Ryan Laukat. Art by Ryan Laukat. Red Raven Games, 2021.
1–4 players | Multiple sessions | Age 14+
Sleeping Gods is a story game, a genre of large-format games combining eurogame resource management, combat mechanics, and roleplaying, in which players control a crew of characters who find themselves transported from a sea voyage to New York into a mysterious archipelago in another world. The gameworld is navigated via a 26-page map-book functioning as a modular game board, with each page containing dozens of numbered locations corresponding to 250+ branching story entries. Players move a ship miniature across the map, undertaking craft tests resolved by card draws, collecting artefacts and keywords that unlock further story options, and engaging in combat with sea monsters. The game has thirteen possible endings, none of which is signposted during play. Sessions are long , typically played across multiple days, and the game’s components occupy significant table space, making saving and re-boxing the game between sessions a substantial practical undertaking.
Sleeping Gods is a productive object for ecological thinking not because of its environmental themes, though its ocean setting and narrative of being ‘unhomed’ are relevant, but because of what playing it reveals about human enmeshment in more-than-human worlds. The game’s material demands are themselves ecologically significant: its components took over domestic space for several days, displaced other activities, and generated a persistent sense of obligation — the feeling that the game ‘needed’ to be finished. This is what game scholars have called the ‘kidnapping of reality’ (Mizer 2019): the game exerts its own agency on the world beyond the tabletop, unsettling familiar patterns of dwelling. Immersion in Sleeping Gods is not a smooth ‘submergence’ into a storyworld but a continual oscillation, or what Paul Wake (2019) calls a push and pull between surfacing and plunging, produced precisely by the game’s heterogeneous materials (tokens, cards, the mapbook), which simultaneously anchor players in the storyworld and gesture outward to the world of the player. This unsettled quality is the condition of eco-weird experience: a paradoxical estranging intimacy with an environment in which inside and outside are never stable. The game’s narrative structure reinforces this through what Timothy Morton (2016) calls ‘aesthetic causality’: rather than a linear chain of player choices, gameplay produces loopy, contingent, dreamlike sequences in which players lose their sense of direction and agency. As Karen Barad’s concept of ‘intra-action’ (2007) suggests, outcomes emerge from the entanglement of player choice, card draws, mechanical constraints, and story prompts rather than from individual decision-making. Sleeping Gods thus reveals player agency to be, as Gadamer (1994) argues, a fiction: it is the game that plays the players, and the players who carry out its mechanical demands on its behalf. These experiences, of being absorbed into, and controlled by, a more-than-human system, offer a mode of ecological reflection, confronting human players with their situatedness within relational worlds they do not master.
Content written by Chloé Wake. Adapted from Germaine, C. (2025) ‘Tabletop Eco-Weird: Gameplay Experience and Ecological Ethics’, in Onishi, B. H. and Bell, N. M. (eds.) The Call of the Eco-Weird in Fiction, Films, and Games. Cham: Springer Nature, pp. 181–209.
References
- Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Gadamer, H. G. 1994. Truth and Method. Second revised edition. New York: Continuum.
- Mizer, N. 2019. Tabletop Roleplaying Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Morton, T. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Wake, P. 2019. Token Gestures: Towards a Theory of Immersion in Analog Games. Analog Game Studies XI (1).