What does it look and feel like to be in the saddle, with a bag full of hot food on your back, as your traverse city high-rises looking for the address of customer? What is the financial impact of waiting around all day for work that never comes? Is it worth pushing your luck and taking a risk if it makes the difference in wages?

The lived experiences of cycle couriers are often invisible to consumers. Their needs can side-lined by app-developers who focus on the customer experience rather than that of the worker.

Meal Deal invites players to share experiences that gig economy cycle couriers face. When we say gig economy courier we mean workers who access work through platforms like Deliveroo or UberEats and deliver food, medicine, and other consumer goods on their bicycles.

Players: 1-4 

Playing time: 30-50 min 

Age: 14+

About

Meal Deal is a game that puts players in the saddles of cycle couriers working in the gig economy. With a finite amount of stamina on tap each day, the cards allow players to weave their own gig economy story expanding on research with couriers who’ve worked in Manchester, York and Edinburgh in the UK as part of the Switch-Gig and FlipGig research projects.

It is for 1-4 players and takes around 30 minutes to play.

The aim of the game is to make enough money to pay rent, by taking courier jobs delivering food and groceries by bicycle, and dealing with the challenges of this kind of work.

Credit

Meal Deal was developed by Oliver Bates and Ben Kirman.

Card illustrations and visual design by Emily Martin. Illustration and visual design for the logo and rules by Tony Pickering (Pick-Art).

License

CC-BY-SA

Play online or print at home

The pdfs are print at home versions of the game. 

They cards are suitable for printing on 62x100 size cards (UK "Trump" sized) so would need rearranging for printing on A4/letter.

For testing and remote play, we created a crude room in playingcards.io that you can also download and create your own game. 

There are a limited number of physical copies available for free, just get in touch.
For international shipping (outside the UK) you will probably need to cover your own shipping.