If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you know by now I adore storytelling games. Even though I’m a novelist, games are my favorite way to enjoy a good yarn. I’ve recently been having fun with Tales of the Fabulist, a new and unique board game for two to ten players as young as fourteen years of age. Each tale takes six minutes to complete; you can use it as a time filler before a longer game session or spend a whole evening making up stories together.
Disclaimer: I received a review copy of Tales of the Fabulist from the game designers.
Who is the Fabulist?
You, you’re the fabulist, for the next six minutes, anyway. But everyone is, because this is a cooperative storytelling game. Although that cooperation can turn into challenges with interjected plot twists that send the tale in weird new directions.
The game addresses many of the common pitfalls of storytelling games such as players that tend to take over the narrative in their enthusiasm for a good story as well as players that are intimidated by the whole idea of creating a story themselves.
What is Their Tale?
The games has two modes, “twisted,” which is the basic version, and “classic,” which may require more advanced storytelling skills. The rounds for both are six minutes.
In the basic version, the starting player, aka “Fabulist,” begins the first sixty seconds of a story based on drawn Character and Quest cards. A timer determines when the next player will jump in with a thirty-second complication based on their own drawn Plot Twist cards, and so on, until minute six, when the lucky final player must tie up the loose ends with their own final plot twist.
The Fabulist then invites each player to share a pithy, silly, or great pun of a moral for the story the group has just created together.
In the advanced mode, the Fabulist tells the whole story while other players introduce Plot Twist cards every thirty seconds, which the Fabulist must incorporate into the story as best they can.
Game Play
The game includes a play mat, where the group keeps track of the number of plot twists played, a timer, and three types of cards, which provide the story elements: Characters, Quests (the story’s inciting incident), and Plot Twists.
Each player draws two Plot Twist cards, and the Fabulist (starting player) draws two Character cards and one Quest. The Fabulist places their cards on the playmat, then uses sixty seconds to set the stage, explaining the relationships among the Characters and the Quest.
Zaki the Yeti (a footprint fetishist) and Winifred O’Malley (a brave bar wench) have a Quest: “Moonbeams softly spread over the castle courtyard. If [one of the characters] can cast the spell, it will be a beautiful destruction.”
The Fabulist must start the story at this point and has sixty seconds to do so.
Perhaps Zaki and Winifred are sworn enemies. Zaki sneaks into the courtyard at night to cast a spell, but Winifred notices them through the window of the castle pub.
Depending on the version your group is playing, either the next player or the Fabulist has thirty seconds to incorporate a plot twist.
Suppose the Plot Twist card is the phrase “a letter that says.” This must be used in a sentence. Zaki finds a letter that says the Yeti tribe wants peace with the lord of the castle.
Play continues for eight short, hilarious story segments.
Tales of the Fabulist Game Design
The game cards, instructions, and timer comprise a compact, portable set. The box is sturdy and contains interior slots to hold and cushion your game components nicely. The artwork is comic-style character illustrations that inspire all sorts of possible stories. The card typeface is easy on the eye, large and legible. (That sounds like a small thing, but game designers sometimes get too cute by half with the practical elements of gameplay. Like “can people read these cards from across a table?”)
The instructions are expressed well and easy to follow.
The Telling of Tales
In addition to giving every player a chance to add to the story, Tales of the Fabulist’s mechanics do a great job of enforcing the principles of good cooperative storytelling.
Improvisation
It brings in the principles of improvisation: the players are all scene partners to each other, and the proper response to someone else’s plot twist is “yes, but…” Also, a quick, adequate idea is better than a thoroughly pondered great idea. No individual player, not even the Fabulist, is responsible for the brilliance of the tale. It is a group effort.
Characters
Generally, effective stories grow out of characters. These tales are about fantasy-trope characters, but in their relationships with each other, motivations and conflicts arise and feed the plot.
Scenes
Each Plot Twist card suggests a scene, i.e., the conflict that comes out of characters wanting different things. That structure tends toward interesting, engaging stories.
So, in addition to entertainment, storytelling artists of all genres will get useful practice in their craft. Painlessly! It’s a game!
What do you look for in a storytelling game? Your comments are welcome. Navigate to my website, click the blog title and a dialogue box will open at the end of the post.
The Big Cinch from Montag Press, is an award-winning supernatural noir adventure by Kathy L. Brown. Sean Joye, a fae-touched young veteran of 1922’s Irish Civil War, aims to atone for his assassin past and make a clean, new life in America. Until he asks the wrong questions…
If you enjoyed reading this game review, you might like to read about the game Fall of Magic.
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St. Louis Writers Guild just published Weird STL, an anthology celebrate the strange, spooky, and just plain wonderful stories of our hometown. This volume of short stories, poems, a play, and essays includes a Sean Joye universe short story, “Big Magick.” Joseph Arwald, one of the baddies from The Big Cinch, tells us what really happened to the Ferris Wheel from the St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair.
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