This paper reports on a co-design workshop conducted to examine how co-designing board games could be conceptualised as an activity for supporting people in critical engagement with potential futures and civic learning. We follow aresearch-through-design approach to investigate how such formats may be designed and used to facilitate creative and collaborative engagement with futures. Thereby, we attempt to position the design activity itself as playful and explore how the idea of how playing and engaging in experiments with prototypes could be seen as making. We reflect on both the workshop blueprint and overall workshop outcomes, exploring to what extent the approaches of criticality, making and play can be balanced, and how they may contribute to supporting workshop participants in engaging with futures in a context of civic learning.