The Game is an engaging, informative scenarios thinking tool to enable decision-makers in local and national government, emergency planners, senior leaders in the food sector, university researchers and other policy influencers to understand existing and emerging risks to our food system, and to explore what resilience in the food supply network means for their communities.

The Game is designed and facilitated by Birmingham Food Council.

How to play The Game

You have to:

• Decide on social and economic trade-offs in a complex system (see the landscape map below)
• Quickly understand the magnitude of the task in supplying sufficient, safe, nutritious food in a fair and equitable way
• Recognise and assess emerging supply threats, and take action to avert them or mitigate their impact

The Origins of The Game

In January 2018, Birmingham Food Council published a horizon scanning project report Back from the future. It highlighted the scale and urgency of the threats on our food supply system, and exposed the inability and/or lack of capacity within governments and other institutions to respond at that time.

Birmingham Food Council were sufficiently concerned that no-one in national government appeared to grasp the challenges ahead, and they therefore decided to devise The Game. The history of this first version, and and a second iteration (about buffer stocks). is here.

In the summer of 2021, Birmingham Food Council reviewed the forecasts made only four years earlier. Scarily, they discovered they had been 10-15 years too optimistic.

Along the while, too, the fragilities and vulnerabilities of the UK’s food supply system have been gravely exacerbated by the impact of both Covid and this Brexit.