Designed by: John Fiore,Rory O'Connor
Untold: Adventures Await is far from a traditional game: you don’t compete with anybody, and there is no winner or loser. Instead it’s a game in the sense of being something you play, telling a story over five acts.
Everybody works together, deciding the setting for their imaginary TV show and the leading character. It can be literally anything you want, and there are a couple of things to help you make your decisions – the first is the story cubes – dice that can be rolled to inspire ideas, with each face showing a unique image. Each player has idea, flashback and modify (to change dice results) chits they can cash in as the story progresses – the central board shows the five acts of your TV show (these are set up randomly, so the plots can vary) and they contain spaces to add the rolled story cubes as the players collectively decide what happens in the narrative. In each act there are a number of available question and action chits to spend – allowing you to flesh out the detail of your story, or try and change events for the better.
When you use an action you’re trying to solve the problems your leading character faces – to see if you succeed, you flip an Outcome card. These will tell you how successful (or not) you’ve been – the finer detail of what that is is of course up to you, the storytellers!
After the final act is played out, the story is finished, and the adventure is over. Though the game does encourage you to record how the events in ‘this episode’ affect your imaginary TV series, so you can return to it later!
None - the players work together as a collective.
None - everybody is always involved, and there are no turns.
The rules are very light, and are there to provide a framework for the imaginations of the players.
Because the game is really a story-telling activity, the replay potential here is limitless.
1-4
Players
6+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
This is quite a marvellous family game I feel, where children - particularly younger children - can take control of things and be encouraged to allow their imaginations to run riot. As a result the stories can often be very silly, but the absurdity seems to suit the game, as you try to bend the dice to some madcap problem you've created with a flippant suggestion earlier in the story. It's wonderful to have kids say whatever they want and have it be okay within the confines of the game: you can't get this 'wrong' because pretty much anything is allowed. It officially plays up to four, but there's not much stopping you from playing it with a bigger crowd really.