Tales of the Arabian Nights

We spent this last weekend camping with some family that we adore and took advantage of the evenings after the kids all went to bed to try and play some board games.  Unfortunately, it turns out most board games require really good lighting for all players most of the time. Who would have thought? On our last evening together, we discovered that Tales of the Arabian Nights is a great camping game because everyone is interacting, but you don't all need great lighting all the time. Now if only we had discovered this on an earlier night...

So here follow my general thoughts on Tales of the Arabian Nights.

Components
To begin with, it's published by Z-Man Games of which I am definitely a fan.  They also published Pandemic, which was our first serious foray into hobby board gaming as well as exposure to a cooperative game. Both Arabian Nights and Pandemic have solid components with appropriate artwork. Arabian Nights has much more thematic and gorgeous artwork with a feel that even seems authentic to the source material.  There is a board with a world map (okay both games happen to have this but I'm only talking about Arabian Nights from here on out) drawn in an old world style complete with mythical as well as real world locations. There are also several decks of cards including statuses, encounters, quests, and treasure cards. My in-laws, who own the game, bought baseball card sheet protectors (at least I think that's what they're called) to organize all of the status cards since there are a lot of them, and you never know which ones you're going to need. In addition to the cards, there are also player reference sheets, player tokens on stands depicting individuals from the Arabian Nights, dice, skill tokens, a matrix sheet for making choices, and THE BIGGEST RULEBOOK EVER!! To be fair the rule book is really a large scale Choose Your Own Adventure playbook that everyone uses. But it can be pretty intimidating to first time players to see that big honkin' thing on the table. Of course the number of different components in general can be a little intimidating. In a very creative approach to organizing the skill tokens, my in-laws also purchased on of those daily pill organizers as it turns out they fit in there perfectly. Overall reaction? The components are high quality but a little complex for ease of organization during play itself.

Gameplay
At first glance, this game appears to be an RPG following the theme of the Arabian Nights. As it turns out, this game is in fact more of a party game with almost no strategy involved and highly dependent on the people playing the game. (Sidenote: my in laws make this game awesome!) Each person plays a character from the Arabian Nights and embarks on quests and seeks encounters that will provide treasures, statuses, skills, and (most importantly) destiny and story points. The latter two things are the victory points of the game. After acquiring a number of both destiny and story points set secretly by each player at the beginning of the game, players attempt to return to Baghdad and declare victory first. What makes this more of a party game is the fact that the choices you make at each encounter (Choose Your Own Adventure Style as previously stated) have almost no predictable outcomes. You might choose to pray to wild Efreet thinking that your piety skill will get you someone when in fact you need either courtly graces or wilderness lore. Or you might choose to rob a destitute beggar just to be mean and realize he's some evil dude that you can defeat using your luck skill. Seriously, no strategy. Instead everyone has lots of fun guessing and telling stories and stringing together the most ridiculous plots that each character is living out during the course of the game. And if you have the right people willing to do voices, use emotion while reading, and throw in their own flavor of improvisation every now and then, it can be totally awesome!


I would recommend this game for a group of people looking for a casual board game experience that love telling stories.

Overall Rating: 8/10