Nick Koppenhagen

is an artist, game designer and baby theorist.


CV  Instagram Are.na

nick.koppenhagen[at]kuleuven.be
Ongoing

~ PhD at LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven, Belgium, 2025–
~ au JUS, collective LARP project space, 2024–

~ dreamXchange Guided Sessions, online dream sharing sessions, 2023–
Recent & Forthcoming

~ Games Against Borders symposium, London, together with Max Haiven and Briar Dickey, October 2026
Tarot, Money, and Mnemonics: Histories of Card Games Beyond Quantifiable-outcome Games, conference paper presentation, DiGRA 2026, Maynooth, Ireland, June 2026

Bar of the Broken Hearted, LARP, Beursschouwburg, Brussels, as part of au JUS, June 2026


Horizontal Twilight Spells

unplayable card game and relational writing system



The ‘Horizontal Twilight Spells’ started as an unplayable card game and relational writing system for myself. Following this framework, I am slowly transforming the project into a small press that exclusively publishes decks of unplayable card games exploring the aesthetic, epistemic, and critical capabilities of the card medium.

The first set of 165 cards exists online (on the project's website, the are.na channel, and the Instagram account) as well as in physical form as a printed deck of cards and exhibition piece. Sometimes, I describe the work as a distributed sculpture without a primary point of view that would qualify either the physical or digital form as more valid.


The Drift

2023, polished marble and onyx, resin bases, forged iron, 64 black core board paper cards from “Horizontal Twilight Spells – Set 2: Xi”, force-directed graph, 240 x 240 cm





Plutonic Bonding

2024, LARP, collaboration with Bea Xu
Plutonic Bonding was a day-long LARP at au JUS & surrounding sites in Brussels.

During a time of ecological unravelling, Plutonic Bonding is a psychogeographic LARP connecting players to terrains across multiple timelines at au JUS and its surrounding sites. Equipped with an inventory device applying the method of loci, a shallowly deep lore of the cosmos is uncovered as characters are guided to encounter and encode the entities inhabiting the land – whomst may well hold the key to accelerating extreme microclimates of the near future.

The first two sessions were played at au JUS in June 2024.


Dream Dungeon

2023, social dreaming role-playing game, collaboration with Carina Erdmann and Bálint Márk Túri

Dream Dungeon lets players explore a collective dream. The players start by sharing their dreams. Together they then take on the role of a shared dreamer as well as other characters from the dream material.

The latest sessions were played online as part of the dreamXchange ~ Guided Sessions, and in person at a.pass in Brussels.