Choose Your Own Adventure: The Board Game

(Originally posted on BoardGameGeek.)

One to six players, best with three or four. About two hours to play, longer if you do the voices. Arabian Nights is the Choose Your Own Adventure board game.

Each turn, you get a random encounter, choose a reaction, and see what happens to your poor character. The game comes with a gigantic encounters book and a reaction sheet, which reference each other in a combinatorial explosion of story snippets. Oh, I met a Disguised Prince on the road? I’m going to Rob him! Uh oh, he’s actually the prince of the land, and has his bodyguards throw me in the dungeon, eh? I guess I’m Imprisoned now. Next turn.

To win, you need two types of VPs: Story and Destiny points. At the beginning of the game, you choose a number of each (summing to twenty) that will be your goal. You can reduce the total points for a shorter game, but I wouldn’t recommend increasing it. Ten of each is pretty standard. As you go through encounters, you get points based on what happens to you. For anyone attempting to game this system, though, don’t bother. Encounters give out practically random assortments of points, so much so that “winning” might as well be a roll of the die itself. The crazy thing: you probably won’t care.

This game isn’t about the win. It’s about the insanity that happens along the way. Encounters are wide and varied, and drop long-term status effects on characters, such as sex-changed or married. Reactions vaguely cover most anything you might want to do, and some things you’d never consider had they not been on there. Encounters themselves feel like they’re pulled straight from the old tales.

My wife was annoyed that the game didn’t have much continuity between turns (encounters are disconnected and episodic, with your character being the only constant), but that doesn’t take much away from the game. Your character does grow and change over time, with skills (which alter the available encounter paths), status effects (which change your options each turn), quests (which provide VPs or treasure for completing a goal), and treasure. However, these just add to the story, rather than present a strategy. Even your quest, ostensibly the means with which you pick up your winning VPs, is impossible to be deliberative about. Often, the best you can do is wander until a random encounter gives you what you need.