infinite in Sleeping Gods you’re still likely to get at least 20-30+ hours of play out of this title. More if you want to get every totem. This is significant for any board game, but especially those with a focus on narrative driven adventures.

      In my experience I haven’t found any narrative-driven games that offer infinite replayability. However, you might want to checkout Eldritch Horror or Arkham Horror 3rd Edition. These games’ story aren’t as structured as Sleeping Gods because they use large decks of randomized cards to tell the story. However, the randomness of these cards mean you won’t get the same exact story twice. Although you might run into the same card multiple times.

      Just a note on the email address for yourself and anyone else who visits our site. Our email list is opt in from the sidebar, and we do not give or sell email addresses to any third party for any reason. 🙂

  2. Hey, I really like your ‘here are all the reasons one might dislike this thing I really like’ approach. I think it’s interesting and exciting to be engaged in an art form/medium/whatever you want to call it that’s still so new, (at least the iteration that we’re engaged in), that a game can have serious flaws and still be a great, or even the best, example of it’s form. Sometimes complaints like the ones you’re fielding here can feel like ragging on Pac-Man’s character design.

    And I would not be able to handle someone telling me that I do not know what my own opinion because I am deluding myself with nearly the grace that you have here. “How can you possibly enjoy a game despite such glaring flaws, you have terrible taste’- that I could understand. But I have a mental illness that means I’ve actually experienced delusions, and being told that I don’t know my own opinion would make me a lot saltier than you are here. I hate that whole ‘your opinion is a cognitive distortion’ approach to disagreement and the reviewer I think brought it into the hobby. Different people can hate and love the same thing for the same reasons.

    Especially given that the flaws you’ve pointed out are, (or were recently), fairly common in many well loved games. You’re saying that S.G. can be played at the range of player counts on the box, but is only fun with a much narrower range, (I’ve never heard of a publisher doing that before). That the rule-book does not work well as a reference document, (as if there are not popular games whose rule-book is not effective at teaching the game or referencing rules during play, much less both). Worst of all, the difficulty of the game is not dialed into your ideal range, (Gasp! I Never!). I remember feeling like a ‘real gamer’ for the first time after spending literal weeks hacking my way through the first iteration of the rule-book for Robinson Crusoe. I’ve still only managed to beat about a third of the scenarios I’ve tried and would never play R.C. with more than two. Yet it was my favorite co-op for years.

    So thanks for bringing up those memories, and the motivation to try Sleeping Gods again now that I can leave it out on a table to solo. Not to mention the reminder that the weirdness of this hobby and the games it’s composed of are what drew me in to begin with.

    1. Fantastic comment!

      Thanks for taking the time to write it up. I completely agree with the sentiment about something being both great and have serious flaws. It’s something I try to tap into with all of my reviews, but specifically with Sleeping Gods. Mainly because I was late to the party and there are so many other voices in the hobby telling how great it is (and it is!), that if I wanted to add something new to the discussion I wanted to approach it from a different angle. Such as, why wouldn’t I want to play this game? Or what would I have wanted to know before buying it.

      I also agree that the flaws pointed out here are fairly common, but are becoming less so.

      For instance games are getting better at rulebooks, I’m quite partial to the Root and Arkham Horror approach of here’s the rule book for your first game, here’s the rule book if you need to look something up.

      But to contextualize it all, we can only call this a flaw because the hobby has innovated and come up with a solution for it. Like you, I remember reading through the original Robinson Crusoe manual sixteen times and still not making heads or tails of it. If I were to review Sleeping Gods back then, I wouldn’t even mention the rule book.

      Fascinating to think about, so again I appreciate the comment. Sounds like you’re going to love playing Sleeping Gods. All the best with it!

    1. Hi Matt,

      I can like a game and still criticise it. The three reasons provided are valid reasons to avoid the game, specifically the first which I’ve seen constant board gamers complain about – especially when we have games like Spirit Island that have been designed around that limitation. So no, the title isn’t clickbait, it says there are three reasons, and you get three good reasons.

  3. I get that you want to justify your purchase. The adventuring part should be great. But it isn’t.

    Let’s start with the minus points that could be fixed but never have been.
    – Iconography is a big miss.
    – Not putting a title on the books. Nor the boxes.
    – icons on crew, inconsistent (laurent for example).
    – index lacks 70% of the terms
    – calling xp xp port, really?
    – 6 pages of errata, wtf?

    “You just end up at the nearest port, refreshed, restocked and ready to continue your journey once more.” that just shows poor design – any decent TTRPG or D&D even that means game over. Then the deus ex machina at the end of phase 1 and 2.

    When you simplify combat by just taking the loss once, you have a better experience. But that means not playing synergy tokens, not covering boxes, either. And if you remove accuracy in combat getting ability cards for that skill is pointless.

    no. It’s bad. You just want to justify your purchase.

    1. Sleeping Gods does have a Brutal Mode that ends the game in defeat. But I prefer it as an adventuring game where I get to explore around and go on adventures. For that purpose, not many games do it better. Though all of your points still stand around the UX design – definitely the worst part of the game. :'(

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