Sleeping Gods and the Contradiction of Story in Gaming

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I usually play board games with minimal storytelling. In one of my favorites, Anachrony, players attempt to save the world from annihilation via one of four time-traveling factions. Each player can take the “evacuate” action in one of the game's later rounds. One might imagine that doing so ends the game. Nope. It just leads to a ton of victory points. In fact, you can evacuate and then play three more rounds. In fact, evacuation requires players to send a worker, and even that worker stays with you after evacuation. What, exactly, is being evacuated? Who knows, but Anachrony is a game with a story slapped on the first page of its rule book, not a story-based game. That’s nice, but I wanted more.

I looked for an affordable game that received praise for its storytelling and settled on Sleeping Gods. The game makes an inspiring first impression. Players will first find an “atlas.” This notebook of about a dozen two-page maps, each with one or two major focal points and around a dozen other locations. One will also see a 150-ish page “storybook” that provides the scenarios of the actions in various locations. Around 200 “quest” cards provide players with tasks to complete and another 200 “adventure” cards represent rewards for these tasks. A solo player will obtain these adventure cards by managing nine characters, three resources, gold, fatigue, a hand of up to three cards, command tokens, EXP, ability cards, level cards, weapons, and damage tokens (separate one for the characters and the ship, I should add.) That’s a lot of stuff, and I think this photo from BGG sums it up:

It might help to explain how, on a basic level, this game works. The most important action involves exploring a spot on the atlas and reading the corresponding passage in the storybook. For example, I may choose to explore location #54. I then open up the storybook to passage 54. From there, it will ask me to check if I control various “keywords.” I may see something like “If keyword DINOSAUR, go to passage #93.” I then check if any of my quest cards have the word DINOSAUR printed in all-caps on their bottom. If not, I continue with passage 54. If I have that keyword, I head to passage 93. In this example, imagine that I own the DINOSAUR keyword. Maybe the townsfolk tell me about a magical tree that I can find a few islands up the map. This could get me a quest card with TREE written at the bottom. Later on, I may visit a forest that says “If keyword TREE, go to passage 31,” and would continue with that storyline.

You travel around, find different quests, and those quests open you to more quests, all of which unlock secrets about the world and novel gameplay mechanics. That part is really fun. Unfortunately, most of Sleeping God’s gameplay is not that part.

Let’s run through a turn. Imagine that I have a card that says TREE and I think that location 65 corresponds to that TREE quest. Here’s the process:

1. First, I choose one of five actions on my ship. This gives me some combination of cards, command tokens, and some other bonus.

2. Then I draw one of 18 cards from the “event deck.” The first six cards benefit you, the next 6 are mixed, and the final 6 cause some sort of harm. The player will run through three such decks in a single campaign.

   1. These cards often invoke one of the game’s common mechanics: a “skill check.” For example, a card may say that my ship takes 2 damage unless a meet a PERCEPTION 7 check. To address this, I choose which characters to involve in the check. This grants them one fatigue. A character with two fatigue can’t participate in these events. I then combine the skill check with cards, a draw from the deck, and various special abilities. If I can combine for 7 PERCEPTION or higher, I avoid the two ship damage

   2. Then I can work my way to location 65. However, that spot is 2 spaces away. To reach that, I have to reach a CRAFT check of 4. I do so by placing fatigue on a certain number of characters and drawing cards from the deck.

   3. Unfortunately, this location requires a SAVVY 5 check. If I don’t succeed, I take 1 ship damage.

   4. Before pursuing further, I may want to heal up. I can accomplish this by searching through my various item cards and spending one command token (plus any other required resources) to heal, remove fatigue, or remove some other boon.

      1. I can also do this using some of the nine characters’ abilities.

   5. I then move to location 65 and open the book. Some shenanigans occur, which forces me to accomplish a STRENGTH 8 check.

   6. Depending on whether I accomplish that check, I read which action to take next

   7. Some of these actions involve combat. When I enter combat, I pull the enemies listed in the book. I won’t explain how combat works for now. In short, this involves a spatial puzzle that can take around 15 minutes to complete.

   8. Then, I don’t see the TREE keyword mentioned. Silly me, I should have gone to the north side of the forest instead of the south side. Next round!

When you do find the right location, there’s often at least one skill check. That means more managing your abilities, command tokens, and fatigue tokens to ensure that you can move on with the story.

