23 October, 2026

How do you prepare for a future when you don’t know what’s coming, you can’t afford to prepare for everything, and some solutions depend on everyone else playing their part? One answer: by playing.

That was the question at the heart of The Future for Beginners, a hands-on climate simulation we recently played at Chatham House, hosted by game designers David Finnigan and Mel Frances. Five towns are preparing for a cultural festival when a powerful tropical storm heads their way. Players become the towns’ decision-makers, choosing how to respond over the years.

With limited resources and space, we had to balance competing social and environmental priorities: fund community workers or create green spaces? Invest in mitigation or adaptation? Some solutions required towns to pool resources, so outcomes depended not only on what we did, but on whether others acted too.

Our first takeaway was that uncertainty doesn’t remove the need to act. Resilience isn’t about predicting the future perfectly, but investing now to build the capacity to respond later. There is no single route to it either: mitigation, adaptation, nature-based solutions and social resilience all have a role, and education and preparedness mattered alongside physical infrastructure. We also kept coming back to the relationship between social and environmental choices. In the game, these often competed for the same resources, but in reality they don’t always have to be a trade-off. Early climate action can bring social and economic benefits too, and some interventions strengthen several forms of resilience at once.

More broadly, the session showed how games can make complex issues tangible and engaging. We’ve explored this ourselves through scenario-based board and card games in Kenya and Nigeria, using play to spark conversations without it feeling like traditional educational material. All of this has taught us that sometimes, the most serious way to tackle a hard problem is to play. Games bring everyone to the table, and that’s exactly where better decisions might start.

By Hillevi Fock