Tales of the Arabian Nights Review – The Board Game Where Everything is Made Up and the Points Don’t Matter

Originally released in 1985, Tales of the Arabian Nights is a roleplaying-lite game that takes players on mystical adventures through the Arabian desert. Sometimes you meet the woman of your dreams, other times you’re jailed for stealing bread, and other times still you are turned into a gorilla by a wandering street magician.

Whatever journey you embark upon, you’ll be competing for Destiny and Story points. The first player to return to Baghdad after collecting enough to meet their goal wins. Although, as a story game, the destination is of less consequence than the journey to get there.

A journey beginning in Baghdad. Each player receives a quest to complete and not enough money to do it. This underpins your character as a motivation for why they’re exploring the world. And it can be as simple as a triumphant return from exile, or as complex as finding a lover for a wealthy merchant.

With this goal in mind, you’ll travel from place to place accumulating wealth, treasure, status, and skills. From increasing your travel speed to opening more options within the narrative, these boons will help you on your journey.

Once you’ve moved to a new area, you’ll draw an encounter card, and then decide on an action to take. Finally, you’ll read, or be read, a passage from the Book of Tales. Outlining the fate in store for your character. During the readthrough, you’ll make choices, take skill checks, find treasure and items, and apply additional effects.

Then it’s all over and onto the next player’s turn.

Too random for its own good

The way this Book of Tales works is astonishing, with 2600 different actions, consequences, and circumstances the craftsmanship is phenomenal. It’s no wonder few games have dared replicate the intricate nature of how it works.

Simplified, it boils down to this: the spot you move to is where the event happens, the drawn encounter card is who it’s with, and the action you select is the what and how. Once you combine all these variables, you get the numbered code for the passage to read out.

Right before this though, when picking your action, is the most fun and ridiculous part of the game. For example, you might encounter a Bloodthirsty Barber suspiciously looking like Johnny Depp. Your action must then be one of honouring, attacking, avoiding, aiding, robbing, following, questioning or praying to this mad hair cutter.

While it’s fun to imagine the outcome of each of these actions, in reality, they feel entirely random. Sometimes praying to a drunken thief is the right thing to do because it was actually the king in disguise. However, there’s an equal chance of it being an ambush where a snake charmer uses their snake to poison you. There’s no indication or predictor of what’s going to happen after you use an action, both in narrative and rewards.

So as silly as the story gets sometimes, it’s frustrating for those who want to gain points, as well as those who want to put together a cohesive story. Compared to modern games like Lands of Galzyr or Forbidden Waters which carry plot points throughout their duration. Tales of the Arabian Nights provides a random potluck of encounters, leaving it up to you to make sense of how they connect.

Get Drew Carey on the phone!

During Tales of the Arabian Nights, your character gains skills and keywords that unlock new opportunities within the narrative. This is a cool way to show character progress. However, the skills don’t appear in the book as often as you’d like. So while your character experiences a lot of growth throughout their journey, you may never put that growth to use.

Otherwise, Tales of the Arabian Nights is like Whose Line Is It Anyway, where everything is made up and the points don’t matter. Where winning isn’t the point of the game, having a good time is – and whether you have a good time depends on how much you enjoy the random light-hearted storytelling.

For me, it fell flat, the disjointed nuggets of narrative were more confusing than entertaining. And while the book is executed exquisitely, stripping all forms of strategy and meaningful decisions from the game is too frustrating for me to ignore.