Sleeping Gods, Tomb of Horrors and The History of Narrative Choice Games

hello today we'll be reviewing a board game called sleeping gods but this isn't quite your regular board game review in fact we won't touch on sleeping guards till quite later in the video now if you're anything like me you will immediately want to skip ahead i have some bad news for you this time it's all relevant we'll also be discussing some very heavy subjects today including sexism and we'll briefly touch on racism and i would like to mention that this video is sponsored by skillshare and the review copy of sleeping gods was provided to us by the publisher none of the other games you will be seeing today have been provided by their publishers we've acquired them ourselves and skillshare is not a ballgame publisher so really has nothing to do with any of the content that is featured in this video they're just our sponsors that make this video possible so with that keep an open mind sit back relax and enjoy the show [Music] [Music] [Music] this is tomb of horrors a classic dungeons and dragons adventure written by one of the game's creators gary gaiax all the way back in 1975. this specifically is the second printing of tomb of horrors and depending on how you count there are at least nine printings retooling tomb of horrors for current editions of dnd or incorporating it into a grander adventure it is also arguably one of the most recognizable dungeons and dragons modules a direct source of inspiration for the cult classic video game iceman dale and the dungeon in its entirety is recreated by easter egg wizard james halliday in the novel ready player one it is obvious massively influential for many a source of fond memories and its cultural impact on games cannot be denied and i hate it i hate it i hate it i hate it it is the worst thing to happen to storytelling in tabletop games and i wish it never existed wait don't throw that egg at me just yet mr wizard let's talk two move horrors is the quintessential adventure of its time and before i dunk on it can we take a second to appreciate the art i love this image i mean yes it's clunky it's colorless it's sparse and distinctive detail and compared to modern fantasy artwork it isn't exactly monet is it but consider how well this illustration captures the mood the adventuring party don't look like they're composed of power fantasy beefcakes or uber wizards they're buffoons take in the sense of scale instead of filling most of the frame the adventuring party is small you can feel the dungeon looming the slanted geometry clouds everything in a haze of strange alien and other all we have here is a brick wall but my word that's one scary war i wasn't even born when this second edition was printed and whilst most of the united states of america were going free tom hanks field dungeons and dragons is satanism scare my country was all like dungeons and dragons more like the proletariat than the perestroika am i right [Laughter] oh no foreign media in soviet union was prohibited and most people had cassettes of the beatles and queen they had to buy it from a man from under his trench coat and whilst there's some word-of-mouth evidence to suggest that there have been three or four people who have played a role-playing game in lithuania in the 80s it was literally three or four people i can't relate to what it was like to play d d back in the day or so you would think the video game boom in the 90s did not escape lithuania and like many in 1998 i ended up with a set of compact discs with the most curious title many of you will be familiar with imagine what it was like to dive into this world without any frame of reference to discover candle keep jahira to discover minsk who was the first person in a video game that i found that sounded like me to traverse the sword coast and to even reverse engineer the rules for thako and all the while the back of the case had one mystical sentence set in tsr's best-selling forgotten realms campaign setting the most popular of the advanced dungeons and dragons role-playing game worlds it wasn't until 2004 that i played my very first tabletop role-playing game and that wasn't even dungeons and dragons that came much later in my life pen and paper role-playing games were still a mystery to most and frankly i don't remember much about how that session went but i can guarantee you one thing it was probably very awkward but i do remember the sense of discovering something new something strange and unexplored with scribbled maps and pennies it was a brave new world it was my world so yeah i'll never know what it was like to play d d in the 80s just like you will never know what it was like to play d d in lithuania in the naughties but my guess was probably much of a muchness which is to say that i understand the nostalgia doing something cool and creative that a lot of people didn't appreciate but as most things back then it tells us more about who we are as a community than we'd like to hear tomb of horus opens with a forward to the dungeon master and let me tell you it's something as clever players will gather from a reading of the legend of the tomb this dungeon has more tricks and traps than it has monsters to fight this is a thinking person's module and if your group is a hack and slay gathering they will be unhappy so rarely do i get to read a text where the author yells at me this thing is not for dum-dums and ironically that sort of writing speaks more about the writer than the adventure itself and i feel comfortable saying that because what guy gex tells you here in my opinion is a lie if you're not familiar with tomb of horrors if you don't know what it is then you might be fooled by his statement but even if you briefly sailed past this module in the night then you will know that it is the most ridiculous murder death trap imagined by a human being when you approach the dungeon you will find not one not two but three entrances the module itself offers no reasonable indication as to the validity of these entrances and the consequences of entering one of them will only be revealed after doing so if you choose the right entrance as soon as you open the false door with nothing behind it the roof over you will collapse causing 5d10 damage to everyone underneath which will probably instantly kill you especially if you like me are a wizard if you choose the left