Arabian Nights Fantasy Adventure Board Game

Who’s the game for:

Ages twelve and up.

Content:

Based on the content and characters from the Arabian Nights.

How it’s played:

Players choose a character that is paralleled from the story such as Sinbad, or Aladdin. The game board itself is a geographical representation of the area covered in the book which is around the Arabian Peninsula and nearby coastal areas of the Mediterranean. The players begin by pulling a card from the deck of quests and receive a certain quest to fulfill. They each take turns in succession traveling along various paths and resting on specific locations on the board.  On their turns, they draw from a deck of encounter cards where they interact with various NPC’s (Non Player Characters) such as a slave or genie, or elephant, or are told to go to a specific location and have another kind of encounter. The different and interesting thing from other adventure games is that the players use two matrices when in an encounter to direct the outcome and direction of the story: one action and the other reaction .  A “Book of Tales” is also involved which is made up of 2002 different story variations that are all coordinated with which encounter card the player has drawn, and which specific location they are on the board. The players will then gain or loose wealth, skills, health, experience and attempt to fulfill their quest.

Critique

I think this is one of those games where you have to be willing to do the initial learning curve for the rules and then it becomes fun. However, if you are someone who doesn’t want to do a lot of reading then it would not be fun. There seems to be a lot of thorough design in creating variants of story outcomes and an intricately designed web of interactions between the player and NPC’s. This allows for the game to be played many times and not have the same things happen to you. The fun in the game seems to be choosing an option when pulling the encounter cards (choosing to beat a slave you meet, or befriend him, steal from him, etc.) and just enjoy how the story unfolds. People who would want more control over their player’s moves and direction would probably not enjoy this game.