Twilight Road 🛣️: A Playset 🎞️ for Tableau Games (Print-N-Play Cards)

(This is the "Print-N-Play" PDF edition of the Twilight Road 🛣️ Playset  🎞️ for Tableau, with 72 cards to facilitate the full playset along with Tableau Core rules. This edition is tailored to fit on US Letter Paper for use with poker-sized card sleeves which facilitate easy manual trimming using the cut-lines template included on the final page. For those seeking a higher-end experience, this Twilight Road 🛣️ Playset  🎞️ is also available in a premium US Poker Cards edition, complete with a stylish "Tuckbox". If you prefer a slightly less expensive version, purchase the "Just the Cards" edition that is unboxed and tied together with a transparent wrapper.)

About Tableau and this Twilight Road 🛣️ Playset  🎞️

“The best stories are the ones we tell together!”

You are fellow travelers on the Twilight Road. Together your journey will take you through choices & transitions, quests & trials. What will you discover on your way? Will you find your destination or return home? Either way, you will arrive changed. These are the stories of the Twilight Road. Every game session is different, every road, every journey is unique.

Embark on a journey of self-discovery and personal growth. Unravel the themes of identity, purpose, and belonging as you navigate The Road filled with choices, challenges, and intriguing characters. Experience a transformative journey filled with choices, challenges, and intriguing characters as you navigate the winding path of Twilight Road.

Twilight Road is a diceless, GMless storytelling game played using 72 poker-sized cards with rules & inspirational images. Game includes everything you need to play except for your own index cards, markers & two sheets of paper. Twilight Road cards may be mixed & matched with other Tableau Games playsets.

Tableau Games offer cinematic storytelling in 2-3 hours, with no prep or GM required. Composable rules on poker-sized cards available from multiple playsets offer versatile gameplay for 2-5 players, ages 14 and up. Explore the opportunities for collaborative storytelling and thrilling cinematic adventures possible with Twilight Road and the Tableau Games system.

Kinds of Twilight Road Stories

Tableau Games inspires players to be creative, supporting a nearly infinite variety of potential stories.

While playtesting the Twilight playset, games have included:

• a historical fantasy, where a river journey across the Viking lands of ancient Russian followed the trail of Uncle Ingvar, lost while he was searching for the Silk Road and a lost city and treasure;
• a 90s paranormal fantasy, in which a spring-break car trip led free-spirited students across America, each trying to find a lost icon on Route 66, looking for answers to a secret in their family history.

A game mixing storytelling cards from both Gate Watch & Twilight Road playsets was:

• a dark historical fantasy, where a water well located in a German farming village at the end of WWII was the only escape from invading Russians, but led the villagers into a perilous journey through the lands of the fae, with no way home.

We've found the mechanics of Tableau Games work well for experienced gamers as well as those who are completely new to collaborative story games. From improv actors to experienced role players, a wide range of people have found the instructions and mechanisms easy to understand and fun to play. The resulting stories were imaginative, the settings and genres intriguing, the play dynamic, and most importantly, all had a satisfying ending in just a couple of hours of play. Tableau Games offer a fun evening's entertainment.

Overview of Play

Following the instructions from the Playset 🎞 setup, Players first choose The Road 🏘️ setting for this session, along with what The Twilight 💢theme means for it, optionally selecting or drawing one from the 18 inspirational images. Reading through the Narrative Rules 🎬 cards, they together create a Map and describe Locations, establish Truths & Questions, and Cast 👥 a diverse set of fellow Travellers. Story 📖cards help players set key goals for the opening Beat 🥁, then take turns as The Director 🗣 to set Scenes that drive the story forward. Drama Rule 🎭 cards increase tension or resolve complications. Guidance for additional Beats 🥁 facilitates the players to guide their Leads 👤to arrive at their final destination, or to return home.

A Hand of Cards in Twilight Road

During Playset 🎞 setup the storytellers will have chosen a set of cards to be on The Table 𐃄, but for any particular Scene, a storyteller typically will only Take Up 🫰control of 3 or 4 cards. Here is an example (from left to right):

The first card is a Player Role 🗣. These include The Director 🗣, who is used in GMless-style games, or The Narrator 🗣, who is a storyteller with a unique perspective or a player who has been given narrative authority for a full act or a session. These are the most common Player Roles 🗣, but there are others such as this one: The Mapper 🗣, who is used in both Twilight Road and Gate Watch.

