Aesop’s Fanfictions is an improvisational party game for 3 or more players. In it, players use cards with people, places, or things to improvise a story that explores a theme from fiction or media.
Each round, a player is selected to be a judge and picks a moral card, which has a lesson from fiction such as “Slow and steady wins the race” or “Be careful what you wish for”. Then, players each draw a hand of word cards, which might have a noun such as "farmer", verb "running", or the adjective "powerless". The player then chooses a card to give to the players to their left and right, and then places the cards they have in their hand in any order on the table face down. Then, each player takes turns telling a story by flipping the cards they have in play face up.
Design Iterations
Aesop's Fanfictions was a game I developed with two friends but continued to work on as their interests changed. I initially pitched a storytelling card game about dreams to them, inspired by the dream journal I was keeping. They were unconvinced by that idea, but after a bit more discussion we settled on the idea of a story-telling card game about fables in the modern world.
Our initial design had two types of cards in it: Morals and Object cards. The first prototype contained everything from celebrities to mundane objects, common themes to enigmatic lessons such as "It is unwise to ape your betters". We slowly found that the best morals were cliche messages, and the best object cards implied story beats (e.g. taxi implies that a character travels somewhere, usually in a hurry).
For a while, our efforts were focused on improving the quality of the cards in the game, but I found during playtesting with friends and at a convention that most people struggled with a specific mechanic. We initially set up hand curation so that you wouldn't know what cards other players gave you. This meant that your entire story could be thrown off by an unknown variable, or a card could be glossed over because the player didn't plan for it. Thus, we allowed players to see all the cards in their story and to arrange them as they wished. This change still allowed improvisation, but also let players sequence their cards to tell a better story.
A friend suggested that I add genre cards or restriction cards to give the player more guidance for telling their stories. I decided to try out the genre cards idea with prompts such as "Space Opera", "Romance", and "Western", among others. I also broadened the concept of morals to themes in general, adding easily understood prompts such as "Believe in yourself". I also expanded object cards to include adjectives and concepts, that are useful in their broadness.
Prospects
Though currently I am working on smaller projects, Aesop's Fanfictions is a game I believe to have potential on the market with some more playtesting.
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