The first of the storytelling games I ran across, Once Upon A Time is targeted toward fairy tales.

It's a card game, where each person is dealt a certain number of cards, and each person has a random ending card.

The goal is to tell a story, discarding your own cards as you tell the story, until you are able to discard your last card and conclude the story so that your desired ending arrives.

The complication is that other players can steal the narrative of the story from you, and they each have their own ending they want to achieve. You may set things up beautifully for the prince and princess to marry and live happily ever after, only to have another player send the prince to get eaten by a dragon!

It takes a few times playing to get comfortable with the way the game works. Most often, the first games are spent listening to one person tell the majority of the story, while everyone else tries to figure out when it's appropriate to steal the narrative.

In general, you can steal the narrative anytime a person uses in their story something that you have a card for. For example, if you have a card that says, "Wolf", and the narrator says, "Then she encounters a fearsome wolf", you can lay down your "Wolf" card and steal the narration.

When you steal the narration, you must continue the story in as logical a way as possible. You cannot simply disregard what previous narrators have established. In fact, it's most fun to see how many of their elements you can continue to work into the story, while still heading toward your desired ending.

This is a very fun game, and the stories are often quite wacky.

This is a game that bills itself as a roleplaying game, but is really a storytelling game. The game itself it out of print, but I can easily describe enough of the rules for you to have fun playing.

The setting is that the players are all bored nobles meeting at a tavern, telling tall tales in the style of Baron Muchausen.

Each player has a number of coins, equal to the number of players. While the narrative cannot be stolen in this game, players can use coins to adjust the narrative in slight ways.

The first player starts by turning to the player on their left, and giving them their story hook. This is done in this fashion: "So, tell me about the time that you swam with the dolphins in the Queen's bath chambers...".

The player thus addressed then has only a few seconds, enough time to take a drink and say something along the lines of, "Yes, I remember that", before they must start telling the story.

This is a game of quick thinking!

Stories should be outlandish and far fetched. But other players can suggest complications by using their coins.

For example, let's say that you had just gotten to the point in your story where you were being chased through a warehouse by a horde of angry dockworkers, and were just about to escape out the door. Another player might give you a coin and say, "I'll wager you were surprised when you found that door locked!"

You're free to refuse the coin and say they were obviously mistaken, the door was indeed unlocked. But that's no fun! Instead, most people accept the coin and work the locked door into the story.

The other way to use coins is to challenge the most outlandish aspects of a story. For example, if someone says, "I knew I must get through that door, so I blasted it open with a cannon!", it would be appropriate to toss them a coin and inquire, "And where were you carrying this cannon all that time?" They can accept the coin and work the cannon into the story more realistically, or refuse the coin and ignore the challenge.

Stories should only be five to ten minutes long. The winner at the end is the one with the most coins, but really the only goal is to have a rousing good time telling tall tales!

Pantheon is a nifty storytelling game that puts you as a character into one of several genres.

For example, you might be in the classic horror genre, or in the courtroom drama genre.

Each person contributes a sentence about what their character is doing to an ongoing story, and can challenge someone else's sentence by bidding against the other players.

Victory points are won by being true to the genre. For example, by having your character spend the night in the haunted house instead of going home like a sensible person.

The heart of Pantheon is the bidding and challenge mechanism that helps you challenge other people's sentences (in the event that they do something nasty to your character in the story).

This was one of a series of storytelling card games, all of which had the initials D.C.

They all worked the same, players would cooperatively build a story by laying cards that had various in-genre story elements. There really was no winner at the end, it was all about the fun of building a story.

You could also mix genres by mixing decks. For example, you could mix the Dark Continent deck with the Domains of Capella deck to get SF action in darkest Africa.

I haven't been able to find any web presence for this game at all lately, so it must be long out of print.