Chip Games are a fun, effective activity to engage community members in the planning process. The chips represent variable units and are used in conjunction with maps of the planning area to create different scenarios for growth and change.
The Chip Game (and many variations of it) allows citizens to try their own hands at scenario planning, using Legos™, poker chips, or other symbols to allocate units (or housing, economic development, conservation land, or other attributes). In most cases, citizens are placed into small groups with maps of the planning area and are given some guidelines, such as required amounts of density, a certain number of units to allocate, or restrictions on placement and land uses. Each group must then create a scenario for the area by placing the chips on the map where the group would like to see the future land uses occur.
The Chip Game is a take-off on other low-tech participatory voting tools, and can be adapted for many different types of planning and decision-making processes. It is usually not used for discovering or identifying community character, but for allocating growth or creating land use plans. It could be used for character identification in much the same way that some meeting facilitators use sticky notes—creating a set of opportunities (perhaps examples of character) and letting participants vote for their favorites by placing their chips (or sticky notes).
Chip Games can be used in combindation with GIS-based software, like CommunityViz, to evaluate the impacts of the scenarios that participants develop. It can also be used in combination with keypad polling to evaluate how all participants feel about different scenarios.
The Chip Game can be an inexpensive public engagement tool. Generally the only related costs are the materials used (though chips are often borrowed or donated) and possible facilitation fees depending on the coordinating organization. More complex set-ups will result in higher costs.
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