Sleeping Gods: Tides of Ruin Review - with Tom Vasel

Tom Vasel takes a look at the Tides of Ruin Expansion for Sleeping Gods!

00:00 - Introduction
01:42 - Game overview
05:11 - Final thoughts

Support the channel by becoming a member!

Check out the friendliest conventions on Earth!

[masblas]

That last line made me laugh out loud, "You don't need it, but you know you're gonna get it!" That's probably 100% true 🤣

[lindseymackey]

I'm so glad you mentioned this is an expansion. Now I know I must buy the base game. Gifting for a highly intelligent eleven year old.

[vlogospheer]

Is the expansion worth half the price of the base game tho?

[madquest]

But what did you think about the Arcade mode? I couldn't tell from the review.

[TheBrokenMeeple]

Agreed on Arcade Mode - i read the rules and just thought "what's the point"? - wasn't even a fan of Arcade Mode in Near & Far.

[eriklindqvist]

One day... This kickstarter will actually deliver... 😅

[kimoro]

I love the arcade mode in Near and Far, maybe this arcade mode will be fun once you’ve played through the whole story but still want to play it. still waiting anxiously to get Sleeping Gods 😁

[mattwindsor]

I preordered sleeping gods in February of 2020. Still don’t have it. Getting frustrated.

[sampak]

I love Sleeping Gods, and I just ordered this expansion after realizing the map provided in the base game isn't complete without it.

What frustrates me about expansions like this one is that it doesn't truly "add" anything that wasn't already built into the base game from the onset (beside the arcade mode I guess). It truly feels like it was a select about of content carved out of the base game and repackaged as an "expansion" when really it's just filling the gaping whole cut out of what you were partially provided in the base game.

This is evidenced by mere fact that the base game provides imagery of the expansion maps and clearly shows it as part of the cohesive world from the beginning of the design, its just that there seemed to be an arbitrary selection of what would be considered base game content opposed to expansion content. (Would it have mattered if instead of including page 25 & 26 in the almanac in the expansion they provided page 7 & 8? No, because they were all meant to be together in the first place).

The only really "add-on" here is the arcade mode apart from content originally meant to be part of the full experience that was simply displaced for sake of creating another marketable product.

It could have all been included in the base game (the maps, stories, and appropriate quests and adventure cards). I would have happily paid $100+ in the Kickstarter for all of the content to be unified in one package instead of being broken apart and labeled as "additional" content.

It's just the psychology of it that gets to me.

I don't mind expansions that genuinely add new things that fundamentally change certain aspects of the game. For example, Alien Frontiers is a complete game on its own, but if you include the Outer Belt expansion, you're literally adding something new that was not part of the original vision for the game, is optional, and substantially changes something about the game.

Tides of Ruin is more of a "fill-in-the-deliberate-gap" product.

[VictorKolbe]

amazing how playtime sas 60-1200 and, when it comes to this game, I've no idea if that's a typo or not

[scyldscefing]

My Arcade Mode cards will likely remain shrink-wrapped until eternity.

[Mandrake]

I just nabbed this today and I have to agree the Arcade Mode seems like a bit of waste. The whole point of the game is the story and if you take that away, you still have functional mechanics etc, but you have torn out the pulsing heart of the game and are essentially trying to play with the game's desecrated corpse. Would much rather have had some more of the other cards.

[jcdc]

Who’s buying it for the arcade mode? 😊

[LeeKenshin]

Not sure how it can get a seal of excellence when Tom disliked a portion of the expansion that makes it different. I understand it's optional but isn't the seal a judgment on the entire expansion. Maybe the other content is so superior that it completely outweighs the negative. In any case, I'm getting it.