Can you clean-up the environment before Mother Earth overheats?
DETAILED DESCRIPTION
Cleanup! is a three to six player card game designed to provide an entertaining context for high school and university students and their families to learn about the most important pollution problems and solutions. We created this one to two-hour card game to inform citizens about the relative importance of various categories of pollution in the air, in the water, and on land, and the available solutions to these problems. While playing Cleanup! your objective is to earn victory points by cleaning up as many local pollution problems, without ignoring the global environmental problems that require cooperation to solve.
Some game cards include concepts, facts, and behaviors that involve ex ante prevention of the pollution problem by modifying personal and societal behavior, while other card solutions involve ex post activities to clean up the messes.
How the game is played
During the game, players are presented with a series of different environmental problems, crises and challenges, including recycling, acid rain, smog, water pollution, and deforestation. These problems emerge randomly in the form of problem cards. To cope with these problems players need to spend money (economic resources) and solution cards (which represent technological and political resources). Each solution card is valid for one or more particular type(s) of problem cards. When all requirements to resolve a disaster are met, the card can be discarded and the player(s) resolving it receives victory points.
How to winThe winner is the first player to reach a predetermined number of victory points (adjustable according to time available), but only until global warming causes the collapse of world agriculture and the crash of modern civilization!
Where to playWhen played in a high school or college setting, Cleanup! is a good icebreaker as it introduces scientific terminology to be covered later (e.g., in an earth science course, or a survey course on global environmental problems). It can also be used at the end of a course as a way of revisiting the key concepts before the exam. This learning objective is achieved with a fun and fast-moving card game that allows both competition and cooperation. Our bet is that students will find it so much fun that they will buy Cleanup! to take home and play at home or in their dorm room! OUR GAMES page (continued)
List of Cleanup! components
- Game box
- One deck of environmental problems cards
- One deck of environmental solutions cards.
- Three wooden dice.
- A supplemental guidebook for players.
- A-bucks (fake money) in various denominations.
- A brief questionnaire soliciting feedback on how to improve the game.
