How A University Is Utilizing Board Games To Train Health–Climate Policy Commerce-offs

“If we redirect healthcare funding to climate infrastructure, cholera spikes in the Sundarbans,” one scholar warns, monitoring illness markers throughout the board. “Dengue and malaria already rise with every flood.”

“But without climate investment, there are no jobs and no resilience infrastructure,” one other counters, shifting useful resource tokens. “How do vulnerable populations survive the next cyclone?”

A 3rd scholar traces the well being inequality index because it dips. “When heatwaves hit and crops fail, who carries the mortality burden? It’s always the most vulnerable.”

The group pauses, recalculating their strikes. “And the next generation inherits whatever system we design,” somebody says. “If we don’t build health equity now – clean air, water, healthcare – there may be no future left to protect.”

The trade might simply be mistaken for high-stakes negotiations at a world local weather summit. Instead, it’s unfolding on a winter afternoon inside a postgraduate classroom on the London School of Economics, a 130-year-old UK public college lengthy related to shaping international debates on economics and public coverage. 

The stakes really feel actual as a result of the scholars will not be analysing another person’s choices; they’re designing their very own board recreation, pressured to confront the identical unattainable trade-offs confronted by local weather and well being policymakers.

Around them, playing cards, tokens, and wood markers lie scattered throughout the desk. At the centre sits a well being index, quietly monitoring which populations retain entry to care, and that are pushed into vulnerability as local weather shocks mount.

Games for Change

Before designing their very own video games, college students had been launched to Daybreak, a climate-action board recreation now used as a educating instrument at LSE, and one which has gained main recognition, together with Best Board or Tabletop Game for Impact on the 2024 Games for Change Awards. 

The recreation emerged from co-creators Matteo Menapace and Matt Leacock’s try and grapple with the local weather disaster. “I wanted to make sense of it,” Menapace says. “And I wanted to do something about it.” 

Unlike aggressive video games, Daybreak is absolutely cooperative: gamers both succeed collectively or fail collectively. Each participant represents a world area–Europe, the United States, China, or the Majority World throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and works in the direction of a shared aim referred to as “Drawdown”, the purpose at which extra carbon is faraway from the environment than emitted. 

To get there, gamers should lower emissions, put money into infrastructure and ecosystems, and forestall communities from sliding into disaster. If international temperatures cross 2.0°C, or any area collapses below repeated shocks, everybody loses.

As a recreation designer, Menapace felt constrained by local weather communication that forged folks as passive observers. “In a game, you put players in the driving seat,” he says. “You give them agency to make choices–and those choices shape the system.”

For college students in LSE’s Health Policy programme, the lesson runs deeper: each local weather resolution can be a well being resolution. Although Daybreak doesn’t explicitly monitor well being indicators, college students rapidly recognise the implications embedded in every disaster. 

Rising emissions translate into lethal heatwaves, triggering heatstroke and cardiovascular deaths. Floods don’t merely displace communities; the “Communities in Crisis” markers stand in for cholera outbreaks, waterborne illness, and well being techniques pushed to breaking level.

Immersive educating

These insights type the muse of Health Equity, Climate Change and the Common Good, a module led by well being economist Professor Miqdad Asaria. After months of collaboration with Menapace, the course was launched within the 2024–25 tutorial 12 months, with Daybreak at its core. 

Its growth, nevertheless, started a lot earlier, unfolding over a number of years of brainstorming, figuring out key readings, piloting strategies via workshops, and navigating inside tutorial processes. The module continues to evolve, formed by ongoing scholar suggestions.

“We use immersive teaching methods across LSE, including simulations, theatre, and games,” Asaria says. “But I think this is the only course at the School where students are challenged to design their own games.”

That distinction is deliberate. Conventional coverage schooling sometimes trains college students to work inside present frameworks–analysing trade-offs, optimising outcomes, and implementing established options. 

By distinction, this module asks college students to interrogate these frameworks and, the place vital, redesign them. Asaria describes the course as an train in “bold, imaginative thinking”, explaining that the sport helps college students grasp each the constraints imposed by coverage guidelines and the facility that comes with with the ability to change them.

The curriculum tightly integrates idea and apply. Seminars on political financial system, local weather science, geoengineering, and public well being present the conceptual foundations. 

Weekly workshops translate these concepts into playable techniques. The course actively engages college students with the world past the classroom–sending them to artwork galleries to discover protest artwork, or collaborating in present exchanges to know the present financial system. 

Students first play Daybreak to know its mechanics, earlier than hacking and remaking it to mirror their very own coverage priorities. 

“It is amazing to see the creative links they’ve been making,” Asaria says.

Refreshing method

The method has additionally drawn consideration from outdoors LSE. Professor Tim Doran, a well being coverage professional on the University of York who visited one of many workshops, praised the pedagogical innovation. 