entrance the dungeon master is instructed to count to 10 in their head and if you haven't left by the time the dungeon master is done then you are trapped in a featureless room forever with no seeming ways to escape unless you possess some very obscure or very powerful spells otherwise enjoy the rest of your life i guess however long that lasts but if you choose the middle entrance then congratulations you are a thinking person did you feel an avalanche of intelligence overwhelm your reasoning ability as you were making that choice no me neither this entrance sets the tone of the design going forward every twist has the potential to outright murder you and if you manage to miraculously evade death there's enough alternative sadistic outcomes that will permanently incapacitate your character in physical or psychological ways or send them on wild goose chasers that will lead to more death crucially there's very little or occasionally nothing at all to indicate what the consequence of your choice will result in which gives us an adventure that's less a thinking person's module but more a tedious affair of trial and error you die you learn you start again and maybe one day you and your friends will find the one true way in the forward to the 1998 sequel returned to the tomb of horrors gygax outlines the intentions for his design why then the scenario in the first place thank alan lucian for conceiving of such a horrid little adventure from his basis i developed the material that was to become the tomb of horus and i admit to chuckling evilly as i did so there were several very expert players in my campaign and this was meant as yet another challenge to their skill and the persistence of their thereto for invincible characters to summarize galax wrote this for his dnd gems who were most of the time all male by the way to challenge people who've become so good at winning the famously unwinnable game today d d is a group activity where the goal isn't to succeed but to partake in play and tell a story whereas in the 70s that wasn't necessarily true tomb of horus premiered at the official dungeons and dragons tournament in the very first origins game fair and whilst gygax isn't being clear on whether he specifically refers to this event but it seems that at least one group of players managed to beat the dungeon kygex called it genius and the best in playing ability i call it luck there's an inevitable coded machismo that comes paired with this module not the sort of machismo that espouses physicality but what in my opinion gigex sells as smarts only the most intelligent will prevail instilling a sense of honor and prowess to those who succeed to cap this all off i would like to show you one last passage from tomb of horrors the one that says efka this game isn't for you when the party examines this arch give them illustration number five and inform them that the stones glow in these colors whenever any person comes within three feet of the portal lower left olive keystone russet lower right citron no matter which stones are pressed in what order the archway remains clouded and veiled with a haze which nothing can enable the onlookers to see through all living matter which goes through the arch will be teleported to three while non-living matter is teleported simultaneously to 33 i.e characters stepping through will appear at the start totally nude while everything else with them will go to the crypt of the demilit cruel but most entertaining for the dm cruel but most entertaining for the dm and that's it you see that's the giveaway line in my opinion the cruelty here is played for a joke a whimsical moment where suddenly you're naked but it's too late i've seen everything ha ha i sort of almost get it in the right environment it passes it's a laugh everyone chuckles at their newfound clothless fate and then tries to figure out how they're going to survive without any equipment but notice that when i say the right environment i don't specify who that environment is right for i can't tell you what geigex was thinking when he wrote this i'm not him i haven't been inside his brain i haven't met him nor have i met anyone who's met him to the best of my knowledge this is all just my opinion derived from the things that he said if you're wondering why gagax's playing group was almost always composed of all men you're in luck because the man himself has provided us with an answer in a 2004 q a on the internet forum and world as i have often said i am a biological determinist and there is no question that male and female brains are different it is apparent to me that by and large females do not derive the same inner satisfaction from playing games as a hobby that males do it isn't that females can't play games well it's just that it isn't a compelling activity to them as is the case for males biological determinism by the way is a theory that basically says your genes determine who you are it shares its roots with other fun notions like racism sexism and homophobia and is at the very least very problematic but now has also been largely debunked if you wanted a good primer on why it's nonsense the documentary free identical strangers is a good place to start in short once again in my opinion geigs believed that women didn't have fun playing games which if you're watching this video and you don't identify as male i am sorry i'm sorry for everyone who's perpetuated and glorified this myth because you and i and anyone who's shared a joyous moment at a game table with you knows it's utter twaddle imagine being thrust into an environment that's not just steeped in that male presence but also that sense of machismo that's already intimidating and unwelcoming and if you don't conform to white male cis heterosexual you will feel like a stranger invading an inner sanctum now imagine your dungeon master says you and all these men that you're playing a game with are now naked that i mean that wouldn't make me feel comfortable i think what happened is that geigex ended up with women who didn't enjoy his game and what he failed to realize was that they weren't enjoying his game not because they were women but because he wrote it sleazy and if you want me to take things a notch further consider the archway of glowing orange a room that forcibly changes your character's gender in what i willingly choose to infer is done for a laugh i can't prove