Take a Tour
Take a Tour is a game in which performers guide the audience through an imaginary location, improvising the details of the space as they narrate. The location accumulates specificity through the guide's descriptions and the reactions of the visitors being led through it.
Structure
Setup
The audience or facilitator suggests a location to be toured. The location should be unusual, specific, or absurd enough to generate interesting detail.
Beginning the Tour
One performer plays the guide. They step into the space and begin welcoming their visitors, establishing themselves as an authority on this location. Other performers may play visiting tourists or remain as audience.
Describing the Space
The guide describes what they see as they lead the tour. Each description adds detail to the location and commits the performer to a specific version of this place. The guide points out notable features, historical facts, and curiosities of the space.
Reactions and Questions
Visitors or audience members can ask questions about the space. The guide must answer without hesitation, continuing to build the location's reality. Every answer adds a new layer of detail that the guide is now committed to.
Escalation
As the tour progresses, the details can become more specific, more strange, or more emotionally revealing. The guide's relationship to the location often becomes the dramatic engine of the game.
How to Teach It
Objectives
Take a Tour develops specificity in description, the ability to commit to an invented reality, and the skill of building a believable world through accumulated detail rather than pre-planning.
How to Explain It
"You are leading a tour of this location. You know everything about this place. Describe it to us as we walk through it. Point out what is interesting, what is unusual, what has history."
Scaffolding
Before full tours, practice brief descriptions of invented rooms or objects. The skill of describing a specific imaginary thing with confidence and detail is the foundation of the full exercise.
Common Pitfalls
The most common issue is guides who describe in generalities rather than specifics. A guide who says "and here is the main hall" is less interesting than one who says "and here is the main hall where in 1987 the director of the institute tried to flush an accordion." Specificity is everything.
How to Perform It
Game Mechanics
Take a Tour rewards guides who develop a distinctive relationship with the location. A guide who clearly loves the space, is embarrassed by parts of it, or has complicated personal history with it creates richer comedy than one who simply describes neutrally.
Audience Interaction
The game works well with audience participation. Planting audience members who ask increasingly difficult or absurd questions forces the guide to commit to specific answers and escalates the game's stakes.
Worth Reading
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Related Games
Tour Guide
Tour Guide is a character game in which a single performer leads the group through an imaginary location, improvising elaborate facts, history, and anecdotes about each stop as the tour progresses. The guide must maintain confident, authoritative delivery while inventing every detail in the moment. The game rewards deadpan commitment, world-building specificity, and the ability to sustain a comic persona under the pressure of continuous invention.
Rough Guide
Rough Guide is a game in which a performer acts as a tour guide leading the audience or other players through an imaginary location, improvising history, landmarks, and local customs based on audience suggestions. The guide must maintain an authoritative tone while inventing increasingly elaborate details. The game rewards confident world-building and deadpan delivery.
How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). Take a Tour. Retrieved September 28, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/games/take-a-tour
The Improv Archive. "Take a Tour." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/games/take-a-tour.
The Improv Archive. "Take a Tour." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/games/take-a-tour. Accessed September 28, 2026.
The Improv Archive is a systemically maintained repository. The archive itself acts as the corporate author.