I had a fantastic time doing Free London's Monsters! at Sandpit #8 at the ICA.
There was the usual SMS gateway failure of course - never work with children, animals or cheap SMS gateways in time sensitive contexts - which meant that the 50 monsters sent by text message didn't show up on Thumbprint till about three hours later.
But somehow that just brought out the liveness of the event.
While I was sitting with my head in my hands in despair about five minutes after we started (some day I'm going to get my own SMS gateway that is actually reliable!) my evening was being saved by the ingenuity of the illustrator Edward Ward and the enthusiasm and sense of fun on the Sandpit participants.
Edward handed out little text message sized pieces of card for people to write on, and when he started to disappear under a blizzard of monsters coming back, he shared out felt tips - from the fluffy orange pencil case - paper and monsters and got people to illustrate someone else's monster.
That's a new game in itself, and over the course of the evening two groups of people at the event (Emily and Ali were one, and another mystery group) also invented Monsterquences.
Here are two Monsterquences monsters: one two
And this is the Liber Monstrorum [Book of Monsters]
I enjoyed myself so much, in fact, that I'm going to go down to London specially for Sandpit #9 this Saturday, to see what I can learn from taking part in some of the other games.
Sandpit #9 is Saturday 7th March, at the Barbican from 7pm.
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