Folk Games Workshops

Photo of a workshop run at the Overkill Festival. Here we're playing the game Fives.
Photo of a workshop run at the Overkill Festival. Here we're playing the game Fives. Photo of us playing Ninja at Abertay. Photo of a game of T-Rex Ninja at the Overkill Festival. Photo of us playing Blind Ninja at Abertay.
Part of my Game Design as Play: Players as Designers research project.

A series of workshops exploring folk games. The basic format is: we play some games and we talk a bit about them - where they came from, what they mean to us, how some of us maybe learned the same game with a different name, or with different rules... And we possibly create some new variations of our own.

What I love about folk games is the way that - because they are primarily passed on by word of mouth - we carry them with us. They are part of our personal histories, and we have our own ways of playing them, our own names for different games. So you'll see the same games played all around the world, but in a variety of different forms; different names, different rules.

And because there's no official ruleset written anywhere for these games, it's very natural for players to make modifications and create their own versions of the games they play.

List of workshops

Please get in touch if you'd like to attend a workshop, or if you'd like me to run a workshop for an event you're planning.

I've also created a website collecting the folk games I've played at these workshops.