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# Collage and Play
- URL: https://playtestmaterial.org/collage-and-play/
- Published: 2026-10-27T13:29:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-27T13:35:04.000Z
- Description: Tor Truslow writes, plays and collages in this visual essay created for Playtest Material Issue One.
- Author: Laurie O'Connel
- Tags: Issue One

> **Tor Truslow** writes, plays and collages in this visual essay created for Playtest Material Issue One. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/58/2c/582c720a-5c85-4e75-81aa-1a1e1dfc9280/content/images/2026/10/playtest-material-collage-pages-with-bleed-1.png)

Take a magazine (maybe this one, once you’ve read it front to back and passed it around all your tabletop-playing friends), and some scissors and glue. Can you make a game out of it? Can you make a game out of making a game out of it? Make it tell many-sided, unpredictable stories?

Is an RPG like a collage?

To explore this question, I put out a survey to game designers, players, and collage artists. Of the five respondents who described themselves as collage artists, four said that they consider collage to be a form of, or contain elements of play, saying it has a “puzzle-y element that feels very play-like”\[1\] and that the appeal comes from “mixing things together without knowing the result—and the surprise that creates.”\[2\] Three of the five said they give themselves rules for collaging.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/58/2c/582c720a-5c85-4e75-81aa-1a1e1dfc9280/content/images/2026/10/playtest-material-collage-pages-with-bleed-2.png)

On the question of whether RPG-making and -playing could be likened to collage-making, seven of twelve game designers surveyed thought so, with reference to appropriating and re-contextualising ideas both in the design process and at the table. Find things, turn them this way or that, tear or snip – the work of playful eyes and hands.

This is how I collage and how I play, too: writing dice tables to determine elements of an artwork, rolling to dictate how many words I can cut out. Make a character out of odd scraps, give players instructions for assembling a dungeon from museum catalogue cuttings. There are convergent pleasures to be had here, making meaning from what’s at hand, connotations and conjurings.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/58/2c/582c720a-5c85-4e75-81aa-1a1e1dfc9280/content/images/2026/10/playtest-material-collage-pages-with-bleed-3.png)

There are TTRPGs that mechanise collage: *Bonds Between* by Bright Bard Games,*Mend*by Em Hubbard, my own *Tending*. There’s the riotous world of Magic: The Gathering proxy-making. Collage and play also come together in art movements like Fluxus, with George Brecht’s *Deck*, a card game made up of found imagery with no written rules. *Additions* by Morphic Rooms is a deck of cards featuring public domain works produced for the express purpose of being cut up for collage, with optional rules for playing a pattern-finding game. And then there’s Jerry Gretzinger’s decades-spanning project to build and endlessly iterate on a mixed-media map for an imagined world, driven by a card-based engine that the artist is also constantly updating.

In the People Make Games documentary about his map, Jerry says: “I like doing it because it’s full of surprises.”\[3\] The joy of surprise came up more than once in the survey responses, too. The thrill of never knowing exactly what to expect when we roll the dice, manipulate the rules, rip up the magazine.

A role-playing game, like a collage, is a machine that makes surprises.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/58/2c/582c720a-5c85-4e75-81aa-1a1e1dfc9280/content/images/2026/10/playtest-material-collage-pages-with-bleed-4.png)

\[1\] Survey response from Lady Tabletop, 2026

\[2\] Survey response from María Blasco (Brote de juegos), 2026

\[3\] People Make Games, ‘He Won’t Stop Building a Map to an Imaginary Place.’*YouTube*, 15 June 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is8N7B9b0GQ

> **Tor Truslow** is a London-based game maker, writer and collagist. They are the creator of Tending: a Game of Devotion and various zines and experiments, with art and fiction published by Sidekick Books, Three of Cups Press and others