The object of this game is simply to tell a story. Don’t bother writing a “What is a Roleplaying Game?” section or anything—everyone knows how to tell a story, so everybody gets to be the Narrator! The Narration Game is cooperative, not competitive, so everyone’s just here to have a good time.

You can think of this as an “introductory” game, or you can just play it and not worry about exactly what category everything has to be in, jeez.

The Story Book

The first thing you’ll need is a Story Book. This is a book that contains a selection of story scaffolds to choose from, tailored to whatever theme or genre your game works in.

All the players will decide upon a story to tell together (or if it’s your game, you get to pick whatever you like, and they can argue about what to get on the pizza or something). Whichever person wants to can read aloud The Introduction and The Ending of the story. That’s right, you start already knowing how the story ends! Innovative!

The Cards

The second thing you’ll need is a deck of Story Cards. We (we who?) recommend 108 cards, because it’s such a nice number, but you can do however many you can manage. These cards each have a story element written on them, like “Thunderstorm”, “Betrayal”, “Free Trip to Bermuda”, or “Larry’s 1975 Dodge Dart”. Pictures to go along with the words are always nice—if you’re not a drawer, there are plenty of places to get nice things to put on them.

To begin, you’ll deal five cards to each player (or four cards, if five or more people are playing). After everyone’s heard the story’s Introduction and Ending, they can discard as many cards as they like from their hand and draw new ones—but you might want to encourage them to keep ones that they think might not fit, because comedy.

The Story

Once everyone’s got their cards all settled and sorted, the player responsible for all of this begins the game. (The Narrator!) They start by telling the story from the beginning, as described in the Introduction, and continue by adding a bit onto it, inspired by one of the cards in their hand. Once they work the person, place, or thing (nouns!) on their card into the story, they’ll lay down their card on the table.

Once the card’s played, the player on their left can jump in any time, taking on the mantle of Narrator and continuing the story. Eventually the new Narrator will play a card from their hand, incorporating that story element into the tale. Then the player on their left can interrupt and become Narrator, and so on around the table.

(How a player uses their cards is pretty much up to them and the good graces of the table, but there should be some connection between what they narrate and what’s on their card. Dad jokes and bad puns are super valid here, but you can make your game work however you like. There are no hard and fast rules here, just remember—be cool, man.)

If for some reason a player just can’t get their brain together enough to work one of their cards into the story (don’t worry, it happens to all of us), they can discard as many cards as they like and draw their hand back up to five cards—new cards can be played immediately, if they like!

The End

Continue the story, going around the table and passing around the Narrator role—in the original game, there was a cool microphone standee, but you can use a card, or nothing, or whatever works for your game. When every player is down to just one card, anyone who wants to can trade in their last card for a new one from the deck. Then it’s STORY SHOWDOWN.

When everyone’s ready (don’t be cute about this, just be cool), the responsible player will count to three. On “Three!”, every player throws their last card down on the table. Then flip over the stack (or terrible mess), and the player whose card winds up on the bottom (that is, the player who was fastest on the draw) gets to end the story using whatever’s on that card.

Remember, this is a cooperative story-telling game, so don’t throw down just for the sake of winning. If someone is crowing that they’ve got the perfect card for the ending, let them have it, and if it turns out they were wrong, well...

Once the story has been brought to an end (one that matches The Ending set out in the Story Book, right?), the game is over. Now it’s time for goodies!

Certificates

When the game is done, everyone gives out awards to the other players. They can be promotions, diplomas, certificates of merit, gift cards to fake restaurants, whatever works for your game. Give the players some structure, but give them space to fill in their own titles: “Best Reporting”, “Worst Punster”, “Doctor of WTF”, “Best Ending of All Time”, and so on. Good vibes all around.

In the Narration game, these certificates are just for fun—the EPaCG makes them count for something, so enjoy them while you can!