House of Games is over!
This song Intro by The XX got stuck in my head as I close down this last chapter and move onto the next one. This album is also a timeless gem. 💎
I took a second to reflect as I left Fools’ Valley, having spent 2 months there, I was sharing a life together with this piece of land. So many stories happened, the beautiful, the mysterious, the challenging, the bittersweet…
House of Games was our third month-long co-living residency. Hosted at Fool’s Valley — a co-living project surrounded by rolling hills and wind turbines, 30 minutes drive from Lisbon 🇵🇹 — we brought together 25+ people working within a diverse range of passions: frontier technology, AI, art and culture, storytelling, quest making, land stewardship, human connection, consciousness and spirituality, experiential design… and what we all had in common was our desire to master the art of being humans.
Here is my honest reflections on running this residency, what we built, what worked, what broke, and what we’re taking forward:
There was a routine and rhythm to the week:
Monday Goal Setting — a chance to name what each person was carrying into the week before the work began:
WHAT DID I ACCOMPLISH LAST WEEK?
GOALS FOR THIS WEEK
WHAT’S BLOCKING ME?
HOW CAN THE HOUSE HELP?
Wednesday Lightning Talks — short, sharp presentations from residents on whatever they were building, obsessed with, or questioning. You can watch a selection here.
Game Nights! — To honor the concept of House of Games, there were a lot of games, table tops, LAN parties, the gamers had A LOT of fun!!
Cleaning & Cooking — Yes, this was not a hotel, we did not have servers. There was the Fools’ Valley team, but we worked together on everything, cook, clean, lighting up the wood sauna, etc…
Beyond the weekly rhythm, we made space for deep work, exercises, group discussions. Any time anyone had an idea, they posted onto our shared calendar.
Townhall — a place where we discuss how to improve the experience of living together, designed to be a fun yet functional form of governance, an essential practice for most communities.
Fieldtrips — we organized visits to 3 different land-based projects, Traditional Dream Factory, Colmeia62 and The Garden.
Love Shower — where one person sits in the center while the group showers them with love, sharing honestly on why they appreciate them and what’s special about them.
How We Can Do Better — a place for people to share honest takes on each other to help us improve.
Quest Making and Fateweaving — activities hosted by Zizi and Dani, turning self inquiry and personal growth into a LARP game throughout the whole month.
Special Weekend Events — every weekend something happened, we took trips to Lisbon for city strolling, we went to Ericeira to check out the beach, we had a dance party, hosted a house Olympics for the sake of having fun…
By the end of the month, we had become something more than colleagues, more than friends, yet not quite family.
To be honest, I left the month feeling quite exhausted… Not just physically, not even just mentally, but holistically, ‘spiritually’ exhausted. This feeling had me very puzzled.
WHY? Building this was supposed to be my DREAM — I got to ‘prototype’ a mini community to pave the road for a future Solarpunk Campus, why am I not leaving the experience feeling rejuvenated? Maybe it’s the nature between dream and reality, or maybe there is something else going on… I went down into some personal soul searching, here is my hypothesis:
When a friend organizes a camping trip, they don’t charge admission. When you invite people over for a dinner party, they don’t charge you a ticket. Community building is one of the oldest human offerings, we do it out of love — every tribe thrives because someone rallies people together, holds the container, makes people feel seen and loved.
In modern society we forgot that, so it becomes a demand in the capitalist market, therefore supply follows.
The IRL connection economy is a $400B+ market. — @jonaswillett1
I believe it is the world we’re stepping into, we need more and more irl gatherings, personal connections. It does justify residencies & events as a viable business model.
But still it doesn’t change the fact that charging for what used to be a gift just feels weird. I felt like I gave myself a lot of pressure of needing to make everyone super happy, and it’s absolutely impossible. Maybe the overthinking makes it worse… Anyways, you learn by doing 🙂↔️.
Reflecting further, it feels like our current economic system doesn’t highly value the work of community builders, which can lead to burn-out because it is hard work with limited compensation.
How can community builders actually be paid appropriately for the value they create? Could this come through different methods outside of ticket sales and sponsorships? What are novel models we can experiment with?
If you have any ideas, leave a comment or reach out in our telegram!
I personally believe that if we can solve family drama, we can solve world peace. If we can’t run a functional kitchen, we definitely can’t run a functional country.
Team dynamics determine the longevity of a band, a startup, a pirate crew. The same is true for a co-living house.
When you live together intentionally, things come up, sometimes deep trauma-infused character flaws come up. We all have them, nobody’s perfect. But in a close-knit group, personal emotions become group weather. Habits clash. Conflict arises. Old wounds surface at a random dinner conversation.
