Tales of the Arabian Nights Review (Z-Man Games)
I don’t know what it is about these past summer months, but as of late is seems like I just can’t get a game in…Curse these beautiful days and outdoor activities! Well a few nights back, I was able to play my first game of Tales of the Arabian Nights with one of my good friends. Neither of us had ever played the game before which for him was understandable since he doesn’t game except to amuse me every once in a while.
Personally, I have a difficult time calling this a game. In the past I have blasted games for being a way to pass time rather than an engaging event, particularly games where the choices you make and what you do has limited impact on if you win the game or not. TotAN fits this like a glove where I feel it is closer to lawn games like bocce-ball or horseshoes than a tactical/strategy game like we’re all used to. At no point during the game did I feel like where I was going or what skills I was picking had an influence on my success or failure in the game. But let me take a step back and talk about the mechanics a bit.
TotAN is best described as a choose your own adventure book, the ones where you read a paragraph, get presented with a few options and then flip to the page that it tells you to. Your turn has you moving a cut-out of your character around a map. At the end of every movement you draw a card from The Encounter Deck, of which there are three types of cards…The specifics of the three types don’t need to be covered here, but what you need to know is the encounter card you draw is the first step to having your story for the turn told to you. At the bottom of each card is a number which directs your opponent to a specific chart with 12 options. You then roll a dice and modify and your opponent tells you your result. This will give you a specific name like Dirty Hag; Terrible Storm; Happy Soldier…etc. Always a descriptive followed by a noun. This then tells you to reference a specific matrix in the matrix folder.
At this point, you as the player actually get to make a decision. Depending on the matrix you are directed to, your character has different action terms on how they can possibly react to the situation. You get to pick things like: Pray; Attack; Hide; Sneak; Follow; Take; Examine…etc. Once you pick that, the matrix directs you to a specific paragraph out of the 2,500+! There are some modifiers which could adjust the exact paragraph you read a bit, but again nothing worthy of detail, just a little note.
Your opponent then starts to read you the paragraph. Many of the paragraphs are divided up into a few segments. The first segment gives a general description of what event is happening. The second segments provide a few options depending on what skills your character has. More often than not, the person will read the “No Skill” option, but say you had the Seduction skill and one of the options is for Seduction, then you have the choice to pursue the Seduction result or go with the No Skill result. Once the decision has been made by the active player, your opponent continues to read the paragraph and at the end you possibly get a reward.
Rewards add things like Wealth, Destiny Points and Story Points, or things like weapons, Status Cards, Skills…etc. Wealth determines how fast and how far you can move in a turn. Weapons typically add skills to you, but I haven’t gone through all the cards so there may be some other affects. Skills I’ve touched on, but basically the depth of skills is they possibly provide you with different options when reading a paragraph. Status cards on the other hand are interesting. They represent things like being Badly Lost to Wounded to Married all the way to Sex Change! For example my first encounter I had last night had me face to face with an Ugly Hag. The option I decided to go with was Attack since I figured hell, it is the first turn let’s see where this game takes us. Well I ended up getting jumped by the crowd, robbed and beat which caused me to lose some wealth and obtain Wounded. This forced me to miss my next turn so I could heal myself back up.
Destiny and Story Points are best described as the Victory Points in this game and by collecting those you inch closer to the win. At the beginning of the game each player, hidden from others, selects a combination of Story and Destiny Points that total up to 20. Tokens are taken to record your goals and placed under your player board. These are kept hidden until someone reaches their selected levels and reaches Baghdad. The rest of the players then have one turn to get to Baghdad if they too have met their goals. If both players are in Baghdad with the requirements for their Status and Destiny Points then it goes to a tie-breaker. And this is what happened the other night.
During the course of our game we were having a blast. Since you have little control over the specific events that you encounter you just have to go along for the ride. Because a lot of the paragraphs or descriptions are vague, your mind is able to wonder and if it is in the gutter like ours were the other night…Well we had a blast. My opponent managed to snag himself a lovely D’jinn wife who, I can’t remember the exact quote, but to us it sounds like he married a sex hungry D’jinn who does nothing but fuck and keep him exhausted.
But the amount of fun I had still doesn’t gloss over the fact that the game just doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of strategy or tactics…I feel like you’re just along for the ride. That’s why after one game I am pretty comfortable in saying that I’ve seen ust about all this game offers, but have only scratched the surface of what the game contains. By that I mean, I don’t expect any “A-Ha!” moments where all of a sudden a clear path to victory becomes apparent. I don’t expect games to be tight all the way down to the wire where people are pulling out all the stops to try to secure their victory. What I do expect is to hear a myriad of unique stories and funny situations that your character gets him/her-self into.
So as I wrap this up I’ll go back to my opening thoughts about how I have a hard time calling this a game. Games to me imply some sort of competition where opponents test their skills against each other…TotAN does not have this. Our game ended with my opponent whooping me in both Destiny and Story Points, he got to Baghdad first and had to wait the full turn as dictated by the rules before he could claim a win. Well during that last turn I didn’t have my goals accomplished (as I said he was whooping my ass) but was able to get back to Baghdad with my only chance of victory being pulling a paragraph that gives me the Story Points that I so badly needed to achieve my goals…I went through the event, had my paragraph read to me, and got my two story points allowing me to accomplish my goals. What struck me as odd though is the tiebreaker, which I ended up winning. I assumed the tie breaker would be either Story or Destiny Points so you could imagine my surprise when I started going through the tiebreaker list and I ended up winning - My voice even cracked in surprise as Ifound out I won. I’ve said it before and this is something I really believe, but winning or losing for me is secondary compared to the experience you have be it in the game or with the company you keep and that is something fully exemplified in TotAN. In my opinion I really should not have been called the winner, but again with this game it isn’t that you got there, but how you got there. Think of all those college road trip movies, more often than not the hijinks that occur, happen on the road and such is the case with TotAN.
So, do I recommend this game to people…One hundred percent I do (provided you value experience over win/loss). Really the only thing for me that keeps it from a perfect game is like I mention above this feeling that I just can’t or have very limited control over things. Never in all the games I’ve played have I been so entertained by both what was happening to me as well as what was happening to my opponent. The atmosphere is light and lively and it creates exactly the situation that I like when gaming with people. It is hard not to have fun with this game unless you can’t get past the lack of meaningful choices. I will admit that it isn’t a game that I want to play all the time because that lack of control does little to scratch my gaming itch, but for a social game which I’d venture to say is a party game in disguise there is nothing else that I’ve found that compares.
‘Til Next Time - Happy Gaming
LvT
