Hobbit Tales

Hobbits (the ones in Jr Tolkiens world) loves pubs, probably there favourite places apart from there homes. But when you gather a group of hobbits in a pub something is inevitable to happen, they will start telling stories. Tall stories that probably never happened, never will happen and were likely made up on the spot. In hobbit tales, we are a group of hobbits, and we are in a pub.

One person to start the game is chosen to be the narrator, and draws 5 adventure cards (in a 4 player game) and draws 2 extra adventure cards to be the pro and epilogue of your story. Adventure cards consist of elements that you have to include within your story like for example 'a warm welcome'. However the other players are trying to play hazards on the adventure cards by matching  symbols on the hazard cards in their hands to the adventure ones on the last 2 cards. If the symbols do match, then you can play your hazard card and depending on the roll of a 12 sided dice the hazard may or may not succeed. If it does succeed then the narrator must take out the adventure card it was played on from the story and the narrator has to incorporate this hazard into their narrative. The more hazards are played onto your story the less likely it will reach its conclusion and the less victory points it will score you. 

So the first thing you will have noticed is how I haven't covered is the scoring system, well, thats because its just terrible. I just use my own home rules because well, the scoring system the rules provide don't give you much reward for actually telling a good story, it is more about luck. You could just flip a coin a few times and the outcome would have probably the same likely hoods of winning if you played it using there own scoring system, which is why we don't.

But saying that, scoring lots of points isn't the really the reason you play the game. You play the game because the way that you have to try and tell a story using adventure cards that seem disparate at best as you try and incorporate the hazard cards in to your story. For me at least this is a really fun and enjoyable experience

Another strong thing about this game is the component quality, which is lovely, the cards are beautifully illustrated and everything has a really lovely feel to them. The slightly larger than normal cards leave a good amount of space for the illustrations without being to cluttered.

If you don't mind slightly changing the scoring system and like telling stories then this is the game for you. Also, it can be used in conjunction with the One Ring roleplaying game (which you can see my review of here) but I haven't really seen it being used in the game. Overall I would give this game a 7/10 and suggest it to anyone that can't get there head out of a good story.