The Digital Preservation Innovation Game

A free, print-at-home game designed to encourage practitioners to think about digital preservation innovation, unencumbered by the usual pressures and constraints of their day jobs!

Purpose of the Game

The aim of the game is to come up with an innovative digital preservation project idea that incorporates cards from the three decks. The cards provide some ideas of potential problem areas to be solved, different kinds of innovations that might be employed, and community experts that could help realise the project. The project could solve that really annoying manual step in a workflow at your own organization or could embed a new digital preservation tool in computers around the world. There are no limits to the innovation concept, but players do need to be able to sell their idea to the other people in the game!

It focuses on 3 objectives:

  1. Encouraging innovative thinking
  2. Working as a Team
  3. Advocating for digipres


About the Game

The Digital Preservation Innovation Game was created by Paul Wheatley and Sharon McMeekin of Preserve Together, and was a hit at the 2026 DPASSH and iPRES conferences. We're now making it freely available in a print at home format (both A4 and US Letter versions available) in the hopes the wider digital preservation community will find it useful to help encourage engagement with digital preservation within organizational, training, and education contexts.

We encourage the sharing of this printable version, and it is available under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. A no derivatives license has been chosen due to the inclusion of real practitioners and their images on the Experts cards, we would, however, love to see the creation of expansion packs if inspiration hits!

Download the Game!