Replayability

While this effectively made the game more difficult to win, it was also a very limited system. So Alex suggested we take inspiration from The Crew’s mission deck and think about how we can present players a scalable set of new challenges and narratives over time.

Group Challenges, Advantages, and Modifiers

Rule modifier cards allow players to explore counterfactual scenarios. For example, who is responsible for the emissions “embedded” in all the products we buy in the Global North, but are manufactured in the Global South? What if we used a framework that doesn’t just take into account the emissions produced within the borders of a country (aka territorial emissions) but also those that are imported (aka consumption emissions)? How does that shift the game balance?

Individual Challenges and Advantages

Wrapping Up

“There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems.
There’s no magic bullet.
Instead there are thousands of answers – at least. 
You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
– Octavia E. Butler

• Do you have a social media following? If so, could you post something about it?
• Do you have a someone in your life who cares about climate change? Or just loves coop games? If so, could you pass along the link to them?
• Are you on any mailing lists, Slacks, Discords, Facebook groups, etc. that might be interested in climate or boardgames? If so, would you share this with them?
• Do you know anyone else who has a big audience who could help us share the project with folks? If so, would you mind connecting me with them?

You can just share this link if so:

https://www.backerkit.com/c/alex-hague/daybreak?ref=community

Thanks so much in advance!

In other news, we just got all of the illustrations from Jia-yi Zoe Liu in, and they are *stunning*

OK that's all for now—thanks so much again for helping to share the campaign!

Alex.

It was only on my fourth try playing Daybreak that we won this punishing game.

I started to reflect on previous attempts.

We’ve all been little children who wanted to save the planet.

Daybreak has one way to win and three ways to lose 

When is the game over?

What about running out of time? 

What about running out of carbon?

What is the core loss condition then?

Setting that threshold as a collective number would indicate that people are equal, no matter which part of the world they are in. If people in the Majority World are suffering, it doesn’t matter how safe people in Europe or in the US are, because the game will be lost by everyone when that collective threshold is reached.

This is how it worked. Each player would place an equal number (10) of people tokens in the middle of the resilience “doughnut” on their player board. Then, when a crisis would cause some people to become “lost”, the tokens would be transferred in a coffin-shaped area on the game board.

Another experiment was to peg the number of communities in crisis to the number of cards people would draw each round.

What is the win condition then?

In Daybreak, each round all emissions from all players are dumped on the game board. Some of those get absorbed by carbon sinks on the world map. Then the remaining net emissions drive up global warming on the thermometer. This causes a cascade of crises, from extreme weather events to global crop failures and political shocks, which if left unchecked will overwhelm players (to learn more on how we modelled this feedback loop, see Design Diary 2 - Antagonists and Impacts).

What’s the difference between drawdown and net zero? 

And how does it feel to win?

Playful Activism 

That's all for today 

Who Should the Players Represent?

What Can the Players Do About the Problem?

• Add energy capacity
• Buy and sell energy
• Exchange ideas

• Buy Dirty Energy Plant
• Buy Clean Energy Plant
• Decommission Dirty Energy Plant
• Give Foreign Aid
• Share Opportunities
• Buy or Sell Energy
• Reforestation
• Sequester Carbon

Standard Actions Become Starting Projects

Fostering Communication and Cooperation

• The U.S. is good at R&D and can discard cards to go “fishing” for solutions that might benefit another player. They can then pass that card to the other player using their Climate Debt Repayments card.
• China starts out with the ability to export clean energy technology which can help other players meet their electricity demand.
• Europe can help by giving other players resilience tokens and can help pull the other players’ communities out of crisis.
• The Majority World can forecast upcoming crises that often affect every player.

Making the Players Feel Powerful

 

A Diversity of Solutions and Tradeoffs

More than Just Decarbonization

• Women’s Empowerment, Rewilding, City Greening, Regenerative Agriculture, Universal Access to Healthcare, and many more that build resilience.
• Environmental Movement, Social Movement, and Community Wealth Building projects as well as various climate finance projects that increase opportunities to roll out future solutions.
• Community Recovery Policies and Climate-smart Immigration Policies that pull communities out of crisis and care for them.
• Indigenous Peoples’ Forest Tenure, Mangrove Restoration, and Peatland Protection and Rewetting that increase land-based sequestration.
• Foreign Aid, Climate Debt Reparations, and Patents Regulation that help players share opportunities with each other.
• Adaptation Programs and Early Warning Systems to help predict and mitigate upcoming crises.

Tradeoffs

• Perfect the enemy of the good? Should you design high efficiency projects that will take longer to mature, or do as much early action as you can – even if it’s less efficient?
• Mitigation or adaptation? Should you focus on mitigation (reducing greenhouse gasses emissions) or adaptation (build resilience)? Both are needed; what’s the right balance?
• At home or abroad? When should you help another player achieve their goals or protect their communities when it would mean less investment in your own economy?
• How much risk is right? Do you invest only in technology, hoping the crises this round will be mild and spare your communities? Do you start a project which requires a lot of future investment that you may not be able to afford? Will this geo-engineering project work? Should you invest in R&D even if it might not pay off this round?

