The Budget Game is a tool to initiate reflection and creative political thinking. The game imitates the political arena, as players have to create a budget for a country as a team, forcing them to explore their own preferences and to find compromises. You have 10 Billion left, do you spend it on healthcare or education, or to maintain your infrastructure? It's never possible to come up with the perfect program.

Discussing your preferences with your team-mates in the game-environment helps you explore your opinions, and in our experiences led to increased tolerance, awareness and even acceptance of different views. 

In the final stage of the game you receive a Persona-Card and have to vote on your own program – one last nudge to get you to challenge your own view. 

Together with Chiara Treglia, I developed this game in a 2-week-sprint project at the Royal College of Art in Global Innovation design. Since then, we've had amazing evenings with great discussions and learned a lot about how people think about politics, decision making, and maintaining the railway-network for 20 Billion.

 The game taught me two things:

- it impressively demonstrates how unbelievably, incredibly, rediculously much harder it is to make a good proposition than to criticise

- one can have a ton of fun with serious topics