I had a vision. A cowboy. Riding at the beach. On his horse. No. On a space hopper! Next to a yodelling Austrian guy in his leather pants. They are chasing a beach ball. None of them get it. That French madame with a baguette under her arm was quicker. She hits the ball and BAM goal!
No there was nothing wrong with the mushroom ragout I had, I am talking about the newly announced game of BOGfest! The First World Fancy Dress Space Hopper Polo Championship! There will be about six different teams dressed up in national costumes playing Polo! Not funny enough?
On space hoppers! With inflatable mallets!
You can watch, you can compete, you can sponsor one of our teams of international superstars. Don’t worry if you don’t know the rules, there aren’t any! So why not grab your hopper by the horns and be part of this historic event?
Will the English Knights bounce back from their disappointing performance in the Europeans and defeat the Hoppy Hun in their lederhosen? Can the the plucky kilted Scots take on the mighty American cowboys? Will the Emirate Sheiks trillions help them bounce past the bikini clad Brazilians?
The event is organised by Bounce Your Balls testicular cancer campaign. For more details see www.bounceyourballs.com email bounce@bounceyourballs.com or call the head bouncer on 07981 334222.
Picture copyright John Hazard – www.hazzy.net
Ever wondered what a 
Fruit Farmer was originally conceived as a location-independent game – i.e. you would start the game in the centre of a field and then the “map” would be relative to that point. But in the setting up of a demonstration for the launch of the Brighton OpenStreetMap (Nov 29th 2007), we were given the opportunity to show LocoMatrix for the first time in public. There was only a small handkerchief of open space by the venue, The Brighthelm Centre in Brighton, so an idea occurred to me – if you create a Fruit Farmer grid with all fruit (henceforward tbk as the Orange Grove) and play from an exact point (marked in picture above), one will knock out the fruit on the route one takes.
The photo to the right shows this happening as we created the game. Now all one has to do is to create the “positive” from this “negative” and so long as we start in the same spot, we should be able to knock out all the fruit (and avoid any obstacles that we put in the way). I have since created the Brunswick game for the space around Brunswick Square and Hove lawns.
The game has now been played successfully several times. The map below shows the route if you should ever want to play this. The streets are fairly quiet but there is still traffic around most of the time, so be careful.
