Today, another report of a game I’ve used in an EFL class. This time, it’s Heart of the Deernicorn’s Night Forest.
If you’re unfamiliar with the game, here’s a short (~6 minutes) example video:
It’s a pretty beautiful game, if you’re playing with people who buy in and are willing to really think and share meaningful personal stories from their lives. I happened to get a copy of it along with something else on eBay a few years ago, and tried to organize a play session of it just before the pandemic, which didn’t happen… and then the pandemic happened.
So I’ve never actually played the real game, with the candles at night in a wooded area. However, I did use the cards in an EFL class today.
You really have to lower your expectations when you’re using this as an EFL exercise. I kept the rules mostly the same—you tell a story from your life related to the theme on the card you’ve pulled, and then trade cards with the person with whom you’ve exchanged stories. (I wasn’t a stickle for this, though: some people didn’t quite have the command of English necessary to tell a story, and did their best with some chit-chat on the theme.) I did change the rule about what happens when you get a card you’ve done before back: I had them come to me and exchange the card for a new one.
(This was actually a problem because a few people—the ones who stuck to talking to the same three people in the class—came back to me with alarming frequency. I would tell them, “You need to talk to different people,” and they’d insist they had, but then ten minutes later they were back asking for a new card.)
That said, if you set the tone of the exercise at the start, making it clear that students are supposed to tell a story related to the theme, rather than just randomly talking about the theme. One of the best things you can do at the start of class is to pull a card and demonstrate how one might tell a story related to the word on the card. That kind of example speaks volumes to the students and will help you avoid having to urge them away from drive-by commentary on the topic, which tends not to last very long or to be very interesting to anyone.
It can be a pretty cool exercise for an intermediate or advanced class. One of the challenges with the cards is that students will be grappling with a constant churn of themes: one moment, they’re telling a story about their first kiss; the next, they’re explaining how they said goodbye to their grandmother when she was dying of cancer last year, or talking about the time everyone in their elementary school refused to tell them a secret that everyone else knew.
Night Forest isn’t, strictly speaking, necessary for this kind of exercise: an instructor could easily create a deck of story prompt cards with images on them. The thing is that the images on the Night Forest cards are somehow, well, suggestive. They don’t always perfectly embody the word on the card, which means that they evoke a certain kind of response—in my experience, a more thoughtful and reflective one. If you’re homebrewing a story deck, you might want to think about designing them to do something similar, but it’s tricky and having the deck is a pretty handy way of skipping that work.
One prerequisite for this exercise is that they need to be comfortable with one another, and—because of the nature of some of the words and themes invoked by the cards—willing to open up a little.That’s gonna depend on the group, and maybe on the dominant culture shared in the class a bit, too.
I’d love to do the game as it’s meant to be played, whether with students but especially with a group of native English speakers just sharing stories from their lives. I think it’d be a really fascinating experience, if today’s class was anything to go by. But I’m a sucker for games that demand vulnerability of their players. You don’t want to play them everyday, but once in a while, they’re just the thing.