“If we redirect healthcare funding to climate infrastructure, cholera spikes in the Sundarbans,” one student warns, tracking disease markers across the board. “Dengue and malaria already rise with every flood.”

“But without climate investment, there are no jobs and no resilience infrastructure,” another counters, shifting resource tokens. “How do vulnerable populations survive the next cyclone?”

A third student traces the health inequality index as it dips. “When heatwaves hit and crops fail, who carries the mortality burden? It’s always the most vulnerable.”

The group pauses, recalculating their moves. “And the next generation inherits whatever system we design,” someone says. “If we don’t build health equity now – clean air, water, healthcare – there may be no future left to protect.”

The exchange could easily be mistaken for high-stakes negotiations at a global climate summit. Instead, it is unfolding on a winter afternoon inside a postgraduate classroom at the London School of Economics, a 130-year-old UK public university long associated with shaping global debates on economics and public policy. 

The stakes feel real because the students are not analysing someone else’s decisions; they are designing their own board game, forced to confront the same impossible trade-offs faced by climate and health policymakers.

Around them, cards, tokens, and wooden markers lie scattered across the table. At the centre sits a health index, quietly tracking which populations retain access to care, and which are pushed into vulnerability as climate shocks mount.

Games for Change

Before designing their own games, students were introduced to Daybreak, a climate-action board game now used as a teaching tool at LSE, and one that has won major recognition, including Best Board or Tabletop Game for Impact at the 2024 Games for Change Awards. 

The game emerged from co-creators Matteo Menapace and Matt Leacock’s attempt to grapple with the climate crisis. “I wanted to make sense of it,” Menapace says. “And I wanted to do something about it.” 

Unlike competitive games, Daybreak is fully cooperative: players either succeed together or fail together. Each player represents a world region–Europe, the United States, China, or the Majority World across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and works towards a shared goal called “Drawdown”, the point at which more carbon is removed from the atmosphere than emitted. 

To get there, players must cut emissions, invest in infrastructure and ecosystems, and prevent communities from sliding into crisis. If global temperatures cross 2.0°C, or any region collapses under repeated shocks, everyone loses.

As a game designer, Menapace felt constrained by climate communication that cast people as passive observers. “In a game, you put players in the driving seat,” he says. “You give them agency to make choices–and those choices shape the system.”

For students in LSE’s Health Policy programme, the lesson runs deeper: every climate decision is also a health decision. Although Daybreak does not explicitly track health indicators, students quickly recognise the consequences embedded in each crisis. 

Rising emissions translate into deadly heatwaves, triggering heatstroke and cardiovascular deaths. Floods do not simply displace communities; the “Communities in Crisis” markers stand in for cholera outbreaks, waterborne disease, and health systems pushed to breaking point.

Immersive teaching

These insights form the foundation of Health Equity, Climate Change and the Common Good, a module led by health economist Professor Miqdad Asaria. After months of collaboration with Menapace, the course was introduced in the 2024–25 academic year, with Daybreak at its core. 

Its development, however, began much earlier, unfolding over several years of brainstorming, identifying key readings, piloting methods through workshops, and navigating internal academic processes. The module continues to evolve, shaped by ongoing student feedback.

“We use immersive teaching methods across LSE, including simulations, theatre, and games,” Asaria says. “But I think this is the only course at the School where students are challenged to design their own games.”

That distinction is deliberate. Conventional policy education typically trains students to work within existing frameworks–analysing trade-offs, optimising outcomes, and implementing established solutions. 

By contrast, this module asks students to interrogate those frameworks and, where necessary, redesign them. Asaria describes the course as an exercise in “bold, imaginative thinking”, explaining that the game helps students grasp both the constraints imposed by policy rules and the power that comes with being able to change them.

The curriculum tightly integrates theory and practice. Seminars on political economy, climate science, geoengineering, and public health provide the conceptual foundations. 

Weekly workshops translate those ideas into playable systems. The course actively engages students with the world beyond the classroom–sending them to art galleries to explore protest art, or participating in gift exchanges to understand the gift economy. 

Students first play Daybreak to understand its mechanics, before hacking and remaking it to reflect their own policy priorities. 

“It is amazing to see the creative links they’ve been making,” Asaria says.

Refreshing approach

The approach has also drawn attention from outside LSE. Professor Tim Doran, a health policy expert at the University of York who visited one of the workshops, praised the pedagogical innovation. 

