Tag Archives: gamecamp

Short creativity and clay-imagination

Posted by under game design

Gamecamp 5 was last weekend (May 12th) and went about as smoothly as one of these events can. The schedule was filled with great sessions from clever people, and once the day was begun there was a lack of logistical nightmares that made it one of the first GameCamps that I’ve been able to relax at (I’ve been on the committee since GameCamp 2). Plus many old friends and new contacts, excellent food, and a spirit of cooperation, collaboration and the free sharing of ideas that makes the British games business such a lovely place to work.

There’s a tradition at GameCamp that we always give out a neat game-related freebie on the door. As time has gone on we’ve specifically tried to find items that will act as ice-breakers and will encourage attendees to talk to strangers and—even better—play games against them. Last year everyone got a random Lego minifig with a three-line game attached: I blogged about it here.

This year we left it a bit late and by the time we started to phone suppliers we found we’d missed their deadline for printing, threading, engraving, enamelling or whatever else. Oops. It looked like we weren’t going to have anything for the event. Then the week before GameCamp I was in our local toyshop and noticed little packs of modelling clay like Plasticine, six different colours to a pack. Not as cool as Lego but undeniably creative…

So I proudly present the second Gamecamp social game:

Rock Scissors Wha…?

Challenge another player. The challengee chooses the clay-colour for the contest.Ask someone to referee. They shout Go! Players have 45 seconds to sculpt something:

a) recognizable and the correct colour;
b) using all your clay of that colour;
c) that would win a fight against the other player’s sculpture.

After 45 seconds the referee declares which sculpture would win the fight. Artistic merit only counts if both players sculpt the same thing.

The winner gets all the loser’s clay of that colour. At the end the person with the heaviest ball of clay wins an underwhelming prize.


Like the Lego game at last year’s GameCamp, ‘Rock Scissors Wha…?’ is designed to be creative and social, not big or important enough to distract from the main business of the day but fun enough that if you found yourself sitting next to someone you didn’t know, issuing a challenge came naturally. We didn’t end up with an eventual winner—which is a shame because David Hayward had dug up a prize that was truly underwhelming—but I think that in a very real sense everyone was the winner.

Rock Scissors Wha…?’ is a blend of two themes that show up over and over again in my work: creativity and simplicity. The game doesn’t tell you what to make, that’s completely up to you, and I really hoped that people would increase their power-levels over the day, so the final show-down would be on the level of Cthulhu versus the Heat Death of the Universe. It was huge fun to watch people play, partly to watch people engage their creativity and imagination as they sculpted.

Once Upon a Time and Baron Munchausen both challenge their players to create stories from fresh cloth: they supply templates and guides, but they never dictate. And I’ve been working on a new creative game with the amazing Jenifer Toksvig—the working title is ‘Framed!’ but our design brief is to make a drawing game that isn’t Pictionary. Because pretty much every drawing game is either Pictionary (Draw Something is just asynchronous Pictionary, like Words With Friends is asynchronous Scrabble) or Exquisite Corpse, and Pictionary is charades with pencils.

The other theme is simplicity. This is the fourth game I’ve designed in a year that’s small enough to fit on the back of a business card. The whole of ‘Rock Scissors Wha…?’ is a hundred words. Condensing a game down into its barest essence requires mind-bending discipline and it has professional relevance as well: I’ve spent the last few weeks on a fantastic project writing riddles and puzzles short enough to fit into a tweet (140 characters). I’m trying to get permission from the client to write a couple of blogposts about that, if only so I can start an article with the words “I’ve been writing for Stephen Fry again.”

Drop Present

Posted by under game design

Almost a year ago I was part of the team that ran BoardGameCamp in London. My contribution to the day was organising a game-design competition sponsored by Cadbury the chocolate people and co-arranged with the good folks at PHD Media.

The prize was to have your game-design printed on the back of the 2011 Santa Selection Box, a boxed set of favourite Cadbury products that’s released every year in time for Christmas. Cadbury puts out about six million of these boxes. Yes, six million. For comparison, the original Halo has sold about 6.4 million.

The winner was Present Drop, a clever tile-placing game for 2-4 players with some nice Eurogame overtones, simple enough for kids to understand but with enough strategy to be interesting for real games-players too. It was designed by Matt Green and Kevan Davis. You know Kevan. He did Urban Dead and Chore Wars.

A year on, and the selection box with the game on it is in UK shops. At Tesco it costs £1.50, which gets you about £3-worth of chocolate, a spiffy game and a donation to the Make-A-Wish Foundation as well. Which is, you have to admit, a heck of a deal.

So show Kevan and Matt (and Cadbury and Make-A-Wish) some support and pick one up when you’re doing the shopping. Or pick up several and give them to your friends. I’m your friend, aren’t I?

(More about Present Drop here.)