The hard work is the work of building new forms of kinship — choosing each other without the scaffolding of blood obligation — and a lot of that work is unseen. Tens (eventually hundreds) of people living harmoniously is not just a casual lifestyle choice, it’s one of the hardest design problems.
Utopia doesn’t exist because we’re here to build it.
We had a vision for a very specific type of residency and community — and this wasn’t fully that vision, maybe not yet. We’re learning in public, building in real time, and living with the gap between what we imagined and what we made. And this experience does sharpen the question: what would it look like to do this right?
I don’t quite have the best answers to that yet, but here are the 2 things I’d like to try next:
Longer Residencies, Fewer People — I actually don’t want to live with 30 people in such close proximity for such a long time. I think my ideal home sharing size is 6-8 in a house sharing a kitchen with core homies, and maybe there are others in different houses that we can visit nearby —- a village or a CAMPUS would be ideal 💕
Shorter & More Intense — Yes, I’d like to explore the idea of an Agartha festival for 1-3 days, or a retreat for 1-2 weeks: where we gather, deeply connect, live & breathe Solarpunk as we go! Maybe it’s a meditation retreat, a sailing trip, or 5 days of trekking thru the Himalayas… Anyways, STAY TUNED! 📻
Here’s my visual framing of a ‘friendship circle’. Basically:
Core Homies — people you can REALLY live together for a long time, without needing extra emotional labor to ‘do the work’, they are your intimate partners, close roommates, families, people you are just super comfortable with, being with them is like wearing a pajama, you don’t have to ‘fit’ in anywhere, you can just relax, and decompress, and that’s home.
Friends — people you love and adore but maybe on smaller doses. Many friendship gets uncomfortable when you live too closely. Sometimes distance creates the beauty. Maybe you’d LOVE a weekend trip together, or go see a show together, but you don’t HAVE to be roommates.
Not Yet Friends — these are people in the ether that you might end up getting along REALLY WELL with. But for some reason, you aren’t that close. Maybe you hang out in different circles, maybe you are yet to realize that you smell similar, anyways, open events like festivals, retreats, pop-up cities are a great way to find out who they are.
Probably Never Friends — there are people that maybe you would just never get along with. My Utopian dream is that never exists and our WHOLE WORLD gets along like a big family (yes because we are ONE!)… But in reality, as of now in 2026, this absolutely exists. And it’s worth to know internally for you who they are, and carve your precious time to not be around them, definitely don’t get married with them!
After running 3 residencies, here’s what I know that would make all the differences. ✨
The right people — this is the most important part, everything else is downstream of this. Concentric circles work: start from trust, let trust expand outward.
The right environment — a Solarpunk environment: good weather, lots of greens, sustainable energy, compost nearby, ideally a farm nearby if possible, the kind of places designed to be good for our health and the planet.
Foundations first — love, care, making people feel seen before anything else starts. A dedicated intro ritual. What we all want in the end is to be seen and to be loved. The sooner we can make people feel that way, the better it is.
Shared responsibility — rotating kitchen shifts, communal tasks, automatic accountability. When everyone owns the space, everyone protects it.
A container for the hard stuff — scheduled space to name what isn’t working.
Intentional programming — not too packed, not too empty. A good rhythm that holds the group together without smothering it.
Escape valves — weekend trips, change of scenery. Community needs movement to stay alive.
None of this happens without the people who show up and do the invisible work alongside you.
Big shoutout to our absolute MVP of the month AND our new Agartha teammate Menno for being so sweet, kind, thoughtful, attentive and so extremely helpful and reliable at the residency.
Thank you to every resident of House of Games who trusted the container, contributed their unique magic, asked the hard questions, and made the month what it was. You know who you are! 💕
Another big shout out to the Fool’s Valley team — our host. For our audience out there, if you’re looking for a place to decompress and deep focus near Lisbon, it’s worth knowing about.
Our next venture will be in Touch Grass June 2026 at Edge Esmeralda in collaboration with Artizen — come find us and we’ll touch some grass together!
If you’re building something like this — a residency, a co-living project, a gathering — we want to hear from you. Join our community on Telegram and come find your people.
Until then, sending you love… 💕
✨ Thanks for reading! Agartha is a Solarpunk studio on a mission to meme Solarpunk into a reality. 💕 Join us as we chronicle our journey through residencies, co-living places, pop-up cities, regenerative villages, and Solarpunk lifestyles. ☀️
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