Review Detail

It started with a prison shanking and ended with the detonation of a two-angels-fucking superweapon. Somewhere in the middle there was an ecstatic frenzy over a heart-shaped box carved from a magic tree, a zeppelin assault with tin-man–firing cannons, and a puppet show no one will ever forget, no matter how hard they try...

This is what I like to do in pretty much every game, formalized and made the entire point of the exercise. The rules are somewhat obtuse and seem at odds with what they're trying to achieve, which is probably why this beautiful experiment fails so often for so many, as it's a fragile thing that requires the right people to play it the right way with the right mindset in order to properly come together, inflate with hot air, and soar. But man, if you can pull it off it's slick as hell.

Just ignore any gamey, fun-murdering card counting bullshit and focus on the storyteller's maxim:

SOMETHING WENT WRONG

And everything'll be just fine.

Or not.

Note: For our first game we just kinda went for it—there were plenty of rules irregularities but the story came through intact and everyone had a fine time. For our next game I'll suggest playing cards into a stack instead of a line so the magnitude of cards isn't reflexively obvious, and maybe judging the "winner" of the story-bit with a vote, using the number of cards played as a tie-breaker. While a vote won't work in mechanism-focused super-competitive groups (who shouldn't be playing this anyway) it will for us, as we prize a good story over winning or losing.