City – Do It Yourself – Departament Gier

CITY – Do It Yourself

Board-urban game | Sankt Petersburg // Polish Institute in Saint Petersburg, 23.03.2019

Three hundred years is not enough for any city. During three hundred years, many events took place in St. Petersburg though: first there were swamps, then a fortress, a magnificent European city, bridges, canals, palaces. There were also fires, there were three hundred floods, and there was the deadly siege. How to show the whole history of the city in one game? We have a way to do that. A game like SimUniversity (this was our first game in this series). The St. Petersburg version of the game began in 1703, when Peter the Great arrived on the banks of the Neva river, the game talked about the difficulties of building the city, Polish stories and footprints in St. Petersburg (for example, buildings designed by Marian Lalevich or bridges built by Stanislav Kerbedz), the first metro station or the little-known fact of an airplane landing on the Neva river. Throughout the game, participants first collected the materials necessary for the construction, and then bought plots of land and built on them so that in the areas they built there would be as many happy residents as possible.

“Do it yourself city” is the first city game organized by the Department of Games together with the Polish Institute in St. Petersburg. City games are not new to St. Petersburg – formats such as Encounter or Running City have been present here for many years so far. Our proposal – to combine classic searches and movements in an urban landscape with a strategic board game – was something new for the residents of the city on the Neva. On the other hand – we have already done such games before in Łódź, Poznań, Sosnowiec, Plovdiv – and we suspected that this would also work here.

This worked perfectly indeed. We value and appreciate when the youthful energy meets on the playing field with many years of experience and the confidence of senior players – this was the case this time as well – we all built our version of St. Petersburg on the floor of the Polish Institute (as you will see in the photographs – it is perfect for such purposes).