Climat Tic Tac (Climate Tick-Tock) Ocean: playing together to save our oceans and coasts

Climat Tic-Tac Ocean is a digital serious game developed from a board game originally designed by climate scientists and science communicators for middle and high-school students (https://climatictac.ipsl.fr), its commercial adaptation for the broad public  (https://www.bioviva.com/fr/bioviva-famille/169-climat-tic-tac.html), and its digital version, available in French and English, better suited for the higher education sector (https://ikigai.games/games/gameDetails/climattictac) (Dulac et al., 2024).
The game’s ambition is simple but urgent: to help people better understand the impacts of human-induced climate, and explore how we could cooperate and act both to mitigate CO₂ emissions and adapt a selection of world cities at risk to preserve a good inhabitability of the planet. The Climat Tic-Tac Ocean version focuses on coastal cities and small islands, which concentrate multiple, interacting climate risks while also being territories where adaptation and mitigation strategies are deeply intertwined. Processes, selected locations, hazards, mitigation and adaptation actions are all based on current knowledge (Dulac et al., 2023).
Up to five connected players cooperate over six rounds, each representing 15 years: nearly a century of collective decisions. Together, they must reduce CO₂ emissions while protecting vulnerable coastal territories through adaptation and mitigation strategies by playing Action cards from a limited set they receive individually. Throughout the game, players face random Hazard cards which cause either climate-related damage to one or more locations, or increase CO₂ emissions. The damages fall into categories: infrastructure, food systems, and human health. These risks reflect the most pressing and already observed impacts of climate change on the selected cities and islands.
Winning the game requires achieving a double objective: keeping atmospheric CO₂ concentrations below a critical threshold to limit global warming, while also preventing too many coastal cities and islands from becoming uninhabitable due to the local accumulation of damages. Two difficulty levels are proposed, which adjust these two thresholds.
To strengthen their actions, players are invited to take on time-limited challenges: quizzes, fill-in-the-blank exercises, and ranking tasks, focusing on climate- or maritime-related topics. These moments of play serve a deeper purpose: improving climate literacy, encouraging collective problem-solving, and helping players transform eco-anxiety into informed action. Players quickly realize that there is no perfect solution: every decision involves trade-offs, like in real life. By playing, participants experience the complexity of climate decisions instead of just hearing about them. The game is also adapted to a collective animation by a teacher or mediator, either on-line or through a screen projection.

Contact: francois.dulac@cea.fr

Acknowledgements: This Ocean version is part of the FORTEIM project aiming at building an e-training educative platform called “B-Sea”, dedicated to supporting the eco-energy transition of maritime professions. FORTEIM is supported through the ANR funding agency as part of the “France-2030” governmental investment plan. Authors acknowledge feedbacks from members of LSCE and FORTEIM’s partners, and the technical contribution from developers of Game for Citizens-Ikigai. The Climat Tic-Tac Team has been awarded the Scientific Mediation Medal by CNRS.

References:
Dulac F. et al., p.599-601, https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04209935, 2023. 
Dulac F. et al., https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU24/EGU24-12424.html, 2024.