Red Raven RRG00023 Sleeping Gods, Multicoloured

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As a board game, Sleeping Gods’ rules are fairly simple. Each turn, the active player moves a shared crew meeple to a new room aboard the ship, gaining bonuses such as cards and resources, before resolving an event card and taking two actions. These actions are the things you’d expect, like moving between spaces on the central map (a book serves as the game’s atlas board) and interacting with things you find around the world. Sounds pretty much like a board game so far, I’ll admit.

Sleeping Gods shows you don’t need a familiar licence to make a board game that captures many of the best parts of video games. It is entirely narrative-focused. Players create D&D-style characters that they will take upon a series of quests focused around Dragonholt village. The world changes around the group as decisions create ripples of consequence. Mechanically, it hangs together under a light skill-based system with appropriate skills opening up additional narrative options in the choose-your-own-adventure framework. The light structure is conducive to immersion and allows the focus to remain on characters and the emergent story.Arriving in 2017, Legacy of Dragonholt is the oldest title on this list – and it’s also the most unique. This is a blend of a tabletop RPG with an open world adventure game. While there are tokens, maps, and cards, the bulk of the experience is shared through a collection of booklets. The adventure occurs through paragraphs, moving between sections in a choose-your-own-adventure format.

The biggest surprise of 2021 was Michael Menzel’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. This oddity is a family weight game where players take on the roles of classic characters such as Robin Hood, Maid Marion, or Little John. Up to four participants work together to traverse a lovingly illustrated board depicting Nottingham and the surrounding forest. The goal is to avoid the Sheriff’s guards and accomplish various story-based objectives that parallel the classic tale. 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. Your tablet, phone, or PC runs the enemy behavior, freeing up players to cooperate against the dungeon and pursue a lengthy multi-adventure narrative. Characters acquire new gear and abilities that allow them to grow in strength over time. The integration of an electronic device allows for ease of play while retaining some sophisticated effects, such as weapons that trigger various boons on a percentage chance. This is woven into the system in a very modern, video game-like way that produces a rich sense of discovery atop a very streamlined and efficient board game. But Sleeping Gods finds its brilliance in an engrossing world and interesting choices rather than pure gameplay complexity - making it feel closer in many ways to its video game brethren than its cardboard cousins.

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Quests feel akin to spotting something enticing glinting in the distance in The Legend of Zelda, or spying a subtle puzzle clue in adventure classics like Myst. Ryan Laukat’s Sleeping Gods is the crowning achievement of Red Raven Games. It’s an open world co-operative adventure best described as tabletop’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Players control a crew of sailors running a 1920s steamship that gets lost amid a cluster of unknown islands promising fortune and danger. The combination of whimsical presentation with serious mechanical underpinnings makes for a very gratifying 15-hour journey. 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! This design feels more free than most. The typical experience in the campaign game genre has players working their way through a prescribed narrative with a limited degree of branching pathways. Sleeping Gods is more exploratory and unrestrained, bearing only a faint meta-narrative and instead allowing players to encounter a myriad of isolated sub-plots and quests. The goal is to locate totems, which are ancient artifacts of surreal might, and ultimately secure a return trip home. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because video game board games have also never been better! Gone are the days of generic cash-ins, replaced by thoughtful, faithful (sometimes to a fault) adaptations that aim to capture the atmosphere and mechanical depth of video games on the tabletop. Just look at the tense Sniper Elite board game, the gleefully stealthy Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood of Venice or A New Dawn’s inventive take on strategy classic Sid Meier’s Civilization. Even that once-terrible Dark Souls board game is sort of worth playing now.