Sleeping Gods

Set up Sleeping Gods by opening the atlas to the designated page and placing the Manticore ship in the starting region. Prepare the ship board based on player count, set out starting market items, and build the event deck using mild, perilous, and deadly cards. Organize tokens, enemy cards, ability decks, and quests into their respective piles. Distribute crew members, synergy tokens, command tokens, and starting ability cards among players, and assign a first player with the captain token. Finally, fill out a new log sheet, choose a normal or brutal difficulty level, and keep the storybook within reach.

Players take on the roles of captain and crew aboard the steamship Manticore, trapped in a strange and mysterious world. Your primary goal is to explore the atlas, complete quests, gather long-lost totems, and wake the sleeping gods. By fulfilling these tasks and uncovering the secrets of the world, you aim to survive the journey and successfully find a way back to your own home.

Turns are taken clockwise around the table. The active player begins by moving the ship action figure to a new room on the ship board to collect resources, draw abilities, or manage damage. Next, draw and resolve the top event card, which often requires passing skill challenges using crew members and fate draws. Finally, the player spends two action points to travel across regions, explore atlas locations in the storybook, trade at markets, or visit ports to heal and buy upgrades.

Final scoring takes place at the conclusion of the campaign. Points are awarded based on your overall success in the narrative, the number of collected totems and adventure cards, and your final status achievements recorded on your sheet.

The campaign concludes either by completing the overarching story or when the group suffers defeat. Defeat occurs if all crew members reach zero health or the ship accumulates maximum damage. In normal mode, players retreat to a safe port, clear damage, discard events, and continue playing. In brutal mode, the campaign ends immediately, requiring you to mark achievements and restart.