it's played as a joke but i am comfortable making that educated guess based on geigex's intent exemplified in this text and elsewhere and even if it isn't played as a joke all you need to do is google archway of glowing orange or girdle of masculinity femininity and read up on how dungeon masters of yore have handled this receipts are all there i know some people will feel like i'm tarnishing the good name of a cultural icon the dungeons and dragons is more than just gynax it's dave arneson and all the other people who wrote and created in this space for nearly half a century and they're right guy gaxx was just some dude from lake geneva wisconsin who i think had some crap opinions he was the egg wizard all shell and no game and he alone wasn't responsible dnd does not belong to gary gygax it belongs to all of us and we must take ownership of the joy that it brought us over the years and the critical shortcomings ingrained in the seed that blossomed into this game here i'd like to rephrase something i said earlier in this video i have no idea what it felt like to play dnd in the 80s or the 70s and i don't want to i get the nostalgia but it's not just the nostalgia that isn't mine it's tied to a cultural space that's not for me or my friends i don't miss that dnd because i don't think me and who i am would have had much fun there [Music] around the same time as tomb of horrors was making its first appearance in origins three men in england decided to start their own business hand-crafting sets of classic board games such as go mancala or backgammon their names were john peake ian livingston and steve jackson and they called the company games workshop more and more ian and steve were interested in importing this new game from america called dungeons and dragons it was a hit they opened the first games workshop retail store it was also a hit things were for a lack of a better word poppin in 1980 mr livingston and mr jackson met a penguin editor geraldine cook and pitched her a book about dungeons and dragons a sort of tutorial on what this phenomenon was but over time the book changed shape instead of telling they decided to do the showing they wanted to write a book that made the reader feel like they were playing dnd warlock of fire top mountain the first fighting fantasy book sold so fast they had to make multiple additional print runs in the first few months just to keep the game in stock much like tabletop role-playing games it was a sensation unto itself opening up a new world for those who found d d inaccessible anyone in the bedroom without any need of finding friends who were interested could now become a part of it fighting fantasy was not the first series of gamified fiction in america choose your own adventure was already popular for years zorp existed i don't really want to talk about zorp but it did exist literary writers were experimenting with the genre for decades including jorge luhiz borges the ulupu movement and enrand but this was the first time someone combined the idea of choosing multiple outcomes in a narrative in a book with the idea that your character has statistics and inventory and can find goblins in a dungeon by rolling dice short of asking steve jackson and ian livingston themselves and if they're watching maybe they can leave a comment i have no way of knowing how much influence tomb of horus had on fighting fantasy but it's inevitable that geigax's writing did the ethos of rinse die repeat is the core pillar the hint section at the back of warlock of fire top mountain specifically uses the phrase one true way and if i'm honest to me tomb of horus is just shorthand for gygaxian storytelling for example in the very first adventure gary gygax ran the players found a treasure chest filled with money but it's three thousand copper pieces and because geigerrigs cared about such things the joke was that it was too heavy for anyone to reasonably carry the two players in his game were his children one of whom soon lost interest in the game it was his daughter what i am interested in is the genealogy of these ideas tomb of horus is gygax at peak gygax and fighting fantasy by borrowing these ideas becomes a successful adaptation in a new medium reimagining dungeons and dragons has become a genre of gaming of its own baldur's gate wasn't the first video game to implement d d systematically their honor goes to pool of radiance it was just the most successful in the 90s and many more followed similarly board games borrowed its themes and tropes steve jackson's munchkin zeroes in on adventurer hijinx creating a take that card game that relies on slapstick comedy at the expense of its players this by the way is not the steve jackson of fighting fantasy although if you ever needed proof that we live in a simulation he has written fighting fantasy books and is indeed the first person outside of ian livingston and steve jackson to write one and of course the original print runs did nothing to distinguish between the two curiously these games never try to recreate the storytelling aspect of role-playing games there's an obsession at delivering another angle on mechanisms and game design dragonfire uses the setting of dungeons and dragons but is a cooperative deck building game role player is choose adventuring to create a game that emulates the mechanical process of creating a dungeons and dragons character complete with attributes like strength charisma and so on the success of fighting fantasy led to it also being adapted to other mediums perhaps the most famous to emulate ideas first seen in tomb of horrors and then fighting fantasy is the video game dark souls in which you the protagonist wander a fantasy world at the brink of collapse exploring locales and encountering monsters the trick being that dark souls is notoriously deadly and the tenor of the game is to once again encounter traps or monsters and the most likely way you'll learn how to defeat them is by dying responding and trying again until you figure out a mechanical solution the game's creator hidetaka miyazaki has cited fighting fantasy as a big source of inspiration over in tabletop world the adaptations have been more direct whereas dark souls and similar games have abandoned the aspect of choosing narrative prompts games like tales of arabian knights embraced them full on and also come with the nasty tropes that geigex planted