A team of UzhNU students created a board game about the ecology of Ukraine – with antagonists, conspiracies and real disasters

Imagine Ukraine on the verge of ecological collapse. The Carpathians are under threat of landslides, the Black Sea is suffering from oil spills, Polissya is in flames from peat fires, cities are in smog. And now you can prevent the disaster… at the game table. This is exactly the idea that two UzhNU students, Nikita Lisovets and Daryna Yantso, came up with.
The game was created as part of the Viridis project, which was implemented as part of the Re:Source initiative of the public organization Teplytsia Initiative Platform with the support of the German government through the KfW development bank and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). But behind the formal name is a personal story, doubts, rejections, and seven months of hard work.

“We didn’t get a grant, but we didn’t give up on the idea”
The idea for the game was born in the spring – during the Re:Source training. The participants had only three days to come up with an eco-project. It was then that the idea arose to create a board game — a format that could interest young people.

“At first, we didn’t get funding at the hackathon. But faith in the idea didn’t allow us to give up. Later, funding became available — and Viridis got the green light,” says the author of the idea and project manager Nikita Lisovets.

Together with Daryna Yantso, they took on full-fledged development. Nikita was responsible for management, finding designers, game mechanisms, and production control. Daryna became the director of the game world — a scriptwriter, character author, and the person who tested the game with real players.

An alternative Ukraine that is too similar to the real one
In Viridis, you find yourself in an alternative Ukraine — one that is on the verge of ecological collapse. But this “alternative” is scary precisely because all the game scenarios are based on real events and scientific forecasts.