Players: Ace, Jordan, Kevin, Nick

Meg Baker's game about playing characters within stories within stories within stories, gave us an interesting opportunity to explore something new. As an older story game (it still refers to a "GM" in the book, but has the "GM" shift from scene to scene) and Meg goes to great lengths in the original text to describe the creation of an immersive experience complete with ambient music, food, costumes, and subtle gestures to cue the current narrator to elaborate.

So that this write-up can make sense, I need to explain how the game works a bit: You play a Court Character who will then portray multiple Story Characters; you're role-playing someone role-playing. For example, Jordan's Court Character, Hasad, told the court the story of The Spider and the Sparrow, and he asked my Court Character (also Hasad) to portray the Sparrow, and Nick's (Baba) and Ace's (Zara) Court Characters to portray the two spiders.

We all found the concept really intriguing, and I know that I definitely enjoyed the telling and playing within stories. The game gets really interesting once your Court Characters have all established their "feelings" about each other and start to use the way they interact within the story to insult and undercut or praise and uplift each other. We also really liked that we establish things that we "Envy" about each other and that we define an Ambition that we're working towards. Meg also does a really good job of providing a lot of examples that you can easily pick from and move on if you're having trouble coming up with something to use.

That said, there were a number of things, mechanically, that we struggled with, and I'm going to reach out to Meg and see if she can provide any context:

• Character creation is interesting, and we all agreed that it seemed too long. Despite the interesting things we got out of character creation, we didn't use most of it in game.
  
• There is a dice mechanic where you ask questions during stories to earn "gems." To end a story, the storyteller has to earn 8 gems, which means the other characters have to ask A LOT of questions, constantly interrupting the flow of the story,
  
• These gems also feed directly into the game's "win" mechanic, so you are further incentivized to ask lots of questions.
  
• While unlikely, it's possible to "win" the game in the first scene, and we had 3 all "win" at the end of the 3rd Scene; we finished the game before we made it all the way around the table.
  

tl;dr - The concept is fantastic, but would benefit from some streamlining and less emphasis on the need to pursue dice.