the seeds for so long ago although that's not true for all of them legacy of dragon hold by nikki valance wasn't just a monumental love letter to fighting fantasy but also establishes more progressive tropes set in the same design space and offers a more compelling and dynamic narrative compared to others by and large these games do not stray far from the call formula you read some text it has prompts you choose an option and you read the outcome whereas the tabletop ones are developed to be played together with other people they are still mostly just books with a sprinkling of mechanisms which is exactly what this is [Music] sometimes an idea comes along and regardless whether you think it's a good idea or a very bad idea you know that it's going to monumentally change the scene as we know it i am of course talking about brexit but seven continent also fits that description marrying the genres of fighting fantasy and open world survival video games seven continent presents a new way to explore the concept of diverging narrative in games instead of a book filled with prompts that lead from one to another the game creates a visual menu masquerading as a map of a yet undiscovered mysterious continent moving your characters through the map will let you interact with locations trigger narrative prompts gather equipment that will aid in your survival and reveal new locations to explore what i think is really cool is that this map is huge there really is a world here simulated on your living room table except it's about the size of your living room floor so you can't build the whole thing at once which means that your focus will shift from zone to zone as you travel through them new areas revealed and old ones forgotten like a thick fog setting on a memory that's powerful there's a sense here that you are playing with something bigger than yourself every nook and cranny has something new to discover there's a promise of adventure of stepping into the unknown i think the reason seven continent became so popular is because it mined this promise and also that sense of scale and the nostalgia that all branching narrative games rely on but if you don't identify with that nostalgia if it doesn't speak to you it's also a miserable experience from the get go seven continent plugs you into a 30 hour campaign spanning the entire continent it wants you to try things and push buttons fully cognizant that some buttons are pitfalls with a hundred foot drop with 10 foot spikes at the bottom that eat you let me bring you in on a little secret 99 of people which is a number i've just made up who played fighting fantasy games you know what they did when they died they just kept on playing as if they didn't die if they had the option of choosing passage 17 or 232 and then they chose 17 and oops a giant snake just tore off their head they're not gonna go all the way back to passage one and start the whole tedious process from the beginning they're gonna go to two three two and pretend that nothing happened conversely if you die in dark souls you're not booted back to northern undead asylum like a child who's been made to sit in a corner as punishment you restart at a bonfire and yes that bonfire might be quite a waste back but at least video games are dynamic and wading through royal sentinels is at least another opportunity to get better at combat so that maybe this time stupid ornstein and smaug won't skewer you again you can't do that in seventh continent there's responsibility anyone who's not playing this solo won't feel like it because then the social construct of playing a game collapses and even if you are playing solo seven continent isn't binary it's not go left or right there's a whole system where you draw cards and play the odds and you can't just undo things once you start putting back together pieces of broken glass you're not back to a vars again you're just juggling broken glass held together with duct tape seventh continent wears its influences on its sleeves and displays them proudly but crucially it forgets that besides the nostalgia in this the game space allows you to skip past the annoyance by making it bigger and grander and all-encompassing by gamifying it with a survival mechanism it heightens that annoyance it's one thing to make the player the butt of the cruel joke if you can just shake it off and keep trying and it's another thing to make them lose at the 15 hour mark through chance and tell them to pack everything up and start from the beginning again if there's a review i consistently keep getting crap for it's seven continent i think there's this idea in the global consciousness of what this game represents an advancement of vision a new creation powered by old myth and fighting against that the piercing of the veil is not met with kindness after all if i am right and this game is indeed rubbish then the dream is over strangely i've experienced that shattering myself the first five hours we're joyous i've been let loose to roam and wander and find things but before this card world folded onto itself there was this suspicious buzz a strange voice in my head saying something is wrong here before the expansion for seventh continent was released not a single one of the playable characters was a person of color to add insult to this lack of diverse representation one of the bonus playable characters was h p lovecraft no not a character from one of lovecraft's books lovecraft himself if you're not familiar with this half human half condiment he's responsible for a pulp horror movement that's kicked about for a century and is a mainstay in the board games because his works are in the public domain and therefore free to use and there's an overlap between people who enjoy his books and the hobbies that would be fine except he was also massively racist sexist xenophobic and homophobic and suspiciously most of the crap we get for our review of seven continent is because of us saying those things even though it's well documented outside of our channel lovecraft's fiction was an outlet for what he called as the fear of the unknown big scary unimaginable things that lurk at the edge of existence to merely encounter them was to submit to the incomprehensible and lose yourself in the process i'm going to oversimplify things here lovecraft as a subject isn't as clear cut and the scope of this video does not have room