Luis García Barrios, a senior researcher at Mexico’s Colegio de la Frontera Sur, invented the Sierra Springs board game to simulate the behavior of farmers gaining access to a new plot of tropical forest.
He uses it to help players understand the dynamics at work in rural communities, but also to study decision-making on land use. This research led to a publication in the International Journal of the Commons
http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/inde…
García Barrios demonstrated the game at the recent Resilience 2014 conference in Montpellier, France.