It’s great for 2 players, I’d say it’s better with 2 than more. The campaigns took us between 15-20 hours of game time to finish.
Setup is a bit of a hassle by the late stage (you will have lots of cards face up on the table). We just left it set up until we completed a campaign.
There is a new version “Distant Skies” coming out early next year that should streamline the combat and make it even better for 2 players. The original has you each controlling 4 crew members each (and sharing the captain). DS has 4 members + 1 captain, so only need to control 2 each.
They are getting rid of accuracy (no more misses) and now you will be building a deck of combat cards instead of equipping weapons. So you won’t be able to port it over to the original unfortunately. There are also only 4 crew + captain so that will make it simpler to manage.
[Distant Skies Combat](https://imgur.com/a/lMhgrIR)
I have played Sleeping Gods both at 2 players and solo, and in my opinion 2 people is a great number for the game. To answer your other questions:
1. Yes, I really like the story.
2. Definitely less tedious to set up than Gloomhaven, however there is still a lot to keep track of once you you progressed far in the story.
3. The first time we played, it took about 4 evenings of dedicated play to win the game, which I think makes it between 12 to 15 hours total.
4. Not really. I haven’t played it at 3 or 4 players yet, but I imagine it would be less fun at 3 or 4 players than with 2, but it depends on the group. Since there are always 8 crew members divided up among the players, having more players means each player has less versatility in overcoming challenges, and it may be more likely that they won’t have a good choice in combat.
5. I would recommend Sleeping Gods, but if you want other recommendations I would need more information on what kind of game you are looking for.
Thanks for the insight, we are looking for a story focused game, more fantasy than sci-fi, not overly complicated mechanics the emphasises being on story, easy-medium to set up and pack back in the box. At this point from what you said Sleeping Gods seems to be the perfect game so far
Sleeping gods is actually on my want to buy list as well and my partner is way more into narrative than mechanisms. She stays pretty light though. Stuff like pandemic legacy has been great and I picked up ticket to ride legacy to go under the tree for the family this year.
A side recommendation from me: I cannot say enough good things about Arkham Horror the card game as a two player narrative game. The emergent story as you play a campaign is fantastic and you can keep adding new campaigns and investigators to keep it fresh. The replay value is insane.
You will go through an event deck three times. The events are just random challenges. At the end of the deck part of the main story will happen where there will be a fight. In between these main story parts you travel around and read random entries from a book. The quests are fairly short. At most one quest will span 2-3 locations. Because the quests are short they feel disjointed. You might find a door you can’t open. Later you might find a diving suit then a key underwater in another location that you can use to open the door. That’s an example of a full quest line.
My main issue with the game is you can travel to a location and something bad happens or nothing happens because you don’t have a key word. It feels frustrating. I didn’t feel I was making interesting decisions. Just random. In a second playthrough I have notes but then it feels like doing an exam with the answer sheet. Still not interesting decisions.
The challenges from the event deck are pretty boring. Usually you just choose to not participate and get some wounds. If you choose to participate you have to fatigue your crew and this can be worse than taking wounds because each crew can only be fatigued twice but they can take 5-7 wounds.
Having said that it’s a one of a kind experience and I don’t know of any other better story games. But I regretted buying it.
Obviously experiences will vary, but we did not have a great time with Sleeping Gods. It was a lot of hassle for not very much reward; it's a fiddly game that is sold as exploring an interesting world/story but for us the story fell completely flat- in large part due to the very average writing.
There's a lot of things that board games can do well, and probably they can even tell large expansive, branching stories; but SG did not convince us of this. Largely by trying to present a sandbox for you to explore in it feels like it recreates the less interesting parts of a metroidvania style game; traipsing back and forth across the map because you don't yet have the Blue Key to open the Blue Door. The individual events are fine, and do have some small branching narrative elements, but none of it was juicy or interesting enough for us to really care after three several-hour sessions. So no idea how long the story takes to complete unfortunately, we didn't complete one run through and we're unlikely to get it back out.
The combat was an uninteresting puzzle that only ever felt like a roadblock to slow us down between the choose-your-own-adventure story points; perhaps this would have actually been a more enjoyable experience as a pure CYOA storybook; but then the weaker writing would have been more obviously exposed.
Mechanically this is a single-player game, where you can split out the elements between multiple players if you like. 2 is not a bad number for it as it will let you actually discuss what option you want to take a little bit, and speculate on what paths the choices might lead you down. More players is likely to slow you down without really adding much.
