Rory’s Story Cubes Review

Let your imagination roll wild One or more players ages 8 and up

One of our favorite activities with groups is to make up stories one sentence at a time. So we were dying to try Rory’s Story Cubes. And you know that we love dice games (see why we play dice at the dinner table here). When we found a great deal on the Fantasia set we grab it up.

Now we get to tell you how to play, the rules and if we think you should make room for them on your Family Game Shelf.

The Cubes

The set comes with 9 dice all with different pictures on them. That’s 54 images. It’s 10, 000, 000 combinations. That’s a lot.

The dice are larger than the standard dice which makes them both a handful and easier to play with.

How to Play Rory’s Story Cubes

First, a player rolls all nine dice. (For smaller hands they can be rolled one at a time.) Next, the player starts the story with “Once upon a time…” and then tells a story that has all nine dice rolls in it. Another story starting line is “Long ago, in a far away land…” However, you could start the story any way you wish.

There are other ways to play too.

Rory’s Story Cube Variations

Fairytale Reinvention.

In this variation, players pick a popular fairy tale and start off telling the story. As the story progresses, you change the story by adding in the images from the dice roll.

Story Title

For this game, you are creating the title of your story by filling in the blanks. First, you roll three dice. Then use their images to fill the blanks to this statement: “NOUN and the ADJECTIVE NOUN.” Players can either then take turns rolling three dice and coming up with titles or make a story using all nine dice that tells the story of the tile.

Mythical Map

For map making you will need some paper and pencils too. You will then make a map of Far Away Land by including images from the dice, adding in fun name places.

Family Game Shelf Style

We played the game a little differently based on other games we’ve played. The first player rolls one dice and starts the story by including the image from that die. The next player rolls another die and continues the story with that image. We play until all the dice have be used. We also play that you need to retell the sentences that come before yours.

What We Like

First, the quality is top notch. We also like that game came with a great storage bag. We like that it is all about creativity and having fun. We also like that there are several ways to play and that it’s open to make up your own ways to play.

What We Don’t Like

There’s just one thing that we don’t like. Some of the images are hard to make out. There were several times where we squinted and then picked up the die, turning it until we figured out what we thought the image to be. Of course it is hard to get images engraved and printed on a half inch cube. Maybe there could have been an image guide to help this.

Is Rory’s Story Cubes Worth It?

When you ignite a child’s imagination you are doing so many things: making their brains think, entertaining them, letting them explore things in a safe way and building skills. Rory’s Story Cubes do all of this. There are also many different sets that you can combine—there’s the original one, actions, adventure, emergency and more targeted ones like Harry Potter and Star Wars. With the value that they provide, we do recommend adding the story cubes to your Family Game Shelf.

But we want to tell you about our Story Cards that were inspired by a similar game that has a different game play and have more clear images to use in your story. You can see our new Summer Story Cards here and keep checking the store for even more Story Cards coming soon.

To shop Story Cards visit the store here. You can shop for Rory’s Story Cubes here. And Canadians can check our the Story Cubes here. Rory’s Story Cubes are a Gamewrite game.