First London Community Game

Man oh man oh man. Saturday's community game was, in my humble opinion, SERIOUSLY FREAKING AWESOME (frawsome!). Around 120 of the most energetic, most creative, most irreverent, most wannabe-nudist people in London showed up in the City to get their Go Game on and it turned out to be one of the funniest and FUNNEST community games we've ever had the pleasure to run (yes, I know that's not a word, but it deserves to be). Chris and I are so psyched that the first London Go Game went off with a bang, thanks to the contributions of so many cool people. Here's a quick recap of how things went down, and few of our our favorite creative submissions from the day. Get ready for some hilariousness.


We kicked things off a little after one at CosmoBar, a cool little spot in the City with squishy couches and bike wheels hanging in the windows. Thanks to the lovely folks over at Hide and Seek (I see you Rosie, Puyan and Abigail!), the check-in went way more smoothly than expected. We ended up with 20 teams of raring-to-Go gamers, some who were friends beforehand and some who became fast friends after showing off their talents AND their naughty bits.

Chris and I sent them off to explore the neighborhood of St. John Street, St. John's Lane, St. John's Square, and some other main streets and back alleys that had nothing to do with that dude who baptized Jesus or whatever. We had location-based puzzles hidden all over the place as well as a few of our secret actors stationed in pubs nearby, including a hungry pirate, a space age air hostess just in from Neptune, an undercover spy with a secret mission, and a weird psychic lady. Can't tell you any more privileged information, or I'd have to do something unspeakably horrific to you.

We set up some head-to-head challenges between teams that showcased the knowledge, the ingenuity, and the random and totally useless talents of players. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see these since we were holed up in CosmoBar pulling strings behind the scenes, but we heard some great stories about trying to get pubs full of people to serenade a random stranger, group handstands in the plaza, and a geography trivia smackdown.

The best part though: the INCREDIBLE creativity and willingness-to-really-and-I-mean-REALLY-go-there demonstrated by the players in the judgable missions. Chris and I were cackling embarrassingly loudly to ourselves while preparing the photos and videos for presentation and a bunch of them truly brought the house down. We'd love to show them all to you here, but that would take a loooong time. So we're forcing ourselves to narrow them down, which is like picking your favorite child, but we've selected for you The Go Game Team's Top Five Video Submissions from London's First Ever Community Game (TGGTT5VSfLFECG).

A quick note to keep in mind: despite what the impressive dance moves, Spielberg-level video production, ingenious plot ideas, and Oscar-quality acting might have you believe, all these incredible videos were created on-the-spot in about fifteen minutes by teams in the Go Game based on an open-ended prompt from HQ. You might view these and think, 'I could never be that creative.' Well, you'd be wrong. We've seen literally thousands of teams come up with photos and videos that are just as hilarious and smart and entertaining. The Go Game challenges players to put their brains together and come up with something brilliant, and we're never disappointed. The only thing we've done is add sound effects, which we do as part of the ending presentation anyway. Chris also added a few visual effects just for fun, which wouldn't happen in a real game. But they were already perfect beforehand. And now enough with the blather, on to TGGTT5VSfLFECG!


In no particular order, our Top Five:

1. Team Quartette Tres Bien channels their inner Tom Cruise and recreates the Ides of March through dance. Julius Caesar was never this cool.



2. Team Go For It recreates the infamous scene from Dam Busters! I'll be honest - I had absolutely no idea what was going on here, but all the Brits in the room went wild. We immediately ran home and watched the original. Major kudos go to the "bomb" in this movie; he was THE BOMB.



3. Team A Question of Thought killed it with this submission in the video game category. They didn't just do Double Dragon, they went with the Industrial Sector level. Chris went immediately home to play hours of Double Dragon.



4. Team Band of Badgers created this truly epic production of NosfINGeratu, which took us a little while to realize was spelled to highlight the FINGER in the middle. Duh. Anyway, I'm not sure if I've ever been so impressed by a Finger Movie. Check out the black and white video mode and the lightning flashes special effects. Incredible.



5. We'll end with another wow-factor video game submission from Team The Magnificent Six and a Half who did this ridiculously awesome recreation of the Doom video game. Chris went a little wild with adding the special effects, which is funny to see although it was great without it too.



Just because we love you, we're going to add in a bonus video that didn't make it to the judging on Saturday because we only had time to show one submission from each team. But going through the media afterwards, Chris and I were extremely entertained by the sexy moves in this dance recreation of Henry the VIII and his six wives by Team Sajjx. LOVE it.



We hope you enjoyed our Top Five. We really enjoyed running this game and getting blown away by the creativity and ingenuity of the players. Sign up on our mailing list for news of the next community game and you can star in your own Go Game video too! Thanks for reading everyone!

-- Mei and Chris