for him if you want to learn more i recommend this video each bomber guy made but that notion of the fear of the unknown was lovecraft's creative outlet to express his internal struggle stemming from the racism sexism xenophobia and homophobia he missed a trick though because whilst his fear made him right words it was people's fascination wonder and sense of exploration that made them read those words if his coded racism wasn't apparent to the observer then he presented the unimaginable at a flip of a page people aren't scared of the unknown they yearn to tug at it so to include him in a game that's literally powered by this drive to encounter the new is a misunderstanding as big as this continent itself three games each a start of a genre each subsequently informing each other each a pioneer with a rug sack bringing their own baggage be it mechanical or cultural 2019 saw the release of tainted grail the fall of avalon published and designed by an entirely different group of people yet much like seven continent it had a map composed of cards with a myriad of locations it had characters you could embody and develop as the campaign progressed it had a survival system integrated into a campaign that spanned dozens of hours and whilst we saw the return of the book it was just a more convenient way to deliver the text narrative you encountered on your exploration we also saw the return of all that baggage the forking paths frequently led you to dead ends time wasters and death traps failure at the role of die was frequent and didn't lead to any interesting consequences it was just failure culturally i would describe tainted grail as aggressively white and sexist and if you're one of those people who are clinging to historical accuracy in a fantasy version of arthurian legend then you're just one quick google search away from finding out that camelot was a lot more diverse than that game would have you believe and with innovation there's also new layers i would call the survival mechanisms in tainted grail clunky and over developed offering too many systems to cohere into a singular vision and the game famously introduces a new element midway through that campaign to increase the sense of urgency that's about as fun and welcome as a kick in the excalibur you might have noticed that up till now i've been fairly critical of everything but here's the thing i love tabletop narrative storytelling i love embodying a character and i love being taken on an adventure we've traveled through role-playing games from adventure books to board games the realm i call my home i wanted to show you that history because i think it's important to acknowledge our roots and where we've come from i wanted to pull out the demons so we could see them face them and deal with them role-playing games even dungeons and dragons are much more diverse than they were back in the day of gary gygax and dave arneson many d d shows feature cast members of different genders sexuality and ethnicity and whilst wizards of the coast struggles with the coded racism inbaked into the mechanical systems so long ago adventure design has moved leaps and bounds beyond dm playing tricks on the players the surprise is no longer at the expense of you instead it collaborates with your sense of storytelling failing forward is a term that stood as a core pillar of game design for decades now even fighting fantasy is seemingly more egalitarian than its roots i'll confess that this is the subject i'm least familiar with in this video since this never hovered in my cultural sphere and whilst i did try and read the warlock of fire top mountain i couldn't finish it because i found the mechanisms a little outdated and dull also the storytelling but at least the character in this book you does not have a defined gender nor is it implied anywhere that i've seen you could be anybody although i accept that i haven't read enough and i'm happy to be proven wrong in the comments yet board games take a strong step back in all of these aspects and by introducing more mechanisms they introduce more problems i so much want to embrace this new emergent genre and it just so happens that now i can [Music] i realized that sleeping gods might be one of the best games that i've ever played when it asked me to choose between something i needed and something that was the right thing to do my reward for being a good boy it was all right it was mechanical i don't think i used it once in the entire 20-plus hour campaign in sleeping gods you play as the crew of the manticore a hodgepodge gang of life's misfits who found kinship and a sense of belonging and family under the leadership of captain sophie odessa also you've been transported to an alternate dimension with no seeming way to escape but that's just by the by the thing i'd really love for you to take away from this is that mechanically the choice was obvious if i look at sleeping gods as cards tokens and mechanisms picking the good boy option was daft there's plenty of games that make this mistake of juggling narrative and mechanisms only for one of those to fall short heck even just looking at sleeping god's designers uber is enough examples of this particular foible and yet when the dust settled and my oh my did it settle when the adventure was over and we packed the box away and we just sat there looking at it as if we'd just been to the cinema and watched a really good film when that happened all i could think was we made the right choice sleeping gods is not a game about individuals on adventure no matter how many players you play with and i'd recommend it at any player count but it is best at two all nine crew members are always used you'll decide which players are in charge of which characters with the captain floating between you depending on whose turn it is normally in this genre you pick one character and the others stay in the box forever banished to a cardboard prison with his stories never to be told by using all nine characters sleeping gods gets to switch perspective and deliver a sense of unity he gets to make a statement and that statement is you're not just you you're not lorently point the quebecois with a dashing moustache you're not mara johnson separated from her sister you're the crew of the manticore and you will live or die as one through our journeys i got to know them and understand their relationships with each