This article originally appeared in Pyramid #18
Once Upon A Time, Second Edition
Written by Richard Lambert,
Andrew Rilstone and James Wallis
Illustrated by Florence Magnin and
Sophie Mounier
Produced by Atlas Games
Price: $15.95We reviewed the original Once Upon A Time in Pyramid #6, two years ago this issue. In those two years, Atlas Games has come a long way — so quick to market with On the Edge, one of the first CCGs, that they were taking orders for cards while most other companies were still slapping their foreheads and crying, "Gee, we wish we'd done that!" Along the way they've attracted a sizable and vocal audience, and a much larger bankroll. The bankroll part is important here, since it's given Atlas the financial muscle to focus on a few pet projects that needed more resources than a struggling game company with three or four employees could manage. Enter pet project number one, Once Upon A Time, Second Edition. And it's not a collectible card game.
What you get for your money is a box, about a finger across and two fingers long, containing three small decks (totalling 168 cards) and a rulebook. Two-thirds of the cards are storytelling cards; they contain evocative ideas, images and events that encompass the general vocabulary of fairy tales — like a kingdom, a giant, lovers meet, a secret is revealed. Players take turns putting down cards from their hands, speaking the "story" as the cards build them, with the goal of wrapping it all up to fit your ending. If you say something that another . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: March 1, 1996
Copyright © 1996 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.
