In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattled on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leapt into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
Photo: AFP
The game “features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen said, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the Pacific Ring of Fire, the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a magnitude 6.9 quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” said Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation, where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster was updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heat waves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Philippine Department of Science and Technology assistant regional director for technical support Bianca Canlas said.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfill a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of US$35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said.
The government is determining if it would throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen said. “As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained ... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
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