Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books you read when you were a kid? (If you haven’t seen the cover of the space vampire books, you truly haven’t lived.) Imagine if someone took every one of those books, jammed them in a blender, and injected the results into the carotid artery of a truly talented and slightly OCD game designer. The result (other than the massive medical bills) would be Tales of the Arabian Nights, one of the most unique and engaging storytelling games ever developed.
Tales of the Arabian Nights seems eye-crossingly complex to any new player, particularly when you bring out a tome that looks like the textbook assigned by a slightly psychopathic history professor, but is actually quite simple. On a player’s turn, they move towards one of the goals they’ve selected at the beginning of the game, and the player to their right opens this massive book of tales, and begins to read, triggering a series of choices.
There’s no possible way that I can explain just how intricate, detailed, and completely freaking INSANE the stories that this game creates will get. In one game, a player met a beggar, tried to rob him, found a giant gem, took a ship through a fleet of pirates, got married to one of the pirates, was marooned on a deserted island, found a fountain, drank from the fountain, and she promptly switched genders from male to female. That covers perhaps 0.00001% of the possibilities in this game, and everyone at the table will be completely engaged while you discover that the princess you just married was actually a djinn with anger management issues, and, oh look, he just turned you into an alcoholic dog. With a bum leg. Obsessed with finding his family’s goat.
I don’t know that I’ve ever played another game where victory was the least interesting thing about it. You can complain that the mechanics of this game are overly simple or too random, or that the game takes too much time to set up, or that the choices you make don’t result in what you intended. You could make those complaints, but you’d be completely missing the point. Board games are extraordinary because they bring families and friends together around a table, and create stories, and Tales of the Arabian Nights does this with a dizzying ease. It’s probably the most unique game on this list, and I promise you, it’s going to surprise the hell out of you.
- Dietrich Stogner
Tales of the Arabian Nights seems eye-crossingly complex to any new player, particularly when you bring out a tome that looks like the textbook assigned by a slightly psychopathic history professor, but is actually quite simple. On a player’s turn, they move towards one of the goals they’ve selected at the beginning of the game, and the player to their right opens this massive book of tales, and begins to read, triggering a series of choices.
There’s no possible way that I can explain just how intricate, detailed, and completely freaking INSANE the stories that this game creates will get. In one game, a player met a beggar, tried to rob him, found a giant gem, took a ship through a fleet of pirates, got married to one of the pirates, was marooned on a deserted island, found a fountain, drank from the fountain, and she promptly switched genders from male to female. That covers perhaps 0.00001% of the possibilities in this game, and everyone at the table will be completely engaged while you discover that the princess you just married was actually a djinn with anger management issues, and, oh look, he just turned you into an alcoholic dog. With a bum leg. Obsessed with finding his family’s goat.
I don’t know that I’ve ever played another game where victory was the least interesting thing about it. You can complain that the mechanics of this game are overly simple or too random, or that the game takes too much time to set up, or that the choices you make don’t result in what you intended. You could make those complaints, but you’d be completely missing the point. Board games are extraordinary because they bring families and friends together around a table, and create stories, and Tales of the Arabian Nights does this with a dizzying ease. It’s probably the most unique game on this list, and I promise you, it’s going to surprise the hell out of you.
- Dietrich Stogner
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