A playful reinterpretation of the childhood game of fill-in-the-blank stories, “Maplibs” is an affective place-based activity for collective memory mapping, storytelling, and community vision-making. In this paper, we outline how we first developed Maplibs in 2017 as an informal, alternative form of community engagement for the then newly proposed Ottawa Central Public Library. In response to the largely performative public consultations offered by the city, Maplibs was an experiment in community process that invited participants to think about the value and use of shared spaces by mapping their personal memories of analogous places and then reflecting on these experiences through a storytelling session. We refer to this process as “past-forward placemaking,” and recognize its benefits in capturing the affective and embodied qualities of public space that are often a key part of community building. Eight years later, we return to that impromptu collaboration with new knowledge and experiences but also a lingering sense that Maplibs and past-forward placemaking have unfulfilled potential as meaningful methods for community engagement. The original activity design emerged intuitively out of our interdisciplinary collaboration with clear references to our individual backgrounds in architecture and urban planning, memory studies, and digital humanities. While we value the immediacy, authenticity, and perhaps naiveté of our past work as emerging scholars in an emerging field, we now return to this work with the benefits but also complications that come from more experience in participatory research and community-based methods. We conclude with our reflections on the practical and ethical limitations of Maplibs and possible refinements for future applications.