Seeds of the futures: creating pathways to a better world is a game created from DT theory where teams step into the role of world-builders to create long-term pathways toward sustainable and just futures.
The game is designed for policy makers, investors, researchers, system thinkers – anyone working at the frontier of sustainability and transitions thinking. It’s suited to teams who need new tools for strategic reflection—those who want to break out of habitual approaches to planning and unlock different ways of seeing the systems they’re trying to change.
This game is an exercise in imaginative thinking and a chance to step out of the usual confines that restrict us into a world where we are aiming to stimulate radical changes to reach sustainable futures. The game is played on a 30-year timeline (each round spans a 10 year period). A team of builders (3-6 people) work together to intervene and shape a sustainability pathway. The builders are a group of ambitious sustainability-oriented policy makers, investors, businesses, universities and NGOs. Your aim is to intervene by playing different intervention cards (you’ll find out more about these later on) to support niches (spaces where new practices can flourish) for sustainability and navigate emerging shocks, trends and unintended consequences. You strive to construct pathways of niches using cards that work towards a desirable future world.
The aim of the game is to get as close to the future world as possible. The broader aim is to interact with concepts and tools for assisting in systems thinking for sustainable futures and long-term planning for building resilient sustainability pathways. The focus is not so much on getting it right or wrong, but rather in collectively exploring the challenges, trade-offs, and complexities of building long-term visions for sustainability.
There is a (physical) board game version and an online version of the game. You can play the online version by clicking the download button below. Click on the download 2 button for the game guide, which you need to read before you play and will be useful to have open while you play.
The facilitator guide can be found here https://tipresourcelab.net/resource/seeds-to-the-future-pathways-game-facilitator-guide/
Acknowledgements
A big thank you to Naz Constante for the design.
Citation
Ghosh, B., Johnstone, P., Kanger, L., Laurence, N., Schot, J., Schuman, E. and Velasco, D. (2025). Game – Seeds of the future: creating pathways to a better world. Deep Transitions Lab. Available at: https://tipresourcelab.net/resource/game-seeds-of-the-future-creating-pathways-to-a-better-world/
