There’s nothing out there quite like Ryan Laukat’s Sleeping Gods. Even after a mediocre sidequel, the repackaged freebie Primeval Peril, this is one of the few fantasy universes I’m eager to dive into, a testament to Laukat’s writing, illustrations, and imagination. Where most board games of its ilk would make me groan at the prospect of another flipped page, another half-baked snippet of dialogue, another skill check (brrrr), Laukat produces worlds that drive me compulsively forward.

Which is why I’m so very happy to report that Distant Skies, the first full-length followup to the 2021 original, is everything the first game was and more.

We are going on an adventure.

It’s the little things that do it. As in the original Sleeping Gods, Distant Skies begins when a vehicle crewed by an anachronistically diverse cast is kidnapped from our world and teleported into Ryan Laukat’s imagination. Pardon me, I mean the Wandering World. Ryan Laukat’s other shared universe. The one that isn’t Arzium. Look, it could be the slums of Narnia for all I care. The year is 1937, and our intrepid crew has an airplane this time around. In order to return home, they must parlay with gods, monsters, and tyrants, cross mountains and deserts and tundras, and cobble together a bunch of powerful totems that have something to do with this realm’s slumbering gods.

Right away, Laukat demonstrates a refinement of his craft. There’s the vehicle itself, for one thing. The original game placed its crew aboard a steamship, a hardy vessel that nevertheless chugged across the landscape a little too slowly. It’s a criticism that exists only in retrospect. Flying, you see, is so much faster. Your airplane functions like a finicky teleporter, hopping across the map in a flash. Doing so requires fuel, while soaring through the Wandering World’s turbulent atmosphere inflicts damage. Both necessitate constant care, not to mention periodic returns to the plane to evade danger or to travel farther and faster than your feet could take you. At the same time, you’re spending much more time on foot. Where Sleeping Gods used its ship as your in-game avatar, Distant Skies puts you and your crew right into the thick of it. When you aren’t bouncing between locations via the air, you’re hoofing it.

This gives the map of Distant Skies an entirely different feel. Traversal is simultaneously faster and slower. Crossing the entire continent, once again compiled into a booklet of spiral-bound pages, is easily done. Summiting the next ridge, however, tends to take some oomph, and might even raise a few blisters as your characters absorb damage from rough terrain. I miss the look of the original game’s shorelines and islands — a personal preference for the contrast of land against water — but there’s no denying how this approach allows Laukat to pack additional detail into every nook and cranny. Taking cues from Ludovic Roudy and Bruno Sautter’s The 7th Continent, players are invited to lean over the illustrations, whether poring over treasure maps or hunting for riddle stones. At other times, picking your way through a snow-capped range requires closer attention than the original game’s seas, no matter how choppy they were. The entire process of traversal has become a worthwhile endeavor in its own right.

Just two great pals enjoying nature.

Similarly, your crew has also been refined. The first game boasted a cast of nine characters, a lively bunch with a wide array of abilities. Nine also happened to be a few more than one could reliably stick in the memory. Distant Skies smartly prunes the central cast to five, and it’s all the better for it. Rather than getting lost in the shuffle, everyone has their own identifiable skills and narrative quirks. Ed is an art tycoon from Honolulu. He’s also a smarmy loudmouth, more given to cunning and deception than outright conflict. Jessie is as blunt as the baseball bat she carries around — boost her strength and prepare to knock out some baddies in two quick blows. Miguel is bookish, but also young enough that he seems primed to come into his own. The captain, Claire, is still something of a cipher, but she has a good spread of skill points. My personal favorite, Ezarius, functions are your guide, introducing the world and breaking stereotype by being as kindly as he is mysterious.

As before, much of the action unfolds via a large storybook. Your party travels to a location and opens to the page number printed on the map. There you make decisions, whether overcoming obstacles — via a skill check system that centers your resources and your characters’ energy levels rather than being another boring die roll — swapping resources for various benefits, or engaging in combat. Returnees to the system will find it largely unchanged.

The few changes that exist, however, are utterly lovely. Some locations now deposit your party into an illustrated location and task you with a worker placement minigame to decide where to allot your skills and attentions. It’s a perfect way to dwell in the world, focusing your gaze and actions in the present moment, not to mention raising questions about your priorities. Meanwhile, certain enemies are now big borking bosses, page-spanning monstrosities with multiple components. These are printed directly into the storybook, revealing themselves in splashes of furious color. It’s one thing to roll up on a trio of undead corvids; it’s another entirely to square off against a rotting raven that’s four stories tall.

