Alien Pastoral: The Strain

Format: Collaborative role-playing card game | Players: 1–6 | Solo play: Yes 

Collaboratively draw, design and bring to life a biological research station where scientists engineer the new strain of a plant species to solve a global crisis. Use the cards to develop the story and experience the gameworld evolving into a weird new reality. Includes a solo-play version.

Involves themes including: body horror, isolation, loss of autonomy and trauma.

Alien Pastoral: The Strain centres on a biological research station, run by an Authority, as the scientists try to engineer a new strain to solve an existential problem. An adaptation of Blandy's previous work Gathering Storm, this game explores the strange and often blurred spaces between agriculture, technology and capitalism. Players will collaboratively design a research station complete with seedbeds, orchards and laboratories to experience how relationships change with their environments in this open worlding game experience.

The game requires:
1–6 players
A tumbling tower block*
A coin
A six-sided die*
Paper & pens

*NB – The card deck does not come with a tumbling tower or die.

David Blandy

David Blandy (he/him) is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas that range from ecology, history and science to arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again. He searches for meaning in cultural life, an expanded form for auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. He builds complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence, through visual poetry and immersive play.   He has exhibited & performed at venues nationally and worldwide, with solo shows with Film & Video Umbrella;  John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea; The Baltic, Gateshead; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Spike Island, Bristol; The Exchange, Newlyn; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany. Blandy has also exhibited in museums internationally including at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Art Tower Mito, Tokyo; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki; Tate Modern, London; & MoMA PS1, New York.  

See more by David Blandy