The Big Night

[Crothian]

The Big Night is a co-operative storytelling game with puppets
to cut out and color. Together, the players will tell a story
about a group of stuffed animals, snowmen, and other creatures,
who help out the Fat Man to deliver presents to children on the
Big Night.

This book does not tell a story. The book gives you the setting,
and characters to tell your own stories of winter magic and
playful adventure. Telling stories this way involves descriptive
play-acting, improvisation, co-operative problem solving and
imagination. The game will be different every time you play it.
The Big Night is a very simple game. It can be played by
anyone who loves stories, but it is designed especially
for young children. This game uses no dice, and no
numbers higher than 3. At least one player in the group
must be able to read the book, but their younger
brothers, sisters, and friends will be able to enjoy it
also.

 

[Crothian]

Some games are tough to review. There are the ones that I know I am not interested in and the ones that are not targeted to the way I game. This one is not targeted to my age group and not having children myself that can make this a hard game to read through and grade. However, given that there are so few games that are aimed at kids and they are the future of gaming I feel this book needs reviewed.

The Big Night is a PDF by May Contain Monkeys. I know nothing of these people but they write a good game. The PDF is simple: little art, big font, no book marks. However, the book is designed for kids to read and to make use of. The writing art and layout are all designed to make it easy for children to be able to read it and easily understand it. The book is one hundred and forty two pages long so it seems like a little much for kids. But with the large font of the book and the simple structure it actually would be a lot smaller if it used a normal sized writing. The last forty pages or there abouts are of puppets for the players to make for their characters. So, it really is not as long as it first seems

The game is designed for kids to play Santa’s helpers. They take toys to the good kids and not the bad kids. They have to avoid and stay away and maybe defeat the evil Toy Companies and their people. They have to stay away from or defeat monsters of different types. There are quite a few adventure ideas already in the book. Adventures can take anywhere from thirty minutes to about three hours. That seems like the perfect time for a kid to be able to pay attention to this game.

The game has puppets that the kids can make and color. They will need glue, pop sickle sticks or the like, and scissors to cut the puppets our or someone to cut them out for them. There are many character types like angels, penguins, elves, kids, dolls, teddy bears, and other options for the kids to play. They get a puppet they can color and make to represent their character. Each character has advantages and disadvantages. These are written on the puppet so the kids really will not have to look anything up.

There are no dice for this game. Everything a player wants to do they are either allowed, not allowed, or in the case where something might happen rock, paper, scissors, are used. The DM or leader as he is called in this game runs the show. This person will need to be able to read and understand a bit more of the game. But younger kids even those that really can not read should be able to have a character.

That’s about all the insight I have to this game. I think it can be a lot of fun to introduce gaming mentality to kids. It is simple enough that dice can be introduced as I imagine some kids will want to use dice after seeing their parents play with dice. There are advanced rolls for playing the same character over many adventures and improving him. It is a simple system and game that I feel kids should be able to handle and have fun with .