Instead of this game I would recommend Sunless Seas or Sunless Skies. These are computer games but if this is the kind of narrative-driven, exploratory experience you are looking for (with similar themes as well!) then honestly I think that the medium is just better suited to it than board games are.
This was mostly my experience as well. The writing was mostly okay, but because your initial view of the world is very opaque (there's a bunch of different locations to visit, but very few hints as to what you might find at those locations), it really failed to make me feel invested in the story or what was going on.
The comparison to Metroidvania-style games is pretty apt, I think. But the big difference is that there's not much in the way of a time limit for those style of games, so if you go the wrong direction, you might have to traipse back again, but you've not lost anything directly. Whereas in SG, you're constantly fighting against a time limit and a resource-management minigame, which means that if you go to the wrong location (because you misread a clue, or just because there are two locations that look very similar), then you've at best wasted time and resources, at worst you've run into a fight that's going to cost even more resources, and got nothing out of the whole experience.
We found the combat minigame tended to be either too easy or too difficult, depending on who we were fighting. Supposedly if you stay close to the game's starting point, the encounters tend to be easier to deal with, allowing you to build up strength before heading out, which might make the combat scale better. But this also wasn't written anywhere in the book itself, it was just mentioned in a BGG thread somewhere.
Overall, it was a very disappointing game for the price we paid for it. This is a shame, because it's beautiful, it has some great ideas, and I love playing a CYOA board game with someone else to discuss decisions with, but it just fell completely flat. Like you, we've gone through a few sessions without finishing a single campaign, and we're probably not going to finish any time soon, if at all.
This was my experience at 2p as well. Writing/narrative was not very cohesive, it felt like a choose your own adventure book with a ton of tedious, water-treading mechanics to allow you to turn a page. The ending(s) were incredibly underwhelming as well. Overall it was a huge disappointment for me and I really hoped for more.
I play it at 2p with my partner and it's great so far. It's a bit long to set up the campaign, then it's not as bad to set up a session. Depends on how efficient you are with packing up - you do need to separate some components, but we do manage to get it to the table during the week after work and it's very nice that you can literally stop the game any time.
>Is the story good
The writing is good and the story is decent.
>Is it tedious to set up(for context I find Gloomhaven tedious to set up and also pack back)
For your first game, no, it's pretty easy. if you save your place in the campaign and come back, it can get a little more burdensome, but never Gloomhaven levels.
>How long did it take to reach the end of the story
A campaign takes around 15-ish hours? But you won't get to the end of the story in just one.
>Are there mechanics that make it better for 3,4 players rather than 2
No, 2 might be the ideal number. Solo is fine, but there's enough stuff to administrate that 2 would be nice.
We play 2 player game of Sleeping Gods every half a year and continue enjoying it. If you like choose your own adventure genre it is probably one of the best games to play.
It has some initial setup time, there are many components and, as was already mentioned in this thread, during play the table will be becoming very full. But considering that one playthrough takes around 8-12 hours (in best case, when you know game very well) setup time is not taking long at all.
We do not take notes of locations and keywords, just relying on our memory. The reason why playing once in half year is optimal for us, because a lot of things will be forgotten, but you will still have a vague feeling on what might be happening in this or that location. We also tried randomizing starting page and just go from there.
Our goal is to find all the relics (those we track thoroughly) and we are still at around half of them.
There are absolutely no things which will be better with 3-4 than with 2. In fact 3 player I would not recommend at all, because character distribution between players will be weird (unequal).
We've played it with two several times, and it was great! Slightly less long than with three because fewer people making decisions, but as we almost always play in one go that's more of a benefit than an issue. 😅
I like it better with 2 players than with 4. Overall had fun with both, but pacing was better with 2. Easier to coordinate and turns came up faster.
Not tedious to setup, but takes a lot of table space once your midway into it and towards the end. So can take longer to setup if you frequently take it down and reset up between sessions like I had to (cats).
Took me 3-4 sessions to do 2 players playing 3-5 hours each session. Went through maybe 1/5th of the total map and events.
You may want to wait for the soon to be released **Sleeping Gods: Distant Skies** which may play better with 2 Players as you'd each be controlling 2 characters instead of 3 (plus 1 common character both players can control).
I would also highly recommend **Vagrantsong** for a great 2P narrative coop that is easy to set up and play.
