WellPlaced: Cooperatively navigating challenges to land and water management to reach SDG6

Introducing 'WellPlaced,' an interactive and collaborative game designed as a unique tool for illustrating the intricate dynamics of land and water management, with a specific focus on the context of Malawi. Played on a hexagonal board, 'WellPlaced' revolves around the vital task of meeting the requirements of population centres, depicted as ‘villages’. Each village demands access to sanitation and water for health maintenance, requiring players to manage their finances, generated through agricultural activities on ’farm tiles’. The spatial component of the game reflects the spatial dynamics of land and water management, particularly regarding availability of water resources and risk of contamination. For example, all villages must be within an appropriate distance of water and sanitation facilities, but latrines cannot be placed adjacent to water-points. As the game progresses and the population grows, increasingly quicker, navigating the growing pressures on land and water use becomes even more challenging.

As players convert tiles to meet these requirements, they confront random environmental hazards including floods, droughts, waterborne disease, and contamination, with player decision making influencing the likelihood of encountering such challenges. For example, removing forest tiles, freeing up their valuable, riverside hexes as well as returning a small amount of money for ‘selling the lumber’, adds more flood risk cards to the pack, increasing the chance of players encountering more flooding. The probabilistic nature of such events helps to communicate risk in an engaging format. The ‘out of sight, out of mind’ nature of groundwater necessitates innovative and creative methods to explore and communicate groundwater challenges and management options effectively. Alongside random environmental hazards, overuse of groundwater can deplete the aquifer represented in the game, drawing attention to considerations of sustainable groundwater use.

Players must work together to navigate the needs of the growing population, keeping their population healthy throughout multiple rounds. Each player adopts a role, representing a stakeholder within the nexus and prompting conversations about different agendas and skillsets within land and water management decision making. Each game involves an engineer, sanitation officer, teacher, and farmer, each having specific capacities and skills. For example, water and sanitation management education programmes can be facilitated by the teacher, providing innovative solutions to problems experienced in the game.  

'WellPlaced' not only provides an engaging platform for understanding the complexities of land and water management in Malawi but also fosters collaborative conversations among players, representing various stakeholders, and serves as an innovative tool for exploring sustainable solutions and challenging decision-making scenarios.