NeverEnding Story
| No. of Players: | 2+ |
| Type of Game: | spoken |
| What you need: | nothing |
Goal
To tell a story using contributions from multiple people.
How to play
Players sit in a circle. One player begins to recite a story, but abruptly stops after just a sentence or two (or in the middle of one). The second player picks up from where the first player left off, and similarly stops briefly thereafter. This continues until all players have at least made one contribution, with the last player finishing the story properly. Or else a player inadvertently finishes the story too early, which would make that player ineligible to participate in the next round.
This game is similar to Consequences, Unfolding Story, and Word By Word.
Example
Five players tell the following story:
Once upon a time Bart the Brave set forth to reclaim the Golden Scepter which was stolen from his father long ago. As he mounted his horse, he waved to the adoring crowd that had gathered, and said: "If I am not back by lunch, would someone please save me a sandwich? Oh, and please don't eat my fruit cup or drink my juice box. Mom packed it special for me this morning." This was typical Robert, always on the lookout for himself. No one really believed he would come back with what he was promising the people. They knew he would instead just stop off at the first Golden Griddle and gorge himself on pancakes until it was time to come home. He would tell us that he had the Scepter in his hands, after wrestling it from an Ogre, and was on his way home. But suddenly he came across a giant dragon who encircled him in fire until he was forced to give it up. He would try again tomorrow.
Did you know?
Noah Hathaway, who played Atreyu in the 1984 fantasy movie The NeverEnding Story, suffered a spinal injury during rehearsal. Apparently, the young actor was riding a horse which got spooked and tried to jump a fence. But the horse missed the jump and ended up falling on top of the actor. This cracked two of Hathaway's vertebrae in his lower back. Despite the pain, he persevered through the rest of filming. But in the decades since the movie was first released, he's had multiple corrective surgeries.
This wasn't the only problem Hathaway encountered on the set, however. During the drowning scene in the 'Swamps of Sadness,' he got his leg caught in the elevator that took his horse down. This pulled Hathaway underwater as well. By the time the crew pulled him out, he was unconscious and had to be revived.
But at least Hathaway was unharmed during the scene where Atreyu battles the werewolf Gmork. At one point, one of Gmork's claws struck him in the face, which could have easily taken out one of Hathaway's eyes!
