Winter Tales, Coming from Albe Pavo

Following its 2010 debut title Munera: Famillia Gladiatoria, Italian publisher Albe Pavo will take a stroll in another direction of game design with Winter Tales, a storytelling game that seems to inherit a lot from Fabula but which also has new and interesting mechanisms. Winter Tales, which is still in the playtest phase at this point, has been developed with Janus Design, an Italian group that has a lot of experience with RPGs. Here's an overview of theme and game play from the designers:

Winter has tightened its grip on the country of fairy tales. Powered by hatred and fear, Winter aims to smother the flames of love with ice and snow, forever obscuring the light of hope in the eternal darkness of the winter night.

In the winding streets of the village and in small houses built on the hill, the fairy tales stand afraid and move only in the shadows, but they know they can not leave Winter all hope for the future and they are prepared to fight to bloom again come spring.

Winter Tales is a narrative board game for 3-7 players, who will create a different shared story on each playing. During each game, the players act out a duel between characters in fairy tales, who are full of good feelings and hope for the future, and the soldiers of Winter, who embody the evilness and ruthlessness of the season. Each player will control elements of both sides of the duel and will fight for either the return of spring or the suffocation of hope and an endless winter.

At the beginning of the game, players secretly determine which faction they wish to support: spring or winter. Each turn, players choose which characters – Tales and Soldiers – will be used, activating them in clockwise order. Each activated character can perform an action, such as turning on the power of a location, facing a quest, or resolving a conflict.

The Tales will try to solve quests for Spring Victory Points, but the Soldiers will attack Tales for Winter Victory Points. As missions are resolved, you will create memories that will be positive (if the missions are completed successfully) or negative (if you are bankrupt). After completing the fourth mission, players start to narrate the epilogue that will include all the memories and lead to the victory of the Fables and the arrival of spring or to the triumph of the Soldiers and the eternal continuation of the cold winter. Once the Epilogue has been told, players reveal their factions and determine the scores, influenced by the outcome of the Epilogue.