Way-Out Wednesday: A Thousand And One Nights

In a rarer-than-a-blue-moon occurrence exacerbated by the dual evils of holidays and technical difficulties, Way-Out Wednesday today occurs on a Thursday, and Game of the Week happened on a Wednesday. Next week the schedule will be far more regular and things really will be back to normal, mark my words. It's felt like forever since I've had regular internet access. It almost felt like... a thousand and one nights.

Yes, that was a painful segue to my indie RPG of the week, Night Sky Games' A Thousand and One Nights. The title should be familiar to any of you familiar with Arabic fairy tales, and it is by far the best vehicle I've seen to roleplay in a Scheherazade-tastic kind of way.

In A Thousand and One Nights, you play members of the Sultan's court, a place of intrigue like no other. You aren't allowed to speak your mind about the people around you or explicitly state what your ambitions are—except through story. Since you can't leave court, this is exactly how you pass the time, vocalizing your opinions and desires in a veiled way through the art of storytelling. The better you do it, the more "gems" you get, tools with which you can achieve your ambitions. Yes, this does mean you must not only play a character, but also tell stories in that character's voice—thus creating a game-within-a-game, since you assign all the other players as the characters within your tale. And yes, this also means that one of those characters can start their own story, which I'd recommend doing at least sometimes to get the true 1001 Nights experience.

Stories-within-stories, characters-nested-in-characters, games-within-games—A Thousand and One Nights, your indie game of the week! (To enjoy an excellent actual play record of the game, go here!)