A Penny for My Thoughts
There’s also line of storytelling games that dip a toe into the Role Playing Game category. These ones don’t focus on stats and hit points and other accounting measures, but are pretty free form from that perspective. You don’t need a lot of preparation to play them, you can generally sit down and start playing. They also are much shorter, so you can often finish them in a night.
One game I tried recently that I enjoyed is A Penny for My Thoughts, by Paul Tevis. I had Jeremiah and Craig over and we gave it a go.
In this game you are all patients at the Orphic Institute for Advanced
Studies. You and all the other patients around
the table have suffered complete memory loss and
are all trying to regain your memories. The
institute has given you a dosage of a drug that
allows you to see glimpses into the thoughts of
the other participants at the table. Together you
work towards regaining your memories.
Pennies are important tokens in the game that allow
you to negotiate the telling of important parts of
the story by passing the pennies from one person to
another. The passing of a penny coincides with a
moving forward of the story line for that person as
your fellow players move your plot along. This allows
you to answer three questions on your sheet that
describe key parts of who you were before you lost
your memory. When all three questions are answered
for each player, the game is done.
We played a spy themed game where we were all spies
who had lost their memories, which was a nice change
from what we usually play and allowed some James
Bond-ing to occur.
An important part of improv is the “go with the
flow” aspect, where you work off of others
ideas. If you say no to such ideas then it halts the
flow of the story. In A Penny for My Thoughts, you
can’t say no to someone’s suggestion.
Instead, you have to say “yes..and” and
work with it. Of course, there’s no limit to
where you can take it after that, but you have to
incorporate the ideas presented by the other players.
It was quite an enjoyable night and I think we would
like to try it again with another theme, now that we
have the hang of the game.
The game book itself is written very well and has a
great medical feel to it to encourage the characters
along. Notable in a positive way is the lack of
grammar and spelling errors. These are unfortunately
often present in indie games today (and mainstream
games, for that matter).
I highly recommended it anyone who likes storytelling
games with some improv.