Tabcott: The Abstract & Brief Chronicles of the Time

This is a tabletop and/or semi-live game for 3 players, with or without an audience. You should be able to finish playing it in ~1 hour.

The year is 2020 and computer scientists working in the fields of robotics and computational creativity have built vaguely humanoid robots to perform a version of Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet.

However, the robots will not perform Hamlet as Shakespeare wrote it, but instead a new version of the play written by an artificial intelligence. This A.I. was programmed to procedurally generate sections of Shakespearean dialogue using the text of Hamlet. However, given the current limits on computational creativity and a moderate budget, the new play is a bit surreal and even nonsensical in places, more in line with modern experimental theatre.

The pseudo-Shakespearean dialog on the game's cards was procedurally generated from the text of Hamlet, not by an A.I. alone, but through human-computer collaboration using Jamie Brew’s predictive text interface “pt-voicebox,” which is available on GitHub.