London games thing
Y'know, I remember when I used to use this space as somewhere to be annoyed or to link to interesting things, but no longer, apparently. Now it's all very-intermittent updates focusing on things I've done that you're not interested in. On which note, I'm currently involved with this, which is associated with Hide and Seek, a festival of social games and playful experiences running at the Southbank Centre from June 26 to 29. The Sandpit involves monthly playing and playtesting meetings wherein we make up games, play games, and (hopefully) polish games to reappear at the festival itself.

I'm curating the games for the next one, which is taking place at Shunt, in the tunnels under London Bridge, on Wednesday 16 April. It's themed around "Spying and Lying", so come along if you feel like passing secret messages, smuggling objects, being assigned numbers and possibly having an excuse to wear a fedora. And if there's a game that you'd like to run (or just a ruleset you'd like to send in in case someone else wants to run it), let me know. They don't need to be big running-around games with actors and fireworks; low-key sit-in-a-corner games, and hidden play-secretly-through-the-night games, are just as good.

Related: Iglab, the Bristol equivalent of the Sandpit events; Come Out and Play, the New York equivalent of the festival; some photos from the last (listening-themed) event, though unfortunately Shunt's whole "being a maze of dimly-lit underground tunnels" thing doesn't really lend itself to action photography so there's very little documentation of the games themselves.

Coming next week, I tell you about how I seem to have more bags of rice in the kitchen cupboard than I remember buying or can ever possibly eat, and point you to a new blog wherein I will document the life of each individual grain of rice as I attempt to find a new home for it.

Edit: bateleur reminds me to mention thesandpit, the livejournal feed of the Sandpit blog, essays and ruleset. The blog part is kinda London-centric; if anyone would like to keep up with the essays and rulesets but doesn't want to sit through all the overexcited London events stuff, kick me and maybe I'll finally get around to sorting out separate feeds for different categories.