Verona hosts the International Festival of Street Games in September

The International Festival of Street Games, Tocatì, is back in Verona in its ninth edition that this year has the focus on emphasizing the importance of games and leisure traditions as a part of the cultural heritage of many countries.

To this end, the Association of Ancient Games, in collaboration with the local authorities has invited to this year's event several countries among which Brasil, Iran, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Portugal and Mexico.
Each of these countries will share with the citizens and visitors that will be in Verona the 23rd, 24th and 25th of September some of the most representative traditional games of their cultures, like the Capoeira from Brasil, the Malha from Portugal, l'Ulama de Cadera from Mexico and the Varpa from Sweden. There will also be a place for Italian regional games, as well an area dedicated to board games and one dedicated to more modern street activities like skateboarding.

Among all the initiatives proposed by the Festival's organization there is one that seeks to encourage the involvement of all the people and families that visit Verona during those days. The idea is to organize workshops and group activities in which one can, for example, create his/her own blowgun or participate in dancing games which can be practised one against one or by teams. A particularly interesting workshop is the one called Ludosophia, that proposes a series of games to start with and then moves on to a discussion on the morals and ethics behind each of these games, touching topics like the benefits from lying, vote systems and the use of stereotypes in traditional games.

The Dixit is one of the newest games introduced in the festival, a 3 to 6 players game invented in 2009 that won the Spiel des Jahres in 2010 and that challenges the linguistic abilities of the players based on a set of cards illustrated by Marie Cardouat. One of the players, the storyteller, chooses one of his 6 cards and enunciates a sentence based on the illustration of that card. The other players have to select among their own cards the one that better matches the storyteller's sentence and give it to him/her. The storyteller mixes the cards and puts them on the table so that the rest of the players try to figure out which one is his/hers. The ones that take the right guess get 3 points, and so does the storyteller. If all the players know the answer or none of them does, they all get 2 points and the storyteller gets none. After each round, the turn passes to the person sitting to the left of the storyteller. The first to reach 30 points is the winner.

The Tocatì Festival is an event worth visiting specially for those that are curious about the particularities of the cultural traditions in other countries and for those kids at heart that wish to spend a fun family weekend.