Sustainability Challenges places students in the middle of community-engaged sustainability work – where good intentions quickly meet messy realities. As project teams preparing to work with city partners, players must draft a rapid-response Code of Ethical Conduct for their service-learning projects. They decide how they will collaborate with partners, handle data, manage expectations, and avoid causing harm.

But the game doesn’t stop there. Other teams step into the role of Stress-Testers, inventing realistic ethical dilemmas drawn from development practice and the challenges of teamwork –
shifting stakeholders, power imbalances, blurred responsibilities, loss of motivation, and unintended consequences. Codes are challenged, defended, and revised under pressure.

The result is not a perfect rulebook, but a sharper awareness of how ethical engagement actually works when sustainability projects move from the classroom into the city.

Designed for:
Developed for the Sustainability in Practice course at CML (Leiden University), this version supports students engaged in real sustainability projects for and with the city, introducing ethics of engagement as a core skill in service-learning.

Facilitated by:
Caroline Archambault, Roy Remme, and Rita Sousa-Silva

Materials:
Download and adapt the Sustainability Challenges Code of Ethical Conduct templates and
dilemma cards.

Serving Our City invites players into the everyday reality of university–society collaboration. Universities promise to serve the public good but interdisciplinary partnerships with cities, communities, and institutions are rarely straightforward. Misaligned timelines, unclear responsibilities, unequal recognition, and invisible labour can quietly undermine even the most well-meaning projects.

In this game, players are tasked with drafting a rapid-response Manual for Fair and Ethical Collaboration. Working in teams, they define principles for decision-making, reciprocity, communication, data use, and long-term impact. Opposing teams then act as challengers, inventing realistic worst-case scenarios to stress-test these rules. What breaks? What holds? And what needs rewriting before the next real collaboration begins?

Designed for:
This version was developed for a short workshop on Interdisciplinarity at Leiden University, as part of the Knowledge Orchard event. It brought together educators, researchers, students, and partners to reflect on what ethical collaboration actually requires when working across disciplines and beyond the university and how easily good intentions can unravel without shared rules of engagement.

Facilitated by:
Dr. Josien de Klerk

Materials:
Download and adapt the Serving Our City game manual, rule templates, and scenario cards.

The Big Partnership Prize places players in a high-stakes academic competition. A powerful (fictional) funder is offering a major prize for the most equitable international partnership in higher education. To win, teams must design a joint university course that spans continents, institutions, and unequal infrastructures without reproducing the very hierarchies they claim
to challenge.

Players work in mixed teams to draft a partnership agreement covering the full lifecycle of collaboration: forming the partnership, designing and teaching the course, producing research, and eventually changing or dissolving the partnership. The twist? Teams then attack each other’s agreements with real-world “worst practice” cases, exposing blind spots around power, credit, resources, and decision-making.

Designed for:
This version was developed for an Erasmus+ ICM project on Fair Partnerships and Equal Exchange in Education, and as part of the Learning Mindset project. It opened a week-long workshop bringing together colleagues from Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and Leiden University.

By playing in mixed teams, participants could surface different expectations, assumptions, and lived experiences of partnership and debate what fairness actually means in practice.

Facilitated by:
Learning Mindset project (Caroline Archambault and David Ehrhardt) www.learningmindset.org

Materials:
Download and adapt The Big Partnership Prize game manual, partnership agreement templates, and case cards.

Ethically Oerol drops players into the vibrant, chaotic setting of the Oerol Festival on Terschelling – where art, audiences, artists, tourists, and researchers intersect. Students are tasked with studying performances and installations for the festival, but quickly discover that ethical challenges arise at every stage: preparing for the field, observing artworks, interacting with artists, engaging audiences, and translating lived experiences into published stories. Working in small teams, players design a code of conduct for their research – then confront worst-case scenarios that expose how things can go wrong, from misrepresentation and intrusion to consent failures and unintended harm. The game invites students to think through the full lifecycle of fieldwork under real-world pressures.

Designed for:
This version was developed for ArtWorks4Sustainability, (www.artworks4sustainability.com) a course preparing students for fieldwork during the Oerol Festival. As students worked toward producing a public-facing magazine entry, the game created space to reflect on ethical responsibility when researching art in public, festival settings – where boundaries between observer, participant, and subject are not so clear.

Materials:
Download and adapt the Ethically Oerol rulebook, scenario cards, and code-of-conduct
templates.

Licence to Connect places players in a fictional – but uncomfortingly familiar – scenario. After a series of student “engagement mishaps,” the city of The Hague introduces a Municipal Engagement Licence. Any university program sending students into the city for fieldwork/research must now prove it can train them to engage ethically, responsibly, and without causing harm.

Players take on the role of academic programs competing to keep their license in good standing. First, they design a training manual for ethical engagement. Then the game turns adversarial: teams invent complaint cases and attempt to expose the blind spots in other programs’ rules. Disputes are debated, defended, and, if needed, escalated to a mock court of appeal.

Designed for:
This version was developed for a Leiden University College heidag. Anticipating a new first year course on the Ethics of Engagement this game provided an opportunity to have all staff weigh in on what our students should be taught when engaging with our city for research/learning purposes.

Facilitated by:
LUC’s Global Challenges first-year reform team (Caroline Archambault, David Ehrhardt, Achim Hager, Barrie Sanders, and Jyothi Thrivikraman)

Materials:
Download and adapt the Licence to Connect manual and board