other and i started to care how they felt about the decisions that we've made i chose the fluffy option not because of some wonky moral compasses i chose it because i wanted this crew to succeed in a way that would leave it emotionally intact i think telling board gamers to put mechanisms aside is a tremendous ask we've relegated settings and themes to fiddle because mechanisms is what makes us curious about games we want to tinker and prod and push buttons and see what happens i am that i want those things so when i realized that i just didn't care that i just wanted the manticore to be okay that's when it hit me i don't want to give you the sense that sleeping gods is mechanically incompetent laid out on this landscape is some of the cleverest stuff that i have ever seen and i am really impressed designer and artist ryan lockett shows that he doesn't just understand the medium that he's dabbling with he also understands that weighty history and how to subvert it each player will start their turn by taking a ship action this means moving to an undamaged space of the manticore and performing the things on the pictures ship actions help you manage the survival aspects of the game as part of your adventures you'll get swept aboard skewered freaked out bitten by snakes and sometimes sometimes you'll just be playing all tired just tired because it isn't always about fighting giant bears that's not a spoiler there are no giant bears or are there ship actions let you heal up take a rest get some of that self-care game going but also all of them in one degree or another provide you with command tokens these are important command tokens represent your characters taking charge of the situation feeling inspired and sure that they're about to do the right thing that their contribution is crucial but you can also use them to make your characters improve through the course of the game you'll acquire ability cards by spending the right number of command tokens you can equip them under one of your character's sheets increasing their skills if you want mara to be even more perceptive slot in the card with the perception symbol oftentimes the game will ask you to perform challenges using one of your skills for example climbing a tall tower with the rope might be a strength 5 challenge in which case you'll have to draw a card from this deck and see if the number is 5 or higher it is where you in i knew that i put that there but wait there's more before you draw the card you can nominate your characters to help out each character you nominate gets a fatigue token which is bad you don't want that but then they get to add their skill to the relevant challenge and if they're a gorgeous gentle beefcake like raphael who's been kitted out with strength cards i mean that's just a win for everyone but wait there's more more let's say that it's my turn but i don't control raphael let's say that herbert controls raphael he can still get him to participate but because it's not his turn he has to spend a command token there's a lot of things happening here mechanically but also conceptually being able to participate in challenges when it's not your turn doesn't just increase that sense that you're all part of a crew it also lets all players be involved at all times raise your hand if you got bored in a board game waiting for your turn to come now raise your other hand if you got so bored that you forgot that it wasn't your turn and then your mind started to wander and decided that it was in fact your turn well that happened to me in this game but not because i was bored because i was so invested in what was going on that it might as well have been my turn yet this cost of command tokens froze in everything for a loop i'm not just thinking about whether i can upgrade my characters i'm also thinking about whether i'll have enough of these to actually utilize them at the right time but wait there's more more more command tokens aren't just good for upgrading your characters or making them leap into action they have a myriad of uses outside of that they can help you cook which is a much more effective way of removing fatigue they can draw you extra ability cards they can help you out in combat or activate your character's other special abilities to for example redraw an ability card if the result didn't quite get you where you need it to be the genius of this survival system isn't that it's circular it's that it gets everyone involved and it doesn't overly complicate things but crucially the core aspects of survival are decoupled from exploration the joy of narrative games is interacting with the story pulling on a thread and seeing where it takes you but if that story plays a mean trick on you and then you have to spend your turn licking your wounds well that's as much fun as playing frisbee with dinner plates it sounds great until you actually try it and then you have to spend your day shopping for new dinner plates and speaking from experience i'd argue that this is what in large part makes seven continent and tinted grail tedious you're poking the story at the expense of your ability to play the game you're either interacting with a narrative or licking your wounds and if the design ethos is to play cruel tricks on you then the story is what stops you from exploring the story whereas in sleeping gods each turn you get to do both your turn is split into ship actions drawing an event card and then two exploration actions you get to manage your crew and survival in the first act some nonsense happens in the second and then you're free to set sail and find out who lives in zakura trading post or why pig ribs is called pig ribs spoilers it's to do with ribs and also pigs there's so much more i want to say about the mechanisms in sleeping gods i could go on literally for hours about how clever the combat system is how the puzzle of assigning damage feels fresh and forces you to make difficult decisions how the health system complements challenge yet doesn't feel punishing and creates emergent storytelling how the event deck isn't just another time event deck but has a free act structure that heightens the tension and then deflates it to give you pause from it how the keyword system actually works unlike in tinted grail because this game gives you a normal map where you can keep notes and mark information how the loose timing of taking bonus