what is this game about?

Links is a narrative-driven analogue game exploring how social, environmental, economic, and cultural forces collide in the age of the climate crisis. The game challenges players to move beyond individualism and into systems thinking, but it highlights how individualism leads to complex and complicated climate-policy outcomes. Through policy play, crises, and life events, it reveals how privilege, ideology, and lived experience shape collective futures.

Rather than preaching solutions, it creates space for confrontation, imagination, and empathy—inviting participants to question not just what we do about climate change, but who we are within it.

Team members: Aengus Schulte, Luciane Fortes, Mariska Lamiaud, Poorvi Garag

Project website

game features

The primary gameplay revolves around placing Policy Tiles to form a political landscape. The multi-coloured borders of these tiles represent different political facets that the policy engages with: environment, society, culture, and economy. By matching two such borders of the same colour with one another, players reinforce that facet’s presence on the board, earning tokens and abilities in the process.

A system like this is usually an incentive to focus on one strategy to the exclusion of any others: dedicate yourself to one facet and contest those of others. Players, in effect, fall into the trap of polarisation. We contest—and, in doing so, foreground—this tendency by subjecting players to Life Events, occurrences that radically change the ways in which players benefit from specific facets. Coupled with these are Climate Crises that physically cover the board, presenting both catastrophic destruction and new beginnings. In combination these two serve to upset the players’ static mode of thinking, encouraging them to extend this reflection outside of the game as well.

printing instructions

Links is available as a free print-to-play board game here.

• Print on A4, double-sided from the long side, full color, on the thickest paper you have available
• Add a touch of fanciness by rounding the corners of the cards (corner rounder 4mm recommended!)
• You can round the corners of all cards, except Policy Tiles and Crisis Tiles, they need to stay square
• If you don’t want to use the full set of Reference Cards that can accommodate 6 players, but 1 big Reference sheet instead, do not print the last 5 pages of the PDF
• Community feedback and narrative