A description of urban games to be used at the Transeuropa Festival.

1. Urban Games
What if you could discover different cultures and cities through feeling them, seeing them, hearing them and
even touching them? What if you could take part in activities where you could discover these cultures in the
nooks and crannies of your city, play with people from cities across Europe and win funky prizes? We’ve
created mini games where you can do just that!
Taking place in 12 cities across the continent from Amsterdam to Warsaw, from a storytelling bus to a
caravan of the commons, from rediscovering the city through the eyes of refugees by bike to repurposing
economic alternatives through a treasure hunt, the Transeuropa Festival helps people imagine, demand
and enact new ways for citizens to connect across border on transnational issues.
Urban games will take place during the festival where people will discover different
cultures and cities through the different senses and through the eyes of our imaginary
characters and go on missions competing with others in games taking place in other
European cities, using a mixture of geolocation and photo sharing. In collaboration with
Bologna Games Analysis & Design Lab, EA Bologna, EA Amsterdam and EA Barcelona,
and it could be with your city too!
Urban games are a fun and exciting way to discover your neighbourhood in new ways, but
also find out about how people live in other cities through the different missions! You’ll get to
play not just with people in your city but with participants from cities across the four corners
of Europe! You’ll get to imagine new ways of living using all of your senses!

2. A sense of
Europe
What if you could discover different cultures and cities
through feeling them, seeing them, hearing them and even
touching them? We’ve created mini games where you can
do just that!
Participants can either play these mini-games individually
or together. Examples of mini games below!
Feel the city Blindfold the participants. Ask them to stick out their
hand and spray some water on it with a water pistol.
Let them guess which city feels like that…It’s rainy
London!
Other examples: a piece of cheese or tulip (Amsterdam),
raw spaghetti (Bologna), a Spanish fan (Barcelona).

3. Hear the city Blindfold the participants. Let them hear a sound and
let them guess which city the sound comes from.
Examples: flamenco music (Barcelona), sound of the tube
(London), milk frothing (cappuccino; Bologna), wooden
shoes/’klompen’ (Amsterdam)
Taste the city Blindfold the participants. Ask them to put something
in their mouth and let them guess which city they taste.
Examples: cheese or beer (Amsterdam), spaghetti
(Bologna), sangria (Barcelona), scone (London)

4. Smell the city Blindfold the participants. Ask them to smell on
something and let them guess which city the smell.
Examples: pizza/pasta/espresso/etc (Bologna),
beer/cheese/tulip (Amsterdam), tea (London), sangria
(Barcelona)
See the city Let them see an object, place or person (pictures) and
let them guess which city they see.
Examples: Royal guards in London, Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam, Two towers in Bologna
Read your
city
Compose a sentence about making a living by taking
pictures of graffiti etc.
Example: Revolutionary party student office doing nothing
for a better education is good for my brain!

5. Pic your story Use Lego or Playmobil figures and short text captions;
create a story starting with a sentence provided by the
festival organisers.
Example: Nicky is unemployed, she starts the day
preparing for an interview as a dancer. What does she do
during the day to make a living?

6. Map your city Get a map of the neighbourhood, image you’re one of the
imaginary characters and you have to try and make a living
throughout an imaginary day
 Find food to eat
 Find a place to stay
 Find something to use your skills
 Find someone to collaborate with
Game to be defined!
Make your
city
Using a mixture of materials from crayons, chalk, paint,
magazine photos, card, clay and any other materials you
can find in public spaces, design or make something in
response to challenges provided by festival organisers
such as:
 Tell a day in the life of your day
 Create a campaign to get people to come to your city
 Create a new service to help people find work
More examples at http://bit.ly/13NtnE0

7. Travelling to
your city
Select a picture provided on the festival Flickr site on a
landmark from another city.
Take a picture of a landmark in your city and add it to the
picture from the other city so it looks like your city’s
landmark is in the other city.
Example: London bus stop in Cluj museum square
Reading
people’s
minds
Participants create mind maps in advance that describe
themselves and their interests. They can draw the mind
maps, colour them in, stick photos or whatever materials
they want to use.
When participants arrive at the festival venue, they stick the
mind maps up on the wall and at a specific time, the
facilitator asks everyone participating in this activity to go to
the wall and stand next to the mind map they would like to
discover more about. This cannot be their own mind map!

8. Trading
Europe
Every participant gets an item which he or she has to trade
three times at least for some other item that will connect to
the theme (like: what is Europe for them or something that
symbolizes a different city, how they see transnationality)
and hand it in at a certain spot, where a collage of all items
will be build. A story teller will make a story out of it (the
story of Europe or something; publish on the website).
T-shirt
‘contest’
Every participant gets a t-shirt (with EA logo), which they
can personalize with t-shirt paint on
 “I wish we could…” followed by what they’d like to
Citizens Pact to propose
 (Europe) makes me feel so
 “How might we” followed by what issue they think
Europe should tackle
Idea to be defined!
Scavenger
hunt
City Scavengers is an interactive game that introduces the
participants to some of the social problems of our city
related to ethnic tension and immigration by challenging

9. them to discover key places related to these problems.
Basically, the idea of the game is something like a treasure
hunt around the city and the participants have to find some
points in Sofia that we have selected from before. The
clues to the places are coded in short poems written by
contemporary young Bulgarian poets specifically for the
games and for the places.
In 2011 the game was centered around the most
multicultural neighborhood in Sofia - Women's market,
which was already then planned for demolishing. It is an old
market place where many gypsies and immigrants have
shops or stands, but also many of them live in the vicinity of
the market. The municipality, following the strong pressure
from some nationalistic political formations, had decided to
demolish the market and the surrounding houses and build
a new shopping mall there, leaving hundreds of people
without shelter in the meanwhile. The neighborhood has
also significant historical and cultural value because many
famous intellectuals and politicians had lived there. So, we
asked the poets to take a walk in the neighborhood and
write short poems for places they find particularly
interesting and showing the conflict between past and
present, but also the multicultural environment there. Then,
our participants, divided in teams, had to find the places by
guessing them from the poems.
In 2012, our focus was on immigration. During the
preparation phase for the game, we interviewed many
immigrants and refugees living in Sofia. All of them were
from different social statuses - from directors to applicants
for refugee status who were not yet allowed to work. There
were people from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, from
the Middle East, from Africa, and India. We asked them to
tell us about the places they go in Sofia and made a map

10. with some of the places (a map of Sofia though the eyes of
the immigrants) and then the poets who participated in the
game this year wrote poems about selected places. This
year we made a guided version of the game so one of us
was with each team, while they were looking for the places
and we had a kind of walking discussion about immigration
and how it is perceived in Bulgaria and in other countries
and also about who is an immigrant and how are some
immigrants treated differently than others, for example,
immigrants from the East compared to immigrants from the
West. We shared with them what the refugees had told us
about their life in Sofia, which was a news for most
participants.
In 2013 - a year heated by protests in Bulgaria - we will
have a game which is centered on the key spots of social
protests in the memory of the city. Not focusing explicitly on
the recent wave, we would interview people from different
generations on the demonstrations and protests they
participated in. We would do the game before the festival,
and at the festival itself we would like to have an exhibition
with pictures from the games together with the poems
written by the poets. We would also have a debate on the
game's purpose and findings and thing of how to have a
follow-up booklet which will present the different faces of
Sofia.
Get in touch with
mariya.ivancheva@gmail.com or tsvetelina.hr@gmail.com