Flipping Lakes

How to play

• To find out how to play this game, please check out the manual.
• Once you are ready to play, the game pieces are available for downloading and printing free-of-charge.
  • We recommend to print the entire 'Starter Set' using a double-sided printer setting. This set contains enough cards and chips for a first-time user to build a catchment and play a round of the game. The set can be found here.
  • Additional lake and catchment cards can be printed from the full set of cards, which will be supplied shortly on this web page. In the meantime, users are recommended to expand their deck with additional cards/chips from the starter set by printing specific pages that their application of the game requires.
• For more information about the game and the science behind it, please check out the other tabs or our paper "Flipping Lakes: Explaining concepts of catchment-scale water management through a serious game”.

Questions about the game can be addressed to flippinglakes@nioo.knaw.nl.

Scientific background

The challenge - What is harming our lakes?

In our world today, there are many pressures that are negatively affecting the health and usability of our freshwater ecosystems:

• Eutrophication (too many nutrients in the water body)
• Anthropogenic actions (large changes, for example, to land use practices and ecosystem processes)
• Climate change (changing of average temperature and precipitation trends) 
• Extreme climatic events (more intense and frequent occurrences of events like heatwaves, droughts and storms) 

These challenges can be seen in our daily lives with the way that our drinking water may require more filtering and processing before we can consume it, how beaches are closed more often in the summer due to harmful algal blooms, in our inability to boat recreationally in some areas due to too many underwater plants, and more.

The value of inclusive education opportunities - How can we include everyone in the discussions?

Lakes are complex systems with abundant living and non-living interactions happening both within the lake system and in the surrounding landscape. Understanding these interactions and processes - from a microscopic scale to a catchment-wide scale - can be challenging, especially for people that have not had the opportunity to study the system professionally and/or academically. However, given how important lakes are to natural and human-built environments, everyone has a role to play in protecting the health and functions of our lake systems.

Flipping Lakes has been developed and tested as an education tool to assist in explaining:

• The types of pressures that affect catchment systems
• How lakes can react to pressures
• How management can assist in protecting lakes. 

Flipping Lakes has been played with a wide audience including, but not limited to:

• High school and university classes
• The general public
• Lake managers
• University administration in non-environmental studies tracks

The responses from the test audiences indicated that Flipping Lakes was a useful tool for improved learning/understanding about lake concepts and for testing theoretical management approaches. 

The value of inclusive decision-making - How can we improve our action plans?

It can be difficult to address all of the stressors that are causing a decline in our ecosystem’s health, especially when these stressors can cause a large number of negative outcomes. So how can we improve our approach to making action plans?

To first know how to fix the problems posed by lake degradation, we must first know what they are. And, as a large number of people can interact with the lake, getting first-hand knowledge, perspectives and opinions from all these individuals is the first step. This method, or an “inclusive” approach, opens up abundant channels to source information about the system. Namely, sharing a perspective on:

• How the local watershed or water system have been used historically, such as for recreational swimming, snowmobiling, product transportation and/or drinking water.
• How, if at all, the system use(s) has/have changed in recent decades.
• Which the use(s) should be protected going forward to ensure they are still available to future generations.

Gathering and reconciling the different perspectives of watershed uses and values can lead to a deeper understanding of the watersheds role(s) within the community, both natural and anthropogenic. Ideally, this in-depth understanding can be used to make informed decisions regarding the ecosystem to preserve and promote its many roles.

Battling communication barriers - What is stopping group collaborations?

So what is preventing a group approach to understanding and protecting our valuable lakes? When working with a number of different groups, there could be any number of nuances that could be causing difficulties. For instance:

• Each group can have their own terminology or language, which makes talking about a lake ecosystem or part(s) of a lake ecosystem difficult.
• Groups can have different interests in the ecosystem, meaning that not everyone is as familiar or interested in the same topic.
• On a similar note, different groups could have opposing interests in the system. While neither perspective may be incorrect (as both sides are utilizing the lake for their own purposes), it can lead to a block in collaboration.
• When working with different water sectors - professional water managers, scientists, lake associations and more - the unique purpose for each different sector could result in conversations not addressing everyone’s interests or working goal.

