The United Nations sponsored another web-based video game to teach people the harsh reality of low-income areas in the world. Like other “UN-certified” games, Stop Disasters allows you to be the leader of a village somewhere in an emerging country and depending on your ability to conduct a project, you would save a bunch of lives or leave the area barren.

Each game is played in two times. The first episode is the improvement time. You as the ‘SimCity’ mayor of the village, have a rather comfortable budget to build housings, improve the village equipment, build a school and a hospital if needed. So far so good, pretty much all your actions raise the standard of the small town. Then comes the other episode: the disaster, the hard one. If you’ve provided the required equipment to the village, casualties will stay low. Otherwise, you’re dead — and your score keeps falling when the game is over.

Stop Disasters provides a set of five scenarios, corresponding to five major disasters (fire, earthquake, flood, tsunami and hurricane.) Up to now, we play three times and definitively suck at almost all the scenarios. But it was interesting to discover and rediscover some common sense tips like in the fire scenario, building a house close to the river or close to low-inflammable trees is preferable to arid areas. If you consider you could beat us at this game, drop a comment with your high-score. Ours was a mere 7,500.