National Storytelling Week is a time to celebrate our human instinct to understand our world in narratives. From telling your friend about your latest holiday, to being hooked by a great new movie, we thrive off following stories. Storytelling Week encourages every person in the U.K. to immerse themselves in reading both old favourites and new stories. 

Children play a large role in National Storytelling Week, as the goal is for kids to enjoy reading considering it is an important part of their education. The National Literacy Trust states that, ‘Stories teach us about the world, they allow us to step into someone else’s shoes and feel empathy, they help us to relax and escape and they can help develop essential literacy skills.’ Finding the time to read with children can be a challenge, but if there was going to be a week to introduce more reading into your child’s life this is the week to do it. National Storytelling Week is an event celebrated in schools, clubs, museums, spoken word venues, and various other places.

When is National Storytelling Week 2023?

The 2023 Storytelling Week runs from the 30th of January to the 5th of February.

Storytelling Games

To celebrate National Storytelling Week, why not introduce fun games that are beneficial for kids? We’ve compiled a list of some great games that encourage creative storytelling with young players to let their imaginations run wild. 

Rory’s Story Cubes

Our top pick for making this National Storytelling Week a success is Rory’s Story Cubes. Within the game, you’ll throw nine dice to give you prompts to create your own story. In your group of players, one person will be the narrator who says “Once upon a time…”, followed by a story they’ve created using the nine symbols on the faces of the dice.

Rory’s Story Cubes Tips

The game creators suggest that to give more of a structure to your story, you can use three dice to set up the narrative, three for story development then finally three for a conclusion. The great thing about these story cubes is that there’s no such thing as a bad story, there are no winners or losers, only a supportive environment for kids to explore their own imagination.

Story Cubes Variations

Choose between different versions of Rory’s Story Cubes to guide your story in a completely new direction. Tell your own stories in the wizarding world with Harry Potter cubes or in a galaxy far, far away with Star Wars cubes.

BrainBox Once Upon a Time

For Storytelling Week, if you already know a little one who’s a fan of children’s stories, test their memory and observation skills with BrainBox. The Once Upon a Time variation of the educational game contains 55 cards with 330 individual questions about fairy tales. 

To play the game in a group, one player will look at and memorise a fairy tale illustration for 10 seconds. Then, they’ll pass the card to another player and roll the die to reveal which question they will have to answer regarding the image they’ve just seen. ‘What colour is the rug on the floor?’, and ‘Is Cinderella wearing shoes?’ are the types of questions you can expect to see. 

This mentally challenging game can be enjoyed in around 10 minutes so is a great quick option to celebrate childrens’ favourite stories.

Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger

If you’re less interested in creating a story from scratch, allow the House of Danger game from the classic Choose Your Own Adventure series to guide you on a journey that you ultimately pick the ending to. 

In this co-operative board game, explore a haunted mansion collecting clues and make decisions along the way using Story Cards. Players read the story cards and imagine each scenario to determine which decisions to make throughout the game. This game is great for older children and adults who want to become immersed in a narrative during National Storytelling Week.

Dixit

Dixit is a clever card game that relies on all of your players’ abilities to tell a story. Each player will have six cards in their hand, and one player will act as the storyteller to start the game. This player picks one of their cards to describe in a sentence, but the trick is that this sentence must be ambiguous enough for some players to recognise the card but others won’t. 

All other players will pick a card from their hand that they think matches the description, these are then shuffled and revealed face-up. You must each guess which card belongs to the Storyteller. If everyone or no one picks the Storyteller, then everyone scores two points, whereas if only some people guess correctly then they and the Storyteller earn three points.

This game is a fun addition for National Storytelling Week which takes skill in putting yourself in other’s shoes and constructing a story to describe your card. 

We hope our exploration into storytelling games has given you some inspiration to make this National Storytelling Week one to remember! If you want to find more exciting board games to entertain kids, take a look at our Best Board Games for Kids blog article.