actions with command tokens creates a sense of free flow and doesn't block the game down and cultures a system where you can constantly find new ways to deal with problems and threats i could also dole out some criticisms on the rulebook leaving a lot of rules interactions ambiguous on the ship actions feeling a touch imbalance and on the setup and tear down times being not quite gloom haven but also not pleasant but ultimately what makes this game so special so groundbreaking and so in touch with its genre is challenges i described challenges in brief before you use your character skills draw a modifier card and see if you beat the result but i neglected to mention the absolutely best part which is how challenges integrate into the narrative let's say you're once again climbing a tower but this time you're not doing it just because you're doing it as part of an ongoing narrative you could choose to climb the tower or you could for example look for a secret entrance whatever you choose you are faced with a challenge and failing that challenge will present consequences if you fail to climb maybe you scrape your knees and then you take some damage if looking around took too long you might have gotten so bored that you now have to take a sad token but failing the challenge itself does not alter the outcome of your choice imagine that a game that doesn't want to trick you or make fun of you it just wants you to have a good time not at the expense of being challenging just at the expense of money it's not a very cheap game i love design that implements simple changes to create profound differences you could almost count it as accidental but make no mistake there is nothing accidental about any of this remember the choice i described at the very beginning of the review between doing the right thing you know the good boy option or getting the thing that i needed that was very clearly delineated as something that would have consequences for failing a challenge sleeping gods lets you know when you're at the cusp of something pivotal and that you should make your choices carefully it trades in surprise and polish your wizardry for actual suspense and in the rare moments it does pull the rug from under your feet it advances the story it leads to adventure opportunities to new discoveries rather than failure here we have the antithesis to guy galaxy and storytelling the bomb for my tired bones swimming in these waters rejuvenated me like nostalgia never could there's an axiom of open world exploration games that somewhere there is a critical point where the magic just wears off the curtain drops and instead of seeing the wonder the disbelief kicks in and we're just left with a crotching man pulling the strings the egg wizard we no longer see the world just the mechanisms that glue it together sleeping gods joins the very rare company of open world games that survive that curtain drop and an even rarer company of campaign board games that we've finished with glee i might add its world is warm and welcoming it's challenging without being obtuse it subverts all tropes of the genre it's charming it's funny and whilst the crew of the manticore does not feature lgbtq or disabled characters as far as we know because there's like a hundred quests we haven't seen yet at least it has a culturally diverse cast like you can tell this game is trying which is definitely better than playing as hp source the campaign is so big that on your first playthrough you barely touch a tenth of it and there's even an expansion that i genuinely can't tell you anything about because whilst it seamlessly integrates into the main game i've spent like 20 plus hours playing this game and having so much fun and there's so much to do that i just didn't need to go here did i mention how many quests there are there's so many quests you'll never feel like you don't have something fun to do and you'll never finish all of them on your play through because there's just too much of them and that's great because it creates a sense of a world that's bigger than you a world that's alive this is definitely one of the best board games i have ever played this video was something huh let me tell you a little secret there's no way it would have been possible without our patience and without our sponsor and we'll have a little message about both of those but first i want to tell you stick past the ads we'll have some nice background footage of us me and elaine starting a new campaign of sleeping gods as the credits roll and maybe a cheeky announcement or two there's just no way this video would exist without the support of our patron backers if you thought this video was pretty cool you might want to see some other ones we did we did a video on colonialism in board games another serious subject and on the lighter side of things we recently did a video about space themed board games once you've seen those and if you enjoyed them maybe consider supporting us on patreon this video is sponsored by skillshare if you're not familiar with skillshare it's an online learning community that has more classes on various subjects than sleeping gods has quests you can teach yourself photography or calligraphy or you can teach yourself to be more efficient at cleaning up or even caring for houseplants or even designing a board game i mentioned this every time we do a sponsor spot for skillshare and i can't believe more people aren't talking about this but there's actual board game designers doing video tutorials for designing a board game how cool is that inspired by ryan lorca's ability to write stories design board games and also draw i decided it's time for me to learn how to draw to become a better visual storyteller thankfully the start drawing free fun freeing exercises to spark your creativity class by kylie was a great jumping in point and look at me now i do this okay maybe not everyone's meant to be an artist but i had a fun time drawing this doodle and i've also learned that carly is a jack russell terrier owner and we appreciate that very much percy don't we don't we busy yeah with an annual subscription skillshare is less than ten dollars a month and the first 1000 of you to click the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare premium so you can learn anything anything i believe in you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you know you nailed that

