Tell Tale

As this was the week we celebrated World Book Day, what better game to have a look at than... Tell Tale 

Never judge a book by its cover , it might not even be a book!

Players: 3 to 5,  

Duration: 30-45mins,

Recommended Ages: 8+

Country of Origin: 
United Kingdom, 

Created By: 
Jack Hanauer

Published By:  
Porcupine Press,  

Distributed By: 
Porcupine Press

The gameboard shows the current round of cards available...

 Tell Tale came to us as part of this years Imagination Gaming Awards, and we loved the look of it straight away.
As you can see the box looks like a book, and it opens like one too... so if you are going to stand it like one, just be careful!

Inside you'll find an equally themed gameboard, 100 gold coins (cardboard), and a bidding board, screen and counters in matching colours for up to 5 players... and a huge stack of cards!

The idea of the game is to spend a limited amount of money in 3 rounds of secret bidding to collect the best cards to help you tell a story worth as many points as possible.

Secretly bid on which cards to add to your collection!

To start, all players take a matching screen and bidding board and 20 gold coins. Each player is also dealt 4 story cards only they can see to start their collection with. The game board is placed in the centre of the table and 8 more story cards are randomly dealt and placed into the 8 spaces on the board. The story cards are a mixture of names, places, objects, times and events from one of 5 differently coloured themes in the game - sci-fi / adventure, soap opera, crime, horror / fantasy, history and fairytale.

 Then all players use their concealed bidding areas to try and buy any or all (or none at all!) of the cards in the middle. When everyone has placed their money, the Tell Tale screens are lifted to reveal who has been successful. The player with the most money on each card takes it for their collection and pays the amount bid into the 'bank', money bid that didn't win a card  and money not used in that round is carried over to the next round of bidding. There are 3 rounds of bidding per story, so spend your wealth wisely!

Mixture of cards =  just 1pt each

Once 3 rounds of bidding have been completed it's time to tell your story and score some points. Players can use as many of their cards as they wish to tell their story, but must do strategically to try and gain the following points:

• Stories with cards all the same colour score 3 pts per card used.
• Stories with no more than one card of as many colours as they wish score 2 pts per card.
• Stories of mixed quantities of different colour cards score 1 pt per card.

But whose is the best story?! Each player then secretly votes using coloured counters for the story they enjoyed the most, with the winner scoring a whopping 15 points! Everyone who voted for the best story also earns 5 points.

There is a score board around the edge of the board to keep track throughout the game, and you could play towards any points total you wish.

We've only had Tell Tale a couple of weeks now but have been able to take it to numerous events and it's gone into a couple of our games packs for schools already. We think it's a great game of strategy and imagination that supports literacy and numeracy skills, but most importantly just plain fun!

Tell Tale is now available from our website here and definitely gets our stamp of approval as a fun and innovative family game that we will be using for a long time to come. We think the IG Award judges will love it too.

One of our very first test groups at the Sheffield Day Of Games... and they couldn't leave it alone!