Photo: Photo by Mecredis.

DESIGNER: Duncan Speakman and Simon Johnson
NUMBER OF PLAYERS: max 10
STUFF REQUIRED: MP3 players (with 3 song playlist provided by gamesmasters)
LOCATION: Best played in busy bar/club environment, preferably with players spread around bar at start of game.
CREW REQUIRED: 1
PREPARATION: ‘dry run’ by referee
TIME: minutes per round
WRITTEN UP BY: Duncan Speakman and Simon Johnson

Gamers are loaned MP3 players on shuffle play and place false plastic lips in their mouths (to prevent talking). On the game start they all press play on the MP3s, then only by dancing they must identify other players that are listening to the same song and from a group with them. At the songs end you get knocked out if you’re in the wrong group (or if you’re on your own when other people are dancing to the same song as you).

VARIATIONS: In a 2-player variant of this game, each player is given an MP3 with 5 songs on it. Through dancing and skipping through track they both have to end up dancing to the same song in under a minute. This one could be toured around the bar by a refereee with the 2 MP3 players.

Photo: Birdsong by Aislinn Ritchie.

DESIGNER: Duncan Speakman and Simon Johnson
NUMBER OF PLAYERS: Any square number (minimum 9)
STUFF REQUIRED: Some paper and envelopes
LOCATION: Can be played in a large indoor location (e.g. railway station ) but we think it’s best played in echoey back alleys, possibly around Clink, on the other side of London Bridge Road from Shunt.
CREW REQUIRED: Possibly 2
PREPARATION: Dividing up groups, handing out envelopes
TIME: Dependent on distance between starting points for groups and amount of local noise.
WRITTEN UP BY:Duncan Speakman and Simon Johnson

Gamers are split into even sized groups. Each is given a set of sealed envelopes and sent to different locations in the vicinity (one location per group, maybe only 1 or 2 streets apart, but must be be out of sight of all the other groups starting points). At specified time players open envelopes, each envelope contains a description of an animal call.

Once the players know their sound they must roam/run around streets making their sound to locate the other players with the same sound. Once they have someone from every group with the same sound they must all run back to base shouting ‘LuLu’

Each group has only one type of each call per person, for example in a group one person may have an owl, one person might have a crow. These sounds are spread so every group has one of the each.

VARIATIONS: Choice of ‘calls’ can be made more elaborate.

Hide and seek games festival held a games playtesting night in shunt this week.

Me and Duncan drove up and made a long day of it. The event itself lasted about 5 hrs or rather we lasted about 5hrs before we had to split. during that time we played lots of games inc the gossip game , texas hold me,  Mudlarking With Francis Barking, some paper based games I forget the name of and lots of games of werewolf a variation on the mafia game .

The gossip game was a lot of fun but the most striking thing for me was the playing style of the wining player. The game sets up an environment where players have some conflicting and some mutual interests. There are several different relationships you have with the other players. People you’d like to protect people you’d like to eject from the game and people you have some dirt on.  you can either choose to be conniving and secretive or open and cooperative. almost everyone defaulted to being sneaky. But the chap who one from the outset said ok what do you want to know, and was openly sharing all the information he could access with anyone who wanted it. A triumph for the cooperative behavior model. except of course that the first thing he did was to eliminate his arch enemy.

Texas hold me is a kind of physical poker game the rules pretty much explain the game play. I would really like to play this again with a betting round built in. It would make all the poker face practice i did worthwhile.

Mudlarkin involved a walk down to the thames and then a spot of beach combing. We were looking for medium sized chalk rocks with the rock paper scissors symbols painted on them. once you found one you could challenge a player from the other side to a game. Normal rock paper scissors rules applied with two variations. You were playing with big lumps of chalk and not your hands and there was one rock that had a river symbol on it. River symbol beats all. It was late by the time we played this and people became unwilling to walk to the river beach(or to leave their drinks) this meant there were not enough people playing. only four people on each team. this made it al a bit to easy. But there was a surprise game of tug of war to spice the end of the game up and then we all shared whiskey and cakes.

The different games of werewolf were so completely different it was amazing. The games masters role had a lot to do with this. one of the games masters was dressed in a harlequin body suit and *performed*  his role like a ham genius. During one of the games the tensions were so high they exceeded that which you could easily say was playful. Somrthing about this game really gets to the core of the people playing. Its a contemporary classic.

All in all it was a fantastic night. the games being playtested were all pretty successful. Excepting that the paint used to paint the rock paper scissors symbols on to the rocks for mudlarking was still wet and Duncan ended up with a coat full of it, the night was perfect. A great start to what i hope will be a great monthly event. Big up to sandpit.

/simon

As is often the way with the best laid plans we actually played quite a different set of games to the ones planned.

All in all the event was a great kick off. Lots of people lots of games and all washed down with a beer.

Here are some of the games we played

luminatio

“A surrealistic photographic game in which players run and hide on the streets, hunting for numbers which are on the back of each others heads. ” although we actually played it in the PMStudio.

This is a great game. The frenetic action makes for a great spectator sport too, a rare quality in pervasive games.

Scramble 2

A physical version of the scramble. Players get a letter each and must form lines to make words.

the general feedback on this was for more structure. Perhaps making it a turn based game.

OMMRPG

We played a couple of different versions of this game, two indoor and two outdoor

Entrainment

ok so in don’t know the name of this game but this seems to fit. A few people talked about the interesting personal interaction generated by this game.

BITE ME!

This was a late entry brought by Duncan Speakman. A really nice simple durational game

there was also a steady stream of wii activity throughout the night. As usual wii sports Boxing and tennis seemed to be the favorites.

There is a lot to be learned from the games we played and from the way the night ran.

Let me know what you liked and what you didn’t. What rule sets were the best and which ones were incomplete.

If you’d like to bring a game to the next iglab please sign in and add it to the games section and/or email me about it at simon.iglab@urbanantics.net

/simon

this is a version of a theater game.

players: 10-20.

duration: 10-15 mins.

setup: none.

rule set:

all the players stand in a circle

everyone has to stand as still as possible, but as soon as anyone makes any movement evryone copies them

thats it.

variant: the players actively make slow subtle changes to their position. the last person to notice and copy then is ejected from the circle.