Adver-City is a strategic board game that challenges you to build a city and survive in an uncertain world, where your plans are always disrupted by natural and unnatural calamities. Adver-City takes into account certain world events that occurred during 1920 - 2020 and the players have to carefully deal with it and survive.
The game is designed to instill the importance of sustainable development. Adver-city tries to reflect the reality of geopolitics by intertwining the consequences of a player's decision with all people playing.
What problem are we solving?
Games are considered strong educational devices. However, it was observed that popular games such as Catan and Monopoly are based on capitalist ideologies, not reflecting the current climate emergency. There was a need for games that sensitize individuals regarding sustainable decisions and the implications of lack thereof.
The situation of games in India
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High screen time due to digital games becoming popular
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Lack of games based on sustainable development
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Easy/short games preffered over complex strategy games
Target Audience Demographics
Children and adults urban cities with, mid-high socio-economic background
Design process that I used
I have followed the UK Design Council’s Double Diamond model (2019) as a guiding framework for this project.
Conceptualisation
The game began with a simple thought amidst the pandemic. How well are our cities designed? Are there enough hospitals, schools, and basic infrastructure for the population that resides in them? This led us to ponder how can a strategic game make individuals aware of the spaces they live in, and give them the ability to recognize sustainable decisions against harmful ones.
Prototyping and Playtesting
Participant type
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We used parts of existing games with rough drawings on paper to make our very first prototype.
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Playtesting was done at every step of prototyping to check if the game functioned and the concept was comprehensible.
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We incorporated a co-design methodology where the users were given the liberty to alter the rules or add elements during gameplay. Depending on how well it suited the game we altered the rules after every feedback session.
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To create a higher fidelity of the game, we resorted to laser-cutting elements to enhance the experience. These elements were later swapped out to processes that were cheaper to produce.
Individuals from the age of 12-65 of different career and educational backgrounds.
Logo design
The concept of the logo began with the thought of capturing the initials of the game and the element of a city.
The logo slowly transformed to include more symbolic elements of a city, such as a signboard and directions. This culminated in the final logo seen on the right.
The final product
Play sessions
Marketing and awareness
We hosted play sessions for Adver-city in different schools and cafes in Ahmedabad and Mumbai. We would have the games pre-set up and invite individuals to come play it. The game was made available at the venues to buy afterward.
This form of marketing helped the customer experience the game before purchasing and it gave us direct customer feedback regarding what worked and what aspects had room for improvement. Although this form of marketing isn't scalable, it provides important insights and makes customers more confident of their purchase.
How to play Adver-city?
Key Achievements
I was invited to the TAISI Conference 2023 (The Association of International Schools India) to present the game as a powerful tool for education. I spoke about how games can be used in classrooms to cover interdisciplinary topics, in an engaging manner.
I held a workshop on board game design with teachers from across India. I guided them to build their very own educational board games with processes and tools used for developing Adver-City.
We were invited by Arthshila (an art center focusing on architecture, urban planning, and space design) to present our game and its impact on shaping attitudes toward sustainable urban development.
