Story Box
- Board's Eye View
- 5 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Story Box, from Pegasus Spiele and TIKI Editions, is just that: a box of cards designed as prompts with which players compose their own stories. The idea is that you have a hand of three cards and you play a card and recount a story that matches or arises from the picture, you replenish your hand and another player continues the story with a card from their hand. This continues for a timed two minutes (you have to supply your own timer).
There is a game here too. After the two minutes is up, the cards that have been played are flipped over. Players then, in turns, try to recount the story - specifically announcing what the next card shows before revealing it. If they are correct, the card goes onto a +2 points pile; if they're wrong it goes on a -1 point pile. If a player is unsure they can call on another player to help them; wrong answers still go on the -1 pile but a correct answer attained with help only scores on the +1 pile.
Julian Prothiere and Alexandre Droit have designed a fully cooperative improvised storytelling and memory game. As with any storytelling or pitching game, it's at its best the more the players throw themselves into it - whether they go for humour, dramatic effect or whatever. The game notionally takes 2-8 players but there's no set upper limit. That said, we've enjoyed it most at 4-6 players. If you're sticking strictly to the two-minute timer for stories then, if your experience is like ours at Board's Eye View, the memory aspect of the game is at its toughest at five players: fewer and people tend to remember at least their own contributions to the story and where those fitted in; more than five and players may only have each contributed one card, which makes it easier to keep track. Of course you can lengthen the story and so up the memory challenge by raising the two minutes to three minutes or longer...
Shown here in our Board's Eye View 360 is the Dreams & Nightmares edition of Story Box with art by Victor Dulon (aka Vidu) but that's just one of several different editions, all with their own decks of prompt cards by different artists. We've been particularly impressed by the art in this set, and some of our team have already pressed the cards into extra service for use in games of Dixit (Libellud) so we're getting a lot of play out of this box beyond the core improv and memory game.
