How to play dark stories

All you need is a group of people and a story. No board, no cards to deal, no setup.

The roles

One person is the narrator: they read the premise out loud and they alone know the answer. Everyone else are the players, and their job is to reconstruct what actually happened.

Hand the narrator role to someone else with each new story, so everybody gets to play.

How questions work

Players ask questions that can be answered with yes, no or irrelevant. Open questions are out: «why did he die?» is not a valid question, «did someone else kill him?» is.

There are no turns. Questions overlap, and that is fine: the game works better when the group thinks out loud instead of waiting in line.

The three answers

• Yes and no when the answer bears on the solution.
• Irrelevant when the answer changes nothing. It is the most useful answer in the game: it tells the table it is following a dead lead.

When a flat yes or no would be misleading, the narrator can say «yes, but…» or «no, but…». Use it sparingly: if you need it often, the premise is usually badly worded.

When a round ends

The round is over when the group has reconstructed the central mechanism, not when someone guesses the ending. If a player says «he drowned» but cannot say why, you are not done yet.

If the table stalls, the narrator can grant a hint. The best route is to confirm which of the hypotheses already on the table is closest, rather than handing over a piece of the solution.

How long it takes

An easy story is solved in a few minutes; a hard one can keep a group busy for a quarter of an hour. Five or six stories fill an evening comfortably.

What you need to know before the first story

A group that has never played needs one or two easy stories to work out what kind of question gets traction. It is a skill you pick up in ten minutes, but it does have to be picked up: start with a level 1 story rather than the one with the best title.