A game played on a map of the literature.
Racing the Machine is the salon’s tabletop exercise. Each player is a nation, a lab or a university in the years before the generative era, pushing research across a map drawn from the field itself, and nobody at the table knows where the decisive discovery lies.
Who plays
Seven to twenty people on a call, with a game master who runs the table. Writers, scientists and readers sit together; nobody needs to have played a wargame before.
How a session runs
About ninety minutes. After a short briefing the table plays a few rounds, and each round is one year.
- The game master reads out the year and the state of the map.
- The table talks in the open: alliances are offered, intentions declared.
- Each player then gives orders in secret, and every order is revealed at once.
- The dice are rolled where everyone can see them, and the map changes.
- The record of what really happened that year is shown, and the table reacts.
Each player also holds a private brief that nobody else reads. At the end everything is revealed: the briefs, the scores, and where the decisive discovery lay all along.
Why we play it
The salon reads fiction beside science to test assumptions about the future. The exercise does the same thing with decisions: it asks what people at the table would have funded, shared or held back, before anyone knew how the story ended.
Taking a seat
Seats go to members of the salon and their guests. To ask for one, write to the organisers.
salon@perspectiveprism.com