LocationsExploring the future through play: making foresight tangible for communities and policymakers.
Futures Served
December 2, 2025
Rehearsing the future through play: making foresight tangible for communities and policymakers.
How can people of all walks of life, but especially those in leadership positions, be better prepared to make decisions they’ve never faced before?
How can we help people think about the future five, ten or 20 years from now and make it tangible and real for them in the present?
How can futures-thinking be made more accessible and inviting for people of different backgrounds in a country of immense diversity, such as Brazil?
Those were some of the questions that lead to the development of Futures Served, a bespoke game that is part of the annex to the Brazil Signals Spotlight 2025, developed in partnership between the government of Brazil, the UNDP Brazil Country Office, and the UNDP Strategy & Futures team.
The game allows people to explore the future together within the context of a long-time tradition, the Brazilian lunch. Futures Served is more than a game -- it’s a collaborative storytelling tool designed to bridge community voices and policy innovation.
The Context
In 2025, UNDP Brazil and the Brazilian Ministry of Management and Innovation in Public Services joined the UNDP Strategy & Futures team to develop Brazil’s own Signals Spotlight: an exploration of signals of change designed to spark conversations about Brazil’s future.
The team ran interviews and workshops across five regions of Brazil, with community leaders, young activists, members of government and experts on the Spotlight’s 16 themes.
It became clear to the team that those conversations shouldn't end with the research process, but should continue with a broader audience. To spark those conversations, the team created a toolkit with activities that explore the themes in different settings of Brazil's society (link) and a role-playing game, inviting the reader to step into other people's shoes as they face the future.
Futures Served is a foresight tool that helps make complex dilemmas more tangible, whether you’re a policy maker, a community leader, such as the pastor of a faith community or a city council member, or a schoolteacher who would like to challenge their students to consider the future as they study the past.
The Process
Futures Served is based on four scenarios of Brazil’s possible future - Baseline, Collapse, Transformation and New Equilibrium – illustrated through the metaphor of a Brazilian lunch. These range from a gourmet version of Rice and Beans, to the collapse of food production, to diverse community buffets and highly nutritional customized human fodder.
The game aims to make futures thinking more playful, accessible and democratic. Personas add an extra dimension: players must respond to challenges based on their character, which allows the building of a collective story where questions lead to dilemmas and consequences. As well as being entertained, players practice skills such as decision-making and negotiation, with all their uncertainties and trade-offs.
From Food to Education
While initially designed to complement the Brazil Signals Spotlight, Futures Served caught the attention of Futures Fellow Ingrid Dos Santos Furtado, who was supporting strategic foresight in the UNDP Honduras Country Office. Ingrid saw the game as an opportunity for the team to explore more deeply the scenarios they had developed around the future of education in Honduras.
Using personas created for the local context, players stepped into the roles of characters such as Eduardo, a student leader; Don José, a traditional Honduran father; and Pastora Ana, a local religious leader. By responding to challenges “in character,” the team was able to build empathy and uncover new insights about potential implications of the “preferred future” scenario.
A quick round of the game helped the Honduras team consider different perspectives, make more informed decisions (even in a play setting), and see potential blind spots. Players said the game revealed new challenges and opportunities around the future of education in Honduras, as well as helping them evaluate important policy trade-offs.
Futures Served arrived at the perfect moment, coinciding with the final phase of the Honduras foresight initiative and functioning as a hands-on experiential futures exercise. Because participants were already familiar with seeing the education topic in their country office- through the lenses of foresight-, the game allowed them to engage with the scenarios more tangibly. It proved to be a fun, simple, scalable, and highly reflective toolIngrid Furtado, UNDP Futures Fellows and foresight strategist
What’s next
The experience in Honduras shows the impact Futures Served can have on futures thinking. And for a team that has already done some foresight research, it’s easy to adapt the game to local context, scenarios and personas. Its design means it can be played in schools, in decision-making settings, innovation labs and more.
Want to try it for yourself?
Download and play the game – and see how a simple game can inspire new thinking about our shared futures.
Download Futures Served here
Authour: Mariana Soares da Costa, 2025 UNDP Future Fellow.
Mariana Soares da Costa is a 2025 UNDP Futures Fellow from Brazil. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of UNDP.