The Archive · Play as Record
The
Games
0 entries
A board scratched into dirt, twelve pits and forty-eight seeds, two people who will not speak for an hour: this is a document. Games are among the oldest things Africa has kept, and unlike a mask or a manuscript they survive only by being played. An archive that describes them without letting you play them has kept the husk and lost the thing.
Each entry records what is known about a game — where it is played, by whom, under which name — and, where a board can be rendered honestly, lets you play it against the machine. Every playable version carries a note saying plainly what it simplifies. None of them is the real thing; all of them are a way in.
The board is not yet set
No games have been published to the archive yet.
— The workshops
Games are still being made on the continent, and the studios making them belong in this record as surely as the boards do. The archive documents them and sends you to their work; it does not reproduce it.