Watts the Deal?

Watts the Deal? is a board game about trading electricity between neighbours. Each player runs a home with solar panels and a battery. Over seven days of play they decide whether to use what they generate, store it, sell it to a neighbour, or buy and sell with the grid.

It was a work project, not a personal one: I developed it with David Shipworth, Alexandra Schneiders and Anna Gorbatcheva as part of our research at the UCL Energy Institute. We made it to explore how people might behave in a peer-to-peer energy market, and so people could try one out for themselves. It was first played in public at the Manchester Science Festival in 2018, and there is a print-at-home version.

I'm working on a digital version you can play alone, with the computer playing the neighbours.