Factory: The Residency Game (2025)

Designed by Laurel Green, Patrick Blenkarn, and Milton Lim

A bespoke tabletop role-playing game about organizational and artistic transformation, designed for Factory Theatre in Toronto.

We were commissioned to design a tabletop role-playing game for a Canadian theatre company at a pivotal moment of organizational change. Factory: The Residency Game acts as a bespoke creative incubator where leadership, staff, and community can explore the opportunities and challenges of institutional transformation — rehearsing what it might feel like to work inside a new organizational and artistic model before it fully exists. Drawing from the company’s Strategic Plan, the game’s system embodies the goals in the new vision while also posing real-world challenges based on the conditions of working in a historical regional theatre in a major urban centre today.

Set in a near-future where the company's transformation has been realized, players step into the roles of a non-hierarchical staff team guiding Residency Projects through multiple seasons. Over four quarters, with one player serving as Residency Director for the full season, the team allocates limited capacity across three types of project needs: Administrative, Relationship, and General Support. Challenges left unresolved only get more urgent. Over time, they must balance the needs of external partners with internal resources, to incubate and launch as many world premiere productions as possible during their tenure.

The game is designed to be light on rules, low-friction to onboard, and rich in conversation. Five key areas of focus shape gameplay: Artist Support, Process & Production Flow, Roles & Structures, Partnerships & Power Sharing, and Public Engagement & Funding.

The Process

Our iterative design process included preliminary research into the organization's strategic priorities and core opportunities/tensions, followed by prototype design, digital asset development, and two rounds of playtesting with leadership and staff. We playtested both with staff who work at the theatre, and an external group who work at a neighbouring theatre, to get a sense of how the core mechanics and worldbuilding translated to another company culture.

Players found the game uncannily reflective of current working conditions in today’s arts economy — resource scarcity, competing priorities, the weight of the leadership role — while also describing sessions as joyful, collaborative, and revealing of their colleagues' real (and surprising) skill sets. Extended playtesting surfaced real questions about authority, distributed leadership, and institutional knowledge.

What the Game Revealed

Across both playtests, The Residency Game functioned as a mirror of the organization's dynamics — surfacing tensions and questions actively being wrestled with: how to keep art central while navigating structural challenges, how to distribute leadership and responsibility, how to manage capacity and burnout, and how to carry institutional learning forward across multi-year projects.

This project extended upon our experience designing TTRPG’s for arts leadership in the project FARCE (Fictional Arts: Reimagining Creative Ecosystems). It continues our advocacy for the dramaturgy of cultural design to be a shared practice in the arts community, informed by the working conditions of staff and artists, rather than relegated to boardrooms and offices of elite decision-makers.

Outcomes

Early phase development was supported by Factory Theatre with funds from the Metcalfe Foundation. Our team produced a fulsome report of the design process with suggestions for future stages, however the project was cancelled after a change in leadership at the company.

Digital playtest of Factory: The Residency Game