Then there’s combat. I’d complain about the dissonance between the storytelling and the combat, but voice actor ProZD made the point better than I ever will. Sleeping Gods has a lot of combat. You fight when the deck runs out. You fight to finish most of the quests. One time, I even fought two rounds of combat at the same location. It’s so common that you need to buy weapons, heal your party, and gain level cards to keep up with the game. Here’s an example of the sort of enemies you’ll see in combat:

Each enemy contains a 3x3 grid. You deal a certain amount of damage based on your weapon strength and choose how to distribute that damage. An enemy dies when you cover all of its hearts. If you can’t cover each heart in one hit (and you usually can’t), you may want to cover spaces in an effort to weaken the enemy’s strength or prevent it from healing. You can even deal “splash damage,” in which some of your damage points land on an adjacent enemy. After receiving damage, the targeted adversary (if it survived) deals a counter against its attacker. In each round of combat, players place a combat token on any of the nine characters. A character can never receive a third combat token, and characters with two fatigue tokens deal one less damage. After the four player-characters attack, each remaining monster attacks again, and players choose which characters receive the damage.

This is a pretty cool system. What it isn’t, though, is storytelling. And I think this illustrates the fundamental issue of storytelling in a game.

The most enjoyable moments in Sleeping Gods occur when the player finds the right spot and connects storylines via the quest cards. Unfortunately, that’s broken up by numerous little resource-management mini-gamed. In my experiences in the hobby, the different elements of a game complement each other. In Sleeping Gods, they contradict each other. I might not understand what Ingmar Bergman is trying to communicate in Persona or Cries and Whispers, but I don’t struggle to physically watch the movie. The images and sounds will appear in front of my face. I don’t need to stop every 5 minutes to perform a skill check, cook a recipe, or complete a puzzle.

The open-ended design also prevents the game from telling an over-arching narrative. In my playthrough, I missed an entire map. The game features around 50 “totems” (the main collectible), and a good playthrough may only find about 12. I finished the game and reached a “good” ending without much of an understanding of what was going on in the world.

I heard many reviewers praise Sleeping Gods for its story, but, man, I don’t see it. The story beats that I did encounter were pretty simplistic. Go here, do this thing, get the thing from it, then go here. I’m not going to present a grand-overarching theory of what makes a good story. I just that it ain’t what you find in Sleeping Gods. To keep things concrete, let me take two recent books that I’ve read: Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral and Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire. The former involves a fictionalized, albeit somewhat biographical, story of a family divided by the 1960s counterculture. Pages will with the narrator’s commentary on the book’s events. The latter, a non-fiction book, illustrates the impact of the American empire over the past few centuries. It tells several stories, ranging from the birth control tests in Puerto Rico to our founder’s contempt of homesteaders to the spread of rock-n-roll in post-war Liverpool. There are dozens of great stories here, but none of them involve Quezon searching for the 12 gems of Filipino Independence. Fetch quests don’t make great stories.

Maybe I’m being unfair by comparing a board game to Phillip Roth and historical non-fiction. Some stories focus on exploration and discovery. For example, Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama takes the reader through an anomalous alien spaceship. You won’t see compelling character development in this novel, but I enjoyed watching the secrets unfold. One could make a similar point about the mystery genre. It’s fun to see Hercules Poirot make sense of a seemingly nonsensical event. That’s the type of story Sleeping Gods could tell, and it’s the type of story that probably exists in that gigantic box. It’s just broken up by a nonstop stream of upkeep.

Even without the upkeep, the game limits one’s ability to uncover mysteries. At one point, I found myself in an auction that provided me with a scuba token. On another part of the world, a strange puzzle provided me with a mystery token A. What do these tokens do? No clue, the campaign ended before I figured it out. Yes, I could play the game again and focus on these items. I just can’t stomach another 10-15 hours of skill checks and event cards and fights.

A sequel is already in the works, and it seems to fix some of the issues mentioned here (or at least attempting to.) I’m holding out hope since I still see a lot of promise in that box. I recommend reducing the amount of gameplay. That might sound weird: I’m asking for a game to have less game. I’m reminded of the great quote from Stephen Covey: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” You want to make an exploration game? Make an exploration game! For one, I’d remove the bloat associated with the event deck. If we must have negative cards, just put “lose 3 health” on them and call it a day. I don’t need ongoing skill checks, and I certainly don’t need to place a serpent token on the map and have it follow me. Also, let me move. I shouldn’t need to run a craft check just to explore stuff on the map. Maybe your default move is 2, and you can take one damage or one fatigue for each space beyond that. I also hate exploring the wrong location and finding something irrelevant to the story. Put a red circle around locations that relate to a quest and yellow circles around one-offs, so I don’t waste a turn picking the wrong mountain. Finally, I just want less combat and fewer skill checks. Focus on the story.