Once Upon a Time

This is a charming card-based game in which each player is given a random set of typical fairy tale elements: for example, a princess, a tower, an escape, a thief. You start telling a story, aiming to mention the elements on your cards, but other players can interrupt and take over the storytelling, twisting it around to fit their own cards. Everyone also has a single, different happy ending card, which is the conclusion they're striving to reach.

It was actually interesting from a writer's point of view. First of all, being a writer doesn't give you much of an advantage. This is more like improv rather than the planned plotting I'm used to, and many times I lost my turn as storyteller because I stammered while trying to weave in an unlikely card. (The flying objects card kept appearing in my hand.)

Second of all, the ending cards heavily influence the path your story takes, and the first person to lead as storyteller has a huge advantage because he can quickly introduce a setup which makes sense with his own ending. If your happy ending is that the village rejoices, there better be a village with a problem somewhere in the story.

This was tougher for the grade-school-aged child who was in my playing group. She had a "brother/sister" element card and a happy ending card of "The child was restored to happy parents," and tried to force her way to the latter by innocently stating in her story that the brother and sister had a child.

She didn't understand why the adults fell over laughing. I couldn't really applaud her because of the subject matter, but I did appreciate her strategy of introducing a key element of the ending. This is the same advice I often heard for high school essays: link the introduction and the conclusion. Readers will recognize that the piece has come full circle.

And finally, although the stories we told careened quite often into preposterous territory, you could call out "Silly!" when something didn't make sense at all. You could be crazy (we had a flying saucer — not a UFO, but an actual saucer that you could pour milk into), but you had to be logical about piecing things together. You couldn't just use four disparate cards in a single sentence; instead you had to build in each element with a purpose. The window element must play a significant role in the story, and not just be a pretty sight to pass by.

I keep forgetting that "writing" doesn't equate to "storytelling," and that each can be mastered separately. This was a good reminder. I'm looking forward to playing this again and honing my storytelling skills.