Allotment Games (originally Siirtolapuutarhapelit) is a standalone tile-laying game inspired by Carcassonne. Instead of walled cities, fields and monasteries, there are allotment plots, suburban streets and community markets. While gathering points for acquiring and maintaining allotment plots you can also consider the strategies to gain a real-life one. Several alternative designs of the game were created by a Finnish-Polish artist and illustrator collective.

Allotment Garden Games (Siirtolapuutarhapelit) is a trans-national project combining print-production, urban farming issues and participatory art processes.

A collection of artist-producers and graphic illustrator friends in Warsaw (Wojtek Mejor, Natalia Kulka) and Helsinki (Lotta Kauppi, Simo Haanpää, Andrew Paterson) combine their skills and work to produce a reprint of the popular tile-based boardgame Carcassonne. They aim to address the theme and strategies of allotment gardening, following adaptive methods originating in fan-based game 'skinning' and 'mod' (modification) culture.

The process involves the design and digital printing of new game 'tile-sets', based on those provided in the basic game-set 'Carcassonne' and its extensions. In other words, 'skinning the game mechanics' and developing an inter-connected set of 72 square tiles (approx size: 5cm x 5cm each), to form visual representations of allotments - siirtolapuutarhat - including vegetable plots, saunas, urban buildings, roads, and other suburban features. The rules of the game may be modified from the original to suit the new thematic.

The 'Siirtolapuutarhapelit' collective also plans to use the project to learn more about allotment culture in Southern Finland and Central Poland, plus related urban farming activism in UK and USA.

We will introduce our game as a tool to raise the topic of strategy and interpersonal issues related to gaining and maintaining an allotment site. It makes its public debut as a prototype to be played at Megapolis2024 symposium (theme: Food), organised by Dodo ry in Helsinki, 26th September 2009.