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.
To start off, everyone gets dealt a Quest card that specifies some task that needs to be done in return for a reward. Once that’s accomplished, the player then draws a new Quest card and tries to complete and so on until someone manages to win. So all that happens each turn is that you move your character up to the maximum rate allowed by your current Wealth level, see what your character encounters, decide how to react based to that encounter and see what the results are by looking at the right paragraph from the huge spiral-bound Book of Tales that the game comes with.
We had six players for our session, the maximum allowed by the game but then Han showed up as a seventh. Since he already owns a copy of the game and was most familiar with its rules, he became our storyteller. This worked out rather well because I’d imagine that trying to pass the Book of Tales around the table would be a huge pain. Sean helped out by looking through the Reaction Matrix to get the correct paragraph whenever someone decides on a response. According to the rules, these two roles should be performed by the two players to the right and left of the current player.
Normally all of the characters start off in Baghdad and then scatter to the four winds to get their quest done. In my case, I was unfortunate enough to draw a Quest card that got me transported by an angry djinn to Bantu, Africa and my Quest was to get back home to Baghdad. Not too difficult, except that the Quest also gave my character a Lost status card which meant that I only had a movement of 1 per turn, regardless of Wealth level. Even worse, after a couple of painstaking turns of slowly making my way to the African coast, I got an event that again deposited me on the very southeastern-most tip of the map!
My wife didn’t have much luck either and had the dubious honor of amassing the largest collection of status cards in our game, all of them bad ones. By the end of the game, she was insane, grief stricken, wanted as an outlaw, crippled and more. Chee Wee seemed to spend most of the game either insane or imprisoned, and in trying to get rid of my annoying Lost card, I ended up being imprisoned for a couple of turns as well. After wasting a turn trying to trick my jailer who was too insane for me to make sense of, I chose the attack response the following round, taking advantage of my Weapon Use skill. This not only allowed me to successfully escape but also allowed me to upgrade my skill to Master level.
Aaron wins the award for most entertaining player in our session by far. Not only did he insist on choosing the Attack reaction whenever it was available, even during the most inappropriate encounters, he actually managed to win the game doing so! The most hilarious moment of the evening came when Han told him that his character had encountered a house on fire. His response was to take a celebratory drink! My wife insisted afterward that the game rewards for choosing crazy responses and punishes you for being reasonable. I don’t quite agree since it’s obvious that choosing responses that match your skills gives you an advantage but I do feel that the game encourages boldness and chutzpah in order to recreate the larger-than-life adventures of its source material.
I’m pretty sure that everyone involved enjoyed the session and even those who were intimidated at first by the huge amount of text were won over by its charm. Even so, I think that this is most a gimmick game that’s good to pull out on new players for its wackiness and novelty value but doesn’t stand up to multiple plays. Playing with six players was also a mistake and it meant everyone had to wait to long to get to their turn. Since there’s next to no player-to-player interaction, that’s a lot of downtime. Less players would also make it easier for us to be engaged with each other’s stories and take the extra time to appreciate all the flavor text.
All in all, a great game for a small party, especially if your friends have a literary bent. It’s the boardgame equivalent of sitting around a campfire swapping stories. But if you’re only interested in pure strategy and min-maxing your way to victory, this will probably drive you to pull your hair out in frustration.
