New zine for Now Play This

Recently I took making it up as we go along to Now Play This (sadly, the final iteration of the festival), and as usual I created a new zine to go with it, now uploaded to itch. You can find it at the making it up as we go along zine (pdf) download link, previous zines are still available at the zine archive link.

For this iteration I wanted to rework the suggested rules at the back of the zine, as I'd found the original suggestions were often hard to incorporate into a game without a bit of thought and creative rewriting. Which worked against their purpose as a way of offering new players pre-made rules that they could slot into the game to get a feel for how it works.

So this time round I tried to make all the suggestions concise and clear, and avoided anything that would require players to insert their own choice of variable into the rule, e.g.:

"Draw a THING or write a word on the game board (where the game board can be a piece of paper, card, etc.)."

became:

"Draw an animal on the board."

I think the new suggestions work a lot better (and I've checked: they can all fit on a blank playing card when written with a chunky sharpie). A few of my favourites:

The clock’s ticking
You have just 10 seconds to perform all 5 rules.

Pause for applause
Clap your hands.

Chaotic climax
Simultaneously, all players play all discarded rules, one after the other. The game ends once the last rule has been played.

Photo credit: Ben Catchpole