№ 120 | We Wunt Be Druv, If You Were a Ghost, What Would You Haunt?, Brick Starter, Can Trivia Save Us?, The Housing Game, 4 Forms of Hope, and Reality Strikes Back: A Cartoon Guide to Complexity

Stephen P. Anderson

Stephen P. Anderson

— 7 min read
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№ 120 | We Wunt Be Druv, If You Were a Ghost, What Would You Haunt?, Brick Starter, Can Trivia Save Us?, The Housing Game, 4 Forms of Hope, and Reality Strikes Back: A Cartoon Guide to Complexity

Welcome to another edition of Thinking Things, your regular roundup of ‘playful things to think with’ and things to think about!

This weekend, I’m back with not 1, not 2, but 3—count ‘em THREE—card decks.

We Wunt Be Druv

At the most recent Cardstock meetup, John V Willshire shared a bit about the “very modern ancient tradition” that is Sussex Day, and a recent workshop he led for the event. There’s a lot of rich, historical context; I’ll let John fill you in on that. Let’s jump to the card game.

We Wunt Be Druv (named after the Sussex county motto) is a Sussex-specific variant of Our House’s charter game, which encourages citizens to “imagine how democracy could work better in the places they live.” I’d describe this as a game that helps players (local citizens) discuss ‘what could be’ for their county (or city), with a focus on actionable outcomes—ways to realize the platitudes contained in a town charter.

The We Wunt Be Druv card deck laid out on a green cutting mat, showing the category cards — the title card, "The Challenge: How can we shape a fairer Sussex for all?," "Who is making the decisions?," "How do they decide on changes," and "Examples from across Sussex" — alongside sample Who cards ("AI Overlord," "Young people"), How cards ("Community wealth building," "Shared ownership"), and an Inspiration card featuring the Adur & Worthing Climate Assembly.

Per John:

[Players] are given one sentence at random from the Sussex Charter to offer what they see of their Sussex in that statement.Then everyone is given a ‘Who’ card and a ‘How’ card - who might hold power, and how might they exercise it? There are 16 of each of these cards, expanded a little from the original Our House deck.Then they will play two rounds - Dreadocracy, and then Dreamocracy. What’s the worst thing that entity might do with that power, and then what’s the best thing they might do.Finally, when each table has explored these angles, they will be invited to shape some new demands for how Sussex democracy should work for people moving forwards.

While you only read about the We Wunt Be Druv card game (unless you live in Sussex), you can download a PDF version of the official Our House charter building game + the facilitator’s guide, to help you build a People’s Charter.

Writing about this, I can’t help but pause… and think about the community where I live. I’ve been exploring where I want to steer my interest in ‘playful things to think with’ and a big part of my narrative is something local. What John shared here made me wonder ‘what kinds of thinking things could I share now—not in the future—with my community?’ That, and, my default mode of thinking is to imagine the things I make being played in business environments, or by interested individuals who stumble across this site. But, it’s a subtle and powerful reframing to imagine taking something I’ve shared here, and playing it with random strangers in my neighborhood. Hmm… 🤔

If You Were a Ghost, What Would You Haunt?

Cards that offer little more than a question for discussion are quite common. So much so that I rarely share those here unless they offer something new (e.g. the way Cozy Juicy Real turns ‘get to know you’ questions into a proper game). If You Were a Ghost, What Would You Haunt?: And Other Conversations to Break the Ice doesn’t change the formula, but… the questions themselves are so darn intriguing! Confession: I backed this on Kickstarter on the strength of the question in the title, in hopes that the rest of the cards would be similarly creative. It hasn’t disappointed.

The "If You Were a Ghost, What Would You Haunt? And Other Conversations to Break the Ice" card box beside eight question cards in ornate gold gothic frames, with prompts including "What painting would you like to step inside of and visit?," "If you could switch lives with an object for a day, what would it be?," "What would be the most fun way for the world to end?," and "What historical figure would you bring back and clone 500 times?"

Finally, to round out our trio of card decks…

Brick Starter

Fellow card enthusiast Cat Hase, along with AMC from Creative Orange Studio, recently launched the Brick Starter BIY card deck. Designed for LEGO Serious Play (LSP) facilitators, each card is a prompt or activity that can be used in an LSP workshop. Best part? This is a crowdsourced card deck. Every card was contributed by facilitators in the LSP community. For a deck like this, where each card presents a separate activity, this is a great way to curate a breadth of great ideas (I have a few card decks in the works that will be developed this way…).

Six Brick Starter cards: two card backs (blue with the "Imagine If" logo, orange with the Creative Orange Studio logo) and four prompt cards — "Build who you want to grow up to be," "Build a space that feels like it's made for you," "Build a tool that sparks collaboration," and "Build what gives your team purpose" — each tagged as a warm-up/skills-build or individual-build activity.


