Following a warm-up 5-second sketch activity conducted with the foldable ThingDie found in the Play-Kit, participants move on to Headlines!

Headlines! is a card-based game in which players act as journalists imagining future challenges within a custom narrative shaped by local signals and trends. Each round, participants use location-specific subject, verb, issue, and context cards to craft imaginative headlines about future scenarios, submitting them to the rotating editor role for selection. Players select a dealt issue card and their imagination to quickly invent headlines, with creativity and relevance rewarded by the editor’s choice. The game’s format inspires participants to engage with probable futures, fostering creative thinking about region-specific issues in a competitive, collaborative workshop setting

Following Headlines! participants take a break and the facilitator reviews players’ headline slips to identify the most compelling future challenges and distill them into actionable outcomes for policies. 

In the next phase, Idea Fusion, players race to craft policy ideas to achieve an outcome by spinning wheels to randomly combine selected policy tools and stakeholders. Players buzz in with an idea for how the “fused” elements could achieve the outcome with appropriate answers moving them up the play board.  The emphasis is rapid ideation and collaborative engagement in a lively, competitive format.

Policy Quest is the final workshop game where players refine policy ideas developed earlier by embarking on a customizable path of board tiles. Each player selects a policy to champion and takes turns rolling a die to advance along the quest. Tiles prompt individual or group reflection on key aspects like costs, obstacles, and benefits, with responses affecting subsequent moves through rewards or penalties. This interactive process deepens and sharpens policy concepts, culminating in more thoroughly developed ideas by the game’s end.