Ultimately, barriers can block the transfer of information regarding the stressors affecting lake ecosystems (particularly with the effects of pollution on water quality and their catchment-scale interactions across space and time). Further, the sharing of individual water use perspectives (which can be abstract without a structured tool for visualization) can be hard. What is needed is a common platform that everyone can express their interest, knowledge and opinions of a lake system.

Flipping Lakes - What can a game do to help?

To battle the barriers impeding collaboration, we have created “Flipping Lakes,” a game-based method for communicating and educating about catchment-level water quality management. In Flipping Lakes, you, as a player, take on the role of a water manager within the catchment and are tasked with preventing a lake from “flipping” from a healthy to an unhealthy state. The ultimate goal is to keep a societally-important recreational lake from flipping into the unhealthy state due to outside pressures.

During the game, your playing field slowly becomes more polluted by a diverse range of sources (i.e. pressures). These pollution sources will also get worse because of societal or climatic scenarios that are applied to each round of the game. To counter the impact of pollution and to keep your playing field pollution-free, you need to buy and play different management actions. 

While playing Flipping Lakes, players get to know concepts of lake ecosystem functioning, transport of pollution in catchments (i.e. the playing field) and water management measures to counter pollution. Besides that, the game is highly customizable and can be applied in a variety of settings to support education and engagement of stakeholders and the broader community to address global water challenges. 

Happy playing!

Game application

Classrooms

The game has been played in classroom settings globally (the Netherlands, China) with positive feedback. Students reported that the game boosted understanding of the integrated lake concepts as well as provided a useful visual tool for reviewing classroom lessons. Given the customizability of the game, Flipping Lakes can be used for a range of ages and complex topics.

About the game:

• Ages 10+ can play the game
• Capable of being customized for different levels of concept complexity
• Offers hands-on learning through the ability to play the game multiple times, to change the gameboard or rules and to learn from previous play-throughs

Stakeholder gatherings

Lakes can have important, and divergent, values for the numerous stakeholders that live near, utilize and work with the lake system. However, each group (for example, a fishing association versus an industrial business) may have different perspectives about the system and different terminology for explaining its uses. Barriers to communication can result from different organizations not being able to discuss the system and understand each other.

Flipping Lakes can assist in easing communication by creating a common visual of the system, terminology for gameplay and set rules of engagement. For stakeholder discussions in particular, this game can:

• Be built to mimic the actual catchment system
• Support discussions around management options can be supported with the semi-realistic board
• Promote simulations of different pressures can be run with the board to gain an understanding of theoretical outcomes.

The outcome is then that the players - in this case, the different stakeholder groups - may have an easier time communicating about their perspectives, system uses and potential compromises.

Planning Meetings

Similar to stakeholder meetings, Flipping Lakes can be used in management discussions to simulate pressures within a specific system and what management approaches would be most suitable. An example of this was conducted with a Dutch water authority wherein part of the local catchment system was simulated with Flipping Lakes and management actions were applied. The water authority commented that this game would be useful in modeling theoretical scenarios and testing different management options.

Customise the game

Flipping Lakes is a fully customizable serious game with opportunities to adjust the board, the challenges and the rules. Full explanations of options for adjusting the game can be found in the manuscript under the section “Comments and Recommendations.” Brief examples of these can be found below.

Playing Fields

The playing field is fully customizable, meaning that components can be emphasized within the gameboard. For example, the game could:

●    Emphasize urban cards to demonstrate urbanization challenges
●    Emphasize agriculture cards to demonstrate agricultural challenges
●    Emphasize turbid (i.e. “unhealthy”) lake cards to demonstrate challenges from degraded lakes

Scenarios

The annual scenarios can also be chosen so that certain scenarios are emphasized. For example:

●    Emphasis on the extreme event scenarios can demonstrate the challenges with altering climatic extremes
●    Emphasis on the societal event scenarios can demonstrate the challenges on intensified human actions

Extra rules

The rules of the game can be adjusted to create more difficulty. This can be useful for more advanced players that understand the basic function of the game, especially considering that real life is never as simple or consistent as a game. Therefore, adjustments can be made such as:

●    The Aquabucks allotment can be altered by rolling a dice or by changing the annual allotment per turn.
●    The cost of the management actions can be altered in the middle of game play to simulate economic changes.
●    Specific management actions can be removed, forcing players to adjust their methods for managing the lakes with a smaller range of action options.