Introduction

      Good games are like good jokes: they get remembered and passed on from person to person. But sometimes they get forgotten. This book is about remembering the best games we’ve ever known. Games are good for our souls. They are magic recipes for cooking up a good time. Once you know the rules you can bring any situation to life. People crave contact. People crave jollity. People crave games.

      This book sets out to prove that you can play games anywhere—on the beach, having dinner with friends, at a barbecue, with your family at Christmas. It’s designed to equip you with loads of simple, memorable games that you can share at any moment of the day.

      The Games Renaissance starts here.

      Games and Me

      I’ve been obsessed with games since I was ten, when I started a club with other kids living nearby. Our club was about one thing only: playing games. We had go-kart races, water fights and football matches that lasted long into the night. We built rafts that we sailed down the local river, sold junk on the street and played wide games in the local park, which was a grassed-over quarry with steep sides called the Brickie. It was a wild time of dusky evenings, confusing crushes and grazed knees. Throughout, being the bossy eldest of four, I got a taste for being in charge and a feeling for what makes the best games great.

      As a teenager, I wanted to be an actor so, every Saturday morning, I commuted from St Albans to a drama school in Islington where I learnt ‘acting’ games. These were different from the Boy’s Own world of the Club. They were less about heroism and dousing your enemy with a water bomb and more about being spontaneous and inventive. These games encouraged creativity and collaboration. After each class I would practically run back to the station, flushed with hope and exhilaration. I was discovering how the theatre was another version of the Club. As a student I discovered the work of Théâtre de Complicité and saw how they used games to create imaginative and breathtaking works of theatre. Games were a force in their own right. After leaving university I became a theatre director and have been researching and playing games ever since.

      A few years ago I started to share the games I had learnt with my friends and family. I discovered they were infectious. At the same time I began asking people to teach me gam es they knew. I slowly began to amass a collection and the result is this book.

      My project is simple: to get grown-ups playing games.

      Now, more than ever, we are looking for things to do that are active, communal and affordable: camping, ballroom dancing, knitting, home baking, wild swimming and roller discos are all on the up. People are searching for activities that are easy on the environment, big on fun and which have a whiff of nostalgia for a lost golden age. Games answer this need.

      Most of the games in this book are short—fifteen, twenty minutes, half an hour. Played with large numbers of people they can take longer, but my aim is to show that games don’t need to be an ordeal. They can come from nowhere and can be played spontaneously with minimum preparation.

      All the games in the book have been tested and many are prefaced with an account of how I came to know them, as well as things to watch out for when playing them and occasional references to their historical origin. There are hundreds, even thousands, of games in the world. There are many that I’ve been forced to leave out. The games that have made it into this book are in the Rolls-Royce category; they are games that I have played and that I know really work.

      Where Do Games Come From?

      Games are deeply lodged in our culture and history. They have always reflected the beliefs, fears and hopes of an age. Knucklebones grew out of the fortune-teller’s bag of tricks and hopscotch is a distant relation of forgotten legends describing labyrinths and mazes. The earliest record we have of game playing