The Siblings Trouble: A Game of Role-playing and Storytelling

The Sibling Trouble sends you into Ancient Forests and Abandoned Junkyards as a group of adventurous kids. Can you stop the Queen of Atlantis or the Bloated Spider?

Get ready to tell stories and roll dice, as you explore these dark and dangerous locations and find your way home!

Gameplay

There are four different types of characters you can play, each with their own special ability that occurs when you roll your character icon or when you spend your character token. Each player chooses a different character type at the start of the game. You then pick which of the four locations your adventure will be set in and create the adventure deck with one of that location’s boss cards, a big secret card, several location cards, and several path cards. This ensures a certain amount of randomness each time you play the game.

Players start the game by each taking a treasure card and then explaining the story of why they brought that particular treasure along. The player going first next tells the story of what brought the characters on this adventure and the next player reveals the first card of the adventure deck.

Some of the cards in the adventure deck will be monsters you must defeat. Many monster cards will have text saying that if you include a certain element in your story, as you describe fighting it, than the fight will be easier. In order to defeat a monster, you must meet or beat the star number written in its bottom right corner. The player who drew the adventure card rolls his character die. You can sell your treasures in order to gain more star points and some treasure will also give you star points if you use it in your story in a certain way. Some adventure cards will give you negative or bonus stars, which are automatically spent on your next fight. If you still don’t have enough star points you can ask one other player to assist you by rolling their character die as well.

If you fail an encounter, you are sent home (and any player who assisted you), and the next player must face the same encounter. When you are home, on your next turn you must describe how you escaped and returned to the adventure. If, at any time, all players are at home, you lose the game. Your character die also has an epic fail result which is an instant fail, unless you call for assistance.

Other cards you draw from the adventure deck may trigger actions like finding a treasure (and you describe how you came upon it), or seeing a good omen and it’s up to you to describe what it is. When you draw the big secret card, you reveal the boss, draw an epic item card, and explain how all three are connected. During the rest of the game, fear tokens can be added to the monster, explaining how he gets scarier and scarier as you move closer to him. The more fear tokens on the boss by the time you work through the entire adventure deck and reach him, the harder he will be to defeat.

If you defeat the boss monster, you head home with his epic treasure. Each player chooses one treasure card to keep for the next adventure, which will carry over to the next time you play!

Review

The Siblings Trouble takes the storytelling aspect of RPGs and runs with it. Often, it is your storytelling that will make encounters easier or determine whether your items are effective. Rules are minimal, and with a play time of thirty minutes, it is an excellent game to introduce kids to role-playing or to provide a more casual RPG experience for adults.

Since the game is so heavy on storytelling, some people just aren’t going to be comfortable playing it. It’s very much a game where you need the right group to have fun with it. But with the right group, this game is a grand adventure for kids or adults.

Even the storytelling is made as easy as it possibly can be, with storytelling tips included in the game and the prompts on the adventure cards giving you a path to follow.

The artwork is very strong and there are many path and location cards so that each time you play, you’ll find a lot of variation in the places you explore. The game has a great deal of personality, with unique theme and lots of atmosphere.

RPGs are a lot of fun but usually complicated and long. Pencil First Games has come out with a game that takes much of what makes role-playing enjoyable and turned it into an easy to learn casual game, that works well both for families and the right group of friends.

Pros: Great artwork, lots of variation in the adventures deck you’ll create each game, makes storytelling as easy as possible

Cons: Very group dependent

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game