Play the City

About Play the City

Changing the way we engage stakeholders, Play the City designs physical games as a method for collaborative decision making. We localize our games and tailor them according to particular questions of our partners. Since 2010, we have developed games for issues such as affordable housing, circular economy, migration, inner city transformation, urban expansion and participatory design.

We use gaming as a problem-solving method, bringing top-down decision makers together with bottom-up stakeholders. In the accessible environment of games, free from professional jargon, players engage with a problem and with each other, facilitating collaborative outcomes.

We believe that gaming offers a real alternative to standard formats of civic engagement in the 21st century. Our method has been acknowledged internationally and has been implemented for large-scale projects in Amsterdam, Istanbul, Brussels, Shenzhen, Dublin, Prague, and Cape Town.

Please enjoy here TEDx talk of Ekim Tan -founder, Play the City:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6kLde7BGjA

Keywords

• City-Gaming
• Design
• Planning
• Research

Address

• Headquarters

  Piet Heinkade 179AmsterdamNoord-Holland, Netherlands

Team by function

Based on 4 public job profiles as of 4 August 2026.

• Design / UX1
• Engineering / Software Development1
• Executive / C-Suite1
• Founder / Owner1