Box Northern Larp festival

On Valentine’s Day this year, I left my wife (I know, she had words…) and went to the one-day Box Northern Larp Festival in Headingley, Leeds.

This was Box’s second outing – the first was back in 2024 in Sheffield. I couldn’t make it then, because it clashed with the weekend freeform in Retford. This year, the dates didn’t clash, and so I went to both.

The HEART of Headingley

The venue for Box was Headingley’s HEART Centre, an old primary school repurposed into a community, enterprise and arts centre. There’s a café and several businesses operating from the building – but most importantly, a number of accessible rooms that can be hired.

With eight larps on offer (four in the morning, four in the afternoon), BOX needs plenty of rooms!

If I have one (minor) criticism, it’s that parking in Headingley isn’t great. BOX encourages everyone to use public transport, but I’m a 30-minute drive away or a 90-minute-plus bus ride. So it’s no contest, unfortunately.

So I arrived early to make sure I could find somewhere to park. I wasn’t the earliest, though, and soon found other larpers. And as we were early, a few of us headed to the café to get a hot drink and start making introductions.

(I saw a few friendly faces – Mo, Daniel, Heather, Ian, Emory, Nyx and maybe a couple of others. And I made more friends.)

Both of my games were in Ridge, at the top of the building. For those with accessibility needs, there’s a lift.

Arsenic & Lies (10 am – 2 pm)

My first game was Arsenic & Lies by Karolina Soltys and facilitated by Hazel Dixon.

Arsenic & Lies is a replayable murder-mystery larp for 5-12 players that lasts three hours. It uses a deck of cards to randomly assign relationships, secrets, and the murderer.

Set in a grand house at a New Year’s Eve party on 31 December 1919, a new decade is about to start – but not for everyone!

The game is played in three parts: character creation, Act 1 (at the end of which the murderer strikes) and Act 2 (at the end of which we decide who to hand over to the police).

I played war hero Lt. Joe Middleton and was married to my lovely wife Violet (who was having an affair unbeknownst to me). I had come back from the war a changed man – I had lost my faith in god.

(I also became embroiled in two other characters’ backstories – both deserters, oddly. There must have been something in the water.)

I wasn’t the murderer – but I was influential in persuading the group to vote for the deeply dodgy Harry Ryland. I had no idea if Harry was the murderer, but his character suggested that he certainly could have been the murderer, and that was enough for me. And my arguments were strong enough that we handed him over to the police – leaving the actual murderer, Lady Beatrice, to escape!

Arsenic & Lies works really well. It creates a lot of game from a single deck of cards, and I can imagine playing it again fairly soon. We had a dedicated host for the game, but having played it once, I’d be happy to host and play Arsenic & Lies simultaneously.

(I’ve also put a review of Arsenic & Lies on my Great Murder Mystery Games website.)

Lunch

We finished Arsenic & Lies shortly before 2 pm. There was a 30-minute wait for food in the café (I think we might have been the last game to finish), so I went around the corner and into Headingley with a couple of other players to grab a bite to eat.

A Haunting in Hartwick (3 pm – 7 pm)

I ran A Haunting in Hartwick in the second slot. A Haunting in Hartwick is a murder mystery larp (two murder mysteries in one day!) written by Mark Schaefer that I’m developing for Freeform Games. It’s pretty much done – this was one of the playtests. Here’s the setting:

It is 1958, and Quinn Hartwick is selling the ancestral home in Hartwick, Connecticut. The new owner will be Blake Crowley, who plans to turn it into a "spirit sanctuary" for ghosts. But not everyone thinks this is a good idea…

I’m always slightly nervous about running our games for “proper” larpers. I’m well aware that the games are introductory larps, designed for people who don’t normally do larping. So it was delightful to see that the players take the game and run with it.

One thing that makes Box different from other places where I might run larps is that it doesn’t allow character assignment in advance. This has positives and negatives.

Positives of casting at the door

I don’t have to worry about casting questionnaires. Instead, I laid out the character envelopes and let people pick them based on the character's name. (Except one – I thought that Daniel might enjoy the scientist character, so I gave that character to him.)

It helped that all the characters were ungendered, so it didn’t matter who played which character.

I didn’t have to send characters out in advance. I can’t be the only person who hates this part of larp admin!

Flexibility in moving players between the groups. This approach makes it easy for the organisers to move players between the groups. Box had a couple of no-shows, and I had one character move from one game to mine.

Negatives of casting at the door

No costuming: No pre-casting did mean no costuming, but that didn’t prevent anyone from getting into character and having fun.

Barely a costume in sight - just one lab coat

Allow time for pre-reading: Of course, assigning characters at random meant I had to give my players plenty of time to read their characters first. But I allowed for that, and the pre-game notice warned that there would be reading.

Feedback

Anyway, the game went great, and the players picked up a couple of things that I need to look at. Nothing significant, just a few tweaks that will make the game run smoother – I’m pretty sure we will release it next month.

Delightfully, partway through the game, a player told me that they had already played and enjoyed two of our games, which was lovely to hear.

Overall

So Box was great. I wrapped up a little after 6 pm and chatted to the organisers for a bit before heading home for tea. I hope to make it next year.

For another take, here's Mo's review.