Twelve years of #play14

On March 14th, 2014, 34 people met at the Technoport in Esch/Belval, Luxembourg, to spend a few days playing games. Nobody gave a keynote and nobody sold anything. There was no agenda either: the participants built it themselves every morning.

Twelve years later, as I write in October 2026, #play14 has held 93 events in 40 cities across 20 countries, from Luxembourg to Sydney and from Mexico to Mumbai. Every one of them was hosted by volunteers. There is no head office, no franchise fee and no marketing team, and nobody approves new cities. I co-founded it, and I built and maintain its website. This post is about how it grew without anyone in charge, and what that taught me.

A sold-out event and a hotel bar

The story starts with an event we could not attend. In 2013, play4agile was a German unconference about games and agile, and its tickets sold out within a few hours. Yann Gensollen, Pierre Neis and I did not get one. We met at the bar of the Alpha Mercure hotel in Luxembourg to talk it over, and the conversation soon turned to a different question: why not organise our own?

It turned out we needed very little: a venue, a date and a name. We picked the date that night. The name came from the date, with “play” in front of it and the hashtag included, so nobody would ever have to ask what the hashtag was. Diego De Biasio, then CEO of the Technoport, gave us the venue for free and helped with the logistics. That is why we count him as the fourth founder.

Organic growth: wider, not bigger

Our first plan was to make the Luxembourg event bigger every year. In 2015, at the second edition, we met Chris Caswell and Christina Ohanian, who wanted to bring the same experience to London. They did, in September 2015, and it changed the plan. Instead of one large event, the community would grow wider: more cities, each with its own local team, each small enough that everyone gets to know each other.

From there it grew one person at a time. In London, I met the person who organised Hamburg. In Hamburg, I met the one who organised Madrid. In Madrid, I met Hanna Karlsson, who took the event to Sydney in 2019. In Sydney, Fred Ducros played and then brought it to Kuala Lumpur the same year. Every new city started with someone who had played somewhere else first: it is a rule, as we will see. And most players still find us through word of mouth.

We never pushed anyone to host an event, and we never went looking for a market. People come to us after playing at one, because they want the same thing at home. That keeps growth slow, and on purpose: a new event only appears when someone local cares enough to host it, and a mentor is available to help.

Slow did not mean small. 2019 opened three new continents: Oceania with Sydney, the Americas with Mexico and Asia with Kuala Lumpur. The pandemic stopped everything in 2020, and the community kept going online, including a 24-hour event that followed the sun from Sydney to Mexico, with hosts in each time zone taking turns. Since the first event back in person, in Utrecht in November 2021, it has grown again, especially in Asia: Manila, Singapore, Bangkok, and four cities in India. When we went back to the Technoport for the tenth anniversary in March 2024, close to 2,500 players had joined us over those ten years.

Mentoring: a player becomes a host, a host becomes a mentor

So how does a #play14 in Kuala Lumpur still feel like one in Luxembourg? Not through a manual. A lot of what makes the event work never shows up in a checklist: the first evening, the energy of the morning marketplace, a good debrief, the moment the hosts stop organising and start playing. You learn those by experiencing them, and by having someone beside you the first time you run them.

That is why there are only two rules for hosting:

• Play first. You must have attended at least one #play14 event. You can only reproduce it well if you have lived it yourself.
• Find a mentor. Someone who has already hosted guides you the first time, and at least one co-founder or mentor attends each new event.

The rest is light. The host secures a venue, picks a date, provides food and drinks, gathers game materials and brings a positive attitude. We recommend a local team of at least three. The mentor does not run the event. They help with the organisation, and make sure the spirit is kept. Afterwards, the host team runs its own retrospective, publishes the results and announces the next date.

In the early years, mentoring was simply what we did: one of the founders travelled to the first editions in London, Hamburg, Madrid, Timisoara and Amsterdam. By 2018 there were too many new teams for the founders to support alone, so mentoring became an explicit rule, and experienced hosts started mentoring too. Today the website lists 32 mentors alongside the four founders, and almost all of them first hosted in their own city.

The best illustration is what happened in Asia after the pandemic. Ricardo Fernandes hosted Porto in 2018. Five years later he was mentoring in Kuala Lumpur, then in Bangalore for India’s first #play14. Laxman Murugappan, who hosted Manila in 2023, and Wan Fadzil Adlan Wan Sidik, who hosted Kuala Lumpur the same year, went on to mentor Bangalore’s second edition, then Pune, Delhi and Mumbai. Darwin Antipolo, also a Manila host, mentored the first Bangkok edition with Avi Liran, who had hosted Singapore. And Sufiz Mohd Suffian, a Kuala Lumpur host since 2019, now mentors in three countries. None of this was planned from Luxembourg.

Flat and self-organised

Mentoring explains how the format travels. What holds the community together is that it is flat, by design, at every level.

At the event. There are no speakers on one side and an audience on the other. #play14 is an unconference based on Open Space Technology: every morning, anyone can propose a session in the marketplace, and anyone can leave a session where they are not learning or contributing. Someone who attends one session may facilitate the next. Proposing a game someone else has run is encouraged, and over the years some have become classics.

Across the community. Each local team chooses its venue, its date and its ticket price, and the players make the programme. Hosts talk to each other in a shared chat and on video calls, and that is where a new host asks how much food to order or what to do if the venue cancels. Any profit goes back to the community: future events, other teams, or games and materials. There is no commercial agenda, so there is no reason to grow for its own sake.

What replaces the hierarchy is a small set of things everyone shares: the two hosting rules, a hosting guide, the logo, and a few values that every event keeps. Within that frame, every edition has its own flavour.

What organisations can take from it

Of course, #play14 is a volunteer community, not a company, and the comparison has limits. But I see the same problem in almost every organisation I work with: how to spread a practice across teams without a central team pushing it. Code katas, architecture reviews, a new way of running retrospectives. A few things from #play14 carry over:

• Let teams pull it. A practice spreads better to teams that ask for it than to teams that receive it in a plan. Start where someone wants it.
• Experience before leading. Ask people to take part before they run it. “Play first” works for a community of practice as well as for an event.
• Pair the first time. A newcomer running a practice for the first time does better with someone experienced beside them, who helps without taking over.
• Few rules, shared openly. Two rules and a guide go further than a long process that nobody reads. Keep the frame small and let teams fill it.
• Grow wider, not bigger. Several small groups with their own owners last longer than one large programme that depends on one sponsor.

The aim is the same as in a client engagement: something that keeps running after the people who started it have stepped back.

What it taught me about facilitation

Twelve years of #play14 also shaped how I run workshops for clients, whether it is a strategy session, a story mapping day or a retrospective with a team that is tired of retrospectives.

The game is an excuse for the debrief. A game is only useful if people reflect on what happened. A good debrief asks questions instead of explaining what people should have felt or understood. In a client workshop, I plan the debrief before I choose the game, not the other way round.

The room decides. At the first edition, most people had left by the last afternoon, so the few who remained dropped the marketplace and did improv theatre all afternoon. Nobody had planned it, and it was the best part of the weekend. I prepare a client workshop carefully, but I keep room for the conversation the group actually needs.

A safe metaphor helps people say difficult things. A game is a mirror of reality with low stakes. People talk more easily about a bottleneck in a game than about the one in their own department, and the second conversation is easier after the first.

Where to start

If you want to see it for yourself, the events page lists the next editions, and the story page has the key moments. If there is no event near you, play at one anyway, find a mentor, and bring it home. If you need a workshop for your own team, the Facilitation & workshops page describes what I offer, or get in touch.