I played Once Upon a Time, a fairy tale storytelling card game that adapts well for all ages and party sizes, although it officially states 8+ as the age and 2-6 as the group size. It is very similar to our game, because it also centers around making up some storyline based on prompts. It was made by Atlas Games, and seems to be geared towards families, casual friend hangouts, or small dinner party type of settings.
My opinion is that Once Upon a Time is a great entry-level storytelling game, but the same game mechanics that make it fun for beginners make it less fun for really strong storytellers or improvisers, and even less fun for a mixed group of individuals with varying levels of comfort with storytelling. Our team game, on the other hand, seems to prioritize quality over quantity of creativity and centers more on collaboration and cohesiveness but may be more difficult for beginners, which I will reflect on later.
The storytelling of Once Upon a Time focuses and is highly driven by the cards driving the story: each player is dealt a hand of story elements (like “Prince,” “Escape,” “Enchanted Object”) and has to incorporate the words into their narrative. This provides a very clear direction for players who may not be used to thinking on their feet to know where to go without having to create a new world from scratch but rather connecting a few clear prompts. This variety of cards, paired with an individual’s ability to play any card in their hand that corresponds to the current story, are part of the mechanisms that make the game easy for new players. However, this same mechanism leads to less creative liberty for players who enjoy or are talented at coming up with ideas on the spot, with an optimal strategy being to quickly and simply connect the words in your hand in order to finish quickly without allowing another player to be able to interfere with a relevant hand. Therefore, the only way for experienced players to shift the story and player is primarily through interrupt cards, which once they’ve happened, leads to predictable winning based on how the cards were dealt.
Personally, I felt this as I played the game, since I tend to be good at improvising stories whereas the people I was playing with were newer. I found that I would interrupt early, quickly and simply connect my cards, saving any interrupts, and play those interrupts to bring the deck back over to me and win while the other players were slowly thinking through their cards and stories. As we all got better, it became a waiting game of who would have the last interrupt rather than centered around the story. Lastly, it felt like all the stories ended up similar.
This comes back to a lot of the basic principles we learned in class about building around FOO strategies and balancing experienced and new players playing a game. You want to make sure that new players will not be completely beaten because there are FOO strategies that enable them to be solid players. But you also want to make sure that there are more powerful strategies so that experienced players can grow beyond the FOO strategies into something larger. I don’t know if I felt like Once Upon a Time struck this balance. Perhaps adding some other ways to interrupt the story or providing a higher value to story quality might introduce more competition in games with more experienced players.
I find that even though the main component of the game is similar to our conspiracy game, the mechanics here cause the game to feel much different. We have focused a lot more on providing creative liberty to our players, which comes as a double edged sword, with some people saying they love the game and others saying they couldn’t think of anything to say. I wonder if there’s some ways to strike a balance: perhaps allowing players to switch out a card they feel is hard and writing an optional ‘hard’ mode in the rules where players have to work with what they draw. For us, the story quality is prioritized over quantity, since there are always 3 simple words to work with, but points are given based on how convincing the story is, not how many words you included. Playing Once Upon a Time, overall, made me realize how much variety there is in the space of these types of games but also what it looks like to make a game beginner-friendly. I want to see if we can balance and bring in some of those components while preserving what I think makes our game really fun over playing Once Upon a Time again.
