Come Out and Play Festival

The Come Out and Play Festival is an event that takes place every year in New York. It is a collection of game designers that come together and design new sports and original outdoor games. For five years I was a game designer for the festival, and made games for children, families, and adolescent-adult audiences.

Target Act

This was my first game for the festival, and it asked participants to split up into two teams. One team was defending a group of boxes, with each box having a word written on it. The other team had to play charades to try guessing which box was the correct one, and then play a handball-style game with the first team to try scoring a ball into the correct box.

Pirates! Ghosts! Ninjas! Oh My!

This game was designed to be played with a mix of children and their parents. Children would split into three teams, each with a designated color. They would run around the field collecting plastic tubes that corresponded to their color, and then surround a cone at the center of the playing field after they collected all of the tubes of their team’s color. Three parents would play as a pirate, a ghost, and a ninja (while wearing appropriate costumes that I provided), and would have special abilities designated to each role. The children could command the parents to either aid their team, or hinder their opponents’ teams, depending on which role the parent was dressed up as at the time.

Click on the image to go to the festival archive page.

Noodle & Bow

For this game, two teams would be formed from the participants. One team was made of archers, and the other of “noodlers” who had to use foam pool noodles to try hitting a giant beach ball past the archers’ offensive line. The “noodlers” could throw bean bags at the archers to disable them temporarily, while the archers would be defended by supporting players who carried heavy fabric shields to protect them from the bean bags.

Click on the image to go to the festival archive page.

Flappy Birdies

This game was a high-energy take on the sport of Badminton, with dozens of birdies in play, and up to about 20 players allowed on the field at once. Teams had to try landing birdies in circular zones on their opponent’s side of the net, racking up huge total scores at the end of each frantic and fast-paces round.

Click on the image to go to the festival archive page.

Bad Apples

For “Bad Apples,” players were separated into two teams - hunters, and gatherers. The gatherers had to go around the playing field and look underneath plastic domes, each of which may or may not have “apples” (tennis balls). Apples would be deposited into a “bushel” container at one end of the field, while hunters on the other team tried to eliminate all gatherers from play. There were also “bad apples,” (tennis balls painted black) which hunters could deposit into the bushel in order to hurt the gatherers’ score.

Click on the image to go to the festival archive page.