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 66,314

Rating: 4.5772953 out of 5

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, sleeping gods, tomb of horrors, gary gygax, ttrpg, 7th continent, tainted grail, fighting fantasy, warlock of firetop mountain, tsr, ernie gygax, gygax jr., ernest gary gygax, ernest gary gygax jr.

Id: WKytIcNyqsY

Length: 54min 22sec (3262 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/stetzwebs]

I find that I agree with NPI's take on games about 33% of the time. Of my top 20 games or so, they've hated several of them and liked a few of them. However, I cannot agree with them more on this review. Sleeping Gods is probably the best game of 2021 so far, and the best, most engaging narrative game I've ever played.

[u/sonofol313]

I like NPI a lot and their essay-like videos are engrossing in an informative yet entertaining way. This one was pretty good but felt a bit disjointed to me. The context of the intro essays about lack of diversity and open sexism in historical narrative gaming didn’t really land for me in the pivot to talking about Sleeping Gods. What did work for me was the other main setup point about pitfalls of narrative gaming and how Sleeping Gods evolves and solves many of those issues - that made sense in their “essay” setting up the problem and then describing how Sleeping Gods is a great solution.

But back to the diversity message - it is an important topic but felt shoehorned into this video. Sleeping Gods is no great pillar of diversity. It does ok in that Ryan Laukat’s games have always been drawn with a cast of characters with varying skin tones. And maybe that’s sadly still a notable progress in inclusion in board games, but it is in no way a defining or unique element of Sleeping Gods. So the historical info on Gygax and sexism and other past narrative games’ lack of diversity really didn’t feel too relevant to a review on Sleeping Gods. Not that I disagreed with their points on the importance of inclusion, it just didn’t feel like Sleeping Gods was the game to lift up or highlight in bringing those topics up.

Side note- I want to play Sleeping Gods even more now after the great praise in this video!

[u/Izodius]

Is this ever going to hit retail in a meaningful way? Aside from some overpriced listing most retailers are out of their preorders.

[u/Aishman]

Honestly I love NPI when they do deep dive on stuff like this. It pin points why I could never get into games like 7th Continent or Kingdom Death Monster because it always felt I'm being punished or tricked from luck of the draw. I had written Sleeping Gods off due to my bad experience with narrative games but this video has very much put it front and center in my radar.

[u/clinicalbrain]

I appreciated and enjoyed the video. I, however, disagree that games like TG or 7th Continent are not fun because the games is actively trying to slow you down or harm you. For some players this challenge or surprise is enjoyable due to the unexpected nature of it.

[u/mieiri]

Efka should leave the review scene and just make essay videos. This, elaine's space video and the colonialism one are three of the best videos about boardgames.

[u/TotalWarspammer]

I do appreciate the ethics and overall heartfelt content of NPI, even if their humour can sometimes feel a bit too forced, but man are their videos becoming a bit of as slog to get through. This one was obviously well-intended, but it was also very tediously written and way, way too long.

Their videos are just no longer very much... fun.

[u/FoggyCrayons]

I liked this review. The context of what makes sleeping gods a good story is nicely set up with the history.

[u/JacobRiley]

Can't state enough how much i'm enjoying these longer essay form videos. Hit's a niche that is exactly my taste and where I think youtube reviews can do something that 15 years ago wouldn't have been a feasible format in almost any media (maybe radio?).