I made a game for GameCamp with Lego

Posted by under game design

So we did another GameCamp. Number four in an ongoing series of games-based unconferences, the third with the current management team, and twice the size of the previous one. It feels like an age ago now but in fact it was only a month. It went really well—we relocated to the roomier and more central spaces of London South Bank University, and a quick google will bring up many happy reports and postmortems. We are chuffed.

There will be another GameCamp in the autumn but that’s not what I wanted to write about. It’s a mini-tradition that we give away neat freebies to everyone who comes to GameCamp: for GameCamp 3 (‘BoardGameCamp’) it was a pair of dice custom-engraved with the unconference’s logo and motif. And we had to find a way to top that.

What I did was… You’ve seen the Lego collectible minifigs, right? Sixteen to a series, but you don’t know which figure you’re getting till you open the pack. And very cool offbeat non-standard figures too—zombies, clowns, Mexican wrestlers, aliens, sports stars and even a dude in a gorilla suit. They are excellent.

So I went into a toy-shop and bought three hundred of them, at which point my inner eight-year-old fell over and died of joy. When I was eight I knew that grown-ups secretly did stuff like this. Now I had proved myself right. Both of me wins.

Then I designed a little game to play with the minifigs. How little? Small enough to fit on a sticky label on the front of the pack. Three rules, each one line long. And because we wanted to give people an excuse to mix and talk to strangers, it’s a social game—and because we wanted people to keep playing it, there was a prize at the end.

Here are the rules:

  1. Make deals with other players to swap a piece of your minifig for a piece of theirs.
  2. With each player, you can EITHER swap one piece OR exchange your entire minifig.
  3. The player whose minifig looks most like them at the end of the day wins a prize.

We did get some spectacularly clever and accurate entries. A couple of people threatened to wrap themselves in loo-paper to resemble their mummy minifigs, but nobody went through with it—I’d said to the committee that if anyone painted their face yellow they were getting an instant win from me, but nobody did that either. I didn’t get the name of the eventual winner but she’d come in full fantasy LARP gear complete with swords, and her minifig was spot on. Somewhere there’s a photograph but I don’t have it.

The game fulfilled its objectives brilliantly: it was an ice-breaker and conversation-starter, and people broke out of their usual groups to approach strangers on the pretext of swapping pieces, but it wasn’t so absorbing that it detracted from the main business of the day. Plus we got to be the unconference that gave away free Lego.

The only downside, really, is that we’re going to have to come up with something better for GameCamp 5.

Spaaace 199

Posted by under Uncategorized

1. Gamecamp is this weekend. It’s been sold out for weeks, but if you’re in the London area and want to come, there’s still a chance you can get a returned ticket by clicking here. And if you’ve got a ticket but now can’t attend, please get in touch and let us know so we can give your place to someone else.

2. I’ve recorded an episode of the lovely podcast Shift Run Stop, which is due to go live tomorrow. I’ve no idea what Roo and Leila have squeezed in and cut out, but we talked about Gamecamp (inevitably), my Baron Munchausen game, the problem of integrating games and stories, the problems with Facebook games (including some hints about my current Sekrit Projekt), breaking the Guinness World record for non-stop AD&D, meeting one’s idols, how to name children, and much more. They’ll also be running a competition for a deluxe copy of Baron Munchausen and some Dragon Warriors stuff.

Proper updates to follow when I’m a bit less busy, not moving office and not holding a one-month-old.

Carry on Camping

Posted by under conference, game design

Two years ago the Guardian hosted a most unusual one-day conference, Gamecamp, in east London. It was an exceptional day—I wrote about it here—with a lot of brilliant and fascinating people bringing together some very different experiences and expertise about games and gaming. There was also a pre-release copy of Rock Band, which was good, and a lack of beer, which wasn’t.

Gamecamp 2 has been formally announced for 8th May 2010, and as with the last event the tickets are free but limited. This time it isn’t being organised by the Guardian, it’s being organised by… well, me. As part of a team featuring the absurdly talented Katy Lindemann, Mark Simpkins, Rachel Clarke, Rain Ashford and Phillip Trippenbach, I hasten to add.

Gamecamp is organised on the *camp model, meaning it won’t have keynotes or invited speakers. But it has an exceptional venue (eBay/Paypal’s wonderful UK headquarters on the banks of the Thames in Richmond), a couple of great sponsors, and some confirmed attendee names that have already caused broad smiles and a spontaneous outbreak of OMG OMGs among the committee.

If you want to attend then the first tranche of tickets will be released at noon on Friday 12th March. There are only 150 tickets total. They will go very quickly.

For more information see the Gamecamp website; for the breakingest news follow Gamecamp on Twitter.

(We are still looking for sponsors. If you’re in a position to offer us some funds to cover the cost of, say, lunch and thereby earning the love and admiration of an important sector of the British games community then please drop me or anyone else on the committee a line.)