Map of Change
This game emerged from stories of schools thriving despite overwhelming obstacles. The design goal was to help stakeholders feel the tension of resource scarcity rather than merely read about it intellectually. There's a difference between understanding that something is hard and knowing what hard actually feels like from inside the decision.
How the Game Works
Players operate a low-income school over 12 rounds using resource management, card drafting, and branching decision pathways. The core experience is difficult trade-offs — not in the abstract, but in practice. Immediate survival versus long-term institutional goals. What do you protect when you can't protect everything?
The game is designed for solo play in conference settings, with a short enough play time that it can be completed during a break or between sessions. That constraint shaped almost everything else about the design.
Design Challenges
Four problems dominated the design process:
- Creating a solo experience playable in a conference environment, with noise and interruptions
- Balancing realism with replayability — too realistic and it's depressing; too gamified and it loses its point
- Ensuring the content authentically reflects the actual decisions school leaders face
- Managing the psychological weight so players feel the difficulty without feeling despair
Notable Innovations
The win conditions are goal-aligned in an unusual way: players have to make choices that align with the higher goal they're trying to achieve — and these are often sub-optimal decisions in the short term. Choosing the right thing for the school's mission isn't always choosing the thing that makes the numbers look best.
Instant game-over mechanics for resource depletion were added to amplify emotional stakes. When something can end abruptly and permanently, decisions carry different weight. Players feel that differently than they feel a gradual point-loss system.
How the Design Evolved
Early versions had too much randomness and not enough player agency — which produced frustration rather than insight. Subsequent refinements introduced card markets, branching decision nodes, and expanded decision spaces that gave players genuine authorship over outcomes. Physical adjustments — larger card sizes (A5 minimum), repositioned board elements — addressed accessibility and legibility at conference tables.
What Players Reported
Players consistently reported a newfound respect for the decision-making processes of school leaders. The game generated meaningful conversations among stakeholders about systemic educational challenges — not because it lectured them, but because it made them feel what it's like to be inside the system.
That's the whole point.