Conceived and developed through a cross-border partnership between the municipality of Prato (Italy), the municipality of Taichung (Taiwan), and ARCO (Action Research for Co-Development) at the University of Florence, “Circular City – the board game” is an educational, non-profit serious game designed to model the real-world complexities of transitioning toward a sustainable future. Rather than focusing on a checklist of ‘eco-friendly’ actions, the game frames a sustainable urban futures as a dynamic process that can only be achieved through multilateral collaboration and the structural transformation of marge parts of society.
In many traditional board games, players compete against each other to amass individual wealth or resources. Circular City flips this dynamic by adopting a so-called quadruple helix model of innovation. Each player (or team) role-plays as one of the four main pillars of urban change, public authorities (i.e. the government), industry, academia/education, and citizens. The game has no individual winners or losers but is a fully cooperativeCooperation This is a dummy entry about cooperation. experience with a fixed 60-minute time limit. To win, all players must hit a collective “scenario goal” such as drastically reducing local emissions or eliminating specific waste streams. The game communicates that a sustainable future is impossible if one sector acts in isolation; for example, the government can’t pass eco-friendly laws if the industry refuses to adapt, and industry can’t adapt without academic research and citizen/customer support.
Sustainable transitions require shifting physical and economic assets away from linear ‘take-make-waste’ practices and toward circular loops, which is simulated in the game via a shared pool of resources managed through debate and negotiation. At the start of the game, players are given an allocation of resource tokens. When a player draws an action card, which outlines a circular economy initiative, they cannot simply deploy it on their own. The group must initiate a structured debate to decide how to allocate their collective tokens to fund and support that specific action. This models real-life municipal and stakeholder budgeting. For an initiative to pass, players must consider the opportunity costs. For instance, the Industry player might have to lobby the Government player to use their tokens to subsidize a recycling technology, while the Academic player pitches why citizen environmental awareness is a prerequisite for that technology to succeed.
The game is built around six distinct scenarios provided in an accompanying game booklet. These scenarios ensure players understand that sustainability isn’t just about planting trees and other visible, external actions, but involves deeply integrated urban planning and politicking. Scenarios push players to tackle distinct target visions, such as reducing CO2 emissions, improving severe air pollution, or redesigning a municipal waste ecosystem. By forcing players to move through different scenarios, the game frames the concept of “a sustainable future” as a multi-faceted goal, e.g. drawing on Prato’s real-world expertise with textile recycling and European carbon-neutrality policies and Taichung’s urban sustainability challenges, thereby showing that circularity must be tailored to specific local environmental and social realities.
To make abstract terms like “circular transition” tangible, the gameplay maps policies to everyday behavioral changes. For example, When landing on specific spaces or drawing cards, players activate role-specific action plans. For example, the Government player might roll to pass a law promoting ‘green consumption’, the Industry player might implement an industrial symbiosis framework, where one factory’s waste becomes another’s raw material, and the Citizen player might adopt low-carbon lifestyle shifts. The game acts as an educational tool to show the mechanisms of systemic change, focusing on how high-level policies must trickle down to micro-level citizen habits (or potentially vice versa?) to successfully secure a thriving, resilient urban future.