Copia Gaming is our ongoing initiative to design and facilitate a variety of games that explore serious and important subjects.

Startup Trail

A browser-based game exploring the policy issues that impact today’s tech startups, designed and developed to support Engine’s 2022 Startup Agenda. Players are put in charge of a tech startup and must steer it through various policy challenges as it grows into a large company. Play it now in your browser »

Money City

We designed a two-hour game for Mozilla’s Mozfest that had players explore the future of money. We used a frame story of a fictional cyberpunk dystopia where players were working to overthrow a powerful megacorporation by coming up with interventions that involve monetization, currencies, payments, and more. Commissioned by Grant for the Web. Money City is available as an open source playkit so you can run the game yourself.

Threatcast 2020

A brainstorm game focused on how bad actors might use technology to manipulate the 2020 election. Commissioned by a major tech company and run for internal and external experts. Available to run at future events. Learn more about Threatcast 2020 in our recap post and podcast on Techdirt.

CIA: Collect It All

An adaptation of the CIA’s own card-based training game, originally created to train analysts about intelligence collection techniques. We adapted the game from heavily redacted versions released via a Freedom of Information Act request. Sold over 4,000 copies via Kickstarter. Listen to our podcast about designing and crowdfunding CIA: Collect It All.

Working Futures

A scenario planning game, involving a custom-made deck of cards to help explore different economic, social, political and technological trends. Run to investigate how the future of work might play out and to inspire a volume of sci-fi stories that further explore these scenarios. The game and anthology yielded great results. Learn more about the original game session and the resulting anthology.

Hindsight 2030

A lightweight game for envisioning possible tech trends and societal outcomes across the next decade. Players start with provocative headlines from 2030 and then fill in the blanks for how we get there from today. Read about the outcome of our pilot session of Hindsight 2030.

HAL of Justice

This game takes place in the far future, where AI governs the world. Over the course of an hour, players take turns petitioning the AI overlords to amend policies and the audience votes as the AIs. The tone is fun and lighthearted. We ran it at the end of the Internet Policy WIP Conference at Santa Clara Law School as a way for attendees to unwind and have fun at the end of a long day.