An intricate and rapidly expanding culture of games based on geographic subjects has developed throughout Europe since the seventeenth century. The exhibition in public space Weltenbummler – Reisen im Spiel! (Globetrotters – Travelling in Games!) after an idea by Ernst Strouhal and Marcus Bruckmann presents the most beautiful travel-themed board games and invites visitors to look, converse, and play with each other. One journeys across the map with one’s finger. The journey takes us to foreign cities, far-off countries and continents, or even into outer space. A small object as a playing piece, a look at the rules, and off you go.

Visitors can get to know and (re)discover numerous, sometimes long-forgotten games—such as the “New York Post Office Game,” the “Bicycle Race,” or the “Latest Vienna Tower Climbing Game”—from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. They also learn something about the beauty of games and the subjects their stories deal with. The project is based on Ernst Strouhal’s publication Die Welt im Spiel. Atlas der spielbaren Landkarten von Ernst Strouhal (2015).

The object developed for the exhibition by designers Désirée Heusl and Lis Eich is flexible in size and form and suited to be set up in different kinds of public places. Swiveling tables with a game, a short description, and the rules printed on the surface are mounted on a bench. Additional comments on the tables tell us about the cultural history of games. What makes the tables special is that their design allows visitors to develop and play their own games according to their own rules.

The program accompanying the exhibition offers several workshops on generation-spanning games and the design of games as well as game parties for children and adults.

A presentation of the exhibition in an extended form in the Per Albin Hansson housing estate takes place from May 2017-May 2018.