The Pic-Story Tellers

Can story telling be done in a community ? Can each person tell a part of the story and the story is changed every-time a storyteller has their input? This is the inspiration behind this community game.
This is a multi-player card game based on the ancient puzzle of “tangrams”. The ideal age group is between 8-12 years. The game is designed to be played by two or more people. Ideally there should be four people.

The idea behind the game is to improve the player’s story telling capacity and also have some amount of learning at the end of the game. Creating connections with various pictures would enhance creative thinking. We have the players start with a set of 8 cards each.
There are two sets of cards in the pack. Each of these cards of the game has either of these things; it’s either a part of the tangram (the seven pieces), or it’s a picture made out of the tangram. The users would be given 6 cards from the picture cards and 2 from the puzzle card.
In the stack is also a "trump card" that is to be used as a missing piece in any combination that can be tried out. The stack would contain 2 trump cards, 2 cards of each of the seven pieces and 14 other cards. All the cards in the stack are shuffled and kept at one place. Thus assuming that 4 people are playing the game the total number of cards would be (2+ 14 + 14 + 32) i.e. 62 cards.

The picture cards also has the DID YOU KNOW section that contains some interesting information about the character in the card.



Fig: The Picture cards, the trump card and the Puzzle cards


Fig detail of the picture card.

The players have to play two cards at a time and then select two cards from the stack. The stacked cards contain the pictures cards and as well as the cards containing one of the seven pieces of the tangram. The player who starts playing is to throw two cards which have some pictures made out of the tangram. However, they have to start a story by using those cards. So the next player builds onto the story by adding another two cards and having to change the story based on the cards they are playing. This process continues in a circular manner.



When the user selects the two cards on each turn, from the stack of cards they can get two things. One could get the piece card, or the other picture card.
The users who manages to get all the seven cards in the puzzle first , is able to use this as the second card in the set and put an end to the story. This person is declared the winner.

Rules of the Game
1) The story that a player tells has to contain the keywords from the cards and the sentence has to make sense. The characters in the story are defined from the chart available with the various players.
2) The next player has to build a story from where the previous player has left and continue thereafter.
3) The player who plays the card must select two cards for every set of two cards that they throw.
4) For every turn there are these activities that need to be performed.
a) Tell a story using the two cards played.
b) Pick up two cards and keep in his stock.
c) They could also choose to trade any one card of their with one card on the stack.
5) The players are allowed not allowed to exchange card amongst themselves. All dealings need to be done through the stack of cards.
6) The trump card present in the stack could be used as a missing piece in the tangram. This can signify any other geometric shape only. These pieces are rare and only two of them are present in the stack.
7) The person who puts all the pieces of the tangram together first is the winner. However this player has to use his set of images to tell the final part story.
8) In the case of the win, the winner would be having 8 cards. Seven to use as one picture and the eight cards to complete the two cards required to tell add to the story.

The idea is to generate the concept of story telling in children and also help them gain a significant amount of learning by doing so! Playing card games can be fun!