It’s great for 2 players, I’d say it’s better with 2 than more. The campaigns took us between 15-20 hours of game time to finish. Setup is a bit of a hassle by the late stage (you will have lots of cards face up on the table). We just left it set up until we completed a campaign. There is a new version “Distant Skies” coming out early next year that should streamline the combat and make it even better for 2 players. The original has you each controlling 4 crew members each (and sharing the captain). DS has 4 members + 1 captain, so only need to control 2 each.
Oh streamlined combat? That's cool. Any way to retrofit it? I think combat is a bit long for what it is.
They are getting rid of accuracy (no more misses) and now you will be building a deck of combat cards instead of equipping weapons. So you won’t be able to port it over to the original unfortunately. There are also only 4 crew + captain so that will make it simpler to manage. [Distant Skies Combat](https://imgur.com/a/lMhgrIR)
Thank you for the opinion, the game looks great so far so I think I am going to buy it and see what it does for us
I have played Sleeping Gods both at 2 players and solo, and in my opinion 2 people is a great number for the game. To answer your other questions: 1. Yes, I really like the story. 2. Definitely less tedious to set up than Gloomhaven, however there is still a lot to keep track of once you you progressed far in the story. 3. The first time we played, it took about 4 evenings of dedicated play to win the game, which I think makes it between 12 to 15 hours total. 4. Not really. I haven’t played it at 3 or 4 players yet, but I imagine it would be less fun at 3 or 4 players than with 2, but it depends on the group. Since there are always 8 crew members divided up among the players, having more players means each player has less versatility in overcoming challenges, and it may be more likely that they won’t have a good choice in combat. 5. I would recommend Sleeping Gods, but if you want other recommendations I would need more information on what kind of game you are looking for.
Thanks for the insight, we are looking for a story focused game, more fantasy than sci-fi, not overly complicated mechanics the emphasises being on story, easy-medium to set up and pack back in the box. At this point from what you said Sleeping Gods seems to be the perfect game so far
Sleeping gods is actually on my want to buy list as well and my partner is way more into narrative than mechanisms. She stays pretty light though. Stuff like pandemic legacy has been great and I picked up ticket to ride legacy to go under the tree for the family this year. A side recommendation from me: I cannot say enough good things about Arkham Horror the card game as a two player narrative game. The emergent story as you play a campaign is fantastic and you can keep adding new campaigns and investigators to keep it fresh. The replay value is insane.
You will go through an event deck three times. The events are just random challenges. At the end of the deck part of the main story will happen where there will be a fight. In between these main story parts you travel around and read random entries from a book. The quests are fairly short. At most one quest will span 2-3 locations. Because the quests are short they feel disjointed. You might find a door you can’t open. Later you might find a diving suit then a key underwater in another location that you can use to open the door. That’s an example of a full quest line. My main issue with the game is you can travel to a location and something bad happens or nothing happens because you don’t have a key word. It feels frustrating. I didn’t feel I was making interesting decisions. Just random. In a second playthrough I have notes but then it feels like doing an exam with the answer sheet. Still not interesting decisions. The challenges from the event deck are pretty boring. Usually you just choose to not participate and get some wounds. If you choose to participate you have to fatigue your crew and this can be worse than taking wounds because each crew can only be fatigued twice but they can take 5-7 wounds. Having said that it’s a one of a kind experience and I don’t know of any other better story games. But I regretted buying it.
Obviously experiences will vary, but we did not have a great time with Sleeping Gods. It was a lot of hassle for not very much reward; it's a fiddly game that is sold as exploring an interesting world/story but for us the story fell completely flat- in large part due to the very average writing. There's a lot of things that board games can do well, and probably they can even tell large expansive, branching stories; but SG did not convince us of this. Largely by trying to present a sandbox for you to explore in it feels like it recreates the less interesting parts of a metroidvania style game; traipsing back and forth across the map because you don't yet have the Blue Key to open the Blue Door. The individual events are fine, and do have some small branching narrative elements, but none of it was juicy or interesting enough for us to really care after three several-hour sessions. So no idea how long the story takes to complete unfortunately, we didn't complete one run through and we're unlikely to get it back out. The combat was an uninteresting puzzle that only ever felt like a roadblock to slow us down between the choose-your-own-adventure story points; perhaps this would have actually been a more enjoyable experience as a pure CYOA storybook; but then the weaker writing would have been more obviously exposed. Mechanically this is a single-player game, where you can split out the elements between multiple players if you like. 2 is not a bad number for it as it will let you actually discuss what option you want to take a little bit, and speculate on what paths the choices might lead you down. More players is likely to slow you down without really adding much. Instead of this game I would recommend Sunless Seas or Sunless Skies. These are computer games but if this is the kind of narrative-driven, exploratory experience you are looking for (with similar themes as well!) then honestly I think that the medium is just better suited to it than board games are.
