In the garden, in motion

Kids playing an energetic outdoor card game in a sunny garden, colourful cards scattered on green grass, one child chasing others with a notebook, warm summer light,

These three games get you moving. They work best with a bit of space and at least three or four players, and each one can be adapted freely as you go. The idea behind all of them is the same: things that are abstract on a screen, tracking, encryption, Censorship, become surprisingly obvious when you are running across a room trying to stay out of reach.

You do not need to understand how the internet works before you play. The games will show you.

One player is the Tracker. Everyone else is a User. Before the game begins, scatter a collection of coloured cards around the room; each card represents a different website. The Users wander around picking up cards, visiting their favourite sites. The Tracker follows them and notes which cards each User collects.

The game rewards the Tracker faster than most people expect. Within a few minutes, the Tracker can tell you not just which websites each User visited, but roughly in what order and how often. It turns out that wandering around picking up cards leaves quite a visible trail.

The Users do have defences.

  • An Ad Blocker card freezes the Tracker for ten seconds.

  • A Private Browser card forces the Tracker to discard all the data they have collected on that User so far.

But using those cards takes attention, and the Tracker keeps going.

What tends to happen is that the Tracker wins more easily than anyone expected, and the Users start to understand why. Being tracked is the default. Protecting yourself from it is the extra step. That is exactly how it works online: your browser picks up tracking cookies the moment you arrive at most websites, and blocking them requires tools you have to install and understand.

Try playing one round without any defence cards, then one round where Users can use them freely. The difference in how comfortable it feels to wander the room will tell you a great deal about what browser extensions are actually doing when they run quietly in the background.

The asymmetry tends to surprise adults as much as children.

The VPN Tunnel Relay

Choose one player to be the ISP, the internet service provider, who stands in the middle of the room. Everyone else is a Data Packet, trying to get from one side of the room to the other without being tagged. If the ISP tags you, you have to hand over a token.

The catch is that the ISP can tag anyone they can see. The protection is the tunnel: two players can hold hands to form a corridor, and any Data Packet running through that corridor is safe. The ISP cannot tag inside it. The team has to cooperate to keep a tunnel open while Packets sprint through, which is harder than it sounds when the ISP is moving and the tunnel players are trying to hold their position.

Once you have run through a tunnel a few times and arrived at the other side with your token still in your pocket, the VPN concept tends to click. A VPN creates an encrypted channel between your device and a server somewhere else, so that your ISP can see that data is travelling but cannot read what it says or where it is ultimately going. The hands-joined tunnel in the game is a physical version of exactly that.

A good question to sit with after the game: what if the ISP could see where the tunnel starts and ends, even if they could not see inside it? That is a real limitation of VPNs, and it is worth knowing about.

Younger players can enjoy the running without fully grasping the metaphor; older ones will start asking the harder questions.

The Great Firewall Fortress

Build a wall of books down the middle of a table. One player is the Censor, who controls everything that crosses the wall. The other players are trying to move their tokens from one side to the other, representing messages they want to send to a friend.

Three tools are available.

  • The VPN card lets you move your token under the table in a literal tunnel, bypassing the wall entirely.

  • The Proxy card lets you ask another player to carry your token across on your behalf.

  • The Tor card lets you bounce your token to two different players before it reaches the goal, making the path so complicated that even the Censor loses track of where it came from.

Each tool has a different feel, and the Censor has to try a different strategy to block each one. What makes the game interesting is watching the Censor’s frustration grow as tokens keep arriving at the goal by unexpected routes.

Each card maps onto a real tool that people use for exactly the same purpose. The VPN card represents a real VPN. The Proxy card represents a proxy server. The Tor card represents the Tor network, which routes your traffic through multiple computers around the world before it arrives at its destination. Understanding why Tor is harder to track than a simple VPN becomes intuitive once you have watched a token bounce through three pairs of hands.

Try a second round where the Censor announces which tool they are watching for, and see how the other players adapt.