and Tom McLean. The object of the game is to defeat the opposing team by telling a story using the cards. There are three types of cards: Warriors, Items and Battlefield. Each turn represents one battle between two teams of players. The setting is defined by a randomly drawn Battlefield card. Players then look at the Warrior cards and Item cards in their hands and try to come up with a clever strategy. Once every player has played their Warrior cards face-down, everyone flips their cards over simultaneously. Then players must quickly describe, in an open discussion, how their team would defeat the opposing team. Each battle is moderated by a judge that rotates every turn so the shared pop cultural context of everyone in the room is very important!The game started raising funds on Kickstarter; the goal being a modest $20,000 but quickly reached that goal halfway through the fundraising and eventually raised over $360,000.
The game itself can be found here. There is an animation short based on the game available on Youtube.
Tropes include:
- Anachronism Stew: The first volume is medieval fantasy-themed, but it can be freely combined with the modern setting from the second volume or the deluxe edition, which contains a few futuristic elements.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Suggestions on how you win the battle.
- Crossover: There's a Story War card in Machine Of Death, with additional rules if you own both games.
- Extrinsic Go-First Rule: The rules state that the owner of the cards will be the judge for the first round.
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Game-Breaker: According to how the judge rules a situation games can be tight on who will win. - Grey-and-Gray Morality: Lampshaded in the short film, where both parties have morally questionable goals that involve abusing a leprechaun.Goblin: Unhand him, you villains!
Medusa: Uh, excuse me? We're not the bad guys.
Gremlin: Yeah, you guys are basically just trying to outright mug this guy, you can't really take the moral high ground here. - Interspecies Romance: The Goblin and Fairy are romantically involved in the animation.
- Jackass Genie: The Wishing Star is said to grant wishes in the most ironic way possible.
- Manic Pixie Dream Girl: The Faerie is described as this.
- Money Spider: In the animation, the Leprechaun bleeds gold coins, prompting the Goblin and Fairy to engage in Comedic Sociopathy in order to pay their rent.
- Our Giants Are Bigger: The giant thinks she's normal sized and living in a tiny world.
- Our Monsters Are Different: Most cards are supernaturally themed.
- Panacea: The Life Potion can cure any one problem.
- Shout-Out:
- In the Deluxe expansion deck, nearly every card is a shout-out to a meme, web series, or web comic.
- There is a card based on Colin Mochrie.
- The Lost Woods card is named that verbatim.
- Skeleton Key: With a skull on top, to boot.
- Temple of Doom: The Trapped Temple was build to honor god of spikes and swinging blades.
