Honors Academic Chair Bryant Simon recently debuted Azari: Feed the Island with Honors students.

When we think about board games, the classics come to mind: Trouble, Risk, Yahtzee. Other modern favorites like Settlers of Catan engage with a specific issue, such as development or resource sharing.  

On Thursday, March 19, in Temple Honors’ The Huddle, students were given the chance to play the North American debut of Azari: Feed the Island, a game designed by food systems experts to educate about climate change and the complex thinking needed to solve it. 

Temple Honors hosted the premiere gaming session by way of Bryant Simon, academic chair of the university Honors Program. Simon attended the 2025 Humboldt Residency Programme in Germany, where Azari was developed by researchers Mónica Guerra Rocha and Nandini Agarwal. The program focuses on food systems and inequities throughout the world, core concepts the game brings to life. 

Simon said that he was inspired to bring the game to Honors because it teaches key academic skills, but also because he was excited to see it in action.  

“I think one of the great virtues of this game is that it teaches our students how to critically think and make arguments,” Simon said. “It gives them a little bit of evidence, it gives them a challenge, and what they essentially have to do is what we’re always trying to get them to do in papers, which is make that argument.” 

It’s played by groups of five to six participants, a “committee” deciding the fate of an island where resources used to be abundant but have recently been decimated by climate change. Each round a new challenge is presented to the group, and they must argue for various solutions before putting it to a vote. The winning argument gets a point, and the one with the most points after five rounds wins.  

As the game took off, students began drawing cards and fielding lighthearted debates with one another. After four rounds, amid spirited discussions and laughter, they took a quick break to receive a Zoom call from Rocha, one of the central developers of the game. They had the opportunity to ask her about how they devised the challenges and solutions, as well as hear the inside story of the game’s refinement process. With renewed clarity, the groups played their last round in “Parliament Mode,” an extra rule stating that each player must also give an argument against the preceding solution. 

Yash Patel, a first-year biology major from Newtown, Pennsylvania, was drawn to the game because of his interest in helping to find solutions for food scarcity. “This game is about food scarcity, and that’s something that’s really important to me,” he said. “A lot of the extracurriculars I do are food-related; for example, I volunteer and I hand out food every Wednesday with the Everywhere Project. It’s great because I find myself working harder throughout the week just so I can make time to go do it.” 

Other students, such as senior biology major Namratha Javvaji from South Brunswick, New Jersey, were drawn to the game out of curiosity. “I thought the concept of the game was really unique, and I had never tackled anything like this before, so I was interested to see what it would look like,” she said. “I think it gives awareness to some real-life problems and gamifies it in a way that makes it easy to understand. I really thought the solutions were all good ideas, and fun to talk about and explain.” 

And that’s exactly the point. Because according to Simon, the collaborative thinking the players use while making their arguments and voting are just as valuable as the solutions themselves. This sort of creative, critical and collaborative thinking is central to Honors’ four pillars: intellectual curiosity, inclusive community, social courage and integrity in leadership; therefore, bringing this game to Honors students was a perfect fit. 

“Part of the point of the game is to show that solving climate change is complicated,” Simon said. “But we have to solve these issues, and they’re central issues about justice. But solving them will not be easy. It will require complicated, agile thinkers to solve them.”