Sleeping Gods | Rahdo's Final Thoughts

hey everybody final thoughts time for sleeping gods although before I get to that please remember folks this was a paid preview and therefore any subjective opinions I give you should take with a grain of salt but having gotten that out of the way what do I think I think this is amazing I think a lot of people are gonna consider this to be designer artist Ryan Locke it's a masterpiece because it really does stand on the shoulders of everything he's done before this feels like it's his culmination of what he's been working on with above and below and near and far to try to meld really rich evocative you know an engaging narrative driven storytelling with sharp clever and equally engaging euro style game mechanisms to create a wonderful sprawling adventure that you know gets told over man over over huge amounts of time and yet I'm not sacrificing everything you want from a board game you know our cooperative euro with lots of interesting opportunities for teamwork between players really great mechanisms and you'll probably the biggest strength sleeping gods has the thing that really makes it stand out more than anything else in the board game industry is this book right here the Atlas this is an endless font of adventure and really you know my prototype only has about half of the pages that will ultimately be in here this is as close as you can get in analog form to matching the ambition and majesty of the you know the hugely popular open-world adventure games you see in the video game market these days you know days gone and you know Red Dead Redemption y'all ever since Grand Theft Auto kind of change the script for what a triple-a Vita games supposed to be that has become standard you know this huge vast endless world where you can just pick a direction and just go and know that you are gonna run across interesting stuff every step of the way because the world is just overflowing with opportunities for gameplay and yet there is still a central spine that you can always come back to that will push the overall narrative forward and tell a story it has a beginning middle and end that show growth in all that guys that's kind of become second nature in the video game industry but in the board game world we're still living session to session oh I had a fun time playing my game of pandemic and we saved the world where we didn't put it away um next time we play we'll start over from scratch there is no starting over from scratch here the fact that um you get your log and by the way I love this log I love hey keep track of the other items we have whose turn it is stuff like that but more importantly keep track of the world watch it evolve take notes take notes knowing like actually the one I just did I should have taken a note what zone was that in where we got jumped I need to make a note never go there death you know being able to take notes like that the don't elite only affect the campaign you're playing right now but affect future campaigns because you will be able to play through this game multiple times and when I say play through a game a game a campaign is ten to twenty hours and so being able to do that multiple times because there's no way you will see all the nooks and crannies even if you do visit all the places you won't have seen everything because there are always full of choices that create branches that open up different opportunities I mean just in the video I did I made a choice that cut off a quest that I'll never be able to do now and I should make a note of that right I didn't help that old man what would have happened I I turns out I went looked I would have gone to another quest and I don't even know what that is so that's gonna be something I can take a note of so that the next time I play the next time I find myself in that corner of the world I gotta make sure this time help the guy so I can find out what the mysterious music was because otherwise I'll come across that not I won't be able to pursue the the you know the lock key system that is in this game to just slowly reveal more and more stuff cuz in any given time you've got up there's a half-dozen quests you're trying to work on and then on top of that a dozen other quests you've already finished that have opened or closed doors that have changed the world it's amazing it is breathtaking to me how well it all works and how smooth I mean if all the work was done by Ryan and his team because it's super easy on us there's not a lot of bookkeeping you have to worry about you just got this big epic deck full of quests it as long as you just keep this deck in number in numerical order so you can find stuff when the book tells you to you're set again you got me I know people are gonna ask me to compare this to the other open-world games that are out there because there are a few on the market they've come out in the last few years and I think most notably people are gonna want to draw comparisons between this and seventh continent and between this and tainted Grail and between this and maybe ether fields and on this war vine there are a few games out there that have tried to do it but I'll just tell you right now if what you're looking for is a big endless seemingly endless world to explore and just find tons and tons and tons of content over a hundred hours of gameplay none of them hold a candle to sleeping gods and they're all very impressive and they all try to skin the cat in their own special way but I think sleeping God's because of this this idea this Atlas where you can explore north south east and west and you know you've got your at-a-glance for the whole world means it is such a huge world but it is such an easy-to-navigate world there isn't any i know saving the game here is super easy you've got your nine characters each character gets their own envelope you just put all their stuff in an envelope you mark down right where were we and next time you play you can be back up and running in just a couple of minutes it's almost as painless as a video game and again it has the same death and breath and wonder as you know as the best of what the V means she has to offer and I'm amazed by that you wouldn't expect just hum you know some books and some cards and some tokens to be able to pull it off but it does so putting all that aside I mean that's really the big lead item on this game is the open-world exploration is second to none um I mean really the only way you could get this kind of experience up until now playing at your table would be a traditional pen and paper RPG where you know the boundaries of the world are only limited by your imagination this world feels almost as boundless as a pen and paper RPG and yet it's not it's lovingly crafted every step of the way by Ryan and and Red Raven games and I'm blown away by putting all that aside though I also have to talk about how wonderfully gobsmacked I am by the great great combat gameplay this is got to be one of the best euro-style combat systems I have ever scene because it is so delightfully puzzly getting you know this group of bad guys and depending on where they're standing next to each other and hey some characters