The Greatest Story Never Told

Mari and I have now played a few games of Once Upon A Time. We don't play to win; we just want to kill time.

The biggest problem we found in our non-competitive games was picking up cards when interrupted. There were too many new elements introduced into a story. The story usually became unwieldy. And towards the end the games became difficult to finish because we'd be interrupted by the other and so have to pick up a new card. This meant that just when the story should have been drawing to a conclusion, a hitherto unknown "stepmother" or "window" would somehow have to be woven into the tale. Passing is an option, but that was too often used just to get around the unwanted cards we'd been forced to pick up all along, rather than because we'd run out of ideas. So we made some changes that worked well in the sample size of 1 game we played.

1. We don't keep "Happily Ever After" cards secret. Instead we lay out 3 of these face up at the start. You can choose any of them to finish with.

2. When interrupted you don't have to pick up another card UNLESS you have no cards.

Under these rules we both added much more description because we weren't so concerned about taking a backward step in hand size when interrupted. In fact there were several times when we both added heaps of description in an attempt to give the role away when we felt we'd added enough to the story. We talked for nigh on 45 minutes and both felt the story that resulted was the most cohesive of any of the games we'd played.

It's all good clean family fun.




With drill and sex.