If you’re looking for a light game that you can play with adults or children, then check out Carrot & Stick, which is currently entering its final week on Kickstarter.
Designed by Matthew Thomas King and Petya Kapralova, and published by Mindpipe, Carrot & Stick comprises a large deck of colourful attractive cards. Some depict characters or locations, others show words or pictures. The idea is to use these in combination to create stories.
Of course, there are other games out there using components to stimulate the imagination and generate stories. Rory O’Connor’s Story Cubes (The Creativity Hub) are perhaps the best known, although the use of customised dice to promote storytelling predates Rory's Story Cubes by some years. Nevertheless, there’s always a place for another story telling game, both as an entertaining filler and as an educational stimulus, particularly when it's an entertaining game that makes use of such cute and appealing artwork.
Carrot & Stick is designed to be played in a variety of ways, depending on numbers and whether you are playing competitively or co-operatively. In competitive play, for example, players will be using the cards they’ve been dealt to weave together a funnier, cleverer or more compelling story than the other players in order to recruit character cards into their tableaus. There are ‘naughty’ and ‘nice’ cards that can be used to reward a sweet story and slightly penalise a rude one. As in other party games like Anthony Conta’s Funemployed (IronWall Games / Mattel), deciding on the best story is a purely subjective choice, so Carrot & Stick isn’t a game that you’re expected to take too seriously. It’s a game that lends itself to ‘house rule’ adaptation, and the creators already acknowledge this in the rules. Players are invited to adapt and ‘play the game as you like it most’. And why not?
Shown here is the preview prototype but the Kickstarter edition will include more cards and the option of different versions of the game. If you’re quick, you can still back the Kickstarter now by clicking here .