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Essays, Events, Games, Words

Now Play This: #128CharGames

Leave a ball on a quiet pavement. Players take bets on whether each passer-by will kick it.

Take a glass of orange juice. Add a tsp. of salt each turn. Sip. First to spit out drink loses.

Back in 2013, an awful lot of people on Twitter made up games designed to fit in a single tweet. They shared them using the hashtag #128CharGames, in a project initiated by game designer and conceptual artist Zach Gage. Gage wrote up the results of his experiment here – dozens and dozens of minimal games and ideas, all folded down into just a sentence or two.

The project itself was pretty great, and so were a lot of the games that people designed. So as part of Now Play This, our September event at Somerset House, we got permission from Gage and the designers of our favourite contributions to print up their games on index cards and show as part of an exhibit of instructional games and artworks. And then we left a little pile of index cards on a table, thinking that a few people might want to add their own.

Events, Games, Physical, Site-specific

Now Play This

Click through the gallery above to see photos from the event.

On 4-6 September, we ran Now Play This, a weekend of games at Somerset House in London with George Buckenham and Jo Summers.

Over the course of three days we involved more than 70 speakers,  game designers, writers and performers, and drew an audience of over a thousand players.