Recently, I had a chance to play Wizkids’ game Tales of the Arthurian Knights (TOAK) with some friends. For those familiar with The Tales of the Arabian Nights, TOAK will feel very familiar. If you enjoyed Arabian Nights, TOAK will take that same mechanic to the next level of intense fun.
In the game, each player takes the role of one of King Arthur’s knights of the Round Table, and you start with a quest to go on and three skills of your choosing. As you wander around the British Isles, you encounter people and they ask you to make choices. Those choices affect your renown, your gaining of extra skills, and the amount of points you end up with at the end, which determines who wins.
The mechanic in TOAK is basically the same as the older game, but with a much smoother, easier to follow, and more interesting execution. The building of a narrative through movement, encounters, quests, and so on is much smoother and skills used in encounters actually make sense while having a marked impact on your future results in the game. There is a decent amount of strategy which players can employ, with enough left to completely blind side you. I was planning to be a villain of great renown, but ended up with a massive romance renown boost after offing a Queen Morgan’s husband. There is a dice-rolling component, which adds that random, luck-based uncertainty.
The components of the game are excellent quality. The primary part, beyond the large board itself, is the Book of Tales from which the story is read by players in turn. You read for the player on your right. The tokens and the cards are robustly made, though I would recommend sleeving the cards for longevity. I am a card-sleeving fanatic, it has to be said. Setting up is intense, as there are a lot of different parts to the game, so a storage system like Folded Space would be recommended if you can get one. My friends’ son designed and 3D printed card boxes, character boxes, and so on, and that made set up much easier. It made a huge difference to the game.
Although I like them, I am not a massive fan of fantasy, and less so of Arthurian stories, but I loved TOAK. For anyone who enjoys reading about King Arthur or similar and has an interest in those romances from medieval times, this game will be right up your alley. It even has a solo play option for those times when your friends have just had enough of roaming the British Isles and talking to the Fae. It is just a fun, story-building game with a good amount of strategy to get you thinking about what you want to achieve. The balance TOAK strikes is as close to perfect as you can get.
If there is one thing I missed from Arabian Knights in TOAK it is only the sense of insanity that Arabian Knights had which I absolutely loved. Being asked if I had the Swimming Skill in the middle of a vast desert which had not seen rain since the Creation was bonkers. But given that, TOAK has a superior, smoother sequence of play and function that makes sense.
Hands down, this is an awesome game, and I absolutely recommend it to any unplugged game players out there.
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