Transsexual shepherd saves drowning princess

[mothwing]

My brother and I played a game today - not WoW for a change, but the fairy tale game called "Es war einmal...". The players tell fairy tales prompted by cards they receive, the goal is to end the story with the sentence on their "ending" card. The cards have characters, events, traits, places, and objects on them, or ending sentences. Each narrator tries to finish with their sentence, the other other players can take over whenever one of the terms on their cards is mentioned or with special cards for taking over. The person who has used up their cards wins, obviously, but this game really is not about winning so much as it is about telling a story.

We played it with one ending only and tried to get a collaboratory fairy tale, and the results were fun. Due to the fact that you can't choose the cards you get but have to work with the ending, there are some rather forced constructions, but also room for general funny awesomeness and changes from original fairy tale scripts and hilarious things introduced by the other player forcing themselves into the tale.

The first one we did had a transsexual shepherd who marries a princess he saved from drowning in a river while he was in the shape of a wolf, a later one one with a princess and a queen who fall for each other and have to appease an evil, homophobic witch and do so by vowing to change one of them into a king (our ending was "And so he reigned forever" or something, our characters were all female). We also had enchanted swords, magic fire birds, and witches cursing a king and a queen with stupidity.

Great fun.

Comments

[zinniazayda.livejournal.com]

Wow, that is cool! I wonder if there's a non-German version. I know someone who would really like that who only speaks Urdu, English, and Russian...

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

There is! I don't know about Urdu or Russian, but as I found out, the German version is a translation of the English game called "Once upon a time", produced by Atlas Games (Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_(game))).

[firenightingale.livejournal.com]

Cool - I shall investigate that, it sounds like an excellent way to kick start creativity & so on!

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

It is! It's also pretty handy as you can take your plotpoints and events and locations and whatnot and spread them out on the table, shoving them around.

It's great for planning. My tutoring kid had a great time planning things and the resulting story was much, much better compared to what he came up with by himself, too.