3LandSpiel is an Interreg-funded initiative led by the Dreiländermuseum, creating an innovative "phygital" game for use in the museum and classrooms. As trinational governance and educational game development rarely intersect in existing literature, the project has a unique chance to define its own clear success criteria—fostering aligned expectations among its Swiss, German, and French partners and a strong fit between educational goals and final output.

The research was carried out in two stages. First, a literature review, structured around PMBOK® 8th Edition's Six Principles, identified eight generic success criteria for project management, cross-border governance, and educational game development. Second, these were compared against eleven project-specific criteria drawn from 3LandSpiel's own project documents and six semi-structured stakeholder interviews, to see where the two sets of criteria aligned, or diverged.

The comparison produced nine final success criteria for 3LandSpiel. Most confirmed the literature; one revealed an unresolved tension between the literature's call for adaptive planning and the deadlines stakeholders actually described; and one emerged independently from all six stakeholders with no grounding in the literature at all. These findings were translated into concrete recommendations addressing staffing, role clarity, cross-border communication, playtesting, long-term institutional ownership, and AI governance. For the Dreiländermuseum and the 3LandSpiel project team, this provides an evidence-based foundation to build-on going forward.