{"id":1149,"date":"2018-09-03T14:29:31","date_gmt":"2018-09-03T14:29:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/?p=1149"},"modified":"2018-09-03T15:37:00","modified_gmt":"2018-09-03T15:37:00","slug":"as-i-was-saying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/2018\/09\/03\/as-i-was-saying\/","title":{"rendered":"As I Was Saying…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Goodrich Castle (photo above by Robert Moranelli<\/a>)\u00a0 is an amazing place – a set of walls and towers and castle fragments that Wordsworth considered the “noblest ruin in Herefordshire”, now cared for by English Heritage.<\/p>\n

And this summer, we made a game for it, to run as part of the castle’s on-site family interpretation. If you visit, you can check it out for free from the visitor centre – something to play while you walk around and explore.<\/p>\n

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It’s a card game for families and groups to play as they explore the castle, called\u00a0As I Was Saying.\u00a0<\/em>It draws on the real history of the castle, and the people who were there around 1296 and 1297 – from countesses to clerks and coachmen.<\/p>\n

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It’s very simple to play – part of our aim was that people should be able to pick up the rules quickly, and not have to make a special effort to learn. It was also important to make sure that the physical components were easy to carry – nobody wants to have a deck of cards blown away from them on a castle rooftop – so we ended up with a gameplay structure where each player has their own different set of cards that they keep throughout, bound together as a booklet or even with a metal loop on a lanyard.<\/p>\n

At different places in the castle, one player – often a parent – picks a person who lived in the castle and reads out a description of them from a little wire-bound set of illustrations. Then they read out a sentence, something that that person might have said…<\/p>\n

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Everyone else races through their bundle of cards to find a good way to end the sentence. There’s no single “correct” answer – instead, players can choose between trying to get it right, and just being funny. It’s a format that\u00a0takes inspiration from flipbooks, Consequences and card games like\u00a0Apples to Apples<\/em>, and it’s situated in the real-life castle where those people lived over 800 years ago.<\/p>\n

We enlisted researcher Sarah Cole<\/a>, and worked with her and with English Heritage historians to identify a list of people who lived in the castle, and what they might have done with their day. Iv\u00e1n Gonzalez<\/a>\u00a0helped out as well, mostly with additional writing.<\/p>\n

The character booklet includes extra information about all the people we featured – what their jobs were, what their daily habits might have been, and how we know. These overviews combine with gorgeous illustrations from Ilaria Urbinati<\/a>, based carefully on historical references, to help bring the 1290s to life – and of course, being in an actual castle doesn’t hurt.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Goodrich Castle (photo above by Robert Moranelli)\u00a0 is an amazing place – a set of walls and towers and castle fragments that Wordsworth considered the “noblest ruin in Herefordshire”, now cared for by English Heritage. And this summer, we made a game for it, to run as part of the castle’s on-site family interpretation. If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1150,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,9,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1149"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1161,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions\/1161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}