The next is a Story 📖 card that gives a storyteller authority over an element in this story.  This one is The Road 🏘️, the default setting story element from Twilight Road 🚪 but could be chosen by the storytellers as a setting for any story.

Character Trait 👤 cards to help define the unique character that a storyteller portrays. This one is Charming, an Approach 🛠 from Twilight Road 🚪 but it can used in a wide variety of other stories.

The last card is a Character Trait 👤, this time for a  Face 🧑🏼‍🦲, which is an archetype associated with a particular type of story. This one is The Runaway 🧑🏼‍🦲 from Twilight Road 🚪, but like all the other cards, it can be used in other Tableau games.

Reviewer Quotes

“Tableau is a versatile, flexible framework for collaborative storygames grounded deep in the fundamentals of story and character. Mix and match cards to shift what themes, rules, archetypes, and ideas are on the table, helping your group tell a compelling and satisfying story.” ~ Aaron A. Reed, author of the Archives of the Sky story game.

Inspirational Quotes

“It is always darkest before the dawn.” ~ Thomas Fuller

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” ~ Lewis Carroll

“Road movies have always been songs of the doomed, warnings that once you enter the open hinterlands between cities, you're on your own” ~Michael Atkinson

“Take a walk on the wild side.” ~ Lou Reed

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged.” ~ William O. Douglas

“As the world fell, each of us, in our own way, was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy: me or everyone else.” ~ “Mad Max” Rockatansky

“It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air - there’s the rub, the task.” ~ Virgil, Poet

“All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.” ~ Jack Kerouac

“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged." ~ William O. Douglas

“My paintings always feature trails that dissolve into mysterious areas, patches of light that lead the eye around corners, pathways, open gates, etc.” ~Thomas Kinkade

“Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.” ~ J. R. R. Tolkien

About Christopher Allen (Writer & Designer)

I am fascinated by the art and craft of collaboration, and have its practice and the study of how and why collaboration works at the center of my professional career as an entrepreneur, a software architect, as well as a creator, producer & publisher in the game industry.

I have been a fan and supporter of games (especially roleplaying games) for decades, with old favorites including Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest II, while my new favorites are the collaborative games that have emerged in the last couple of decades, both in the form of GMless story games as well as in board games.

Professionally, I've done considerable work in the computer game industry: I was the lead designer for Castle Marrach and Lovecraft Country online games and producer for mobile adaptions of several strategy games by Reiner Knizia and Michael Schacht.

In the tabletop games industry, I produced Chaosium's award-winning Beyond the Mountains of Madness RPG supplement, resurrected Arkham Horror cooperative board game before licensing it to Fantasy Flight for their bestselling 2nd edition, and I support the tabletop gaming community as the owner/publisher of the popular website RPG.net.

Recently, I have been doing more personal projects, directly creating releases for the tabletop industry: I co-authored with Shannon Appelcline Meeples Together: How and Why Cooperative Board Games Work published by Gameplaywright with a successful Kickstarter in 2018, a successful Kickstarter in 2019 for the original 18-card Gate Watch 2019, and a 2023 Kickstarter for the first two Tableau Games, my cooperative storytelling card game system. I will be releasing other games & media through Dyvers Hands Productions. I am also an avid supporter of other game designers on Kickstarter and Patreon.

About Dyvers Hands Productions (Publisher)

“Dyvers Hands” is an archaic phrase used to refer to a project that has been contributed to by many people. Divers is a word of Latin origin (diversus) that is still commonly used in modern French language; it literally means “many and varied”. ~ Wikipedia

At Dyvers Hands Productions, we are passionate about creating and developing collaborative storytelling experiences across a wide range of media. Our focus includes tabletop games, online communities, graphic novels, short-story anthologies, and we hope to one day expand into TV and movies.

We believe that the best stories are the ones told together, and our mission is to foster creativity, promote collaboration, and bring people together through immersive and engaging gameplay.

Our latest project, Tableau, successfully funded on Kickstarter, is a storytelling game system that emphasizes shared storytelling and character development.

Credits

Twilight Road: A Playset for Tableau was written & designed by Christopher Allen.

©2022-23 by Dyvers Hands Productions, LLC. — All Rights Reserved (no license is granted for redistribution or derivation without permission). Images © original creators & are Permissively Licensed. More info & image credits a the Dyvers Hands website.

Tableau Games™, Dyvers Hands™, and Twilight Road™ are trademarks of Dyvers Hands Productions LLC.

Creative Contributors: Shannon Appelcline, Aaron Reed