The game of Conversation Piece. Photo by Holly.

Poets versus Policemen ended up tied at one-all at the final postbox collection, although we’re told that one of the beat officers apprehended a suspiciously thoughtful-looking character in the bar, only to discover that they’d caught an actual poet who wasn’t playing the game. And The Man Who Was Thursday revealed herself at the stroke of midnight, after hiding out in a corner of Battersea Arts Centre for most of the last half hour, avoiding the attention of the straggling Wednesdays and Fridays.

Sandpit #5 will be running at the Hayward Gallery in just three weeks’ time, on Friday the 30th of May. Game details and signup forms will appear nearer the date.

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.

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

Sandpit #4 will be at the Battersea Arts Centre on Saturday 10 May, as part of the opening night party for the Burst festival. The party itself is going to be full of playful events, and if you’re interested in running a game we’re particularly looking for anything connected to G.K. Chesterton, who called Battersea “the most beautiful of human localities”, and wrote about Sandpit-style games long before they existed in the real world. Expect anything from balloons, books and buses to chaos and common sense.

Sandpit #5 will be at the Hayward Gallery on Friday 30 May, to coincide with the opening of their Psycho Buildings exhibition. It’ll be full of games that can be played among the exhibition, both inside and on the outdoor terraces surrounding, and if you’re interested in running a game yourself this is a good Sandpit to pick, since one of the games will chosen to receive a budget to run again at the Hayward as part of the Hide and Seek Festival in June.

Of course, there’ll be plenty of unscheduled games that you can play without booking, including some of the favourites from last time (including Paper Telephone and Nomic), plus some new ones (1000 Blank White Cards and Foldover) and a special spy-themed variant of Werewolf, where the loyal spies are trying to root out the double-agents.

Dossier is also recruiting members of the public to be “targets”, which the game’s players will have to find in the crowd, using only a blurry photo. If you’d like to be a Dossier target, contact the game’s organiser at sandbagger.three@googlemail.com for further information.

Finally, if you’re stuck in a safehouse and won’t be able to come out at all on Wednesday, with no way to while away the evening except to draw false moustaches on a picture of yourself in Photoshop, you can play an online preview of Numbers Station Bingo.

It’s an exciting night at Shunt even apart from the Sandpit, with films, performances, installations and Pinball Geoff’s gaming machines; so when you combine that with maps, melodrama, sneaking, deception, badly-written spy novels and moustaches, why wouldn’t you want to come?

There’s no particular obligation to dress up as a spy - but there’s also no particular obligation not to, which is as good an excuse as any.

Small Towns have been run before, and Coney are using the week to develop the game even further, testing out new mechanics and twists, and working in some elements of Mafia/Werewolf to keep the townspeople on their toes. If you were a fan of the Gossip Game, or if you want to try out your Werewolf skills in a broader narrative environment, the Small Towns Anywhere will be right up your street. And if you’re new to the game, it’s certainly an interesting way to spend an evening.

The games are free, and run each evening at 6pm from Tuesday the 15th of April to Friday the 18th. This is the same week in which Sandpit #3 takes place (on the Wednesday), so it’s a chance to get two evenings of gaming in, in the same week. The Small Towns website has contact details for the town crier - places are limited, so book your place now.

Photo: Grebe CR-12 Radio, 1920s by Euthman.

DESIGNER: Kevan Davis and Holly Gramazio
STATUS: Undergoing playtests
NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 6 to 40, depending on preparation
STUFF REQUIRED: pre-written monologues and recording equipment (for preparation); short-range radio transmitters, MP3 players, radios and headphones (for play)
CREW REQUIRED: 3 to 10 actors, one organiser, one person to run around making sure everything’s okay
PREPARATION: Extensive
TIME: Ten minutes to half an hour, depending on preparation
PLACE REQUIRED: A somewhat crowded but not too overwhelmingly noisy area
ACTIVITIES: Listening, deduction, sneaking
WRITTEN UP BY: Holly Gramazio

Instructions for Players:

At the start of the game you receive a radio tuned to a particular signal, and are let free to wander through a crowded place. Keep the volume low while you explore the static.

There will be some people in the crowds around you who are broadcasting their thoughts. As you approach them, the static will fade, and you will be able to hear them thinking, over the radio. Turn the volume up, and listen carefully; you will then need to match up the thoughts that you can hear to the people around you, trying to figure out who is thinking what.

Once you’ve worked it out, you’ll need to take a token from the person whose thoughts you can hear. The token will be something small, and they’ll have a large number of them: business cards, buttons, post-it notes. The first person to collect a token from each thinker and return to the starting place is the winner. If nobody has found all the tokens by the time the game ends (after a period of time declared at the beginning), then the person who has found the most is the winner.

Instructions for Organisers

This is a time-consuming one to run. To start off with, you need to decide how many actors you’ll have for the players to “overhear”. Four actors makes for a game that lasts ten to twelve minutes; more actors will take longer. Reckon at two or three minutes per actor, plus a couple of minutes for the pot.

Now you have a number of actors, say five, and a playing time, say fifteen minutes. You will have to write a monologue for each actor, five monologues in the hypothetical example; each monologue will last for as long as the game runs, 15 minutes (maybe 2000 words) in the hypothetical example. The monologue needn’t be that interesting, as the players will only be hanging around for snippets of it - you can even loop it several times to fill up the time, for a longer game.

