Call to Adventure – A Treatment for Writer’s Block Cleverly Disguised as a Fun Boardgame
Every New Year’s Day and July 4th my husband and I play board games and watch The Twilight Zone (the original series). I grew up watching the Syfy channel marathons on those holidays, creating a permanent association in my mind between fireworks and surreal tales of the paranormal sprinkled with irony and pointed critiques of human society.
But I digress.
This year on the 4th we played Call to Adventure. We love this game – it’s easy to learn (and to remember after you haven’t played it in a while), it’s relaxed, and it’s beautiful. It’s technically competitive – you accrue points and try to get the highest score – but it’s not intensely cutthroat unless you try hard to play it that way.
Basic Overview
I’m going to oversimplify this for brevity’s sake, but you can learn more at the Brotherwise Games website. The object of the game is to create a hero and an outline of their journey by choosing cards and attempting to acquire them by rolling tiles. You choose three to start with that are the “base” of the three acts of your story, then you accrue more cards to fill in more plot points. The more cards you accrue, the more perks you get to help you get more, particularly, more tiles to cast when trying to win a card.
Okay, But How Does This Help With Writer’s Block?
This game produces a new story outline with every playthrough. Here’s my completed game from yesterday:
In this particular story, I started out with my three base cards for each act of the story – A Student, A Thrill Seeker, and then an Intrepid Explorer. After acquiring the supporting cards (notice some are named at the top, and some at the bottom), a story outline takes shape:
An adventurous student uncovered hidden lore and found the location of a place of power.
Spurred on by this discovery, they abandoned their studies and became an inventive thrill seeker, leading a risky expedition to the place they discovered, barely surviving the harsh journey.
They slayed the Archmage of Eternal Fire, extinguishing the evil flame forever and restoring balance to the land.
This outline from my game yesterday is a fairly expected, linear adventure at face value. What’s fun about this game though is how often you won’t get that. You (generally) have to win the cards you want by rolling to meet or exceed the challenge cost, and if you fail, that card is discarded. Additionally, sometimes the card that seems to fit best story-wise is the worst card for you to pick up because of victory conditions or your current build of symbols. This can lead to some unexpected story beats:
A brave noble enlists in the king’s army, gains the attention of a master who gives them special training, and then throws it all away to start a life of crime?
[Do it, Heather. Burn it all to the ground!]
Uh…sure, why not?
[Yessss]
Frustratingly, I have a hard time resisting the cards that make immediate sense, but I have much more fun when I end up with ones that aren’t expected. Unexpected combinations are what make this game so good for eliciting new ideas and stirring up inspiration.
Also – just the art is inspiring. Look at how gorgeous these are!
Here I’ve spread the cards out from the first picture so you can see the art on each one. You’ll see from this photo that many cards have two possible outcomes that you can choose from, but the challenge is often higher for the one on the bottom row.
Excuse Me, I’m Not Writing Fantasy Over Here
Me neither! Or at least, the story I’m working on right now isn’t high fantasy or heroic fantasy, which the cards in the original Call to Adventure mostly evoke. With a little imagination, I think it’s easy to adapt the cards to most other genres or settings. Uncovering Hidden Lore doesn’t have to mean an ancient library filled with moldering lost tomes – it could easily be a file buried in a computer that unlocks the secret to bestowing an A.I with a true mind. Surviving A Harsh Journey doesn’t have to mean a long horseback trek and dwindling rations. Extinguishing The Fire could easily be metaphorical.
Take a photo of the cards you ended up with and chew on it for a while. You might find something useful in the combinations of ideas without taking the whole set as an outline for a single story, too.
What Else?
There are alternate versions of Call to Adventure too – one based on The Name of the Wind (the first book in The Kingkiller Chronicle) by Patrick Rothfuss and one based on The Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson. Both are still generalized enough to produce great prompts for original stories (you can see some examples of the cards on the pages I linked). There’s also a new edition, Epic Origins, which appears to be more solidly high fantasy or classic fantasy (more focus on elves, dwarves, dragons, etc.).
I’m not being sponsored to write this post. I just love this game and thought it might be a help to my fellow Camp NaNoWriMo participants.