Suppose a story begins like this:
“We heard a shuffling noise outside the tent.”
What’s going to happen next? Will the hikers investigate the noise, or will they hide in their sleeping bags?
Who knows. But what if you and your friends had to separately write the next sentence of the story, and your goal was to write something similar to each other? In that case, you’d be playing Plot Points, a game I made up in August. The game works like this:
- One player, the referee, writes down the first sentence of a new story, and says it out loud to the group.
- Everyone else writes down a possible next sentence for the story.
- Everyone reads their sentence aloud, and if several people have similar content, they all score a point.
For example, if three players continue the “shuffling noise” story with the sentences below, players A and B score a point.
“My friend unzipped the tent door and peeked her head out to investigate.”
“We stepped outside the tent and looked around, hoping to find the source of the noise.”
“The shuffling stopped, and a low voice began to sing.”
After scoring, one of the winning sentences becomes the next official sentence of the story, and the process repeats.
Here are the full rules and an example scoresheet.
If you get a chance to test out Plot Points, let me know how it goes. You can reach me at tigerboardgames@gmail.com.
-Will