How "Tales - Told & Untold" was born

From Pen&Paper to Boardgames to a Computer Game

“You cannot play with us, because we have already played 10 sessions of this game.”

“Tales, Told & Untold” - now a Computergame in developement - started as a game with dice, cards and boards.

 When I was a child, I went camping in Greece with around 40 school mates. Four boys from a higher grade were playing Dungeons and Dragons, but when I asked them to play with them, they said, this wasn't possible. I thought “What a stupid game, where people cannot join at the start of a new game session.”

So I decided to create a role playing game that was easy to learn and where people could join easily - and I failed miserably.

The game I created worked well - I played it with friends for 20 sessions over several years - but it was impossible for other players to join later. The rules were - in my honest opinion - easier than most pen& paper RPGs' rules, but my friends couldn't play the game without of me, because the rules were very complicated and because I never wrote them down.

My game - only called “Fantasy Game”, was different to classical pen&paper RPGs:
I used playboards to represent the game world, and dice for moving along these boards. Cards where used for Quests, random encounters (which I called Occurrences) and items. Thus the game could theoretically be played without any Game Master. As I was the only one who new the rules, I still had to act as a Game Master, but at the same time I was a regular player.

I mixed elements from my favorite console games - the Zelda and the Elder Scrolls series - stole ideas from every fantasy story that I read (most of all Tolkien's books, but also Eddings's Belgariad and countless other works), and added some parody and humor to the whole thing. This way I created over 6000 cards. While item cards where easy to create, Quests and occurrences contained a lot of text, describing what happened to the player and the world.

As I never had completed any of my projects before, I choose a different approach for this Fantasy Game: I created it expendable, which means that I could start to play the first regions, while I was still creating future regions. Thus being forever unfinished was not a shortcoming of the game, but part of the design concept.

Printer's ink is quite expensive. And professional printing of several thousand different cards on true playing cards carton is more than I could afford, especially as this monstrous project would only target a small audience of potential costumers. Publishing this game as a card game was just not possible.

So I started to port this game back to a computer game. And that is how “Tales - Told & Untold” was born. One thing that helped for this step was the Greenbox concept, which I had used from the beginning on. I will explain it in one of the next blog posts.

After 3 years, I had several thousands of cards and over 10 play boards.