‘0–99: The Design of Play’ opens near Milan

A design show near Milan is treating board games the way Milan usually treats chairs: as serious objects with rules, materials, authors, and a point of view. “0–99. Design per gioco” opened on April 10 at Palazzo Arese Borromeo in Cesano Maderno and runs through May 10, 2026. (gamescenes.org) The location is part of the pitch. Instead of sitting inside the busiest commercial core of Milan Design Week, the exhibition is staged in a 17th-century palace at Via Borromeo 41, a little north of the city, with a schedule that starts before and ends after the main Fuorisalone dates of April 20 to 26. (gamescenes.org) (salonemilano.it) (fuorisalone.it) What the curators are arguing is simple: a board game is not just a pastime, because every board, token, and rulebook is a small machine for getting strangers to cooperate, compete, and negotiate at one table. Fuorisalone describes the show as an exhibition about the board game as a cultural object that expresses identities and visions through rules, pieces, and game boards. (fuorisalone.it) The show starts at the very beginning, with 30 ancient games from different parts of the world, including the Royal Game of Ur, Go, chess, dominoes, playing cards, and tombola. That turns a walk through the rooms into a compressed history of how humans learned strategy, luck, ritual, and social order long before screens existed. (fuorisalone.it) (gamescenes.org) Then it jumps to 20th-century mass-market titles like Cluedo, Connect Four, Monopoly, and Risk, with Risk expanded into a fully playable 90-square-meter version. A game usually held in your hands gets blown up to room size, which makes its logic of territory and conquest feel like architecture instead of packaging. (fuorisalone.it 1) (fuorisalone.it 2) The curators are Cristian Confalonieri and Alessia Interlandi, and Confalonieri brings unusual homework for a design-week exhibition: he is also co-author, with Andrea Cuman, of the 2024 book “Atlante dei giochi da tavolo.” Fuorisalone calls that book one of the most comprehensive mappings of board games worldwide and the scientific reference behind the project. (fuorisalone.it) (gamescenes.org) One of the sharpest moves in the exhibition is giving two rooms to Alex Randolph, the game designer behind titles including TwixT and Inkognito, plus a 2022 documentary by Luca Bitonte. That shifts attention from famous brands to authorship, the same way design history names the person behind a lamp instead of only the company that sold it. (gamescenes.org) (abbonamentomusei.it) There is also a designer-object layer that Milan visitors will instantly recognize: a Carrom table by Vismara Design, a steel chess set by Gianfranco Frattini, a Backgammon carpet by Valeria Molinari, a leather-and-wood Battleship set by Pinetti, and a Game of the Goose by Pineider. The point is not nostalgia alone, but showing how familiar games migrate into luxury materials, collectible editions, and interior design. (fuorisalone.it 1) (fuorisalone.it 2) The title “0–99” comes from the age range printed on countless game boxes, and the exhibition turns that retail label into its thesis about universality across generations. The final stop is a playroom, and the museum listing says the route also includes a project called memorIA on artificial intelligence and craft creativity, so the show ends by asking what play design looks like after the analog era instead of pretending the story stopped with Monopoly. (gamescenes.org) (abbonamentomusei.it) If you actually want to go, the practical details are unusually gentle by Design Week standards: the exhibition is listed at €5 full price and €3 reduced, with weekday hours split between 10:00 to 13:00 and 15:00 to 18:00, and weekend closing extended to 19:00. In a week built around crowded launches and invitation lists, this one is a month-long detour about how rules, objects, and people learn to share a table. (abbonamentomusei.it)