I own 1 or 2 LSP books, and I’ve attended a couple LSP workshops. Adding to this an instant bank of the very best ideas from dozens of LSP facilitators—priceless!

I came across this next find while driving!

Can trivia save us?

By way of a Here & Now segment on NPR, I learned about the work of Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene and his “evidence-based research and quiz game” Tango. Essentially, you’re paired with a random stranger—someone with different political views—to answer trivia questions together. Right away, I saw the elegance in this arrangement: Mutually beneficial cooperation. When we step into a game space, especially a cooperative game like this one, it’s no longer personal; we’re on the same team, trying to “win” by answering correctly. If what follows is something we might otherwise disagree on and even debate, that—for the moment—takes a backseat to us aligning on the right answer. At least, that’s how I see this construction. And, along the way, you start to appreciate the unique expertise that the other person offers. Anyway, there’s an academic paper you can check out, and you can listen to the same segment I did: Can a trivia platform help people break their partisan echo chambers? (Yes.)

First page of the Nature Human Behaviour paper "Defusing political animosity in the United States with a cooperative online quiz game" by Lucas Woodley, Evan DeFilippis, Shankar Ravi, and Joshua D. Greene, with an abstract describing how the Tango quiz game reduces negative partisanship between opposing party members.

The Housing Game

Over on LinkedIn, I’ve been following Micael Sousa as he frequently posts about various serious [analog] games he’s working on. Usually, these are teasers with nothing I can link to. Until now.

By way of the 3rd Geogames Symposium (3GGS), we can now learn about Sousa’s housing policy game, designed “to establish a more collaborative process for participatory budgeting aimed at housing policies.”

Workshop participants gathered around a table playing Micael Sousa's housing policy game, arranging red and blue building blocks on a gridded map board alongside printed scoring sheets, colored tokens, and geographic visualizations.

What jumped out to me was Sousa’s focus on the visual collaboration embedded into a game like his:

Participatory budgeting typically abstracts spatial considerations from the resource allocation process. This study evaluates whether municipal civil servants can facilitate game-based participatory budgeting that combines budget allocation with geographic visualizations.

I’ll be the first to argue that strategy board games (as this appears to be) are a sprawling, cardboard, card, and cube-driven form of data-visualization. If you’ve ever attended one of my talks or workshops, you probably heard this refrain: When we bring information into the world, and then arrange that information in meaningful ways, we’re able to support more complex thinking. This is as true of data visualizations as it is board games.

While his focus is more on the training necessary, Sousa’s research also seems to confirm the benefits of transforming abstract information into a visual form.

The spatial dimension proved critical: participants discussed not only which policies to fund but also where to locate them. Findings suggest that spatially explicit, game-based participatory budgeting can democratize introductory discussions of housing policy through existing municipal staff without extensive training.

😍

Oh, and for similar projects, check out more proceedings from the 3rd Geogames Symposium (3GGS), including:

4 forms of hope

I love a thing that helps us to think more deeply about a ‘simple’ topic. In this case, it’s the idea of ‘hope’. Specifically, “which form of hope are you leading your [org] change with?”

It’s a simple 2x2, but splitting hope into four forms, based on Aspiration and Credibility axes, seems like a useful way to slice up this topic.

A 2×2 matrix titled "Which form of hope are you leading your change with?," plotting Aspiration (vertical axis) against Credibility (horizontal axis). Inflated hope (high aspiration, low credibility): leaders promise transformation without the resources to deliver it. Mobilising hope (high aspiration, high credibility): leaders name what's hard and back conviction with consistent action. Empty hope (low aspiration, low credibility): vague communication that leaves people without direction. Stabilising hope (low aspiration, high credibility): leaders focus on steady, incremental progress. Source: Meister, Dael and Bach (2026), Harvard Business Review.

H/t Helen Bevan

Reality Strikes Back: A Cartoon Guide to Complexity

There’s a good chance you’ve encountered this comic, especially if you spend any time over on LinkedIn:

A single-panel cartoon: stick figures stand inside a neatly drawn cube around a flip chart showing a simple "A → B" arrow, while a figure at the edge of the cube looks out at a vast tangle of scribbled, looping lines and says "Um…" — a tidy plan set against messy reality.

(I even shared it way back in Issue № 61).

It’s a punchy way to quickly communicate what can be a complex topic for many. Anyway, that singular comic—that’s gone kind of viral—has now grown into a full-blown book: Reality Strikes Back. 164 pages of illustrated goodness. This was an instant buy for me.

Book cover for "Reality Strikes Back: A Cartoon Guide to Complexity" by Virpi Oinonen. A hand-drawn cube encloses stick figures presenting a tidy "A → B" chart while a figure outside the cube says "Um…," the whole scene surrounded by a dense tangle of scribbled lines.

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