Board games fixing the world

Can playing board games help us fix real-world problems?

All around the world, people play board games for fun. But in recent years, a new generation of designers have been creating games with a social purpose - to enable understanding about complex problems like climate change, inequality and deforestation, and collaboratively design strategies to solve them.

We look at how a group of researchers from Switzerland are creating custom-made board games that help resolve environmental disputes, led by Professor Claude Garcia from ETH Zurich and Bern University of Applied Sciences. Local farmers, businesspeople and government officials play their own roles in the games – which have helped them find compromises that protect the natural world in Indonesia and the Congo Basin.

And in London, we also get a first-look at Daybreak, a new cooperative board game designed by Matteo Menapace and Matt Leacock, who designed Pandemic - a game that helped people understand the spread of coronavirus. In Daybreak, they’ve used the best scientific advice to design a game where you work together to try to stop climate change in its tracks.

Presenter: Myra Anubi

Reporters: Lizzy McNeill and Zoe Gelber

Producers: Zoe Gelber, William Kremer and Lizzy McNeill

Series producer: Tom Colls

Sound mix: Hal Haines

Editor: Penny Murphy

Email: [email protected]

Image: The Daybreak board game