ISS Vanguard vs Sleeping Gods: Which Should You Buy?

ISS Vanguard is very much the Star Trek away-team fantasy. You're crew on a deep-space exploration ship, dropping onto strange planets one mission at a time, and each landing is a dice-and-card puzzle where you commit dice to checks, then play cards to nudge results and claw dice back. That dice manipulation is where the cleverness lives, and the planetary exploration genuinely captures that scared-and-curious feeling of stepping onto an alien world. The catch is that it's really two games stapled together. The away missions can be thrilling but lean hard on luck, and the ship management phase between them plays thinner than the marketing suggests.

Sleeping Gods trades the mission structure for a true open world. You're Captain Sofi Odessa and her crew, yanked into a strange sea in 1929, sailing the Manticore around a giant hand-painted atlas and flipping to numbered passages in a spiral-bound story book. You choose where to sail and which threads to chase, and with 250-plus story passages, players keep calling it the exploration game that finally gets exploration right. Its rough edge is combat. It's a clever grid puzzle when it clicks, but it can spike brutally without warning, and reviewers describe staring down a seven-defence enemy with no gear and just drawing fate cards in despair.

Both games sit at medium-heavy, but they're heavy in different places. Vanguard's weight is mostly admin: cards shuffling between folder sections, a fat log book, and fiddly AI rules. Most groups quietly hand one person the job of running the table, so if nobody at yours wants to be that person, that's a real warning sign. It's aimed at people who loved Gloomhaven and wished it wore a spacesuit, and the setup ritual comes with the territory.

Sleeping Gods is gentler to run day to day (you're mostly reading, sailing, and making choices), but it has its own trip hazards. The iconography is genuinely hard to remember (a skull meaning accuracy trips up a lot of new crews), and combat can feel unfair before you've learned to respect it. First sessions in both games are bumpy, but I'd hand Sleeping Gods to a less experienced pair and save Vanguard for a table that already enjoys rules-wrangling.

Player count is where these two really split. Vanguard wants a group. Talkative tables that enjoy debating missions get the most from it, while solo and two-player games feel pinched on resources. Sleeping Gods is the mirror image: push past two players and it sags into quarterbacking and long downtime, with one poor soul reading passages aloud while everyone waits. Most reviewers say cap it at two, and it's honestly lovely solo.

As for staying power, be honest with yourself about both. Vanguard's late campaign can sag into repetitive rolling, and Sleeping Gods loses some spark on later voyages once the first trip's magic is spent. But Sleeping Gods has one quiet superpower: the save-and-resume atlas. You mark a log sheet, pack the whole thing up, and come back weeks later right where you left off. For a campaign this big, that's rare, and it's the reason so many copies actually get finished instead of gathering dust.