ItinerAnts: an urban exploration game

What

Itinerants is an adventure game that encourages you to explore, imagine and propose transformations for the city you live in. Your neighbourhood is the gameboard, and a series of steps will lead you through a process of rediscovery from different perspectives in order to imagine alternative, more sustainable and liveable urban spaces, and propose these visions to your neighbours.

Ant colonies are complex societies that have been cooperating for more than a hundred million years (much longer than human societies), and they hold basic functions for most urban ecosystems: they pollinate plants with their comings and goings, spread seeds, clean our streets of waste and aerate the soil, to name a few. Itinerants views ants as a companion species present in neighbourhoods across the world.

In itinerants, we are the ants. Usually unnoticed, we explore our surrounding areas, digging invisible tunnels between current and imagined urban spaces to pollinate and spread seeds for more sustainable cities.

Download ItinerAnts here

How

Itinerants has four steps. Each of them gathers a series of adaptable missions and tasks for different contexts.

1. 1. Setting the rules! Together with the participAnts, we will define the rules for our own game, go through the Resource Cards and identify the borders of our neighbourhood.
   2. Pollination phase: the Colony explores. A series of resources are randomly distributed, participAnts go out and explore them in the neighbourhood. From a health centre to a local market, from posters on the walls to trees. Ants will explore all those resources we need for a good living.
   3. The Tunnels in your Ant’s Nest: Design your neighbourhood. After having explored the neighbourhood, the colony of ants gathers to share their findings. The Narrative Cards will add a whole layer of complexity to the way of doing it!
   4. Spreading seeds: Redefine the neighbourhood. It’s time to tell other neighbours about your findings. Ants will spread the colony’s learnings through a set of stickers for those places with urgent transformation needs.

Itinerants has the following printable resources:

• A Rules and Resources document
• 45 Resource Cards
• 30 Mission Cards
• 20 Narrative Cards
• 2 stickers
• A toolset with other methodologies

Itinerants can be designed and implemented in a modular way, adapting it to the needs of the group and the neighbourhood where it is developed. Feel free to remix it and keep those parts you find especially relevant for you!

You can download the game in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian or French by clicking on this link. If you play it, please, send us an email to info@zemos98.org and share with us your experience!

Why

Itinerants has been developed by ZEMOS98 in the context of UrbEx. UrbEx is a project coordinated by Tesserae (Germany) and funded by an Erasmus+ grant. Partners in the project are Bond of Union (Italy), Nomadways (France), 4Change (Portugal) and ZEMOS98 (Spain). A whole lot of resources for urban exploration with youth have been developed in the framework of the project. You can take a look and download them at the project’s website.