Tales of the Arabian Nights - Tips & Strategies

We usually play that you roll the -/+/blank die to determine the time of day for the round (each player gets the same time of day) instead of relying on the deck to run out, which it never does. We have found that it adds variety to the game and stories rarely repeat that way.
Thanks

Find the right type of players for a session of this game – it dramatically improves the enjoyment of it! By “right type”, I mean players that are willing and able to get into the roleplaying aspects of Tales. When you are the storyteller, involve other players, especially the ones that aren’t directly affected by the story. Encourage everyone to make sounds, voices for characters and even antics and movements while you tell the story! Try to remember events and characters involved in every story you tell, and use them again to link stories together, thereby forging a continous, epic tale, instead of random tidbits here and there. That disguised beggar you just met? He’s the same person you attacked and wounded last turn, AND he happens to be the father of the girl you wanted to woe. Now he’s out for revenge!

If everyone does this, there’s virtually no downtime and all the players become involved in every story!

4+ players:
Give the chart to the second player to the active player’s right.
6 players:
Give the book to the second player to the active player’s left.

This will limit the down time of the non-active players and it also gives the player to the immediate right of the active player time to figure out what they new toys they just received without annoying everyone else.

the thing that we have most problem with is the status cards because there is no maximum and you can end up easily with more than 10 cards in your hands. There is a lot of thext on these cards and it become really hard to keep track of every thing.

So we decided to put a maximum of 4 active status cards. (we can keep more if it’s a passive status like sex-change or Beast

We have to keep the 5th card and discard the one that have less effect on the game/adventure

Try splitting the encounter deck into Three equal stacks and placing the time of day token in front of each one. Start with morning and when that runs out then move to noon. Also the biggest problem, in my opinion with this game is status effects. Some run way too long and hamper game enjoyment. Limit the ones that make sense to do so to an agreeable number of turns before expiring. No one wants to spend a life imprison for a minor crime. Right? So maybe you’re only lost or imprisoned for three turns max.

If you want to adventure alone, ZMan Games has an official solo variant for the game

http://zmangames.com/product-details.php?id=949

This game is wonderful, probably my favorite story game, but there are a ton of little bits that you’re going to need throughout the game. Buy a tray with a lot of little segments to it so that you can keep everything sorted and easy to get at.

The friend who first showed me the game used a tray made for holding deviled eggs and what I’ll be using it one of those trays that provide a bunch of small paint reservoirs that miniatures painters use. It really is a very useful thing to have.

Whenever we play this, especially with a group of 4 or more of us, we try to have a dedicated Games Master who takes control of the books and deals with the running of the game. This can speed up the running of the game and also avoids any confusion as the books and sheets are passed between people to take care of.

This person should be familiar with the rules and able to answer people’s questions and queries about them.

If you don’t enjoy seeing the adventures of other people play out then it isn’t a role for you, but it can be a lot of fun just being along for the ride and seeing where people’s stories end up.

We change the time of day after character encounter is drawn, rather than waiting until the deck runs out.