“In the AI era, educators need to keep innovating–this approach is refreshing,” he noticed. “It forces students to actively engage their minds and apply knowledge in real time through tangible problem-solving. You can’t AI your way through building a functional game system–you have to think. In the coming years, colleges will need more innovative modules like this.”

Asaria describes the video games college students design and play as “playable policy models”– not simplifications, however intentional alternate options to standard coverage modelling. Rather than counting on “complex mathematics and computer programming”, he explains, the video games enable college students to work via the total vary of meant and unintended penalties that coverage choices set in movement. 

By decreasing the technical barrier, the method redirects college students’ “time and intellectual energy” away from constructing fashions and in the direction of grappling with the political, moral, and distributive questions that insurance policies inevitably elevate. Crucially, it opens the classroom to real interdisciplinary collaboration. 

Students from “very diverse academic perspectives”, Asaria says, can discover troublesome coverage issues collectively–permitting clinicians, economists, and social scientists to check concepts facet by facet. The result’s a studying area the place experience is shared quite than siloed, and technical talent not acts as a gatekeeper to coverage creativeness.

Turning well being crises into playable coverage

The module’s summative evaluation asks college students to design a board recreation that fashions local weather and well being collectively, with well being fairness and the widespread good at its centre. 

“This assessment requires students to see the whole course as a complex system, with ideas feeding back off each other,” Asaria explains. Unlike conventional exams, he provides, “doing the assessment is very much part of the learning process.”

In apply, college students translate coverage selections into recreation mechanics–utilizing playing cards, scores, thresholds, and disaster occasions to simulate how choices ripple via well being techniques and societies over time. That shift is deliberate. 

“This authorial leap is crucial,” Asaria says, “because it conveys that there is hope, and that students have agency.”

The ensuing video games take various kinds. Some use Health Quality Indices to trace entry to care and illness burden; others incorporate quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) or happiness indices, forcing gamers to weigh high quality of life in opposition to local weather and financial choices. Several video games mannequin how local weather anxiousness, displacement, and trauma accumulate throughout generations.

“Over the course of the module, students begin to understand that health and wellbeing are what truly matter,” Asaria displays. “They also recognise a key failure in policymaking, that we prioritise progress using metrics with little intrinsic value.”

The course of additionally offers college students hands-on expertise of real-world policymaking, the place sustainability have to be negotiated throughout competing pursuits. As they design their video games, college students are required to grapple with the tensions between company actors, activist actions, and analysis proof–mirroring the messy politics via which local weather and well being insurance policies are literally made.

One group, Bonum Commune, is designing a recreation set in West Bengal, considered one of India’s most climate-vulnerable states. Rather than focusing solely on emissions or illness outcomes, the sport makes ideology itself playable, forcing members to barter local weather and well being coverage from positions formed by capitalism, welfare, environmental justice, and collective care. 

The intention is to indicate how energy, values, and historic inequality decide which insurance policies turn into potential, lengthy earlier than technical options are even thought of.

For Sounak Das, a scholar from one other group, which focuses on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the train made these connections unavoidable. “This module showed me how climate collapse intersects with historical inequality and public health,” he says.

“Our game demonstrated that survival depends on crossing health thresholds–reducing disease burden and maintaining healthcare capacity–while navigating cooperation dilemmas. The key lesson was clear: equity isn’t a moral luxury, but a strategic condition for resilience.”

Beyond the college door

Nearly two years went into growing Daybreak, formed via conversations with local weather scientists and humanitarian consultants. Crucial suggestions got here from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.

“We were focusing too much on decarbonisation,” Menapace recollects. “They helped us realise that mitigation alone isn’t enough. You also have to build resilience and protect people.”

Menapace’s work with video games extends nicely past LSE. He additionally collaborates with the UK authorities’s Policy Lab, the place video games are used as instruments for coverage design quite than leisure. 

In these workshops, policymakers, researchers, and affected communities come collectively to expertise how a system works, critique its failures, and “hack” it by altering the foundations. In one challenge, a co-designed recreation introduced fishermen, scientists, and officers into the identical room, serving to form discussions that fed into fisheries coverage choices.

Menapace believes this method may very well be particularly highly effective in low- and middle-income nations, the place local weather impacts are acute and communities are sometimes excluded from policymaking. 

Simplified, low-cost video games will help folks perceive advanced points–and adapt them to mirror lived realities. He can be growing Dawn, a shorter, extra accessible companion to Daybreak targeted on zero emissions. “Net zero can create complacency,” he says.

The recreation ends. Students assess who survived and who didn’t. For Asaria, this second is the place studying occurs, tracing the road from coverage to mortality, from selections to penalties.

In a world dealing with well being shocks and widening inequality, a board recreation in London is rehearsing the longer term. Not as it’s, however as it would nonetheless be redesigned.

Image Credits: Miqdad Asaria, Abhishek Chakraborty/ Unsplash.