Trap Street

Fill a map of your city with surprising stories, and try to work out whether other people’s stories are true.

A section of a Trap Street map, at the end of a night.

DESIGNER: Holly Gramazio
STATUS: Playtested (at Sandpit #3)
NUMBER OF PLAYERS: Any number
STUFF REQUIRED: Lots of small red and green stickers. A really really big sheet of paper, or many not-so-big sheets of paper. Lots of masking tape. A couple of decent permanent markers, and a lot of cheap felt-tipped pens; you will never get these back, and the 12-for-a-pound type work fine, so no point going for anything more extravagant. (You might need to get a few packets.) Some printed copies of the instructions for players.
CREW REQUIRED: One to set up, none during play.
PREPARATION: Half an hour.
TIME: Depends on number of players and size of map; anywhere from an hour to a week.
PLACE REQUIRED: A large dry wall that you can stick things to.
ACTIVITIES: Drawing, writing, inventing, evaluating.

Preparation: Stick the sheets of paper on the wall, or onto a table if you don’t have a wall. These will be your map. Ideally the map should be big, perhaps big enough that not everyone can reach right to the top; it’s been played with nine sheets of A1 paper (torn out of a flip chart) in a 3×3 grid, making a map of around 1.8 by 2.5 metres, which worked well with a group of 100 people who were around for three or four hours. A game with more players or a longer playing time might need a larger map.

Using the permanent markers, draw a rough map of whatever city you’re in on the paper. Copying from a smaller map using grid drawing will probably do fine. You just want to get in the big bodies of water and bridges, a few main roads, perhaps some major parks and very prominent buildings, and the place where you’re playing the game; it doesn’t have to be too detailed, just enough to let people orient themselves. Try to get it more or less accurate, but a couple of mistakes won’t matter.

Once you’ve drawn the map, put up some instructions for the players (either write these up yourself or download them as a word document here). Some players will miss these if you just stick copies at the side, so it’s probably worth sticking one in the middle of the map as well.

Put out the red and green stickers and felt-tipped pens; perhaps use them to add a few landmarks and stories to the map to get other people started.

Playing: Look at the map, and the stories and landmarks that have already been placed there. Put a green sticker by two of the parts of the map that you think are true, and a red sticker by two of the additions that you think are false.

Now build part of the map yourself: add one true landmark, building, story or street to the map, and one false one. Other people will judge your additions to the map. If the majority of people who judge your lie think it’s the truth, or the majority of people who judge your truth think it’s a lie, then your trap has worked.

You’re welcome to play multiple times; but every time you play you must always judge four things already on the map, and add one true thing and one false thing of your own. You may not judge your own additions.

Variants: You could probably play this board-game-style, on a smaller map with normal pens, taking it in turns to fill in a fact and then all voting.