RElastiCity: An urban resilience game

Games are safe environments where players can experiment freely with complex and uncertain decisions. RElastiCity is a game about urban resilience. In the game, the players are responsible for the resilience of a city, they have to protect the city against stresses and adapt the city to become more resilient. In this way, the players experience the choices that have to be made and the consequences of the choices.

In this version of the game, a fictional city is simulated, a city that is similar to an average Western-European (Dutch) city. It is also possible to customize the game to any other city in the world.

In the files you can find a facilitator manual for the teachers about how to use the game and how to prepare.
Second you find the rulebook, which explains the rules in detail and can be given to the players (in principle they can play without a facilitator). And you find the materials for the game (General materials A3Format, general materials A4format, Materials set built environment, energy, urban water and transport). For the background of the content of the game, you can use the systems analysis report).

Besides the basic game that can be printed, you can also develop your own content. In the facilitator manual you can find some ideas and you can use the blank_materials set to develop new cards.

Learning Objectives

After playing the game, the participants:

• Understand different perspectives of resilience and how they influence key performance indicators and decision making
• Experience the impact of disasters on the environment of the system
• Experience the consequences of different measures on disasters
• Experience the consequences of different measures on other systems (counter intuitive effects):
  a. effect of measure during implementation and under normal conditions,
  b. effect of measure to protect one disaster on effects when another disaster happens
• Experience how to organize disaster prevention and mitigation.

The game is primarily developed as an introduction for engineering students (in higher education) to the topic of resilience. This can be part of a course about resilience or related to a resilience topic within a course. As the focus is engineering, the content of the game is more focused on the engineering challenges and less on the societal issues.

In a broader perspective, the game can also be used for professional training, in resilience research projects or in any other interested group of players. The content of the game can be adapted to make a closer fit with the city or area of interest.

More information about the use and adaptation of the game can be found in the facilitator manual.

Credits: this game was developed by the TU Delft gamelab (website: https://seriousgaming.tudelft.nl/).