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About Sleeping Gods
Sleeping Gods is Ryan Laukat's open-world campaign game. The players share one crew, Captain Sofi Odessa and the sailors of the steamship Manticore, lost in a strange world in 1929. The map is a spiral-bound atlas: you sail from page to page, land on numbered locations and read paragraphs from a storybook. The aim across the campaign is to find as many totems as you can, and a full campaign runs roughly ten to twenty hours, saved between sessions.
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Is Sleeping Gods Right for You?
Best for
Sleeping Gods is for people who want an open-world adventure on the table and are happy to play one long story over several evenings. The atlas lets you sail wherever you like, and the paragraph-based story is well written and often funny. It is excellent solo or at two, when one or two people can make decisions quickly and follow the story closely.
Maybe skip it if…
It is a campaign, and it wants the same group to come back several times. At four players the shared ship means a lot of waiting and group discussion, and anyone who wants a tight tactical game will find the storybook structure loose.
How to Play Sleeping Gods
Setup
Open the atlas to the starting page, set up the ship board and crew, and shuffle the event and fate decks. To continue a campaign, restore the journey log.
On Your Turn
- Ship phase: move a crew meeple to a different room on the Manticore and take that room's action.
- Draw and resolve the top event card.
- Take two actions from travel, explore, visit a market or visit a port. Exploring reads a storybook entry, often with a challenge tested by crew skill plus a fate card.
How to Win
The campaign runs through the event deck three times before its finale. Your score and the ending depend on how many totems you found, and the ship or crew can be lost along the way.
💡 Strategy Tips
Spread fatigue across the crew. A crew member with two fatigue cannot help in challenges, and running your best sailor into the ground leaves you helpless when it matters.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Trying to see everything. The world is too large for one campaign, and chasing every location means missing the totems that drive your score.
- Letting one crew member do all the work. Fatigue accumulates fast, and an exhausted specialist cannot help when a challenge needs their skill.
- Neglecting the ship. Ship damage turns a manageable event into a run of bad turns.
- Forgetting keywords. The story remembers your choices through keywords and quest cards, and missing one closes off paths without warning.
Advanced Strategy
- Pick a direction and commit for a session. Sailing back and forth wastes turns against the event deck.
- Buy equipment early. Items that raise skills or reduce fatigue pay back across the whole campaign.
- Save command markers for the challenge that matters. They are how you turn a near miss into a success.
- Record the journey log carefully at every stop. A good save means the next session starts in minutes.
Variants & House Rules
Tides of Ruin
An expansion adding regions to the atlas, with further story and content for crews who want a longer campaign.
Dungeons
A smaller expansion adding dungeon adventures to the world.
Sleeping Gods: Distant Skies
A standalone sequel with a new crew and a land-based journey. It explains the earlier game's concepts as they come up, so it can be played first.
Video Guides
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Our Verdict
Sleeping Gods is one of the best storybook campaigns in the hobby, and the atlas is a lovely way to present an open world. The writing does the heavy lifting and the challenges are simple enough to keep the story moving. Play it solo or at two and it is the closest a board game gets to a sailing adventure novel.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long is a campaign?
Roughly ten to twenty hours, spread over as many sessions as you like. The journey log saves your progress between them.
Is it good solo?
Yes. The game plays identically solo, with you making every decision for the crew, and many consider it the best way to play.
Can I replay it?
Partly. A single campaign cannot visit every location, so a second campaign in a different direction sees a lot of new story.