Rory's Story Cubes Review

A while back, while listening to The Little Metal Dog Show podcast, I got to hear an interview with the creator of Rory's Story Cubes. My mother is a middle school librarian for Tulsa Public Schools, and so I immediately become intrigued by them (I need to stop listening to the Little Metal Dog Show - it's a great podcast, but always makes me want to buy things). Fortunately, I was later talking to the fine people at Gamewright and mentioned that I was interested in their game - *poof* I was able to receive a review copy!

Here are the rules: Roll the Dice. Then, tell a story based off of them.

Well, now for the pros and cons. Wait, no, that would be really boring. Instead, I will use the game to tell you a story (let's hope it's halfway decent, as I haven't actually come up with it yet, because doing that before rolling the dice is somewhat cheating).

Once upon a time, there was a fabulous Blogger named Josh. He was successful in all that he did, was stunningly good looking, and had taken the Internet by storm! (This is how you know it's not actually about me.) He often wrote blogs about a variety of topics - sports, body building, growing flowers, and, of course, board games. After a while, he got bored with his success, and decided to take on a real challenge - the challenge of slaying a dragon! (Which, needless to say, is quite a challenge in the 21st century - he first would need to find a dragon!)

So, waving goodbye to his friends, family, and wonderful followers, Josh embarked on his new journey. Not knowing which way he should go (and not taking a computer, as he felt like "Googling it" might not be effective when it came to finding dragons), he found an old sage in a distant land. This sage, as with all crazy old hermits, decided that he would not just share his knowledge with Josh. Instead, he decided to make him go on quests to prove his worth. He sent him on quests to find food, quests to recover water, and quests to find his long lost daughter.

Well, being the practical sort, Josh went into the town that was only half a mile away from the crazy old hermit and bought food and water. While at the store, he decided to go ahead and ask the clerk if they knew anything about the hermit's long lost daughter. Sure enough, they said, she lives just at the edge of town. With his hopes up, Josh went to the home that they had directed him to. He knocked on the door, and looked around - but everything was run down and locked! Surely, this couldn't be right. However, as he looked around the house, a person emerged from next door and asked him what he was looking for. "I'm looking for my sage's long lost daughter," he said.

"Are you kidding me? Sage? Do you mean that crazy old man just outside of town? Yeah, I'm his 'long lost daughter,' but I don't know why he thinks I'm lost - he came to visit me just last week!" she replied.

Immediately, a light went on inside Josh's head, and he realized that he had been tricked! All that time sleeping outside and running errands for the man - he probably didn't know where any dragons even were. Josh, taking the "sage's" daughter with him, stormed straight back to the old man.

"Here's your daughter," he said. "Now tell me where I can find a dragon!!"

Startled by Josh's sudden anger, the man said, "well, right here, of course," and showed Josh a small jar with a tiny lizard in it. Annoyed, Josh decided that it wasn't worth his effort to continue dealing with his sage, and that it would just be cruel to kill a baby lizard. In fact, he started wondering why he wanted to hunt down and kill any animal that wasn't causing harm to anyone. If it took that much effort just to find a dragon, the dragon probably wasn't really hurting anybody. So, Josh went back home and took a nap, shaking his head and muttering to himself about the crazy old man. Wait, muttering to himself! When did this start? I suppose the old sage rubbed off on Josh after all.

(Yes, the picture is showing the dice that I used during that story - feel free to try to match up what parts of the story came from each individual die.)

Anyway. Overall, I give Rory's Story Cubes a score of "Apple" on my new Apple-Banana-Carrot grading scale. What does that mean, you ask? It means that Rory's Story Cubes isn't really like any other game (after all, there's not even a score or a winner), so I didn't feel like I should grade it against other games. The story cubes are really neat, though, and I think that anyone who wants to be creative and would appreciate a bit of inspiration would enjoy them. It's also something that I think most young children would be able to play with and love - after all, young children are still creative, instead of being boring old codgers like adults.

I would like to thank Gamewright games for providing me with a review copy of Rory's Story Cubes.