YouthTopia
YouthTopia is a card game about your own surroundings. You talk about what's going on in your village or town and work out together how to tackle it. Young people at Jong Noord designed the game themselves.
What is YouthTopia?
YouthTopia gets young people thinking about issues close to home. What's stuck in your neighbourhood, and what can you do about it yourself? The game borrows its mechanics from well known card games. So you pick it up quickly and soon find yourself in a good conversation.
Youth workers can use the game as a method, for example to help a group on its way to a plan of its own for the neighbourhood. JongGOUD, the youth participation team of the municipality of Eemsdelta, wants to use it with groups of young people.
How to play
Soon you'll find a short guide to playing here.
The full rules are in the manual, which comes with the download.
Make it yourself
Everything you need to make YouthTopia yourself is free to download: the manual, all the cards and the models for the 3D printed parts. Ideally, print the cards on recycled paper. For the 3D prints we use PLA, a filament made from plant based materials such as corn starch.
There's no box. Almost everyone has a small box or bag at home that the game fits into.
Download everything (cards and 3D prints)
The files will be here soon.
Request the game
Do you work for a youth organisation? Then you get YouthTopia from us for free. We only make the game once someone orders it, 3D prints included. That way we don't keep stock we might have to throw away later.
Request the game through the contact form and tell us which group you'd like to use it with.
How it started
YouthTopia comes from Young Minds, Local Voices, our project in Eemsdelta where young people spent two years talking with local politics. The plan included a handbook for policy makers. A few members of the core team came up with the idea for a card game. That's what it became.
The core team did almost everything themselves. Some wrote the manual, others worked on the cards or designed and printed the 3D parts. At De Huiskamer in Appingedam they discussed every new version on a big screen. They only printed a prototype when it was actually going to be played. After every round, players gave feedback and new ideas, and the game kept getting better. At the Toekomstmakers Congres on 25 September 2026, the team launched YouthTopia themselves.
The project behind it
Curious what else the young people in Young Minds, Local Voices did? Read about the evenings with council members, the initiatives that came out of it and what lasts after the project.
