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Team — Goal Diggers

A student-led project on energy transition, climate policy, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Student-led grantee project · SDGs + Mobility MaPs 2025 · Global Partnerships Division, Mahidol University

How we started

Watts and Wealth began as a class project on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, built as a tabletop board game prototype to make the energy transition feel like a series of choices rather than a chart in a report. The first physical version ran on hand-cut cards, dice borrowed from a Monopoly set, and a printed paper grid taped to a kitchen table.

That first session ran long. Players argued about whether nuclear should count as “clean.” Someone tried to build five coal plants in a row and discovered that a Drought card blocks hydro builds on the very turn they meant to pivot. By the end of round 18 the table had reorganised itself: the loudest pro-coal player was holding back a Climate Adaptation Strategy to gift to the renewable-pathway opponent, because the alternative was losing the whole game to the pollution counter. That moment — the table doing the work the lecture couldn’t — became the design thesis.

Over 22+ iterations the prototype moved from paper to Unity to a browser-based hot-seat edition. The Asia-Pacific lens stayed locked from day one: this is a region carrying the highest climate exposure and the steepest transition curve, and we wanted a game that played the way the region actually negotiates — with subsidy politics, smog crises, and a power grid that still runs on a lot of coal.

The team

Five students of the Faculty of Medicine Ramathibodi Hospital, Mahidol University.

Project advisor

Asst. Prof. Dr. Somsiri Siewwuttanagul
Division of Logistics and Rail Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University
Two team members presenting Watts and Wealth at the SDGs + Mobility MaPs 2025 showcase booth, flanked by two project banners
Presenting Watts and Wealth at the SDGs + Mobility MaPs 2025 showcase, Mahidol University.
Players around two physical Watts and Wealth boards mid-session — hex-tile world maps, card decks, dice, and token chips on the table
A live playtest of the physical edition — two tables running side by side.

The journey

  1. R1–R8 Tabletop prototype. Hand-cut cards, dice from a Monopoly set, printed paper grid. Eight playtest sessions on the physical version surfaced the early-coal / mid-game-pivot pattern that still holds in the digital editions.
  2. R5 Card text immutability locked as a design rule. From this point on, balance changes move through silent constants only — never through rewriting printed card effects.
  3. R9–R16 Unity 6 hot-seat port. Phase 3 card system implementation. Hot-seat handoff UX iterated to friction-free by R12.
  4. Snapshot Unity build tagged as final-snapshot reference. The whole game then re-implemented for the browser in TypeScript + React with a deterministic action-log engine.
  5. R17–R22 Browser hot-seat edition. Setup friction dropped to seconds (no install). Mid-game pivot pattern replicated from earlier phases. Adversarial code review introduced as a default last-step on text-heavy work.
  6. Now Live at play.wattsandwealth.online. Companion site built alongside for the SDGs + Mobility MaPs 2025 submission.

Acknowledgments

Playtesters across 22+ sessions contributed the trade-off pressure that shaped every card. The full playtester cohort acknowledgment will be published at public release.