A comparison of narrative mechanics in 'Tales of the Arabian Nights' and 'Eldritch Horror'

Although on the surface very different, Fantasy Flight's 'Eldritch Horror' and Z-Man Games' 'Tales of the Arabian Nights' are actually quite similar in some ways; primarily in their mechanical approach to narrative building. For reference, the former is about a group of adventurers trying to save the world from Lovecraftian horrors, while the latter is a story based game about travelling around having adventures.

This isn't intended as a full critique of either game, but instead will mostly be talking about a single mechanic from each game and focusing on each mechanic's context within the game. There are other things that could be discussed, such as narrative consequence, but this will focus solely on one more interesting comparison between the two.

In Eldritch Horror, at the end of each player's turn, a card is drawn which essentially tells a snippet of a short story. There is usually a small amount of exposition, then some sort of test which will change the outcome depending on whether it is passed or failed. In some of the more complicated cases, there are a series of tests and/ or decisions.

These cards are also contextual. Depending on whether the player is in the wilderness, the ocean, generic cities, larger named cities or through a portal to another dimension, they can expect both the flavour of the encounters, the dangers and the rewards to differ, which is handled by having the player draw from different decks depending on location.

Similarly in Arabian Nights, at the end of each player's turn, a card is drawn (from a singular deck though,) with several possible results.


The first is a character encounter card. Depending on the time of day, the player will be directed to an encounter matrix which will ad an adjective (wealthy, lost, vengeful etc.) and then direct the player to a reaction matrix, from which there will be various ways they can respond (attack, aid, hire etc.) This will finally direct them to the relevant passage from the book of tales.

Slightly lengthy process aside, each tale has preceding section of exposition, then often a choice presented to the player, based on their acquired skills. If the player had the quick witted skill, for example, they could optionally use it to resolve the encounter differently (though they still wouldn't know the outcome either way ahead of time)

Location encounter cards mostly work the same as character encounter cards, with an extra step to determine the encounter based on what terrain type the player is on.

Finally, the city card will direct the player to a specific set of encounters and provide a benefit if the player goes to the named city at some point.

Like Eldritch Horror, these are contextual, but overall, I would say that the locational contextualisation of Eldritch Horror is implemented slightly better than Arabian Nights.

There are effectively six terrain types in Arabian Nights: mountain, desert, sea, land, city and island, with each providing an encounter roughly suitable to that terrain type. The trouble is, that these need to be generic enough that they could fit any space of the same terrain. If I were to travel to the city space of Britain, it would pull from the same encounter pool as Baghdad and not be personalised to the region.

 I suspect this is a problem introduced by the book of tales. Although an enormous amount of work has clearly gone into the extremely numerous tales, if they were to further segment the tales by board region as well as terrain, it would inevitably result in tales being recycled more often. This particularly would effect the area around Baghdad, since everyone starts there every game. Inevitably everyone would get to know the stories around the starting region better than everywhere else and familiarity with the tales in a game like this is probably one of the worst things that could happen. The solution of course, would be to expand the book size, but this probably isn't feasible, given its already huge size.

In some respects, Eldritch Horror suffers from a similar issue. The basic terrain types: city, wilderness and sea, much like Tales, provide a reasonable degree of contextual coherence, but still don't change by location. The east Asian wilderness is unlikely to be particularly similar to the jungles of South America, for example.

What Eldritch does do slightly differently to combat this, however, is provide some more specific locations, each with their own deck of encounters. Several major cities around the board, such as London, Istanbul, Rome and Shanghai have individual encounters more apt for those location. In Rome, for example I have the potential to interact with the Vatican, while in Arkham, the cults to various old gods are likely extremely active.

There are various other well fleshed out locations too. Various expedition spaces are around the board (the Great Pyramids, the Arctic etc.) While players can occasionally travel through gates to other worlds in an attempt to seal them and hold back the coming doom.

There is an attempt to do something like this in Arabian Nights: the location encounter cards each has a letter rather than a number in one terrain type. The card 'Magnetic Mountain,' for example, has an 'N' rather than a number, directing a player straight to the reaction matrix. In this case, the encounter would be directly relevant to the location, since it would only trigger in a mountain location. With such a large number of terrain types on the board, however, these aren't particularly frequent occurrences.

The reason I believe this mechanic, (to create encounters based on specific locations,) is important, is that it adds a great deal of weight to player actions. Moving onto a mountain space and getting a mountain event has far less significance when it it effectively is no different to if the player had gone to the other mountain space. Moving into Rome, as opposed to going to sea or entering the wilderness means that the player made the outcome happen. Even though its still randomly drawn from the deck, the fact that is relevant to the location means that the player had an impact on the narrative of the game. Even a seemingly small impact like this can be hugely relevant in making the player feel like their input matters.

Overall, the strength of Arabian Nights is certainly in the length of its stories. Each is much more lengthy than the corresponding Eldritch card and provides an entirely self contained short story. Eldritch on the other hand relies far more on player imagination to fill in the gaps, as it were. The chunks of exposition simply aren't large enough to provide the players with a complete story; you'll never know why you decided to visit the asylum or go to Alcatraz prison island, its simply left to the players' imaginations. In exchange, however, Eldritch does gain something just as important, a situational awareness that is present in Arabian Nights a little but to a far lesser degree. The players may not know why they decided to visit Alcatraz island in particular but it does at least make logical sense, given where the player is in the world. More importantly: the player made it happen.