Gaming Livelihoods in the Bangladesh Delta:

Tala, Shathkira, Padma Pukur and Assasuni

For over a decade, Carthago Consultancy has been developing innovative approaches to support climate-resilient livelihoods in the Bangladesh Delta. Our work combines participatory methods, serious gaming, and cultural exploration to understand local decision-making, social dynamics, and adaptation strategies.

Through years of iterative research, field engagement, and methodological refinement, we have developed a suite of tools and approaches that enable communities, researchers, and practitioners to explore complex resilience challenges in an engaging, grounded, and actionable way.

This page showcases our achievements, methodologies, and insights, reflecting Carthago Consultancy’s long-term commitment to combining scientific rigor with practical solutions in the context of climate adaptation and sustainable livelihoods.

Games, Stories, and the Delta

The southwest delta of Bangladesh, including Gabura, Padmapukur, Tala, and Shatkira within Polder 7/1, is a rich and dynamic landscape shaped by centuries of human–environment interaction. Seasonal floods once brought fresh silt, flushed salts, and maintained fertile land, while mangroves protected communities from cyclones. For thousands of years, people successfully cultivated this delta. Yet colonial embankments and modern polder systems disrupted these natural cycles, often worsening waterlogging, salinity, and livelihood vulnerability. As Camilla Dewan emphasizes in Misreading the Bangla Delta, it is not only disasters that challenge the delta, but also attempts to fix and control what was historically dynamic.

Global science offers deep knowledge about hydrology, climate change, and socio-economic trends, yet much of this knowledge struggles to reach the communities most affected. Reports, models, and technical meetings often overlook local mental models, cultural practices, and lived experience. As a result, people are exposed not only to natural forces, but also to decisions made far from their daily realities.

Gaming and storytelling help bridge this gap. The Tidal River Water Custodian game brings together water, land, and livelihood systems in a shared simulation. Players take on different roles, explore trade-offs, negotiate decisions, and experience the ripple effects of interventions — from embankment repairs to land-use choices — in a participatory setting. Conflicts and dependencies become tangible rather than abstract.

The মাটি ও লবনের ষড়যন্ত্র! The Conspiracy Between Salt and Soil! game, a Ludo-style climate resilience game, complements this approach by focusing on livelihoods and uncertainty. Players choose livelihood strategies and encounter floods, salinity intrusion, or cyclones through chance-based events. The game highlights how risk, cooperation, and short-term choices shape long-term resilience.

Together, these games make visible that the delta’s challenges are systemic and historical. Today’s vulnerabilities are shaped by past land-use changes, infrastructure decisions, and socio-economic dynamics. Through play, participants can see how interventions may repeat old patterns or open new pathways.

Rather than starting with technical fixes, this work starts with people — their knowledge, experience, and dialogue. Science, satellite data, and models enter the conversation as tools for shared understanding, not as directives. Gaming becomes a way to reflect, learn, and co-create more resilient futures for the delta.

Why Board Games?

In these projects, we intentionally work with board games.

We do develop hybrid and fully computer-based games in other contexts, and we recognize their strengths, especially for visualization, data integration, and scaling up. But in the southwest delta, board games play a unique and essential role.

Board games keep decision-making collective and visible. People sit around the same table, negotiate face-to-face, question assumptions, and tell stories from lived experience. These interactions: who speaks, who listens, who hesitates, who compromises, are at the heart of water management, yet are easily diluted when engagement shifts to individual screens.

Board games preserve openness and exploration. Rules can be discussed, scenarios adapted, and unexpected ideas tested in real time. This flexibility is difficult to maintain once choices and pathways are fixed into computer code.

We see computer and hybrid games as valuable complements and possible next steps. But starting with board games helps us keep the focus on dialogue, shared learning, and collective sense-making — before solutions are formalized, optimized, or automated.

মাটি ও লবনের ষড়যন্ত্র

The Conspiracy Between Salt and Soil

The Ludo Game

In the climate-vulnerable southwest of Bangladesh, adaptation is part of daily life—but rarely something people get to explore together. Our board game creates that space.

Inspired by the familiar game of Ludo, our game brings community members around a shared table to play through the realities of living with climate risk. Players take on different livelihood roles from the delta and move across a physical board using dice, coins, and tokens. Each turn reflects real challenges such as salinity, cyclones, floods, and uncertain incomes. Wins and losses are tangible, sparking emotions, debate, laughter, and reflection.

The game is deliberately slow and social. As players progress, they talk—about risk, cooperation, fairness, and the choices they make when the future is uncertain. Rules are flexible and evolve through discussion, allowing local knowledge and lived experience to shape the game itself.

More than a game, it is a shared learning experience. It helps people recognize vulnerabilities, imagine alternatives, and understand that adaptation is not only about individual survival, but about collective choices.

With BRAC (Bd), KUET (Bd), MIT (USA), BUET (Bd), University of Dhaka (Bd) and Instituto Politecnico Nacional IPN (MX), Sonar Bangla.

Played multiple times in PadmaPukur and Assasuni in Bangladesh South-West delta.

Tidal River Water Custodian Game

Livelihoods in the South-West Delta of Bangladesh are shaped by a dynamic and changing physical environment, where soil salinity, tidal flows, and drainage congestion interact with socio-economic pressures such as population growth and declining agricultural incomes. Over the past 50 years, engineers and experts have sought to manage these challenges with optimized polder designs inspired by Dutch models. While technically sophisticated, these interventions often produce unintended consequences: rising salinity, soil subsidence, and blocked drainage, leaving communities frustrated with promised solutions.

The Tidal River Water Custodian game places players into this complex physical and social landscape. Participants take on roles ranging from large landowners and small farmers to fishers, engineers, and policymakers, navigating the tension between top-down engineering approaches and indigenous tidal river management practices. Players negotiate water distribution, embankment repairs, and land-use strategies, experiencing firsthand how decisions in one part of the system ripple across the delta.

The game emphasizes inclusive decision-making: agricultural stakeholders are diverse, with differing incentives and perspectives, and adaptation strategies must consider their interplay. By simulating these dynamics, the game reveals the limits of purely technical solutions and the value of combining local knowledge with scientific data.

Designed with Uttaran (Bd), Shahnoor Hasan (NL) and Mahmuda Mutahara (Bd), the game blends hydrological models, local stories, and role-play into a safe, participatory space for experimentation. Communities, students, and decision-makers explore trade-offs, negotiate shared strategies, and co-create approaches that build resilience for the next 50 years — not only to climate change, but also to the unintended effects of past interventions.

Played multiple times in Shatkira and Tala, Bangladesh South-West delta.

About

Willem van Deursen Senior Expert in Integrated Water Resources Management
Willem founded Carthago Consultancy in 1995 and has since advised on the management of major river systems in the Netherlands and internationally. With extensive experience in integrated water resources management, he currently leads projects in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Pakistan, combining technical expertise with strategic, locally grounded solutions.

Myisha Ahmad is a hydrologist and livelihood expert at Carthago Consultancy, with a focus on participatory approaches to water and agricultural management. She holds a Master’s degree in Hydroinformatics from the Erasmus Mundus program. At Carthago, Myisha develops serious games that connect scientific insights with local knowledge, helping communities and decision-makers co-create resilient strategies. Her special expertise lies in translating complex scientific data into actionable understanding for local communities, fostering dialogue, learning, and collaborative problem-solving.

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