Game Changers: Another Way to Play

This special exhibition will provide a more in-depth look at the creative process behind game design. Visitors will discover how traditional forms of chess, billiards and mazes continue to influence designers making exciting new games today. Archival imagery will provide a timeline tracing how these game types have evolved, and there will be a selection of contemporary examples – both physical and digital - on show for visitors to try, including:

• Four regional variations of Orthogonal/Diagonal, Nova Jiang’s modified chess sets which showed at Now Play This in 2016. Inspired by traditional Bauhaus chess sets, the pieces’ physical shape indicates how they should move

• A playable installation of Zach Gage’s Really Bad Chess, a digital game that recreates chess with a random selection of pieces for each player

• Home Turf, by Ed Saperia, a distorted billiards table that combines the normal challenges of billiards with a deliberately difficult shape

• INKS by State of Play, an on-screen game within a physical pinball-style environment – derived from more traditional forms of billiards and bagatelle

• Maze, a challenging, two-player table-top maze game by sculptor Alexander Berchert