My Thoughts After 12 Hours with Sleeping Gods: Distant Skies

Welcome to this week’s gaming post! This week I’m discussing a cooperative open-world adventure game. So without further ado, let’s jump into the recent highlights.

I recently started my first solo campaign of Sleeping Gods: Distant Skies, the sequel to the extremely popular 2021 game Sleeping Gods. If you’ve played the first Sleeping Gods, then a lot of the core elements are retained in Distant Skies – you’re stuck in a mysterious world and have to find your way home by rejuvenating totems that you collect throughout the world.

I’ll preface that though I own the first Sleeping Gods, I’ve only read the rules and played through the introduction to the campaign. When I was doing research into Distant Skies compared to the original, many people recommended Distant Skies as the easier of the two to jump into, largely as a result of some streamlined mechanics. So I decided to fully jump into Distant Skies first before the original. From a solo perspective, I was also excited about the idea of only having to control five characters in Distant Skies compared to nine in the first.

First off, I have to tip my hat to Ryan Laukat and his small team for the amount of content they have created in this game. More than any other board game I’ve played, this game feels the closest to replicating a large open-world video game. While there is an overarching goal, it’s easy to veer off the path and uncover many different and memorable stories. Even on the first map, I quickly built up a sizable stack of quest cards that sent me in all different directions.

As with other narrative heavy games, the game presents you with plenty of choices even beyond choosing which quests to focus on. The story book will often give you choices on how to proceed representing different challenges or combat encounters that lead to different outcomes. Even with most combat, you can often choose to avoid it by choosing to run away.

Continuing with combat, I really enjoy the changes to combat encounters in Distant Skies. There’s now a semi-deckbuilding element where when you collect certain adventure cards out in the world, you can add them to your deck of available combat cards.

Another addition I really enjoy is the wandering encounters. With wandering encounters, you get to assign each of your characters to a spot on story book page that provide challenges and rewards. These provide a nice change to the usually story numbers and feel very thematic. Also, unlike some other games that feel very punishing when you fail a challenge, in Sleeping Gods, you still often receive the reward when you fail; you just may take some damage or status tokens in the process.

Due to the amount of content in the game, there’s over 200 quest cards, and it can sometimes feel like stories jump around. So if you’re someone who enjoys a more focused story/main quest line, then this may bother you. However, if you’re someone who enjoys side quests and the freedom to explore in multiple directions, then this will likely be your cup of tea.

One minor thing I’ve found is that the plane can be frustrating to manage at times. Most of the time you’ll be moving your main character around on the map tiles to perform actions, but you can also use the plane to travel farther distances. The challenge is that your character has to be on the map tile with the plane icon, while the plane is also in that region. This can sometimes lead to having to double back to get to the plane. It’s especially frustrating when you’re off in one direction following a quest and then a random event forces you to have to move the plane or have it take damage each turn. While it’s nice to sometimes be encouraged to use the plane to fly in a new direction, I have found it frustrating when those plane events crop up close together. Finally, while the game states that it supports one to four players, Distant Skies is really more of a solo or two-player cooperative game.

While I haven’t finished my campaign of Distant Skies, I am well into the double digits in terms of hours played. I’ve built up a sizable stack of adventure and completed quest cards. Even with a fair amount of time put into the game, I still feel like I’ve only seen a fraction of the total content in this game. I’ll let you all know if I have any additional thoughts once I complete my campaign, but so far I’m really enjoying my time with the game. It’s also making me want to jump into the original Sleeping Gods once I’ve finished my current campaign to see how the two compare. Overall though, Sleeping Gods: Distant Skies feels like the perfect open-world board game.

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s gaming highlights! I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the games I’ve mentioned, future content, or format in the comments section below. And let me know which of the two Sleeping Gods you prefer. Happy gaming!