I Play Games: Tate Accompli

 

Tate Accompli

A group of thieves you used to belong to are brought together for one last job. A new exhibition is taking place in the Tate Modern, the converted powerplant, now an art gallery for modern and contemporary art. It’s a mystery, but undoubtedly whatever they're showing is valuable. Your fixer who arranges heists for you has brought you all out of retirement. Now you have to plot your robbery and make your way in.

So begins Tate Accompli, a storytelling game. We all have a speciality, though some remained unspoken (I was good at ropes, though in a pinch I could be a sexy distraction). Yet we’ve been out of the game for a while and are a bit rusty. To represent this there is a Mondrian-themed Jenga tower on the table in the middle of the room. If we have to do something risky, whoever does it has to draw a piece out and put it on top – if the tower falls something terrible will happen.

As we make our way in – unable to decide between entrances our group splits into three – things start to get strange. We find ourselves blacking out, then waking to find the gallery in darkness, the night having progressed to midnight. And now the exhibits take on a new aspect. Can we find our way to the mysterious new exhibition. Can we find anything along the way worth stealing – or is it not worth the risk?

This was a fun game, though my efforts to try and keep the team on track – professional thieves everyone! Don’t get distracted by every exhibit! – were thankfully frustrated. Joe Stickland who ran it told us afterwards that the first time he ran it was at Colab, on the South Bank so he’d gone all over the Tate Modern before running it. There’s definitely more to this if you’ve been to the place, are familiar with the exhibits we saw, or contemporary art in general (there’s a good joke about Rothkos for example). But it works even when you don’t recognise the details, the sketched in descriptions if anything making the place more spooky and odd.