LARP FOR CLIMATE

Our good friends at the Nausika Foundation, a partner organisation of Climate for All, led Larp For Climate, an international initiative to support climate activists and educators with larp and larp-based tools for education and social change. The initiative was launched in 2021, with Fridays For Future Poland and support from the Municipality of Kraków. In 2022 – 2024, Larp For Climate was supported financially by the Erasmus+ Program, which allowed them to design new games and facilitate them at various occasions, from school lessons to big cultural festivals. The partners of the Erasmus+ project are Peipsi MTU (Estonia), Alibier (Norway), and Larpifiers (Greece).

This partnership produced five amazing games! Our personal favourite? Climate Perspectives, a diplomatic game about climate change.

K2 GAMES

K2Games—Learning by Playing was an Erasmus+ funded project that ran from 2018 to 2021. A historic first, the project recognised the power of games to develop competences for sustainability and got to work designing! Led by the Society for Responsible Consumption (Romania), in partnership with Insight_epd (Italy), CRISP (Germany), and EEHYC (Lithuania), a team of 25+ members of staff and collaborators produced two board games, five simulation games, and a guidebook for facilitators.

Our personal favourite? K2 Pioneer City, a cooperative board game that addresses environmental change, pollution, decision-making, and the sustainability debate.

SOLARPUNK FUTURES

Solarpunk Futures is a storytelling game where players imagine the pathways to a desirable world from the perspective of a utopian future. Players use a deck of cards to remember Ancestors and work together using Tools and Values to overcome a set of real-world Challenges. Through dialogue and collaborative worldbuilding, collective and visionary narratives emerge of a new society, along with plausible scenarios for how to get there.

A wonderful and very artistic storytelling game, where you use the game’s deck of cards as prompts for collaborative worldbuilding. It’s a great game for exploratory thinking and collective action, that helps to imagine positive futures. The print-and-play version of the game can be freely downloaded from the website of the project.

THE CIRCULAR MARING WORLD

Once again, we turn to our friends at Nausika Foundation for one more inspiring project and game!

The Circular Maring World is co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, led by the Nausika Foundation (Poland) in partnership with The Larpifiers (Greece) and Fahrten Ferne Abenteuer (Germany).

An anthropological board game was produced by this partnership, based on academic research by Roy Rappaport (Pigs for the Ancestors, 1968, New Haven: Yale University Press). You play one of the indigenous Maring tribes of Papua Island, struggling to maintain balance in times of globalisation, threatening to throw you off the scale. You will find plenty of anthropological details in the storyline, while on the overall level, the Game tackles modern topics of Degrowth, Circular Economy and Deep Ecology.

CATAN OIL SPRINGS

Eureka! Oil has been discovered on the island of Catan.

The great engineers of Catan have learned ways to improve production using this valuable new resource, both by converting it into other resources and enabling the upgrade of cities into metropolises. ​​​​​​

Oil Springs is a scenario expansion for CATAN. To play this scenario, you need all game components of the CATAN base game.

Resource management is integral to understanding climate change in practice, and few games are better at tackling resource management in-game than CATAN. The EDUCATOR’S RESOURCES available on the game page also help a lot to understand the underlying links to real-world climate change.

PS. We’d love to also play the standalone CATAN NEW ENERGIES, but we simply haven’t played it yet, and that’s the only reason we can’t recommend it here!

EARTH RISING

A cooperative board game about saving the world!

Earth Rising isn’t about vanquishing evil or undoing some terrible plot… instead, up to six players must work together to bring the world into sustainable harmony. Balancing the needs of people with the limits of our planet’s biosphere, it’ll take strong co-operation and careful planning to reverse the damage done and transform our society into sustainability. A co-operative game for families and friends, aged 10+. You have twenty years to transform the world. Are you up to the task?

The game design is based on the ‘doughnut economics’ system, devised by Oxford Economics Professor, Kate Raworth, and demonstrates how our societal needs may be balanced alongside our planetary impact. We love the engine-building mechanics of Earth Rising, perfect for developing systems thinking skills. It also has a really beautiful board design!

THE 2030 SDGS GAME

An invitation to explore the world and yourself

The 2030 SDGs Game is a multiplayer, in-person, card-based game that simulates taking the “real world” into the year 2030. Designed in Japan in 2016, this experience has become a powerful and impactful social phenomenon, earning extensive media coverage and reaching over 400,000 participants.

Due to its nature, this game is not available for purchase, but only through events hosted by certified facilitators around the world.

One of the only two corporate games we recommend, this one is magnificent in its capacity for a mindset shift and brilliant in its implementation of systems thinking. The game has its own debriefing method, so using it with our workshop format would require adaptation, for example, by implementing our alignment with GreenComp and the Brainstorm and Act phases after the “kizuki” phase of the game’s own debriefing.

EVIVVE

Develop Leaders Who Think Faster, Collaborate Better, and Perform Under Pressure

Evivve is a cutting-edge multiplayer simulation designed to surface authentic leadership behaviours in real time. Underpinned by neuroscience, it transforms how organizations build adaptive, high-performing teams.

Due to its nature, this game is not available for purchase. It is offered to businesses by certified facilitators around the world as part of their professional services.

The second corporate game we recommend, Evivve is competence-based in its own merit. It is directly relevant to the green competences of individual vs collective action. This game also has its own debriefing method, so using it with our workshop format would require adaptation. You can do that by implementing our alignment with GreenComp and the Brainstorm and Act phases after the game’s own debriefing on concrete learning points and behaviours.