Best Festival Ever: How To Manage A Disaster makes catastrophe a delight

The Seymour Centre’s iteration of Best Festival Ever has the air of a homecoming – it’s been performed in various forms across the world, and for the first time, it’s finally landed in Sydney to test, amuse and inspire audiences with a thrillingly curated game experience.

You’re sitting at the back of a bus, filthy and tired from a gruelling music festival experience. You have a lot to complain about. You’re almost certain you could organise a better show. Your mate says he knows a farmer with some land he’s willing to loan. Time to put your money where your mouth is.

It’s best to approach Best Festival Ever as a co-operative board game, rather than a show. You and your fellow punters are now the organisers of a start-up music festival. Its staging ground: a long felt strip with a winding river, complete with model cows and a tiny main stage. Over the next hour, you build the festival as a team, and then struggle to keep it afloat as disaster strikes.

The show is presented by three members of Sydney’s Applespiel (full disclosure: peers and friends of this critic), who have cultivated a remarkably comfortable atmosphere for such a high-stakes game. Unlike many audience participation experiences, nothing here puts you as a viewer on edge by forcing you into the spotlight. The whole encounter is just serious enough, just silly enough. You’re all in this together, and the consequences are no further reaching than the doors of the theatre.

Each mini-game is structured to test the players while avoiding too many arguments. You rarely have time to sweat the details. In 30 seconds, we had a headline act – Sia “from the band Sia”. These games rarely strike as unfair; be prepared, though, for a few quick-time events that will test your reaction speed.

The strength of the show is its gamification of complex system theory, which is explained clearly and engagingly wherever it arises. Boho Interactive complete the experience by inviting a guest speaker in (attendance is optional) to clarify the game’s focus, and this night’s speaker – complex adaptive systems researcher Dr Michael Harré – opened new doors for connecting with both the show and the world outside.

The festival itself may well be calamitous, but with its endearing indie aesthetic, careful construction and light-hearted demeanour, Best Festival Ever is doubtless the best board game you’ll play on a Sydney stage.