Item - Tales of the Arabian Nights

Tales of the Arabian Nights from West End games came out in the 80's. Though it has a large book of paragraphs it differs in a few ways from a standard gamebook in that each paragraph/encounter is usually independent from the rest and there is no clear path, making it very replayable

Game play - you pick from a group of either male or female characters. Each of the characters are exactly the same and have no bearing on game play except for if they're male or female. You can play either solo or with other players.

After picking your character, you pick any 3 skills from about 20 available. You then travel the board which is a map of a fantasy version of the middle east, starting in Baghdad. At the end of each day of travel, You check for an encounter using a deck of cards, dice and the paragraph book. There are 4 types of cards - cards you can use against other players, city cards with a city named on it where you would check for an encounter when you reach the city on the card, and people and places cards.

Each person and place can be modified from a base by the dice and the book. A person could be beautiful, needy or foolish, and a place could be ancient, mysterious or treacherous.

You can pick your reaction to an encounter from a list of about 8 choices for each, keeping in mind what skills you have. When checking the book, you'll get the base encounter and usually 2 resolutions - a good one if you have the right skill and a bad one if you don't.

From an encounter, you can gain more skills, conditions such as insane or envious, or a magical item. You'll also get story points and destiny points needed to win the game.

The game is over when someone gets what they need to win the game, or time runs out.

The remake of the game is about the same but adds more encounters and some quests, among other things.

This is a classic game, lots of fun in a group or alone, and has lots of replayability.

I've been working on an a windows app for it off and on for a while and it's about 80% done. A video is here: https://youtu.be/Uf2LniTs3kY.

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