THE ANANSI GAME

Author's Notes. This is a Twine game where you are trying to collect trophies in order to win the game. I thought a collecting game would be good for a trickster like Anansi. Greediness is Anansi's main quality: he's usually trying to get something from somebody. I picked ten contests to use for the game. In five of the contests, Anansi is the winner, so there are five opportunities to win trophies. But there are dangers: in three of the contests, Anansi dies. You have three lives to start with, so it really is possible to lose the game by dying three times (not likely, but definitely possible). There is another danger too: you might live but be humiliated. When that happens and Anansi gets tricked, you lose a trophy. There are two contests with the trickster-tricked where Anansi loses a trophy.

With that set-up, it's very likely that you will win the game! But it's not guaranteed.

You can also see how many contests it takes to win. The best is if you can win in just three contests! If it takes you a lot of contests to win, you can play again. Pay attention to the stories! That way you will be able to win in fewer contests the next time. (The stories don't change; the variations in the game all come from your choices and the order in which you make those choices.)

I chose the classic Harlowe Twine style for this. I think the dark theme works well for the trickster world of Anansi. He's fun but dangerous.

I hope you enjoy the game; let me know what you think. This is the first time I have ever written a Twine game with variables that keep score. Before, the games I wrote were always just maze games. It was really exciting to learn how to use variables and do actual if/then programming in Twine this time.

Also, there might be some programming errors that I made (this is all new to me!), so if you see weird stuff that does not look right, let me know so I can fix the programming syntax.

And do you think I should make the game harder? I can definitely make it harder by adding more death and more humiliation, but since Anansi usually does win in the end, I thought it made sense to let people usually win this game too. Just not right away!

Bibliography. All the fables here are 100-word stories that I wrote for Tiny Tales of Anansi, which is a free book you can read online. For bibliographical details about each story, go to Anansi.LauraGibbs.net, and you will see each story there linked to a blog post with bibliography and notes. The only story where I changed the characters to make it fit here was removing Bouki from the story about Rabbit and the bananas; instead of Bouki and Rabbit together with Anansi in the boat, I just focused on Rabbit and Anansi.

Here's what the game looks like: the five trophy contests are on the right, with the three death-traps on the upper left and the two humiliations on the lower left. You'll also see that I have three different choice-generating modules to add some variety. It does look kind of like a spiderweb too! :-)

Image credit: Spiderweb