“In the AI era, educators need to keep innovating–this approach is refreshing,” he observed. “It forces students to actively engage their minds and apply knowledge in real time through tangible problem-solving. You can’t AI your way through building a functional game system–you have to think. In the coming years, colleges will need more innovative modules like this.”

Asaria describes the games students design and play as “playable policy models”– not simplifications, but intentional alternatives to conventional policy modelling. Rather than relying on “complex mathematics and computer programming”, he explains, the games allow students to work through the full range of intended and unintended consequences that policy decisions set in motion. 

By lowering the technical barrier, the approach redirects students’ “time and intellectual energy” away from building models and towards grappling with the political, ethical, and distributive questions that policies inevitably raise. Crucially, it opens the classroom to genuine interdisciplinary collaboration. 

Students from “very diverse academic perspectives”, Asaria says, can explore difficult policy problems together–allowing clinicians, economists, and social scientists to test ideas side by side. The result is a learning space where expertise is shared rather than siloed, and technical skill no longer acts as a gatekeeper to policy imagination.

Turning health crises into playable policy

The module’s summative assessment asks students to design a board game that models climate and health together, with health equity and the common good at its centre. 

“This assessment requires students to see the whole course as a complex system, with ideas feeding back off each other,” Asaria explains. Unlike traditional exams, he adds, “doing the assessment is very much part of the learning process.”

In practice, students translate policy choices into game mechanics–using cards, scores, thresholds, and crisis events to simulate how decisions ripple through health systems and societies over time. That shift is deliberate. 

“This authorial leap is crucial,” Asaria says, “because it conveys that there is hope, and that students have agency.”

The resulting games take diverse forms. Some use Health Quality Indices to track access to care and disease burden; others incorporate quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) or happiness indices, forcing players to weigh quality of life against climate and economic decisions. Several games model how climate anxiety, displacement, and trauma accumulate across generations.

“Over the course of the module, students begin to understand that health and wellbeing are what truly matter,” Asaria reflects. “They also recognise a key failure in policymaking, that we prioritise progress using metrics with little intrinsic value.”

The process also gives students hands-on experience of real-world policymaking, where sustainability must be negotiated across competing interests. As they design their games, students are required to grapple with the tensions between corporate actors, activist movements, and research evidence–mirroring the messy politics through which climate and health policies are actually made.

One group, Bonum Commune, is designing a game set in West Bengal, one of India’s most climate-vulnerable states. Rather than focusing only on emissions or disease outcomes, the game makes ideology itself playable, forcing participants to negotiate climate and health policy from positions shaped by capitalism, welfare, environmental justice, and collective care. 

The aim is to show how power, values, and historical inequality determine which policies become possible, long before technical solutions are even considered.

For Sounak Das, a student from another group, which focuses on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the exercise made those connections unavoidable. “This module showed me how climate collapse intersects with historical inequality and public health,” he says.

“Our game demonstrated that survival depends on crossing health thresholds–reducing disease burden and maintaining healthcare capacity–while navigating cooperation dilemmas. The key lesson was clear: equity isn’t a moral luxury, but a strategic condition for resilience.”

Beyond the university door

Nearly two years went into developing Daybreak, shaped through conversations with climate scientists and humanitarian experts. Crucial feedback came from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.

“We were focusing too much on decarbonisation,” Menapace recalls. “They helped us realise that mitigation alone isn’t enough. You also have to build resilience and protect people.”

Menapace’s work with games extends well beyond LSE. He also collaborates with the UK government’s Policy Lab, where games are used as tools for policy design rather than entertainment. 

In these workshops, policymakers, researchers, and affected communities come together to experience how a system works, critique its failures, and “hack” it by changing the rules. In one project, a co-designed game brought fishermen, scientists, and officials into the same room, helping shape discussions that fed into fisheries policy decisions.

Menapace believes this approach could be especially powerful in low- and middle-income countries, where climate impacts are acute and communities are often excluded from policymaking. 

Simplified, low-cost games can help people understand complex issues–and adapt them to reflect lived realities. He is also developing Dawn, a shorter, more accessible companion to Daybreak focused on zero emissions. “Net zero can create complacency,” he says.

The game ends. Students assess who survived and who didn’t. For Asaria, this moment is where learning happens, tracing the line from policy to mortality, from choices to consequences.

In a world facing health shocks and widening inequality, a board game in London is rehearsing the future. Not as it is, but as it might still be redesigned.

 

 

Image Credits: Miqdad Asaria, Abhishek Chakraborty/ Unsplash.