Tales of the Arabian Nights

Games: competitions where you pit your strength, or skill, or will, or brains, or something else and in some combination against a number of other people.  There are rules, winners, losers, a score, perhaps even celebrations or rancour.

Tales of the Arabian Nights is not, by that definition, a game.

Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books from your childhood? The ones where, after making some arbitrary choice, you would flick to the page directed and find out you had made the wrong choice and were now dead – but it didn’t matter because you’d subverted the book by keeping your finger on the previous page. Those who have read these books, or the Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf books, will feel quite at home with TotAN. The focus of the game is the spiral-bound Book of Tales, designed not to be read cover-to-cover, but full of numbered paragraphs picked out and read depending on the player’s decisions. Also in the box is a board showing Southern Europe and North Africa, a whole load of tokens, piles of cards, a few dice, and stand-up cards to represent our heroes – Ali Baba, Aladdin, Sindbad, Ma’aruf, Zumurrud and Sheheherazade, in order of who I tend to choose for fear of appearing ignorant about pronunciation.

Choosing your character, you’re then given a quest card, which will require you to go forth, travelling around the board and having encounters. On your turn, you move up to the allowed number of spaces as determined by your wealth, and, wherever you land, flip over an encounter card. Your encounter could be with a beggar, or a monster, or a witch, or anything within the large range of cards provided. This is where the fun begins. Let’s take an example turn.

You are Ali Baba, and your current quest, determined by a random card from the Quest deck, is to ‘seek treasure’ – simply head out into the world and find yourself a nice trinket to show off. Travelling a little aimlessly, you move to Kiev, and flip a card from the Encounter deck. Your encounter is with a toothless old hag. But what sort of hag? Rolling a die, you ask the player holding the Book of Tales. The reader consults a table using your card and die result, and tells you it’s a ‘diseased’ hag. Ew. What do do with this diseased hag? Your choice comes from another table – the storyteller instructs you choose from ‘matrix C’.

Each player has a chart of the different reactions you can take to your encounter – in this example there are eight different things, ranging from ‘enrich’ to ‘rob’, letting you be nice or nasty or somewhere in-between. One of the choices is ‘follow’. Let’s try that. Using your reaction, the player with the ‘reaction matrices’ can read off the appropriate number. Finally, you roll the ‘destiny die’ to see if you should read out the numbered paragraph given, or the one before or after. Now the reader can, in his or her best hammy acting, tell us what occurs.

And what happens? Well, in this case, it turns out you were so overcome with sympathy you couldn’t help but give your money away to this poor unfortunate wretch. You lose some wealth (tracked on the board), have your misfortune mocked by your fellow players but gain the status of ‘blessed’ for being such a good guy, which may affect encounters in the future. I’ve deliberately chosen a relatively mundane encounter here so to avoid spoilers – there are encounters with mystical creatures, magical objects, with undersea kingdoms and jewelled fortresses. You can get meet handsome princes/beautiful princesses, get married, and find a magic carpet for Sunday excursions with the kids. You can also end up a penniless pauper, in jail, cursed by a genie you slighted. You’re never quite sure what’s going to happen, or how your reactions will play out – and that’s why TotAN is not for everyone.

Strategy? Tactics? Forget it. In TotAN you have very limited control over what happens to you – and very often the choices you make are meaningless and arbitrary; you choose your actions with no idea of what the consequences will be. It’s also often terribly unfair. I’ve spent entire games with the rottenest of luck, lost in the sea just off France, making landfall only to be thrown, crippled and diseased, in a hideous dungeon. All the while, the player next to me, is gaining unimaginable wealth and eventually the title of Sultan. ToTAN is purely about storytelling, and while there is a ‘winner’ (whoever makes it back to Baghdad with enough ‘story’ and ‘destiny’ points) it’s of little importance.

It’s not flawless, even if it appeals to you. Already slightly fiddly with the tables and matrices, the game gets even fiddlier towards the end. Having a ‘master skill’ means you can avoid the randomness of the destiny die by choosing a paragraph that references that particular skill – useful, but it often gives a lot of work to the reader. The game doesn’t scale as well as it claims, either. Despite the box claiming 2-6 players, more than 4 means too much downtime, and two players gives one of you slightly too much to do on your opponent’s turn. Fun with the right group, Tales of the Arabian Nights is at its best with enthusiastic readers unafraid to make a fool of themselves.