The game that lets you imagine a city

Since he was about seven years old, Mark Vanhoenacker has liked to imagine his own city. "Its location changes occasionally, as does its name. But no matter where I draw it or what I call it, it's the same city to me."

Vanhoenacker is a British Airways pilot, and the author of two of my favourite books. The first, Skyfaring, is a glorious hymn to flying, and to doing a job that you love. The second, Imagine a City, is a pilot's perspective on cities real and, in this case, imagined.

Why a city? For Vanhoenacker, it's a place to travel to when he's sad or worried, or when "I don't wish to think about what I don't like about myself." It's the melancholic starting point for a generous, enveloping, far-ranging book. You must read it. But anyway...

Over the last few weekends my daughter and I have been imagining cities too. But we've had a bit of help. Firstly, I feel like I always have Vanhoenacker sitting on my shoulder, nodding or occasionally squinting in confusion at a strange decision. But we've also got I'm Sorry, Did you Say Street Magic, a city-building story game by Caro Asercion to guide us.

I'm Sorry was originally conceived as a hack of Microscope, by Ben Robbins. In Microscope, players construct the history of a civilisation, role-playing without dice or a GM. In I'm Sorry, players construct a city - a city, but not a map, crucially. "Maps," Asercion writes, "are inherently reductive."

Instead players build outwards in turns and rounds. Here are the rules, then, not quite as they are in the game, I suspect, but as my daughter and I have internalised them - a move that feels legitimate for a game like this.

The city is built of neighborhoods, landmarks and residents. Neighborhoods are a discrete chunk of city - a place with its own feeling, its own sense of itself. Landmarks live within neighborhoods, as do residents, but residents involve a bit of complex role-playing so my daughter and I haven't really tried them out yet.

After choosing three words to guide the overall city - this in itself is something of a game, and we always start by trying to choose three words to describe a city we already know, just to get things flowing - players take turn adding features: neighborhoods, landmarks, residents, in rounds. Each round has a compass, which is a guiding principle for that round and the things created within it. To begin things easily, we always start with "food" as a compass, but it could really be anything.

To create a neighborhood or a landmark you fill out a card - since starting to play, we now have stacks of index cards scattered around the house ready for a session. You write down the title, reputation and true name of a neighborhood, and the title, address, and true name of a landmark. The title is a common name that people use. In Brighton, say, this might be Hanover or Montpelier. In LA it might be Silver Lake or Baldwin Hills. The reputation, for neighborhoods, is a description of the "general vibe", while the address for a Landmark can be pretty literal if you want. True Names, though...

True Names are where the game really lives, if you ask me. These are the specific magic of the place, summoned in a few sentences that are descriptive, sensory, pin-pointing. We spend almost all of our time bickering over True Names, trying to get them just right, trying to make sure we're all seeing the same thing, or if we aren't, trying to make sure that the differences are clear and interesting.

This would be enough, I think. A city made of neighborhoods, landmarks, and residents, arranged on index cards without the stultifying formality of a map. A place of words, descriptions, pieces of imagined memory. But each round ends with an event, an event that somehow reflects the compass for the round and leaves the city changed in some way. Big or small, it doesn't matter. There's a fire. There's a festival. There's a birth. Things are different. Time has passed.

It's this layer of time passing that makes I'm Sorry truly fascinating. We make a city together, and then we have to understand that times change and the city we've just been building is already different. In a way it's already gone and already on its way to being replaced with another version of itself.

One last thing, and it connects to this idea very strongly. I'm Sorry's gamebook - it's also available as an Itch download - ends with a note on indigeneity and the relationship between maps and colonialism. "If you are playing this game on stolen land, hold a few moments at the start of your session to acknowledge the legacy of the Indigenous communities who did, and who still do, reside on the land where you have gathered. Beyond acknowledgement, consider making a donation to your local Native community. This could be your time, your voice, goods, money, or other requested help."