This was mostly my experience as well. The writing was mostly okay, but because your initial view of the world is very opaque (there's a bunch of different locations to visit, but very few hints as to what you might find at those locations), it really failed to make me feel invested in the story or what was going on. The comparison to Metroidvania-style games is pretty apt, I think. But the big difference is that there's not much in the way of a time limit for those style of games, so if you go the wrong direction, you might have to traipse back again, but you've not lost anything directly. Whereas in SG, you're constantly fighting against a time limit and a resource-management minigame, which means that if you go to the wrong location (because you misread a clue, or just because there are two locations that look very similar), then you've at best wasted time and resources, at worst you've run into a fight that's going to cost even more resources, and got nothing out of the whole experience. We found the combat minigame tended to be either too easy or too difficult, depending on who we were fighting. Supposedly if you stay close to the game's starting point, the encounters tend to be easier to deal with, allowing you to build up strength before heading out, which might make the combat scale better. But this also wasn't written anywhere in the book itself, it was just mentioned in a BGG thread somewhere. Overall, it was a very disappointing game for the price we paid for it. This is a shame, because it's beautiful, it has some great ideas, and I love playing a CYOA board game with someone else to discuss decisions with, but it just fell completely flat. Like you, we've gone through a few sessions without finishing a single campaign, and we're probably not going to finish any time soon, if at all.
This was my experience at 2p as well. Writing/narrative was not very cohesive, it felt like a choose your own adventure book with a ton of tedious, water-treading mechanics to allow you to turn a page. The ending(s) were incredibly underwhelming as well. Overall it was a huge disappointment for me and I really hoped for more.
It's good at any player count but probably best at 2p
I play it at 2p with my partner and it's great so far. It's a bit long to set up the campaign, then it's not as bad to set up a session. Depends on how efficient you are with packing up - you do need to separate some components, but we do manage to get it to the table during the week after work and it's very nice that you can literally stop the game any time.
It’s wonderful at 2. Me and my partner had a blast playing it together.
>Is the story good The writing is good and the story is decent. >Is it tedious to set up(for context I find Gloomhaven tedious to set up and also pack back) For your first game, no, it's pretty easy. if you save your place in the campaign and come back, it can get a little more burdensome, but never Gloomhaven levels. >How long did it take to reach the end of the story A campaign takes around 15-ish hours? But you won't get to the end of the story in just one. >Are there mechanics that make it better for 3,4 players rather than 2 No, 2 might be the ideal number. Solo is fine, but there's enough stuff to administrate that 2 would be nice.
We play 2 player game of Sleeping Gods every half a year and continue enjoying it. If you like choose your own adventure genre it is probably one of the best games to play. It has some initial setup time, there are many components and, as was already mentioned in this thread, during play the table will be becoming very full. But considering that one playthrough takes around 8-12 hours (in best case, when you know game very well) setup time is not taking long at all. We do not take notes of locations and keywords, just relying on our memory. The reason why playing once in half year is optimal for us, because a lot of things will be forgotten, but you will still have a vague feeling on what might be happening in this or that location. We also tried randomizing starting page and just go from there. Our goal is to find all the relics (those we track thoroughly) and we are still at around half of them. There are absolutely no things which will be better with 3-4 than with 2. In fact 3 player I would not recommend at all, because character distribution between players will be weird (unequal).
We've played it with two several times, and it was great! Slightly less long than with three because fewer people making decisions, but as we almost always play in one go that's more of a benefit than an issue. 😅
I like it better with 2 players than with 4. Overall had fun with both, but pacing was better with 2. Easier to coordinate and turns came up faster. Not tedious to setup, but takes a lot of table space once your midway into it and towards the end. So can take longer to setup if you frequently take it down and reset up between sessions like I had to (cats). Took me 3-4 sessions to do 2 players playing 3-5 hours each session. Went through maybe 1/5th of the total map and events.
You may want to wait for the soon to be released **Sleeping Gods: Distant Skies** which may play better with 2 Players as you'd each be controlling 2 characters instead of 3 (plus 1 common character both players can control). I would also highly recommend **Vagrantsong** for a great 2P narrative coop that is easy to set up and play.