So the last two days have been a flurry of activity. I’ve been called in as a special reinforcement to help to pull things together for tonight’s Sandpit playthrough, and so we’ve been dashing around, pulling together the various props, costumes and handouts that are going to be needed for tonight’s innaugural run of the Scoop! ruleset. Silke’s theme of duelling cable news crews won the vote and, if all goes to plan, should make for extremely entertaining play.

Putting together an equipment pack that will challenge the players’ creativities while not stiffling them with obvious “right” answers is a trickly line to tred – as Alex put it, we want to give them enough rope to hang themselves, but not proscribe the type of knot they have to use. So each team will find itself with several large pieces of cardboard, some transparent acetates that will allow them to draw in their own special effects, and a collection of party poppers, balls and other delights that carefully straddle the line between ‘whimsical’ and ‘useless’.

The same challenge emerged in putting together an appropriate set of clues. Between us, Holly and I put together two full sets of clues – one nice and vague, leaving a lot of creativity to the teams (“the south bank has been invaded!”), and the other quite concrete, with specific examples and suggestions of how each story could be manufactured. In the end, we all agreed that a mixture of the two was best, and so we have some quite lose clues mixed with some very specific ones. Finally, we added the possibility of inserting new tip-offs throughout the course of the game, by giving each team a mobile phone and preparing some extra-special surprises for the night…

Against the backdrop of all this, we were also working hard at the ruleset, giving it some extra streamlining for live play. The scoring system has been simplified substantially; the missions are now graded in terms of difficulty and are scored for completion, rather than on a per-second basis. On the other hand, the criteria that the reporters now have to meet in order to earn their points are much more stringent. Jingles have to be sung and dress codes have to be met before points will be handed out. A half-day in Clapham Junction turned up some wonderfully tiny blazers that would make excellent reporters’ jackets; Camden provided them with some suitably massive counterparts. Ties made from ribbon will be de rigueur on the South Bank this evening. Gradually, our choices could be seen to be drawing us ever closer to our obvious muse…