Mysterious Circumstances - Instructions

Please find below the full intro content to our Hmm... Mysterious Circumstances single cards PDF package.

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About these cards

Our Mysterious Circumstances story cards provide little mysteries that could appear in a story – your job is to think like a storyteller and come up with potential explanations for each scenario.

There are two ways to our these cards

#1 | Open-ended story ideas: Use only the top portion of the card and ignore the optional answer below the dots.

What you do: On each card, we describe a mysterious circumstance and, using your creative thinking skills, you imagine possible explanations. You can do this in groups or on your own.

You can focus on coming up with one unique and interesting explanation, an idea fit for a fantastic story.

Or you can tap your brainstorming skills and come up with different ideas.To push your “think like a storyteller” skills, you may want to set a minimum number of possible explanations to come up with for each circumstance.

2 | With answers: You need two or more players for this yes-or-no question-and-answer game. 

What you do: On each card, we describe a mysterious circumstance that could appear in a story and, on the bottom of the card, we provide our explanation of this mystery.

One participant has the card and reads the mystery. Using their detective skills, the other player or players then ask yes or no questions until they are able to determine the explanation.

Take note that the person who has the card must also use their thinking skills. They’ll need to exercise their judgment when answering questions.

For example: You’ll see that some explanations are more difficult – and more detailed – than others. So, you’ll need to decide what you’ll accept as a correct answer.

• You can accept a generally correct answer or encourage players to keep narrowing down their answer or to provide more details.
• You may want to provide hints or clues.
• How you do that is up to you.
• You can answer yes or no, but at times you may decide that you can also say you "don’t have this information” or “it’s possible,” or you “cannot confirm.”
• Some explanations wildly veer off into sci fi or fantasy. You can let players know this before starting the game or the scenario. But you can also just let them figure it out on their own through their questioning.

In addition to creative problem-solving, this option will work players’ critical thinking, reasoning and logic skills.

Tip for those asking the questions!

It is better to go from big to small when possible. That means, try to ask general questions that can narrow down your options by categories, rather than just shooting out guesses one at a time.

For instance, if you’re trying to determine the explanation for why a tree is lying across a busy street – instead of asking whether the circumstance was caused by a tornado, you could ask if it was caused by weather.

With that single question you’ll be able to rule in or out entire categories of possibilities. This is a more effective line of questioning than random guessing.

Extend the activity

You can take your ideas and explanations and transform them into something concrete. You can use your writing or artistic skills to create drawings, short stories, comic strips, plays, videos/short films or a trailer for a short film. You can also use your idea as the basis of a pretend newspaper article, podcast, or social media post.

However you choose to use these cards, we hope you think well and have fun!!