Authors: Davide Cozza (SDSN)
It is the year 2026, and your country stands at a crossroads. Populations are growing. Natural ecosystems are under mounting pressure. Diets are shifting in ways that affect land, water, and climate systems. And the planet continues to warm. These are not hypothetical scenarios — they are the conditions shaping decisions made by governments right now.
The "2050 is Now: A FABLE Serious Game" was designed by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network — through the FABLE Secretariat — to make modelling tools accessible to non-technical stakeholders. The game helps participants understand the value of integrated approaches to food systems, their role in meeting long-term climate targets, and the complex interconnections, synergies, and trade-offs involved in planning food system transformation.
How the game works
In the game, players are organized in teams of four, and each participant takes on a ministerial role within a national cabinet — agriculture, environment, health, trade — advocating for their sector while collaborating to design integrated policy packages that serve the country as a whole.
Players make decisions that shape outcomes across five interconnected dimensions: land use, food security, biodiversity, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and public health. Over multiple rounds, each team has to prioritize sectoral policies while striving to meet national sustainability targets by 2050 — and quickly discovers that every decision carries consequences. Promoting a crop may reduce hunger, but it may emit higher GHG emissions. Reforesting land may boost biodiversity but limit agricultural production.
As in the real world, players must navigate shocks — climate disasters, trade wars, economic crises — that disrupt or reshape their strategy, and make hard choices about how to spend their "political points," the in-game currency needed to implement policies.
Built on the FABLE Calculator
Behind the game lies a model and real country data. Players use a specific version of the FABLE Calculator, an Excel-based model that simulates future food and land-use scenarios using real national data. As teams make policy choices, the Calculator translates those decisions into projected outcomes, showing in real time whether their country is moving toward or away from its 2050 sustainability targets.
The game was co-designed with the FABLE Consortium through multiple rounds of play, refining the rules, calibrating the score computation, and improving the materials based on direct participant feedback.
Open to replicate, designed to adapt
The game is accessible to anyone. All materials needed to run a session are freely available on Zenodo: instructions, a game version of the Calculator, guidance for adapting any calculator into a game format, and a full facilitator pack — handbook, a presentation slides template, feedback forms, and print-ready materials. The repository also includes guidance for adapting the game to different national contexts, so facilitators can adapt it for their own audiences.
Feel free to play the game in informal settings with friends and family, or in more formal contexts such as stakeholder workshops, teaching sessions, and training events. And don't forget to let us know how it goes! Tag us on LinkedIn, share your experience, and tell us how we can continue improving the game.
This Serious Game was developed through the FABLE Consortium initiative and funded with the support of the International Climate Initiative (IKI) and of CHOICE – Horizon Europe.