CarcaSean received a shipment of new games last week so everyone was eager to try them out. Of these, Heroscape: Rise of the Valkyrie was easily the most visually impressive with its Lego-like terrain pieces and pre-painted miniatures. The most unusual however was the new edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights which is barely a game at all and can be best described as a more advanced version of the old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. Each player takes the role of one of the famous characters from the stories from One Thousand and One Nights and sets off on a grand adventure. The point of the game is not to win per se, but to see what crazy scrapes you get into.
As a game that’s all about telling stories, there’s little in the way of rules. There are no statistics for the characters for example and everyone starts the same except for gender. Everyone does choose three skills to start the game with but that’s pretty much it in terms of differentiation. Victory is determined by collecting Destiny and Story Points over the course of the game and a neat little twist is that each player can secretly decide how many of each they need to win before the game begins, so long as they add up together to 20 points. Due to the randomness and unpredictability of the game however, this is obviously meant more to give an ending to the game rather than awarding victory to a player in the traditional sense.
