Live At Mayhem

Hopeless Games is committed to exploring the shadowy borderlands between games and other art forms. Last week we put on our first ever public performance of the board game Tower of Silence. A profoundly bleak tale about shipwrecked souls losing hope as they brave the crumbling walls of a gigantic tower in search of terrible prophecy.

The event took place at an underground venue for extreme and experimental art in Copenhagen. Mayhem is part of a larger collective of non-profit, do-it-together punk projects housed in an old smithy known as the Candy Factory. The space is raw concrete and wooden beams with huge steel doors and no windows.

Perfect for a night of atmospheric music, board games, and a sea of black candles.

People started showing up as the sun was sinking low over the abandoned warehouses and factory shops of the run-down industrial grounds. We greeted them at the door with a bagful of souls and a drink of blackened tears.

One guy drew the soul of a drowned priest from the bag. He then randomly chose the trait that would define the priest. Hopeless, of course. A hopeless priest with the unique ability to gain +0 hope at any one time during the game. And how much hope would he begin with? The eight-sided die quickly settled on 1. We dropped a measly single sea shell into his personal black chiffon bag.

Behind the heavy door that only pulled open slowly, the room spread out mysteriously. It was dimly lit with black candles and shrouded in an ethereal mist that seemed to drift through matter itself. Across from the makeshift bar, two huge tables flanked the central space of the room where people were slowly gathering. The tables were hung with cloth and set up with gameboards showing the rugged coast where the souls would later drift ashore.

Our intrigued yet slightly uncomprehending guests were still sipping their dark drinks of porter and champagne when long, icy notes started cutting through the gloom. It was Pafund. A local one-wizard dungeon synth project casting powerful spells of entrancement.

Everybody moved forward into the mists to worship at the keyboard altar in the far end of the room. Pafund loomed majestically in his black cloak and drew mysterious signs in the air with spidery fingers. Bodies swayed back and forth like drowned souls trapped in weeds at the bottom of the sea.

Finally the wizard released the souls from their trance and let them drift towards the shore. We urged them closer and told them the story of how their ship had sunk. Only by spending their last remaining hope could they climb the crumbling walls of the tower and enter into the flames of prophecy. It was either that or become yet another shadow of death lingering forever on the forbidding shore.

This was the moment that everybody had been waiting for. Including ourselves. We really had no idea how the game was going to play out with upwards of 30 players and no rules explanation. We had two gamemasters stationed at each table and they were immediately surrounded by large groups of restless souls intent on making the most of whatever little hope remained in their chiffon bags.

We tried to run the games as intuitively and organically as at all possible, focusing on atmosphere, character, and story above rules. Without getting into any specifics, we asked for volunteers among the drowned crew to step forth and start climbing.

As one soul after another took its turn, sea shells were spent and discovery tokens revealed in the spaces they entered. Some would simply move ahead, while others would try their hands at abilities stated on their soul cards or the items they picked up. Everybody was learning from everybody and soon the souls were moving ahead rhythmically in starts and stops like waves breaking against the shore.

At one table, the soul of a mournful child led the climb up the crumbling walls of the tower. After moving only once or twice, it fell into a yawning abyss and lost all its hope. The other souls withdrew a little at first, wary of what else the game might have in store for them. But hope was quickly ebbing out into the sea behind them and there really was no time to lose.

A desperate stowaway with a brass pistol and a single hope remaining was the first to enter the mysterious flame attracting the souls like moths. The table cried out in relief and the player got to burn her soul in the candle at the top of the gameboard. She drew a prophecy and handed it over to the gamemasters without looking at it. Hopefully it would turn out something good.

The final moment in the game was when the suicidal captain of the sunken ship held a speech atop the tower before entering into the flame. He had actually died on his way up there during an encounter with the devil's vulture, but being suicidal his death had given him that little extra hope he needed to complete the journey.

"We are all gonna die," he declared to the few scattered souls below that once were his crew. "But let us hope that we wash up on better shores!"

Leaving behind tables strewn with the ashes of burnt souls and empty sea shells, we gathered the players together for the reading of the prophecy. The ethereal mist still hung heavy in the air, obscuring the true scale of the room and weaving its way in and out of every little nook and cranny. As we read out the prophecies one by one, we let them slip through our fingers and flitter to the ground like cheap candy paper.

Curse the night that brings the day

Waste the seed that sows the land

See the void that fills the womb

On and on we droned until there was nothing left but silence. The prophecy was complete. All that remained was to fulfill it.

Son of Seth, another local conjurer of apocalyptic visions, arose like a dark shadow behind his blasphemous altar, strewn with twisted bones and broken amulets from ancient worlds unrecorded by man. His face was painted black and his every sudden gesture seemed ripe with terrible consequence.

A deafening wall of sound built up around the audience, only to come crashing down as if the tower of silence itself had finally collapsed and fallen into the calm sea of despair. A series of howling screams, drawn from the innermost depths of a tormented soul, pierced the ears and hearts of everybody around and invited them to join in the exorcism.

For an eternity or for a moment, the prophetic shaman of doom ripped the demons of pain and suffering from our convulsing bodies and let them fly maniacally around the room until they finally disappeared in the mist. Suddenly he stepped forward to confront us with ourselves. And looking into the white of the eyes that were all that shone from his blackened face, we tore through the dream of existence and let go.

The ritual was over. The prophecy had been fulfilled. We had wrapped a game inside a concert inside a performance and somehow gotten away with it. We did not know quite how, but we wondered what else might be possible.

The night has only just begun.