Analogue Game – Green Media Mediography

Climate Cooldown

Climate Cooldown is a cooperativeCooperation This is a dummy entry about cooperation. educational board game designed for 2–4 players (though the game is scalable for larger groups in classrooms). Over the course of up to five rounds, players must coordinate their actions to slash global emissions, build green energy grids, and heal damaged ecosystems before

Post Growth Toolkit: The Game

Developed by the art and research collective Disnovation.org, Post Growth Toolkit: The Game is a tactical intervention into how we conceptualize the climate crisis. Most commercial environmental simulation games like SimCity or more recent ‘green-tech’ city builders operate within a neoliberal framework, challenging players to optimize resources, deploy eco-friendly upgrades, and manage carbon metrics, all

Plastic Island

Plastic Island, developed by the Indonesia-based “Ecogames” collective, is an educational board game that thematizes combating plastic pollution. Participants clean and upcycle trash, enhancing the ocean’s health; the game (like every title designed by the Ecogames collective) is created by local artisans in Bali, at least partly from upcycled materials like recycled wood, canvas, and

Future Energy

Future Energy, designed by Emanuele Ornella and published by Queen Games, is officially part of Queen Games’ Green Planet series, a line of games explicitly dedicated to themes of sustainability and ecological transformation. In most traditional resource-management games, players build factories on blank spaces or ‘extract’ resources from the in-game environment. Future Energy presents a

Canopy: Evergreen

While its predecessor, Canopy, focused on the lush, dense tropical rainforest, Evergreen shifts the focus to a temperate forest ecosystem. In a functioning ecosystem, plants and animals rely on each other to survive and reproduce. Evergreen models the interdependence of trophic levels via a mechanical pairing system between the forest habitat and its wildlife. Players

Circular City – the board game

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

Reduce, Reuse, Revolt

From the itch.io website: “The news doesn’t even mention it anymore. The rising temperatures, mass migrations, dirty water, acid rain–none of it. It’s all bought and paid for by corporations, those entities which press down upon the people, grinding them into the pavement until nothing but a husk is left. Everyone is angry, sick, and

Ecology: The Game of Man and Nature

From the Science History Institute website: “Ecology: The Game of Man and Nature was published in 1970 by Urban Systems, a consulting and research firm, whose president, Richard H. Rosen, was an ecologist and environmental engineer. While teaching undergraduate air pollution classes at Harvard, Rosen produced a number of anti-pollution board games for educational purposes.

Earth Rising: 20 Years to Transform Our World

Earth Rising: 20 Years to Transform Our World is a cooperativeCooperation This is a dummy entry about cooperation. board game for 1 to 6 players. Each player takes on a role such as activist, scientist, politician, or innovator, working together to achieve sustainability before time runs out. The game lasts for twenty rounds, each representing

New Angeles

New Angeles, set in the Android universe, is a bustling industrial hub that depends on constant resource extraction and distribution to function. Each player controls a megacorporation, competing to earn more wealth than their opponents. But they must also cooperate to keep the city stable. If unrest, infrastructure problems, or resource shortages cause the city

Flourish

Players design and cultivate a personal garden over the course of four rounds of play, gradually building a tableau of flower beds, trees, ornamental features, and bee hives that form a flourishing ecosystem with each other, but also with their neighbours’ gardens. Each player scores points from the combinations of plants and landscape elements they

Kelp: Shark vs Octopus

Kelp is a two-player asymmetrical game that offers players a unique opportunity to delve into the natural world of Pyjama Sharks and Common Octopuses, set in a South African kelp forest. Hide and seek meets bluffing and manipulation. Deck builder meets dice bag builder. As players take on the roles of these iconic sea creatures, they

Carbon City Zero

Carbon City Zero: World Edition is a collaborative deck-building game for 1-4 people (aged 8+), in which players develop a sustainable city by greening transport, transforming industries, getting citizens on board, and showing world leaders how it’s done. Each player starts with an identical deck, buying additional cards from a shared marketplace to create a

Keep Cool

With Keep Cool, each player takes a role within global climate politics. You have to put through economic interests – e.g., of the USA and its partners or of the Developing Countries – yet you must not forget the strong lobby groups in your country like the oil industry or environmental groups as they also decide

Happy Shoppers

Chloé Wake and Paul Wake (Frank and Alex Games). Self-published, 2024. Free to download. 3+ players | 20–40 minutes | Adult Happy Shoppers: A New and Most Disgusting Game for Consumers of All Ages is a free, print-and-play card game designed for the Fuck Capitalism Game Jam (2024), with a revised edition available to download from

Catan

Klaus Teuber. Catan GmbH, 1995. 3–4 Players | 60-120 Mins | Age 10+ Catan, designed by Klaus Teuber, is a multiplayer game in which players compete to create the dominant settlement on the fictional island of Catan. Players compete for space and resources, and build roads, towns and cities until the island has been effectively

Renature

Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer. Art by Dennis Lohausen. Deep Print Games, 2020. 2-4 players | 45-60 minutes | Age 8+ Renature is a competitive board game where players plant trees in a national park to compete for points. There are various methods for collecting points: by planting trees which are an equal or larger

Wingspan

Elizabeth Hargrave. Art by Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, Natalia Rojas, Greg May, Beth Sobel. Stonemaier Games, 2019. 1-5 players | 40-70 mins | Age 10+ Wingspan is an engine builder game in which players are bird enthusiasts who compete to build the best bird sanctuary within four rounds. Each player has their own personal board

Scythe

Jamey Stegmaier. Art by Jakub Rozalski. Stonemaier Games, 2016. 1-5 Players | 115 Minutes | Age 14+ Jamie Stegmaier’s Scythe is an engine-building game in which players take control of nations struggling to survive in 1920s ‘Europa’, a place riven by unrest caused by the Great War. The city-state known simply as “The Factory”, whose

Rustling Leaves

Paolo Mori. Art by Elli Jäger. Kosmos, 2020. 2-6 Players | 20 minutes | Age 8+ Rustling Leaves is a roll-and-write game set in a forest habitat with varying rules as the seasons – spring, summer, autumn, and winter – change. Each player will get a sheet of paper upon which a grid represents the

Planet

Urtis Šulinskas. Art by Sabrina Miramon. Blue Orange, 2018. 2-4 players | 30- 45 minutes | Age 8+ Planet is a tactile game in which players build their own individual world by selecting vibrantly coloured tiles containing different biomes: ocean, desert, mountain ranges, forest and glaciers. Each player also has an individual objective card and

Power Failure

Tao-Tao Chen, Yen-Lin Chen, Yu-Xuan Su and An-Qi Zheng. Art by Sy Li, Masha Tace, Will Meadows and Sarah Lafser. Artana, 2021. 2-4 players | 45 minutes | Age 14+ Power Failure is a card and dexterity game where players try to collect city cards which account for points at the end of the game.

Parks

Henry Aubudon. Art by Fifty-Nine Parks Print Series. Keymaster Games, 2021. 1-5 players | 30-60 minutes | Age 10+ Parks is a resource management and travel board game where players take on the role of hikers trekking trails in North American national parks throughout four seasons of the year. The game’s objective is to score

Pandemic: Rising Tide

2-5 players | 45 minutes | Age 8+ Jeroen Doumen and Matt Leacock. Z-Man Games, 2017 Rising tide is a collaborative game where players must work together to build four hydraulic structures, to prevent the North Sea flooding low lying areas in the Netherlands. The game is based on true historical events reflecting the processes