Memorabilia
M.E.M.O.RI. museum Board Game
A board game to play M.E.M.O.RI (EuroMediterranean Museum of Re-jected Objects)
Potenza was one of the 4 cities that hosted the Basilicata Border Games back in 2013, and although is considered one of the ugliest cities in Italy, after that week it has a warm spot in my heart, mostly because of all the wonderful people that I met and worked with during that week and after that.
So when Sara and Rossana from La Luna al Guinzaglio, the Potenza association that we worked with, reached out to collaborate on a project I was really happy!
The idea was to create a card/board game that could generate a new way to interact with M.E.M.O.RI. the EuroMediterranea traveling museum that La Luna al Guinzaglio created in the previous months, collecting specimen and finds all over the Mediterranean in the previous years.
As usual the timing was really short!
we had one month to ideate, prototype and design a board/card game, possibly with multiple ways to play it and multiple audiences! But it was summer, the team was great so we were up for the task!
First we decided that we needed to have a common vocabulary when if we were to discuss about board games we needed to speak the same “language”, the was one little problem tough, I was in the US and Sara and La Luna al Guinzaglio were in Potenza, Italy. We created a list of games and we started playing them over online calls, it was very messy and very noisy, but at the end it worked out.
In three weeks we had two prototypes, pretty quickly we trashed one and we created two more variation of the first one, so that with a single deck it was possible to play three different games.
After one month of playtest with different audiences the games were ready, the production phase could begin.
At the end of 2019 the games were ready to be ship to schools and museum that wanted to use them to create an interactive experiences for their visitors. Memorabilia is a board game that can be played in big team or small groups, is it comprised of a deck and a board and has three main gameplay:
MemorAbilia Museum (10years +) board game, create your collections of objects and make it so great that they can enter the official exhibition of the museum M.E.M.O.RI.
MemorAbilia Story (6years +) narrative card game, create the best story and collect cards while doing it, the best narrator will be the winner, but don’t get the other players to interrupt you or catch you in contradiction.
MemorAbilia Map (3year +) the workshop experimental version, download the AR app (Augmented Reality) and look at the cards as they take life, connect your cards with the others and retrace back the origin of the specimen.
Credits
MemorAbilia, museum to play, a project by Matera 2019
Game Design by Matteo Uguzzoni, La Luna al guinzaglio
Co-Produced by La Luna al guinzaglio, Fondazione Matera-Basilicata 2019, Centro Zaffiria, Cemea.
Thank to Domenico Colucci for the help and the play-tests all of our Researchers and WeMake.
Pictures by La Luna al Guinzaglio