The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen Review

One of my favorite lines in the original Pirates of the Caribbean movie is spoken by Jack Sparrow, as Elizabeth is falling from the ramparts into the water. He’s speaking to the two British soldiers assigned to guard a ship; as the camera cuts to them Sparrow finishes a story with “…and then they made me their chief.” I’ve always wondered what kind of story he was telling. After playing The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, I know what kind of story it was because I’ve told my own.

Put simply, Munchausen is a rules-light storytelling RPG. Players take on the role of a fictional noble and tell totally absolutely 100% true stories of their grandiose adventures, like the story of how they rode a cannonball to the moon in order to establish a British colony. But you’re not here to hear me put things simply. You’re here because you want me to tell you how The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen provided one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had to date.

Sitting around with friends recounting experiences and making each other laugh, cry, or cry with laughter feels good. The reason is simple. Storytelling is old; we’ve been telling stories as long as we’ve been able to communicate with each other. The problem is that we aren’t all great at coming up with entertaining stories out of whole cloth. Munchausen provides just enough of a framework to encourage you to do that with just few enough rules to make it easy.

A few coins and a slim book is all you need.

The quick-beating heart of Munchausen is improv. Players take turns giving each other ridiculous story seeds in a game of competitive boasting. “Tell me, Dear Don Francisco, of the time you convinced the Dolphin King of the Atlantic that you were in fact the Wizard Merlin” is an actual prompt from my last game. The storyteller wet their lips with a sip of beer (as recommended in the rule book) and launched their tale by first describing a vicious shipwreck. Along the way other players interrupted, both to help the storyteller along and to make the story more impressive.

Each player begins with a handful of tokens. We often play with fantasy coins, but anything from buttons to tater tots from your bar appetizer will suffice. These tokens have two uses. At any point in someone’s story you can slide a coin across the table and interrupt the story with a challenge: “But, sir, how did you visit the dolphin king if you can’t breathe water?” The storyteller may accept the coin and work the new complication into the story, or slide one of their own back across and admit that they were misremembering the events. At the end of the game these tokens are your voting chits. Hand all of yours to the player whose story you enjoyed the most and the person with the most tokens (or tots) wins.

The Baron really did this. Promise.

These tokens are a big part of what makes Munchausen brilliant. For starters, they’re a great way to help your friends. In theory the challenges make things harder, but they’re also a spark. If someone is floundering, your “challenge” can be a way to help flesh out the story and get their juices flowing again. What really makes them shine however is the way they’re used to determine a “winner." No matter how well you’ve done at incorporating everyone’s narrative curveballs you’ll have to give away all those coins at the end. You can’t keep them. In this way the game drives you to celebrate your friends and their stories, not your own actions or coin-hoarding strategies. It’s far different from other competitive games and it’s wonderful.

Standing in the spotlight and trying to tell an imagined story is hard enough; doing it after your buddy just left the table pounding their glasses on the table in laughter is even harder. I really appreciate the way the token system relieves some of that pressure. Munchausen’s simple rules help - if you’ve read this far you already know how to play - and this 3rd edition includes things to make it even easier. There is an Arabian Nights inspired variant that turns it into the communal telling of a single story, using coins to take and pass control. There are variants for children, for playing as cavepeople, or Bond-villains, or a number of other settings and systems to help you find your comfort zone. Once you’ve picked one, playing is as simple as letting your imagination run wild and taking everyone along for the ride. My favorite may be the one that has you tell stories of revolution in the time of Lenin, where voting is used to determine which equally good story is the most-equal of them all.

It’s easy to get lost in this hobby of cardboard and plastic. There are plenty of new mechanics to check out, dragons to slay, and space things to blow up. I love that stuff, but what I really love is hanging out with my friends around the game table. The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen distills the roleplaying experience to one of the oldest of human traditions. It’s storytelling at its finest.