A Road Less Travelled

Land of a Thousand Kings is a role playing game that’s still in progress by Ben Leman. In the game you play yourself. You walk through a door and find yourself in the Land of a Thousand Kings where you have adventures and then you come back. It’s similar to The Chronicles of Narnia. The nifty thing is that you the character get your stats by the other players sharing real life memories of you. The five Attributes are Strong, Kind, Brave, Sharp, Beautiful. You go around the table and on your turn you say a real live memory of one of the other players and what Attribute it goes with. And then that player gets a point in that Attribute. Your Attributes are what you will use in the game to get dice during conflicts. Also, during conflict the players have an opportunity to share a real life memory that has something to do with the conflict to get a die that they can assign to which ever side they please.

Last Friday I played Land of a Thousand Kings with Raquel, a friend of ours and that friend’s ten-year-old sister. The ten-year-old, Julia, had been up too late several nights running and has no experience with anything fairy tale like or fantastical and not a lot of experience with fiction. So she was insanely giggly and completely beyond her frame of reference. Her sister, Jana, was also pretty tired and about five months pregnant. Jana’s only role playing experience is play testing my brother Seth’s work in progress A Flower For Mara which is a combination role playing game and improvisational play. That left my friend Raquel, who has some role playing experience, but all indie games, and me. I’d played Land of a thousand kings twice and Raquel’s played once. And it worked. It worked very well.

Because I had the most experience role playing in general and with Land of a Thousand Kings in particular I was GateKeeper. I was having a really hard time explaining the game to Julia because I’d only met her that night, she wasn’t at her best and we have just about nothing in common. So I dropped any sort of rules that were at all long term and just went with what we needed to play that night. And when I read over the play test rules I decided to totally drop Preparedness because it just looked like it would add complicated without adding any niftyness.

The memory sharing at the beginning went very well. It was a little tricky because Raquel and I had only met Julia that evening and so didn’t have many memories of her and she didn’t have any of us. But I tend to think that passing at this point is tantamount to cheating and since I really wanted her to have fun I knew she needed points. So we just got creative.

I sent Jana and Julia off together to someplace with castles and horse drawn chariots. I sent Raquel by herself because the other time she’d played she’d been with someone else and hadn’t had a lot of opportunities to step up and do stuff. Strangely, Raquel’s first time playing she’d been put with her older sister and now it was Julia’s first time playing and she got placed with her older sister. They had similar issues of the older sister automatically taking charge.

Neither of the stories were very deep or introspective. I had done absolutely no prep, which was cool, and was just shooting from my hip. Jana and Julia had to negotiate with the Castle King to let the Pyramid King pave the road that lay between their kingdoms. Whenever the Pyramid people ride the road the dust flies up and gets in their eyes which is very painful. But the Castle King didn’t want them to pave the road with their gold stones because his wife said that it wouldn’t match her dress and then she would be mad at him and wouldn’t give him his breakfast. Jana in particular was very good at sucking up to the Queen. Raquel was asked by the Water King, a fisherman sort of king, to free his kingdom of the Great Marlin that had been eating all their fish. So she had to go find the Great Marlin and then help him lead his children someplace away from the Water Kingdom.

Land of a Thousand Kings felt very similar to a party game. The point, at least when we played it, wasn’t to tell an intricate story full of character development, plot twists and angst, but to enjoy spending time with each other through the game. I’d wanted to play this game with some of my friends because it brings out memories that don’t usually come up in everyday conversation, but that are important to people. I feel like I know a bit more about Jana and certainly about Julia because of the game. That was what I wanted from it and it worked exactly how I wanted. And that was only playing with half the rules.