From September 7 to 12, 2026, LAGIP (Game Lab for Analog Games and Imaginative Play), part of the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft, will once again host a week full of games at the University of Bonn: the Uni Bonn GAME WEEK. This is a multifaceted event that took place for the first time in September 2025. It brings together everyone at the University of Bonn and in the surrounding community who is interested in gaming, playful formats, and the vision of a playful university.  Here you’ll find the website for this year’s GAME WEEK. There you’ll find our event calendar and detailed descriptions of the individual Game Talks, Talk(ad)ventures, hands-on workshops, mind-game discussions, etc. Once again, there are some extremely exciting events on the schedule! This year, we’re once again kicking off GAME WEEK with the big CAMPO Cafeteria Game Night on September 7, a mid-GAME WEEK game night on September 9, and the finale at our LARP closing party on Friday, September 11, 2026. Just like last year, we’ll once again be streaming Breakfast Lectures from Wednesday through Friday on our LAGIP Twitch channel, always at 8:30 a.m., covering various topics in game studies. In addition to the numerous discussions and presentations, you’ll also have the option to participate in the “Escape 2051” escape room or try out our university role-playing game, 7’Rizons. On Saturday, September 12, just like last year, you’ll have the opportunity to visit the Bonn-based board game publisher Nice Game Publishing. Links to register are available on the website.   We look forward to seeing you there and to your participation!  Your LAGIP Team

Your Seminar as a Podcast!  The IMPULSE – House for Intellectual Innovation and Creativity, in collaboration with the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft, is once again offering lecturers the opportunity to conduct and record individual seminar sessions as podcasts during the Winter Semester 2026/27. Lecturers will receive expert guidance from a member of the podcast team in planning and executing these sessions. For those interested, there will first be a preliminary meeting via Zoom on Thursday, September 10, and Monday, September 21.  On Tuesday, October 13, and Monday, October 19, a studio tour will take place at IMPULSE. The dates for the podcast seminar will be set by arrangement. Further information can be found in the attached flyer  (PDF, German). We would appreciate it if you could forward this offer to the faculty at your institute!

Project Science Gaming: Board Game Events as a Gateway to STEM Topics (German title: Brettspielevents als Zugang zu MINT-Themen): Commercially available board games as a popular gateway to science.  Board games reach millions and have long been addressing scientific topics. Our project explores this potential and puts it to use: as a conversation starter, as a space for connection, and as a format for science communication. We are researching how game mechanics make complex topics accessible. A major opportunity arises from the fact that modern, commercially available board games are increasingly addressing science-related topics, such as climate change and climate protection, biodiversity, space exploration, history, and numerous other subjects. Even if some of these games contain only a few concrete elements of science communication, they can still serve as a conversation starter simply by the nature of the topics they address. This project investigates how modern board games can be used for science communication. The project Science Gaming: Board Game Events as a Gateway to STEM Topics is funded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation. An article about the project has now been published on their website, which here. The project website on the University of Bonn website is here.   

Dr. Lena Laube (Forum Internationale Wissenschaft), together with Dr. Juliane Dame (Acting Professor of Urban and Regional Geography), Prof. Dr. Kathrin Hörschelmann (Cultural Geography Research Group), and an inter- and transdisciplinary network of the Bonn Platform for Forced Migration Studies, has received funding to implement a pilot project on the topic of “Co-creative Research in Post-Migrant Democracy” (German title: Kokreative Forschung in der postmigrantischen Demokratie)  through the Transdisciplinary Research Area “Individuals, Institutions, and Societies” (TRA 4). The Transdisciplinary Research Areas (TRAs) comprise a total of six so-called innovation spaces for research and teaching at the University of Bonn, in which leading scholars collaborate across disciplines to explore key future-oriented questions in science, technology, and society. Building on a local network of academic and non-university stakeholders within the framework of the Bonn Platform for Forced Migration Studies, the project uses selected case studies in two cities to examine how existing community initiatives can contribute to the democratic shaping of a post-migrant society. In addition to the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft (FIW), the Department of Geography (GIUB), and the Bonn Research Alliance (BORA) at the University of Bonn, the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC),