Yes, And Then What‪?‬

Every other book gives you the games. Then you are alone in the room with them.

You take one in, you explain it, and three minutes later it dies in front of you. Nobody wants to go first. One person is taking over. Two others have quietly decided they are the audience. And the book you got the game from does not tell you why, or what to do next.

Half of this book is the half that is usually missing.

What has to happen in the first ten minutes and in what order. How to sequence sixty minutes so the group is warm before you ask anything hard. How to kill a dying game cleanly in one sentence without losing the room. The person who dominates, and the four things that work instead of asking them to hold back. The person who will not play, and the three completely different reasons for it. How to give a note. When to stop a scene. What to do when something real comes up in a room full of teenagers.

The other half is 170 games, grouped by what they are actually for rather than alphabetically. Every one gives you the number of players, the time it takes, how it runs, what it teaches, the specific way it usually goes wrong, and a variation.

•Openers and name games, energy warm-ups, focus games
•Listening, agreement, and making and taking offers
•Character, and status: the most useful idea in improvisation, taught properly
•Object and space work, two-person scenes, group scenes, narrative
•Short-form performance games for a first show
•Games for a room that will not speak, for thirty people at once, for video calls, and for one learner
•Five ready-made session plans, including a 30-minute version and a corporate half day
•An index that finds you a game by the problem you have right now

Where a game or an idea has a known inventor, this book says so. Improv games are a folk tradition and most have no single author, but Viola Spolin, Keith Johnstone, Del Close and Augusto Boal between them invented a great deal of what everybody now uses without knowing where it came from. They are credited throughout and listed at the back. Every description here was written fresh; nothing is copied from another collection.

It works from about age seven to adults, with a chapter on what actually changes between ages, and a chapter on consent, touch and content boundaries that comes before the games rather than after them.

Read the first half tonight. It takes ninety minutes. You will get more out of thirty games run well than a hundred and seventy run badly, and the difference is entirely in the first half.