Product Review: Story Engine Decks

As content creators and storytellers, we all occasionally hit a point where we'd like to just let some muse start the ball rolling. Some of us hit that moment more or less often than others; some live there. That's ok. 

If you are setting up an adventure, creating a campaign world, or just filling in some interesting NPCs, sometimes it's nice to have an inspiring prompt. Looking for something that's not AI? I've got just the thing!

The Story Engine Deck

Let's start with a link - https://storyenginedeck.com/ 

For the record, I'm not getting paid for this. I paid full price for the product, don't work for or with the company, and haven't communicated with them at all (aside from ordering) before posting this. It's a good product, and I like reviewing a good product that people might find worth their time and money.

The wife and I are always building stories of some sort - games, short stories, backstories for artwork she's drawing. She saw this and decided to grab a bundle.
 

That big box is nice, comes with a full set of cards that can do most of what you need.

The open box here shows the guide booklet laying inside the box lid.

It isn't a hardwood heirloom item, but it is a nice box. The internal frame is just plastic, and hollow underneath, but the wells are each deep enough to hold an entire expansion box, so it's no problem to fold several into the main decks if you prefer to keep them that way. The little expansion set boxes are lightweight but workable if you prefer to keep them individually. We shuffled the extra horror expansion box right in, stacked the Agent and Anchor cards together in one well, added the backstory cards to the Engine and Conflict wells, and put our Fantasy pack into the vacated well, still in the box, no problem at all.

As for the box itself, it's cardboard, but it's sturdy cardboard. The magnetic closure on the front was an especially nice touch.

I love the booklet - you don't have to use it at all, but it gives some great suggestions of how to draw and lay out idea-generating spreads. You can just pull cards and stack them, but some of the spreads are almost tarot-like in their setup and interrelationships. 

We also grabbed a bunch of Story Engine expansion packs, including two copies of the horror pack. You can use most of these as little standalone decks, or shuffle them into the base deck for broader applicability with a little slant toward a style. 

Our one complaint: once you mix most of these into the base deck, there's really no quick and easy way to separate them back out again. It's not difficult to use them if you keep them separate, but it does cost you a certain amount of randomness. For some people this will never be an issue; for the OCD types like me, it's an issue, if not a huge one.

They do still work well alone: here's a quick spread I did from just the sci-fi deck.

Each of the expansion decks comes with it's own little mini booklet, too.

As you can see, the expansions are each effectively a little standalone Story Engine Deck. They generally come with a dozen of each type card, each of which has two or four different options, so even with only a single expansion deck there are theoretically well over sixty-three million possible combinations. Admittedly, not every combination will make sense - saying the robber wants to humiliate a closet (the mystery deck) sounds a little odd, but my wife immediately took that as an indication that there was an entity haunting the closet, and ran with it. Isn't that what the deck is for? 

The backstory expansion is a little different. Rather than a dozen of each type card, it has 30 each of the engine and conflict cards. Also, this one is easy to separate out - every card has an additional backstory icon on the front, and the cards are printed with their binary options divided diagonally on the face, rather than horizontally like the cards in the main deck. 

I put these right into the big box with the main cards, but didn't shuffle them in, because they work very well in addition, to add more depth to a draw, but you could certainly shuffle them right in if you wanted, and then quite easily separate them out again later. Hopefully they will add this sort of feature more uniformly in future expansion packs. 

If you're interested or curious, drop by their website - try a couple of their videos at https://storyenginedeck.com/products/the-story-engine-deck-of-prompt-cards

and maybe the tutorial: https://storyenginedeck.com/pages/tutorial-create-writing-prompts-story-ideas-dnd-campaign-ideas

Personally, I usually prefer to spin up my own stories. I'm overburdened with ideas, but even so, playing with these cards is fun. Sitting down with the wife, or a group of friends and just brainstorming through some concepts sounds like a great way to set up a writing prompt challenge where everyone can then go away and write their own version of the story, then come back next month for a night of beer, pizza, and reading them aloud. 

I hope you have as much fun with them. We dropped $150 on a shipment with lots of expansion packs as well as the main box, and I haven't regretted it for a minute.