So, with unprecedented swiftness, a few weeks after posting about wanting to play a game with balloons, I have now played a game with balloons. It took involvement with a smallish ARG and days spent sitting around in a Soho office building up my credibility with competence and cake, but it worked. The best photos of the day that I’ve seen are here.

The Soho Project involved the fictional media company Fictional Media, who were running a competition in which people chose tasks (”organise a tug-of-war between businessmen”, “tell the story of a Soho street”, “eat a meal in a Soho restaurant and review it in song while still on the premises”), recorded them, and uploaded the videos to be judged. A simple enough process: the team with the most points at the end was the winner. At the same time, however, a shadowy Resistance was working against Fictional Media, and at Super Stag Saturday — the final day of the Project — all teams dissolved, subsequently reforming into FM versus Resistance. Fictional Media were the forward-looking technocrats, aiming to synthesise a Soho Experience from the videos, keen capitalists with a taste for mediation; the Resistance were the slightly luddite, desperate-for-reality rebels with a love of unconvincing rhetoric, barbecues, William Blake, and silly hats.

I joined the Resistance, and brought my own hat.

For complex plot reasons that make perfect sense, the endgame came down to hunting a stag that had the brain of a genius computer scientist inside it. It wandered the streets of Soho (roughly a square mile) for an hour and a half, heading unpredictably toward the steps of William Blake House. Resistance members in groups of three, carrying a balloon each, had to find the stag, show it the balloons (the symbol of the Resistance was three golden balls), and, when it stopped, tie the balloons to its antlers before returning to base for more balloons. FM members — also in groups of three — had to photograph the stag, return to base, show the photographs to, um, the body of the computer scientist genius (currently inhabited by the mind of a stag), and then run out to find the stag again.

Gameplay considerations:

• Running around Soho chasing a stag with fifty balloons on its head is a lot of fun. I think it probably wasn’t as much fun for the FM side - no balloons for them, after all - so perhaps it would work better, once divorced from the Soho Project plot, with two teams, each with a different colour of balloon?
• The game ran for around ninety minutes, and we’d used up between fifty and eighty balloons by the end, with only 12 people on the Resistance team. So it’s probably not a good game for a huge number of players, but it could accommodate 30 or so (an hour would have been comfortably long enough for a satisfying game, I think).
• The stag head is, yes, not integral to gameplay. But it’s pretty spectacular. And tying the balloons to something is definitely much better than just giving them to someone.
• There’s no point trying to stop people from using their phones to tell each other where the stag is, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s pretty hard to find a single person in a square mile, even if they do have a giant stag head, and having to do it afresh every time you find it would get a bit wearying.
• More games need to force their players to ask passers-by whether they’ve seen a stag.
• If you play this game where there are children and you don’t have a heart of stone, expect some balloon attrition. If you play this game and one of the members of your team does have a heart of stone, expect her (it wasn’t me!) to take back one of the balloons you’ve given to a child in order to tie it to the stag.