Sleeping Gods

We started a three player campaign on Normal difficulty, the box’s actual default setting, and by turn two of a fight every single crew member on our ship was dead. Two turns. I looked it up after and yeah, apparently everybody just quietly switches to the Easy Mode variant online before their first session, which is a weird thing for a box to not just tell you on the inside cover.

That rough start aside, the world here is the best part by a wide margin, painted map, real sense of somewhere, the kind of game where you want to sail to the edge just to see what’s drawn there. Combat is fine, exploration is genuinely great, the storytelling holds together across a long campaign in a way I didn’t expect from something with this much crunch under the hood.

Where it drags is the maintenance loop, fatigue tracking, status effects, having to sail back to a port over and over just to patch your crew up before you can go do the interesting thing again. It starts to feel less like sailing and more like doing laundry between the parts of the trip you actually wanted. Somebody described it as basically a solitaire efficiency puzzle that gets divided up between however many people are at the table, and once the fog cleared on that framing for me, I stopped fighting it and started optimizing, which honestly did make it click better. Big box too, table hog, don’t plan on playing this on anything smaller than a real dining table.

Four stars. The story and the map earn it, the busywork keeps it from five.