As I Was Saying / 2018 / as part of Matheson Marcault
We made As I Was Saying for Goodrich Castle, in Herefordshire. It’s a game that families and visitor groups can borrow when they come to the castle, and it prompts them to explore the castle thoroughly. Each player gets a deck of sentence ending cards (bound together so none of them go astray in the windy castle!), and each group also takes a booklet filled with illustrations of people who genuinely lived in the castle eight hundred years earlier.
At each stop around the castle, one player reads aloud the opening sentence of something that one of those people might say - and everyone else races to find an ending to the sentence they’re happy with. Different groups can go for historical accuracy or for humour, as they prefer.
We worked with visitor services and English Heritage historians, and with illustrator Ilaria Urbinati, game designer Ivan Gonzalez, and researcher Sarah Cole (who found out and subsequently proved to the satisfaction of sceptical historians that the countess had a pet pig). Photo of Goodrich Castle by Robert Moranelli.