10 games to play at Now Play This

Now Play This is a festival of experimental game design running from 6 - 14 April as part of the London Games Festival. In 2019 we're looking at a theme of community: multiplayer games that create a community around them when they're played; games that articulate the experiences of a particular community; even the wider game-making community itself.

We've got forty games running throughout the festival, not counting the board games lounge, the workshops, and the games that we're helping people to design through the week. So there's a lot of different things to see! But if you're coming along, here's ten things that you might want to keep a particular eye out for...

Create your own emoji

Have you ever wished that there was a greater variety of emoji? Are your feelings so complex that the usual range of "smiling face", "crying face" and all the other standards can't express them? Well, Emma Winston's new game My Face When gives you the chance to solve this problem. It's a competitive emoji-making game, where you and three other people race to drag eyes and mouths and symbols onto a big yellow face as quickly as possible, to express how you feel in a whole load of different unlikely situations.

my-face-when.png

INVENT A NEW LANGUAGE

Glyphsprache is a game that we've commissioned with independent games festival A MAZE. / Berlin, and it's premiering simultaneously at both festivals. You play by making up symbols and giving them a meaning. They’re then added to a dictionary shared by both festivals - where you and other visitors can use them to piece together glyph poems that visitors to either festival can read.

TACKLE THE OCTOPAD

Do you remember the NES, the Nintendo Entertainment System from the 1980s? If so, you might want to try out Octopad by Patrick LeMieux, which takes a classic NES and invites you to play - but instead of giving you eight buttons on one controller, it has eight controllers with one button each, so you're going to need to cooperate with others to play. Now, who's got the button to press to go right?

Patrick LeMieux Octopad

TIMETRAVEL TRHOUGH CYBERSPACE

Molly Soda and Aquma's Wrong Box is a digital game that revisits what it was like to be on the internet in the early 2000s. What has changed in the last fifteen years? What has been forgotten? What might still be there, waiting?

Wrong Box - Molly Soda, Aquma

BOARD GAMES LOUNGE

Feel like something a little more traditional? Perfect: we've got a board games lounge you can drop into any time from 8 - 14 April. Keep a special eye out on Monday 8 April between 11.00 and 14.00, when you'll be able to join Kenechukwu Ogbuagu of Nibcard Games to play a whole selection of Nibcard's games based on different aspects of Nigerian life, including Safe Journi, which will be available in the board games lounge for the whole week.

Safe Journi by Kenechukwu Ogbuagu

REALISE YOUR DREAMS

Or why not come on Friday 12 April, when Media Molecule will be running a series of workshops throughout the day? The workshops will give everyone the chance to see their upcoming Dreams, which will let players try out other people's games - as well as creating their own.

Dreams, Media Molecule

HIT THE LIGHTS

Flux is a new piece from We Throw Switches, premiering at Now Play This. On the face of it, it's a super simple game. There's a table with buttons - a real physical table, with real physical buttons. Different parts of the table light up. When a light goes on, you push the corresponding button as fast as you can. Easy, right? But the game's joy is in how adaptable it is, how you can play on your own or with two or a huge group crowded around the table, making up your own rules about what to do and how to play.

Flux by We Throw Stitches

GET LOST IN A MEDITATION MAZE

This one is going to be... hard to miss, so in fact, you probably don't need to try very hard to look out for it. Transit Meditation is a great big labyrinth made of security barriers, in the middle of the very large Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court. Walk slowly into the centre; turn around; walk out again. It's been designed by New York-based game designer and conceptual artist Zach Gage, specially commissioned for Now Play This.

Transit Meditation, Zach Gage

CONDUCT A HANDDRAWN RAILWAY

Alexander Perrin's Short Trip is a gentle tram ride of a game. As the player, you take charge of a scenic railway that winds its way up and down hills, past windmills, trees, gorgeous buildings - and tram stops where you can, if you choose, let passengers join you. It's beautifully hand-drawn, part of Perrin's ongoing experimentation into interactive illustrations.

Short Trip, Alexander Perrin

TAKE SOME TIME OUT

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the games? Want to take some time out from playing? Well, why not join Emilie Reed in our zine library? She's curated a great selection of books and zines relating to the themes of the festival, so you can just sit down and read - or if you'd rather, you can respond to prompts and make drawings or stories or notes to add to the new zines that we're creating across the course of the festival.

Book Now

Now Play This 2019 takes place from 6 - 14 April