GAME-CHANGERS: THE GAME

A game for simulating fights over the buzzwords, stories and alternatives shaping our futures

About

Game-Changers: The Game is a modular board game, game show and co-design format for staging discursive battles over contested social, economic, ecological and technological futures.

Two teams embody seemingly opposed positions – for example Capitalism vs. Commonism or Green Growth vs. Degrowth – and compete to claim a board made up of contested playing fields: buzzwords, proposed models, real-world initiatives and other places where arguments about change are getting fought over.

Players make short improvised moves using prompt cards. Challenge cards introduce systemic barriers, lock-ins and co-optation. Intervention cards offer strategies and tactics of disrupting the status quo. Wildcards, as external events, bring in shocks or openings that can suddenly alter the balance of the game.

The game puts political language under pressure. A term that sounds radical in the abstract can look different when a team has to defend it against a concrete challenge, when the other side co-opts it, or when a convincing story turns out to conceal a familiar old arrangement.

The audience is part of the game. Peerticipants score moves in real time, can challenge or discuss what they heard, and can contribute new storying prompt cards before, during or after a session. In this way, the game is not only played with a body of knowledge, but also transforms that body of knowledge.

How it plays

A Game-Changers session is built around an ideological pairing, a board, three prompt card decks and an audience. Players receive cards and take turns making short persuasive narrative moves on the playing fields in front of them. The precise rules can be tweaked for different contexts, but the basic task stays the same: use the material you have, make a case, and convince the room.

  • Most sessions use 2 vs. 2 or 3 vs. 3 teams
    1 vs. 1, asymmetric teams and larger groups can also work.
  • The audience acts as a peer jury
    One person is enough to play, but a larger audience makes the game more interesting and less partial.
  • Boards can be assembled with 4, 6, 8 or 12 playing fields
    At a standard two-minute turn, those configurations tend to produce playthroughs of roughly 30, 45, 60 or 90 minutes, not including introductions and post-game reflection.

Download, build and play

Print-and-play

Make and export a custom edition

A working Game Commons Online Platform prototype lets you create cards, assemble custom decks and boards, combine them into an edition, and export them as print-and-play materials in multiple formats. Developed during the 2026 Polymorphic Futures Web Residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude. Some profiles, support figures, votes and funding flows in the online prototype are simulated.

Open the custom edition builder

Virtual tabletop

Files compatible with VirtualTabletop.io, an open-source VTT: .pcio files (pwd: nuHD3VdQA9)

Guides

Current collaborations and experiments

Accelerating Just Climate Transitions (ACT) with Utrecht University

ACT is a research project concerned with fair transitions toward climate-neutral and climate-resilient neighbourhoods in Dutch urban regions. Within the collaboration, desk research, interviews and situated transition questions are being turned into Game-Changers cards and discursive battlegrounds. Editions are being tested with university students and local stakeholders, with the aim of developing the format further with climate justice movements, transition practitioners and other groups working through contested local change.

[Project link]  [Working materials for the ACT edition; pwd: 0wf2Xs30CW]

Expanded publishing

Several custom editions are being developed as experiments in expanded publishing by taking a body of writing and turning it into an infinitely replayable and expandable set of arguments, problems and interventions.

  • Stuck on the Platform edition, based on Geert Lovink, Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet (Valiz, 2022). [Working materials for the Stuck on the Platform edition; pwd: MSX9cr9dzK]
  • Radical Abundance edition, in development from Radical Abundance: How to Win a Green Democratic Future by Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell (Pluto Press, 2025).

Game Commons Online Platform

The platform prototype, developed during a 2026 web residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude, is a working sketch of the broader Game Commons: an interface for making cards, building decks and boards, assembling editions, exporting materials, documenting play and testing ways of collectively curating future sessions. The longer-term ambition is deliberately larger than the current prototype: a living archive with visible lineages between materials, recurring online and in-person games, distributed curation, artist commissions, and practical ways of supporting the labour that keeps the game commons alive.

Zine documentation format

The Game-Changers e-zine experiment is one way of keeping a play session from disappearing when the event ends. A recorded game is layered with the cards that were played, the current board state, scores and an edited transcript, so that the session can later be browsed as both documentation and reusable material.

Events

Upcoming

  • Games Transformed, London, UK (October 2026)

Previous

Exhibitions and programmes

  • Polymorphic Futures Web Residency, Akademie Schloss Solitude, online (2026)
  • 30th International Festival of Computer Arts (MFRU), Maribor, Slovenia (October 2024)
  • The Seashore of Endless Worlds, FTW, Le Commun, Geneva, Switzerland (November 2023)
  • Aksioma U30+ production programme / From Commons to NFTs, Aksioma, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2022)

Credits

Game-Changers: The Game is developed by Rok Kranjc (Futurescraft). The original gamechangers.wiki site and related web work were developed with Pablo Somonte Ruano. The 2026 Game Commons Online Platform prototype was developed as part of the Polymorphic Futures Web Residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Futurescraft  |  pablo.sx  |  Game Commons Online Platform prototype