Once Upon a Time is a card game in which a group of players collaborate to create a story while using up all of their cards. The object of the game is to create a fairy tale-esque story by the end. The game’s system allows players to create entire stories from very little starting material, something that would be hard for many to do otherwise. Its fairy tale theming encourages players to draw on familiar genre traditions to create something recognizable. This is reminiscent of Henry Jenkins’ concept of evocative spaces, where experiences such as stories become more compelling by building upon traditions well known to participants (Jenkins 6). Yet this same system sometimes works against us: players prioritize winning over constructing cohesive narrative, producing a disjointed, circuitous story that is difficult to recall.
To better understand how Once Upon a Time draws on familiar traditions and genres, it helps to look more closely at Jenkins’ idea of evocative spaces. Jenkins defines ‘evocative spaces’ as spaces that draw from and build upon existing stories or genre traditions that are familiar to participants (Jenkins 6). These spaces do not need to tell their own stories but rely on the audience’s prior knowledge to fill in the gaps. Often referencing known genres, intellectual property, or archetypal story elements, evocative spaces allow creators, or in this case storytellers, to craft environments that feel meaningful without extensive exposition. In the context of Once Upon a Time, the concept of evocative narrative elements helps explain how players can quickly generate coherent narratives by drawing upon shared cultural knowledge of fairy tale conventions.
While evocative spaces explain how players can build from existing knowledge, the rules of Once Upon a Time actively shape the story on a finer scale. During my group’s run of the game, our story began cohesively as a tale of a giant who sought to build a better life for himself despite his lack of education and illiteracy. After encountering a witch and being cursed, he gained the ability to speak and attend school. However, as players tried to play their story cards and interrupt one another in an attempt to win the game, the story quickly spun out of control. Random elements were introduced, and the narrative became disjointed and chaotic. With more experienced and confident players, this issue can be mitigated, as players can call out nonsensical narrative turns and use their cards strategically. Despite these occasional disruptions, the mechanics ultimately do more to support storytelling than to hinder it.
Beyond narrative and mechanics, the social dynamics of our group significantly shaped the experience. Confidence and experience played a noticeable role: at times, the game suffered because players misunderstood the rules, yet no one felt confident enough to correct them. Several players used interrupt cards incorrectly, treating them as excuses to halt the story and drop in unrelated elements, which disrupted the flow. I was struck by how different this felt compared to the video of Wil Wheaton’s group playing the game, where everyone knew the rules and confidently created smooth, believable narrative beats. Our own gameplay might have flowed more easily had we been more familiar with each other, and more comfortable calling one another out when someone added a story card too abruptly or stalled while thinking of what to say next. This shows that the social side of play—the confidence of participants, their shared understanding of rules, and their willingness to negotiate—was just as important as the formal rules in shaping the story.
The mechanics of Once Upon a Time provide a form of narrative scaffolding: the story cards offer players specific narrative points to build toward, while the ending cards provide a clear way to conclude the story and a goal to work toward, helping players construct coherent narratives more easily than if they were creating a tale entirely from scratch. The game’s cards and mechanics align with aspects of Abbott's definition of narrative. Story and interrupt cards represent the story aspect, providing events, entities, and setting for players to incorporate into their narratives (Abbott 19). In contrast, the narrative discourse is reflected in the game's rules: players must orally convey the narrative to the group, shaping the story in real time and negotiating the narrativity as they go (Abbott 24). Furthermore, story cards often prompted constituent events that drove the narrative forward, such as the Giant being cursed by the witch or attending school (Abbott 22). Many elements introduced to play their cards functioned as supplementary events: tangential or filler moments that did little to advance the story (Abbott 22). While these elements added some unpredictability, they contributed to the narrative becoming circuitous and difficult to recall. In this way, the mechanics simultaneously provide material for storytelling and structure the process by which that story is communicated.
Once Upon a Time demonstrates the delicate balance between storytelling, game systems, and social interaction. The mechanics provide powerful scaffolding that makes the creation of fairy tale-like narratives accessible, even for players who might otherwise struggle to invent stories from scratch. At the same time, the drive to play cards and pursue victory often fractured the story, producing supplementary events that diluted narrative cohesion. Jenkins’ concept of evocative spaces helps explain why the stories still felt recognizable and meaningful, while Abbott’s distinction between story and discourse clarifies how the mechanics structured our storytelling in real time. Yet what mattered just as much as rules and theory was the social side of play: confidence, negotiation, and familiarity with the group shaped whether our story flowed or fell apart. Once Upon a Time reminds us that storytelling in games is always co-created by systems, narrative conventions, and the players around the table.