Shift Happens
The Coalition Crisis Game
 Enter the Crisis Room →
Playable futures simulator

Save the
future
badly a coalition game for smart people making questionable plans

Shift Happens is a chaotic futures game where misfit characters respond to absurd-but-plausible crises, get judged by AI, and discover what their solutions break next.

Enter the Crisis Room → See how it works ▸
Strategy nerds AI-curious teams Educators Families with opinions Playtest nights
♙5Characters
▧80+Crises
◉6Signal sources
∞∞Bad tradeoffs

Meet the Coalition

Every power comes with a blindspot. The best rounds happen when the blindspots start collaborating.

🦄

Unicorn CEO

Turns catastrophe into a funding round.

Blindspot

Ignores non-monetizable solutions.

“The worse the crisis, the bigger the exit.”
😸

Cat Hacker

Breaks any system in one turn.

Blindspot

Gets distracted by side quests.

“Every system has a root. I just need five minutes.”
🤖

AI Robot

Sees ten moves ahead.

Blindspot

Cannot understand vibes or culture.

“The optimal path has 12% casualties. Why are you upset?”
👽

Alien VC

Infinite capital, zero context.

Blindspot

Overfunds obvious bad ideas.

“On my home world, we simply buy the volcano.”
🧙

Regulation Wizard

Can freeze or accelerate any rule.

Blindspot

Slows everything down.

“Excellent proposal. I’ll need a 90-day comment period.”

How to Play

Six phases. Thirty to sixty minutes. One plan. Many consequences. Several apologies.

1

Assemble your coalition

Pick 2–5 misfit characters with useful powers and extremely educational blindspots.

2

Pick a crisis

Choose a future shock from Climate, Labor, Tech, or Politics. Pick the one that makes the table make a face.

3

Read the signals

See how real the crisis already looks across research, preprints, attention, macro, market, and regulation.

4

Write your pitch

Create one merged plan. Admit the bad part before the AI does. It respects that.

5

Get AI verdict

Receive scores for Profit, Planet, Novelty, plausibility, and institutional embarrassment.

6

Face the fallout

Your solution creates the next crisis. This is called product-market fit.

Example Crisis

Critical

Freshwater Declared a Weapon

Climate · 2030

Three upstream nations have rebranded “taking the river” as “bold hydrological sovereignty.” 400M people are now downstream of a PowerPoint problem. The UN is deadlocked, private water utilities are hiring security, and the Unicorn CEO has already registered Water-as-a-Service.ai.

View all crises

Signal Snapshot

67 /100
Already halfway real. Sorry.
Research Activity
High
Preprint Velocity
Rising Fast
Public Attention
Moderate
Macro Pressure
High
Market Movement
Moving
Regulatory Activity
Lagging
Preprint-to-Regulatory Gap: High
Science is moving faster than governance. Governance has requested a calendar invite.

AI Verdict

“Shockingly coherent. Morally damp. Somehow your worst idea has a revenue model.”
7
Profit
6
Planet
9
Novelty
Unexpected Risk
Your Cat Hacker fixed the dashboard so well that three governments classified transparency as malware. The Alien VC has offered to buy the word “river.”
View full report ▸

Not just funny scenarios.

Shift Happens uses absurdity as a delivery mechanism for serious thinking. The joke gets people in. The tradeoffs keep them arguing. The fallout teaches the actual lesson.

For teams
Practice decision-making under uncertainty without turning it into a boring workshop.
For educators
Make systems thinking concrete, weird, and playable.

Ready to make the future worse?

Build your coalition. Face the crisis. Defend your plan. Then find out what your solution accidentally broke.

Enter the Crisis Room → Run a Playtest Night ♟