For most of the past 30 years, live games have straddled a bizarre divide. They have, simultaneously, been a niche subcategory of an already niche pursuit, while also being enjoyed by millions across the world daily.
The latter, you’ll know as playground games like hide and seek and tag; the former, if you know it at all, as LARPing, or live-action role-playing – the practice of playing dungeons and dragons-style role-playing games in the real world. Both take play into the outside world, away from tabletops or video games, but they do so in a way less focused on pure skill and athletic ability than conventional sports.
But over the past five years, the divide has been shrinking. Larping, rechristened “live gaming”, has gone through the same broadening of appeal as board games did before them. The rules are streamlined, the games made shorter and more accessible, and the role-playing element, often a stumbling point for newcomers, diminished slightly.
And that progress continues today. I went to my first live game four years ago, where I slayed vampires in a disused metalworks in Islington. The game was a hit, but took all evening, switched through multiple modes of play and required players to get into the spirit of, well, vampire hunting. At the time, it lived on the accessible end of what the live game scene offered, and I loved it, but the less geeky friend I had brought still felt a bit out of place.
That didn’t happen the next time I brought a friend to a game. Last year, I went to two games run by the young company Fire Hazard: CityDash and Undercover. Run by Gwyn Morfey, Fire Hazard takes live games seriously, and unlike most other groups running them around Britain, does them nearly constantly. This week, Fire Hazard have taken both games to the Adelaide Fringe festival, but in a normal week, they will run several sessions throughout the week, as well as bespoke games for businesses, as team building events, and larger parties looking for a personalised experience.
CityDash takes up the bulk of the group’s time, and it is absolutely brilliant. Like a cross between a high-octane scavenger hunt and a large-scale game of Hide and Seek, it can change the way you look at your city streets for ever. The game sees players, in groups of up to five, given a map of their area, a smartphone app, and an hour to get as many points as possible.
Those points are won by solving cryptic questions that pop up on the smartphone screen, running to the correct square on the map, and hunting for a tiny sticker with a four letter code. Enter the code, win points; enter it before all the other teams, win more points. Solve a particularly hard clue, win more points still.
The clues themselves aren’t particularly tricky (“Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s a clue!”, for instance, should hint to players to search around the outside of the only comic shop in their vicinity), but solving them in the middle of an hour of near-constant running can be.
Complicating matters are the four guards wandering around the neighbourhood. If they see you, and get close enough to read the letters pinned to your chest and back you lose points.
When we played, in Soho in London on a sunny weekend afternoon, the crowds helped the guards almost as much as they helped us. Both sides could blend in to a large group easily enough, but start moving quickly – as you have to to earn enough points to stay competitive – and you would stand out from the Saturday shoppers easily enough. Of course, it helps if you pay attention. We were caught by one guard who simply strolled up to us as we huddled over the map, trying to find the next clue.
By the end of the game, our team had adopted pseudo-militaristic strategies, with a point-man peering round corners before signalling to the rest of the team to sprint across wide passages. That, plus my fairly good knowledge of Soho’s backstreets from a misspent adolescence, was enough to secure second place.
But a lot of CityDash is about pure speed. Getting to as many clues as possible, as quickly as possible, is the best way to win the game. For those who want a more cerebral approach, Fire Hazard’s other game, Undercover, could be more appealing.
The game takes the same software as CityDash, but puts it to a completely different use. Rather than sprinting around the city, players have to use basic spycraft to leave, find, and intercept small pieces of information around the city. If you’ve ever wanted the experience of pretending to tie your shoelace while surreptitiously sticking a scrap of paper to the underside of a park bench, it’s the game for you.
Other times, your challenge will be to follow the simple instructions left by a previous pair of players to find the clue they hid. But you have to move fast, because a third pair will be trying to intercept the drop themselves – they may not have the same instructions as you, but if they were good, they’ll have spotted the other players dropping the package in in the first place.
Aside from the main game of hot-potato, players are also tasked with meeting up with the games organisers (without letting slip they’re spies, obviously), and dropping a codeword to receive yet more hidden information. Being told to meet up with “Agent Condor” in Leicester Square and drop the codeword “Bluebird” is fun enough, but turning the corner to find that the agent is undercover as a literal bird, handing out leaflets, added a sublime ridiculousness. Having to work out a way to instigate a conversation that wouldn’t blow my cover was harder still.
But while the highs of Undercover are glorious, it fails to gel into the same perfection as CityDash. There’s a fundamental tension between the goal – get the most points – and the style of play, which is slow, methodical and deliberate. Ultimately, it’s hard to shake the feeling that hiding a package shoddily but quickly, and so moving on to the next task as rapidly as possible, is a better strategy for winning than finding the perfect hiding spot.
If you can run, can read a map and can find four friends and a spare hour, there’s no good reason not to play CityDash when it comes to a city near you. And even if it doesn’t, take a look at the live games that are happening around where you live: in Manchester and Preston, for instance, you can play The Escape Room; in Bristol, Puzzlair offers a similar experience; and in Essex, you can spend two and a half hours fleeing zombies in a secret nuclear bunker with The Last Survivors.
It’s a small world now, but there’s something for everyone in it already.
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