like Rafael he can actually force characters to move by spending command points so that you can line them up so you can get these oh that's the weak one in the herd okay hit him and then allow my slash to travel over to the really big tough scary thing that I would never be able to hit in a million years and now that guy special powers taken offline so we do have to worry about him there is so much depth and joy to be had in puzzling out the best way to fight through this this combat system I am blown away by it in fact it's interesting this combat system is effectively a whole game in and of itself and I know that because Ryan did this system as the basis for oh the other the last game he had on Kickstarter I cannot think of the name of it now oh that's gonna drive me nuts okay I gotta look it up alright shoot shoot shoot where are you keyboard ah sorry folks I should have looked up before I started filming but now I filmed too far BoardGameGeek Ryan locket I'll just get a list of his games I've done a video for it it was a really good game I was interesting it was an area control game using the same laying down cubes in orthogonal patterns kind of feels a little bit like old macaron oh s--- artifacts Inc of course it's not the first page because nobody's played it yet cuz hasn't come out yet oh come on not a sort by year oh this is ridiculous Rome ro am um I'm assuming Ryan's been working on this for years and he knew he had a really cool combat system so good he can make a whole game out of it just that system and that's what he did with Rome I was really impressed by Rome when we first played it but seeing it now here in its full splendor and glory how it dovetails with well really the the the entire nature of the challenge of this game is a war of attrition every single time you do anything in this game your characters are getting worn down and it's a very common trope in adventure style games to give players mana Oh everybody has mana to cast their spells and oh you've run out of mana now you've got a rest so you can regain your mana this game it's it's not some weird Tyrael force that you have it's your character itself you don't run out of mana you just run out of energy your character slowly get physically exhausted and get weaker and weaker and so the game gets this a band flow of yeah we're all rested up we're great we're gonna go out have a lot of entries and over time you know the encounters we have just start wearing us down some people are completely taken offline some people are exhausted but they can still keep pushing on but we're finding new items every step of the way that can make up for the fact oh I'm too weak to do it but bring the dog in he's got that little bit of extra strength we need um to get us through eventually you'll get to the point where you're so beaten down hopefully by that point you will have earned enough resources that you can start cooking up a storm to get everybody's bellies full in there and shake off the fatigue or you can get to a port which is what I was about to do in the renter I just did and pay money to get rid of all that stuff instead of the resources either way you basically you get worn down beat up making tough choices because got to make sure we can handle anything that comes up okay we can't let him get exhausted because he's our last savvy character um yeah I know he could do this and he's a little bit better at it than her but let's have her do it anyway because we got to keep savvy up in case something comes up we got to be ready for that balancing all of that to be successful in this game is a skill it's a required skill because the game really puts you through the ringer and it is great it is fun it is satisfying it creates a really good loop of we can take on the world we can do anything and then oh we are worn down we're all exhausted we can we feel like John McLean at the end of die hard where you can just barely walk into Holly but then we get a little bit resting we get a little food in our bellies and we're bright back at it that's a really nice roller coaster that is very much appreciated and then you know spike to every once a while with those really cool combat puzzles and always an underlying sense of joy and discovery because the world just keeps opening up to you bigger and bigger and bigger I'm really impressed now that said I will mention a couple of little issues I've had although one is maybe not fair for me to say um I said right up front this is a prototype and you know some of the rules are still in flux like yo my player board says you only get two but Ryan said no I'm actually you get three you know they're still trying to tweak the balance for everything to try to hit that you hit that perfect sweet spot and I think I think there get in there I can see how with a little bit more tweaking imbalances to be perfect as it is right now I mean heck you saw two times I had to just jettison cards because I didn't have a good way to play these cards I didn't have a use for them that feels kind of weird you know as an example it's like a little bit off just like needs a little bit more tweaking now I I say that as a complaint but even if it didn't get tweaked I wouldn't mind it's just something it would just be kind of like this odd thing about the game that wow you find yourself just saying cards a lot which feels doesn't feel good and you just have to work harder to come up with uses for them quicker but then that means you can't use all your items and stuff like that so I mean I think there's a little bit of pushing Paul I think there can just be a little bit of tightening of stuff you know using the morale track more you know stuff like that I've talked with Ryan I know he's still tweaking stuff it's still going through testing because the game is I'm you know quite a ways away just going on Kickstarter right now and I'm you'll I mean heck if you compare the if you go back and watch the run-through I did for near and far when it was on Kickstarter and compare it to the final game it went through so much more additional development in that final whatever was nine months and became such a better game that's why I'm confident that any clues I have about the gameplay and sleeping God right now Ryan will ultimately resolve because he still got time and he's a very iterative designer and I mean the bones the base of what is here is already phenomenal if this were coming out this year I would imagine it I mean like I said I like said right up front this is gonna be I think go down as one of Ryan's greatest most well-loved games of all time it scratches a niche that no other game has come close to and I I don't I don't I didn't think maybe a game could do what video games do so well but it does it wonderfully it's sleeping gods I'm very impressed and that is the final thoughts that's the preview folks thanks for watching have a very nice day talk to you later so long Oh bye-bye

Channel: Rahdo

Views: 34,749

Keywords: rhado, board game, baord game, radho, board games, baord games, boardgames, baordgames, boardgame, baordgame, rahdo, game

Id: wR0dJBfkaJA

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 06 2019