About

To support United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals at the 2024 Games for Change Festival, we designed a board game with mechanics mirroring the reality of plastic waste management and the broken recycle system around the world.

Read more about this UN Sustainable Development Goals

Objective

Four imaginary nations: Alm, Chelsea, Lambda, and Guma, are at the heart of the global recycling dilemma. The differences in economy and trash production among these nations of varying development statuses play a crucial role in their efforts to maximize recycling for economic needs and dispose of excess waste. As representatives of your nation, your task is daunting yet crucial: navigate the complexities of recycling to mitigate the environmental catastrophe while getting rid of your plastic waste.

Overview

Unsolved: The Recycle Board Game is a strategic journey played over 2 rounds of free trades and discussion periods, with a combination of strategic planning, negotiation, and decision-making as players aim to minimize their plastic waste while maximizing economic gains.

During discussion periods, players could spend their national budget to process their 4 different types of plastic cards inside the country through:

– building and running processing facility
– or burdening the environment (landfill, dumping into the sea, or burning)

During the free trade periods, players can negotiate trading prices to pay and send their plastic waste cards to another nation. Ultimately, players could also take other nations’ plastic waste if they see economic benefits.

Client
Cassie Baralis
Director of Marketing & Communication

Core Mechanics

Destroy Plastic Waste Cards

Each country has different ways to destroy plastic waste cards at a price of 1 dollar/card. Pollution tokens will be given for each card destroyed, and must be placed on the board.

Chelsea: Landfill
Alm: Landfill
Guma: Burn
Lambda: Sea dump

Waste Processing Facilities

Each country can purchase up to 4 facilities. Each type of plastic waste corresponds to a type of processing facility. The cost of purchasing facilities varies for countries, and types.

To use a facility to process cards, pay the one time fee into the ‘dice rolling cost’ box. Roll the dice, the result number is the number of plastic waste cards that has been successfully recycled for this use of the facility.

After plastic cards have been processed, they can be exchanged for money to use at the IPC.

Global Waste Trade

Countries will take turns to initiate trading offers during the trading phase. When a country starts trading turns, other countries should listen to the country.

Normally, importing plastic waste cards also means taking money from others to handle their trash for them. Exporting plastic waste cards means paying others to handle trash for you.

To complete a trade, both countries should agree with the content and the price of the trade.

GET IN TOUCH

Core Mechanics

etc-unsolved@lists.andrew.cmu.edu