On the night, your actors will be acting along to these monologues as they broadcast them. Each monologue should be associated with a token for the character to fiddle with, and contain plenty of clues about what that token is, and what the character might be doing as they think their different thoughts. Ideally the monologues shouldn’t have anything sudden happening in them - you don’t want your actors on the night to have to memorise every little detail, and to remember to drop all their loose change two seconds before the recording says “Oh! I have dropped all my loose change.”

After you’ve written the monologues, you need actors to record them. These can be the same actors you have on the night, but they don’t need to be. They will read out and record the monologue as if they were thinking it, with plenty of pauses, and timed so that the actors on the night will be able to act along sensibly.

It can be helpful to editing a couple of minutes of memorable music into the start of the monologues, and again at the end, to bookend the game and indicate to players when playtime starts and ends - you can tell the players that when they hear the music, that means the game is over and they should return to the game’s host for final scoring.

Make sure you have as many MP3 players, short-range radio transmitters, radios and headsets as you have actors. Take a few of these down to the place where you’re going to play, and wander around to make sure there’s a variety of positions that you can put your actors in so that their areas of broadcast don’t overlap too heavily, and aren’t too far apart (ideally they should be just touching at the edges, although radio waves won’t “overlap”, and nearby broadcasts will find their own boundaries). Ideally, test this at the same time of the day as the game will run.

Now it’s game time! Each actor will need an MP3 player, to play their monologue; a short-range radio broadcaster tuned to the chosen frequency and plugged into the mp3 player, to broadcast the monologue; and a radio (also tuned to the chosen frequency) and surreptitious headphone, to listen to the monologue so that they can act along. Give them all a time to start the broadcast, and make sure their watches are at least loosely synchronised - within a minute or so.

Now gather your players. Each of them will need a radio and headphones. Hand these out (unless you’ve asked them to bring their own), and if possible test that they’re working by broadcasting a signal of your own at the chosen frequency and getting them to tune into it.

Then explain to the players what they’ll need to do, and set them free to wander and collect their tokens.

Instructions for Actors

Start broadcasting your signal at the prearranged time, and then begin acting along to it. If nobody has found you when the game is halfway over, maybe move position slightly (if you can do this without getting too close to another actor), or step up the obviousness of your acting.

When the game is over and you are broadcasting closing music, feel free to start wandering around the play area looking to “mop up” any players who haven’t realised that the game has finished.

As if it wasn’t enough that those of us aged 26 and over have our young person’s rail cards torn from our trembling hands, Tate Britain has organised a game of Art Bingo that’s only open to people aged 15 to 25. If that’s you, then you’ll be encouraged to “explore the construction and destruction of images” on the 14th of April.

However, the attempt to prevent the rest of us from exploring the construction and destruction of images has failed, failed!, because there’s a ruleset for the game online:

9. This process will continue until all 9 forms of destruction have been done.

Take that, Tate Britain! We can have fun without you! Alternatively we could just go to the other Tate for the Here We Dance exhibition, in which “bodily movements and gestures, collective actions and games are examined”, all about the use of public space for purposes including play.

It’s new ARG company Six to Start’s first public project, and it involves Hide and Seek stalwart the partly-fictional Mink Ette, but even apart from that I find it very interesting. However, my reasons for finding it interesting are almost directly opposed to those of many of its other enthusiasts, including to some extent its creators.

See this, from the press release, for example: “These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.” This is not literally true; the first, Google-maps-based, story would have been trickier a couple of years ago, but the second, Toby Litt’s “Slice”, is basically a story told in parallel blogs of the type we’ve seen since 1995, with The Spot (parallel fictional blogs before the word “blog”; a daily audience of 100,000 in 1995, when the online audience was a couple percent of what it is today).

So if statements like this are not literally true, what do they mean? Perhaps that Six to Start or many of the readers of its stories see novelty as one of the important characteristics of the project. See comments like “the sad thing is that there’s generally a real disdain for ‘linear’ storytelling, despite its huge popularity and history, and I think this has caused most people to ignore the possibilities of what could be done with presenting ‘normal’ stories in new ways.” Again this is not literally true (except perhaps in video games, where attitudes to linear storytelling are ambivalent), but it points to the idea that the exploration of new forms undertaken by “We Tell Stories” is something innovative.

This is odd for me because my reaction to the project is predicated not on perceived novelty but rather on how firmly it fits into what seems to me to be a long-running tradition of experimental text-based online fiction that verges on the gimmicky but doesn’t suffer because of it, a tradition that has Geoff Ryman’s 1996 253 as its first prominent “literary fiction” success (or, arguably, Douglas Cooper’s 1994 Delirium—but Cooper hasn’t kept the work online, so only the archaeologists care). By “gimmicky” I mean that the stories feel like they have been constructed medium-first; somebody’s seen a possible technological form for a work of fiction and then consciously created a fiction (or commissioned a writer to create a fiction) that fits that form. Regardless of their success as fiction, these works are most obviously about seeing what can be done; trying to find out what experiments will hold up in a relatively new medium (well, fifteen years old now, or you could start counting from academic darling Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story and make it twenty-one; we’re not as new as we insist on thinking). Not “how best can I tell my story?”, but “what happens if I try to tell it like this?”

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