Tales of the Arabian Nights is a board game first published by West End Games in 1985.
Contents
Description
Tales of the Arabian Nights is a paragraph-based storytelling board game.
Publication history
Tales of the Arabian Nights was first published by West End Games in 1985, and was designed by Eric Goldberg. It was re-issued in 2009 by Z-Man Games in a revised, corrected, and much expanded form.
Reception
Jeff Grubb comments: "Tales of the Arabian Nights succeeds because its rules match its subject matter so well. The paragraph system within the Book of Tales nicely mirrors the type of original storytelling in content, framework, and descriptive language. The original One Thousand and One Nights (translated into English many times, from the bowdlerizing E.W. Lane to the bawdy Sir Richard Francis Burton) were a collection of short adventures, sometimes spun out serially, but just as often nested one within the other like Russian matryoshka dolls. The game experience is similar: your encounter with the friendly hunchback can lead you to a kindly efreet, who in turn gives you the opportunity to enter a place of power in the distant islands to the north (Stonehenge). The tales naturally spin out of each other, each being short and self-contained. The game similarly stresses the episodic nature of these magical tales."