Join us for a night of creative exchange! Come to the Talecraft Event at Booktopia on March 30, 2007, Friday, from 6:00 to 9:00 pm.

We first encountered Talecraft at the Read or Die convention. People were gathered around a table near the entrance to the convention hall and we couldn’t quite get a good look at what was going on. It turns out, they were playing a game, a storytelling game using a deck of cards. Ah, we thought. Interesting.

A few weeks later, I sat down with the artist and creator of TaleCraft, Ria L., and she showed me what Talecraft was all about. It is a deck of 86 cards composed of three types of cards: genre, archetype, and key cards. Players take a combination of random cards from the deck to come up with a story of the chosen genre, with characters based on the chosen archetypes, using the chosen key cards for plot elements. During RodCon where they assigned judges, the best stories were judged and chosen. It’s really very engaging.

* Designs for the Adventure genre card and the Pied Piper archetype card.

If you think playing Talecraft is difficult, think again. At RodCon, players who never thought they could tell a story from start to finish did surprisingly well. TaleCraft traces its roots to a game that Ria and her siblings used to play as children. (We’ll let her tell you that story during the event on March 30.) So it’s something that young adults can play too. Perhaps younger players will need the assistance of their parents to be able to understand some of the more difficult words printed on the cards.

You and your friends can invent different rules for the game and you can find helpful suggestions on how to play from the Talecraft website. Better yet, come to the event we are hosting on March 30. See the game at play, meet its creator, and take home your own story-creation deck.

Tell us if you are attending and how many friends will be there with you.