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So you walk up a wide street, arches and big white houses all around. LOOK AT THIS, the road says. LONDON. LONDON, 2019. History book London, olden-days London, extremely-rich-people London.

You go past a big steepled grey-white church and dozens and dozens of almost-identical white houses until you come to the public-facing headquarters of RIBA, an architectural organisation so fancy that its URL is literally just “architecture.com”.

Inside there are huge staircases; there are columns. The ceiling has these kinda bevelled recesses that must have an official design name. The windows are wide, but so tall that they look narrow. There is just a whole lot of architecture going on. I mean, you know what museums look like, but in this very particular case all the details are important, the road outside, the vista, the variety of columns. There’s a desk with a guy behind it, too, and you can go past the desk and into a dimly lit gallery space. It’s free.

The show in the gallery space is by architectural research duo / artists / game designers You+Pea, and it’s called Playing the Picturesque.

There are a lot things I don't generally want to do on New Year's Day, and one of those things is: desperately try to remember a hundred short poems while occasionally trying to grab something off the floor as quickly as I can.

Which is fine, nobody asked me to.  But there's a game that asks its players to do exactly that - Uta-garuta, a Japanese game traditionally played in the first few days of the new year. So now it's 2 January, there's still a few days left to run in the Uta-garuta season (the Japanese championship is on 7 January), and GOSH it sounds like an interesting game.

It's played with a deck of cards that show 100 different five-line poems (from an anthology called the Hyakunin Isshu, which is around eight hundred years old). Each poem is split across two cards - the first three lines are printed on one card, and the last two on another. The hundred cards with the poems' openings are the reading cards; the cards with the ends of the poems are the grabbing cards.

And those card names, reading and grabbing, go a long way towards explaining how the game works. You lay out the grabbing cards on the ground, face up. A reader selects a reading card at random, and reads it aloud. All the players race to spot the card that finishes that poem off and to, well, grab it.

You'll need 3 to 5 players, and paper, pens and an envelope for everyone.

Give each player ten minutes to invent a memory of something you all did together. A party you went to, a movie you watched, a meal you ate. Something communal, something plausible but definitely untrue, something that "happened" within the last five years.

It should be a nice memory. Something low-key. Something charming. Something that could well have happened, something you kinda wish was true, something that would be true in a very slightly better version of your life.

Don't tell anyone else your memory - just write down a one-sentence summary on a strip of paper. Copy that exact sentence out once for each player. That Boxing Day when we couldn't find an open pub so we drank corner-shop beer on a bench near the river, sleeves pulled down over our fingers to keep them warm, and we saw three foxes run along the middle of the empty pavement. That night when we went out dancing and it snowed while we were inside, and we came out at two and everything was white in the streetlamps, and we were drunk and it didn't feel cold and we threw snowballs in each other's faces in the park and fell over a lot. That autumn morning when it was suddenly hot, and we went to the park and there was a power cut at the cafe so they were giving out their ice-cream free before it melted, and someone thought they were getting mint but it turned out to be pistachio and they were so sad, who was that anyway? That boat trip at sunset. That picnic where a squirrel ran up and stole a whole cupcake, what the hell. 

BREAKUP SQUAD (by Catt Small). 4 minutes.

Breakup Squad is a five-player game. I play as one of a team of three allied friends; we're trying to keep two exes away from each other at a party. The exes, controlled by rival players, are nice people but they're bad for each other. They need to stay apart for their own good. You can push other partygoers in front of them, build barriers of flesh to ensure that they stay separate; as a last-ditch effort you can just get in the way yourself. I'm playing this game at a party, and real-world crowds are around me, barriers of people I had to push through to get my turn: it feels like a good setting.

But after fifteen seconds of playing I realise: wait, no, I'm not a helpful friend at all! I'm one of the exes. And as an ex, I know what's best for me! I'm a grownup! These crowds are my enemies, these on-screen crowds and the real crowd around that wants me to fail. If I'd like to talk to someone at a party, then who are my monstrous friends to try to stop me? And all of a sudden I push my way towards an intensely adorable on-screen figure, my long-lost love, and we meet. Ah, it's so great to catch up! Why haven't we hung out lately? I high-five the real-world stranger who played the other ex: WELL DONE US. "This won't go well", the screen informs me, but it already has.