Defend the Delta: Prototyping and Testing a Tower Defense Game on Salt Intrusion

Shaping climate resilient futures is a key challenge faced all around the globe. To support this, games are used to bring people together, experience plausi-ble future climatic conditions, and experiment with possible courses of action. In this study, we present the Delta Management Game, a simulation game designed for stakeholders to explore the impact of and courses of action against historic and plausible future salt intrusion events. In the game, players are challenged to defend critical locations in the Dutch Rhine-Meuse delta against salt water during multiple droughts. A novel approach is that the game builds on the tower defense subgenre and its characteristic mechanisms in combination with a physical board to represent the delta, prepare its defense, and show augmented simulations. We organized four sessions with a game prototype to evaluate to what extent the game is applicable to support policy-making around fresh water availability in the Netherlands. The formative evaluation showed that the game and its design was overall received positively and, at least conceptually, aligned well with rel-evant policy questions faced in Dutch fresh water management. We discuss key improvements that players highlighted to increase alignment with policy-making like including further trade-offs. We additionally discuss the game’s design and how building on the tower defense subgenre enabled capturing both short-term and long-term climate change effects. We end with offering a main benefit of expand-ing experimentation potential through the game’s physical board in combination with computation-based simulations.