Chrissie Poulter read Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University from 1973 to 1976, and was taught by Clive Barker during her first year there. Now a Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, her specialism is theatre games, so their paths continued to cross over the years. As a theatre director, deviser, and trainer her work centres on the use of play within and without the theatre world, with a particular focus on inter- and intra-cultural exchange. Her book Playing the Game (Palgrave-Macmillan, 1987) is a widely used manual of theatre games. Her most recent creative projects have been as one of the directors of The Bus Project – a site-specific project on a moving Dublin bus – for Performance Lab in the Dublin Fringe Festival in September 2007, and Metamorphoses with Prey Trio, a site-specific production with three musicians for the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Co Wicklow, described in the preceding article by Lizbeth Goodman. Here, Chrissie Poulter takes theatre games as a springboard to discuss and define the need for ‘guardianship’ in game playing, online or in the studio workship.