This half-day workshop explores playful engagement in cultural settings that centers four interrelated concepts central to creating compelling, memorable physical, digital, or blended participant experiences: sensory immersion, emotional evocation, narrative transportation, and playful participation. This workshop will provide participants with a framework for understanding the visitor experience in cultural settings, proposes a model of playful engagement that allows experience designers to more clearly visualize their mandate, and explores four concepts that they can employ to create a new generation of compelling, memorable, and transformative experiences, both in-person and online.