This review was originally written for my board game editorial site Player Elimination.
<PERSON> has made a career pairing Euro-style adventure mechanisms with threaded narrative content. This is most directly seen in Near & Far, but it’s also present in Above & Below and Empires of the Void II. Unfortunately none of those games have felt perfectly comfortable or expertly integrated between their various elements. Iteration, however, leads to innovation. Sleeping Gods is Red Raven’s chef-d’œuvre.
This design represents a philosophical shift. Instead of attempting to service a worker placement and storytelling game equally, the focus has been placed on developing a sprawling narrative endeavor. There is still resource management – almost too much – and of course systems for conflict and skill tests, but those are clearly in service to the fireside whispers of The Manticore’s journey through a far away land full of wonder.
The Manticore is of course your ship. A 1920s steamboat crewed by nine characters, characters you will control and divvy up among the players equally. Taking a page out of Ravenloft, the steamer disappears in a blanket of fog and ends up in a foreign sea. It’s a tale of bewilderment, discovery, and moral plight.
This is good stuff.
This game is inseparably linked to recent standouts 7th Continent and Tainted Grail. It offers an open world for players to explore while demanding you precisely manage health and fatigue – across both your crew members and The Manticore – in order to earn the right to keep going.
The narrative here is fundamentally between the two approaches offered in those predecessors. 7th Continent required you attempt to lift a curse by following a couple of vague clues. Like a pigeon scooping up errant breadcrumbs scattered in the Bakeoff Tent, there are many distractions and interesting features pulling at your feathers. The main storyline almost felt like an aside to exploring the continent. This worked to its detriment as the central loop of resource gathering gave way to such repetition that I found myself wishing <PERSON> would turn the damn wheel already and make the whole continent disappear.
Tainted Grail on the other hand was sharply focused. If you don’t engage the intricate main plotline of a post-apocalyptic King <PERSON> seeking his legacy, well then you’re condemned to a life of repeatedly gathering supplies to light oversized monolithic statues. This game only succeeds because the central story is so well written.
Sleeping Gods has none of this nonsense. 504
While you do have to spend time resting and attending to your people’s bruises, it’s ultimately much less focused on the grind. Instead, it’s all about visiting locations on the map and engaging locals in discourse or exploring wondrous locations. This is funneled through a main storyline that is structurally wispy: you’re trying to gather totems which will raise the slumbering gods in exchange for your freedom. It’s a proposition, but one which you have really no choice to accept when you open that box.
What’s quite remarkable is how focused this game is despite basically being an enormous collection of side-quests. Each little task you engage is an isolated job – head to an island to the west and retrieve a lost blade, or visit the large forest to the south and find my son – but the overarching spirit of the game feels incredibly directed and centered.
This is reflected in The Manticore itself. Since players take on the role of several crew members, each with emergent personality and their own special abilities, you are all tethered to the ship. Unlike those previous two touchstone games you can’t wander off on your own.
That’s an important distinction. For one, it means this game is consistent across any range of players. Every single crew member is utilized regardless of the number of participants. This makes for a sturdy solitaire game as well as an incredible multiplayer co-operative one.
More importantly though it keeps the action focused. When you engage in the relatively uncommon combat, everyone participates. When you head to the storybook to read a passage, everyone should be perked up and invested. There are still turns where leadership alternates between players, but group collaboration is always paramount.
There’s a certain warm satisfaction in all of these disparate quests knotting together around the focal point of that little steamboat miniature. It’s one of the central themes that you’re sailing through this cryptic realm but it’s actually sailing through you. Everything of note is occurring by your hand and your decision. Sleeping Gods may not be your dwelling, but its fate is uniquely yours.
One of the quirks of <PERSON> style is that the worlds they build are whimsical. This results in Sleeping Gods feeling more like Young Adult fiction as opposed to a serious dramatic work. 237