Combat hasn’t been overhauled, exactly, so much as fine-tuned. When the game begins, your party is presented with a deck of combat cards, rough effects like wrenches, a few battle techniques, and the odd pistol. These are shuffled and doled out at the start of battle, allowing your characters to weaken enemies, inflict damage, and protect themselves from counterattack. Over time, new tools slip into the mix. An ice sword, maybe, or an enchanted deer’s murder-antlers, pried from its skull and turned against its demonic kin. These gradually replace your original kit, transforming combat from a struggle for survival into an anime-styled stomping.

As in the original game, there’s so much ground to cover.

This raises some questions about the game’s pacing and difficulty. Unfortunately, this is one of the few patches where Distant Skies slips onto its rump.

I was an apologist for the original title’s challenging atmosphere. Despite the blue skies and whimsical collision of inspirations, Sleeping Gods sometimes veered into survival horror, sapping your roster of health points, resources, and vigor. You could indeed travel in any direction, but the game didn’t go out of its way to prevent you from stumbling into an encounter that would leave you seriously bloodied, if not awakening back at the nearby inn minus a few days and some of your possessions. The Wandering Sea was as deadly as it was beautiful.

Apparently, the country found in Distant Skies is more of a tutorial zone. The difficulty has been toned down in nearly every respect. Enemies aren’t so brutal. Resources are more plentiful. Rather than needing to pay to rest at secure inns, you can camp anywhere. This provides some healing and replenishes your energy tokens, but also refreshes your stack of adventure cards, the real measure of how far you can stretch your party. Meanwhile, Laukat has turned down the time pressure. I was also an advocate for the original game’s limited duration, a necessary framework that gave your ongoing quest its meaning and urgency. There’s still a time limit, although it’s now connected to how many times your crew camps rather than how many turns you take.

As improvements go, this might or might not be one of them. It’s hard to tell because you’re afforded too many pit stops before the conclusion arrives. To give you some sense for what I mean, your objective is to find and reactivate five totems before the portal back to Earth closes. In my campaign, my daughter and I recovered twenty such totems — and by the end, we were camping willy-nilly to usher in the final chapter. At that point, the final boss presented about as much resistance as a windblown shack poses to a rocket-boosted bulldozer. When Laukat first pitched Sleeping Gods, he wanted to reproduce the open-air feel of Skyrim within the confines of a board game. With Distant Skies, he’s crept closer to achieving that aim, but has also replicated the pratfall where everybody insists you need to solve all of these urgent problems right now lest the world implode, except you’re free to learn how to blacksmith and also cast clairvoyance ten thousand times to level up your illusion mastery.

Combat is much improved this time around.

While I miss that forward momentum, Distant Skies more than makes up for it in other ways. I’ve mentioned most of them, but there are others as well. Gone is the system where you assign shipboard chores to your crew. The whole “save your game” problem has been smoothed out. Adventure cards are easier to use this time around, providing singular benefits that refresh when you camp. Also, there’s an ongoing conflict you can participate in, a war between the land’s oppressive king and an organization of (rather ill-suited, if I’m being honest) rebels. As conflicts go, Skyrim’s shade continues to float up from behind the couch, but it helps establish that there are things happening in this realm that aren’t solely due to your merry band’s comings and goings.

Perhaps the most important change to the game’s quest structure has to do with the totems themselves. As in Sleeping Gods, these are the magical trinkets you need in order to power your escape. However, their importance in the original game quickly delineated quests into two categories: quests that awarded a totem were supreme; everything else was fluff.

Distant Skies solves this problem with a deft touch. Finishing big quests awards totems, but they’re dormant and useless. To recharge their energy, and thus unlock their form as powerful weapons and items, you must first spend a number of magical resources on them. Said resources can be found all over the place, but they’re rarer than the usual cords of rope or cuts of steak that fill your inventory. This therefore sends you along the game’s many side avenues, chasing lesser quests, looting treasure deposits, or just swinging into remote corners in your search for the magical flowers, berries, and crystals that will reactivate your totems. It’s no longer possible to game the system by prioritizing quests with lots of text over other activities. Everything serves some purpose toward your overall goal.

A day on the town.

In a sense, this also speaks to Distant Skies as a whole. Where its precarious balance has been struck out of whack, nearly everything else has been fine-tuned to a satisfying hum. This is a grand adventure, one that crosses gorgeous locales and plumbs murky depths. There aren’t many worlds this vibrant or well-realized. It’s a hard place to leave. As soon as we had finished our campaign, my ten-year-old insisted we start another. There’s so much yet to see that we may do exactly that.

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A complimentary copy was provided.