Managing Complexity

Natural Restrictions and Simplifications

• We introduced a limit to the number of stacks of cards that a player could manage (at first 4, then 5) and ruled that only the topmost card in each stack was available. When we started, all of the cards in each player’s tableau were spread out in a large pile and the player might need to evaluate every one. We also tried limiting each stack’s depth but found that this was unnecessary.
• We didn’t allow players to move cards around in their tableaus. Doing so would have meant players would have to re-evaluate every card and its position. Far too time consuming!
• We severely limited the players ability to exchange cards, making it a special action they had to unlock in order to use. This felt wrong to me, initially: I figured this would be an essential component of cooperation. Initially we let players hand cards to each other at the cost of 1 political power. Then we let players simply swap cards whenever they wanted. But this often meant that players would attempt to internalize the entirety of each others’ tableaus in order to best min/max the potential of each card. This obviously led to much longer play time and a tendency for some players to attempt to direct the action (the “alpha player” syndrome). When we added the card passing restrictions, these problems disappeared, play time became much more manageable, and there was still plenty of cooperation.
• We reduced the number of ways you could play a card. We experimented with cards that had “instant effects” (that were played and then discarded) and cards with rollout costs that you’d have to pay in order to add the card to your play area. We removed all of these exceptions in favor of a single, easier-to-understand system.
• We moved global project cards out of the opportunity deck. The global project cards used to be mixed in with all of the opportunity cards. Players would draw them into their hands and then have to try to make a case to the group for rolling them out – while everyone was focused on improving their local economy. We pulled these out of the opportunity deck and into their own deck when we introduced the Conference step.

Abandoned Ideas

• An elaborate model of battery technology which attempted to model how intermittency could be mitigated. We scrapped this after discussions with Justin Vickers for a much simpler system that also made for a better model.
• Clean energy storage. Turns out, you can’t store electricity (at least in these quantities) for 4–5 years anyway.
• Buying and selling energy. Early versions of the game allowed players to buy and sell dirty energy (and with some technology cards) clean electricity with each other.
• Financial capital and political power. These currencies bogged the game down and were presented with a level of fidelity that was largely just made up. We replaced them with a system that used opportunity cards as currency instead.
• Dirty energy demand. This represented the fact that legacy systems that run on fossil fuels can’t run on electricity. We ditched the idea of “reducing dirty energy demand” in favor of representing these sources of emissions directly with different tokens. We were then able to model electrification by removing these tokens in exchange for increasing electricity demand.
• Innovation checks. In earlier versions, many of the cards that used speculative technologies had a system where you’d pay for the card and then draw further cards to see if you were successful, using a system similar to 7th Continent. We simplified this system considerably and limited it to only the R&D cards.

A Long Evolution

A Toy Model

To get started, we needed to figure out what resources the players had and what attributes they’d need to track and how they affected each other. In order to guide the game’s design, we sketched out an early model to summarize this:

Early Stats

We didn’t want to over-engineer the first prototype of the game but also wanted the values involved to have some basis in reality. (Our initial aim was to get roughly within an order of magnitude.) We pulled some values from The 100% Solution (emissions and sequestration) and Wikipedia (financial capital was loosely based on GDP) to plug into the first prototype:

Our first player boards were set up to track all of this information. Here’s our very first player board:

Our next version used a whiteboard arranged with the goal of making accounting a bit easier. Dirty energy cubes could be dragged downward from a supply box to meet demand, and then dragged downward again, to join the “other carbon” the player generated, in order to become the emissions generated for that round. We thought this was quite clever: the same tokens that were used for a resource could be converted into waste simply by dragging them across the board.

Resources at a Glance

After we took that big leap, players no longer needed to track financial capital and political power. They still had to track energy and carbon however. I took a stab at how players might keep track of those resources with the aim of making their counts easier to read across the table. One experiment resulted in this physical sketch that used puzzle pieces:

After quickly abandoning the puzzle pieces, we tried a board with an extendable channel to hold the plant tokens next to a pegboard number line to track energy demand. The best feature of this design is that players wouldn’t need to do sums — they could simply physically rack up their plants to see if they met their demand.

Different Emissions Sources as “Resources”

(Here's the spreadsheet we used at the time.) This led to this design, which was a real breakthrough:

Fine Tuning

Once we had this design, we tried out a number of different arrangements so that we could quickly do emissions accounting, track resilience, and count the number of people or communities in crisis.

Where does one even start making a climate game?

Modelling the carbon cycle

We learned that the world emits around 50 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases each year. Roughly half of those emissions are absorbed by our planet through natural sinks like forests, soil, and oceans. The remaining net emissions accumulate in the atmosphere, and drive up global temperatures. The increased temperature, in turn, causes planetary effects, such as the loss of natural sinks like the Amazon rainforest (meaning less emissions are absorbed) or the melting of ice caps (meaning more heat is trapped).

This game board from June 2020 exemplifies our early attempts at creating a playable model of the emissions cycle. At the top is the Atmosphere, where all players dumped their emission tokens each round. From there, an arrow pointed down to Natural Sequestration, where green squares with trees represent land sinks and blue squares represent ocean sinks.

From the Atmosphere, another arrow points to a giant thermometer, where emission tokens are converted into red temperature cubes. As the thermometer fills up, it will trigger the random flip of planetary effect tokens on the world map.

Setting expectations

Notice how the thermometer goes up to 3.0ºC in our early board. We quickly learned that was too lenient, and the runaway loop of climate breakdown too gentle and unrealistic. So we chopped the thermometer to about 2.0ºC and intensified the growth of planetary effects to be flipped.

Another question we grappled with was how to link game-time with real-world time. At first we imagined each round would represent 4 years, the first one being set to Today. But what would happen when people play this game in a few years, and Today is the date of the second or third round?

We gradually removed any reference to years from the game board, but I still like to tell players that each round is about 5 years in real-life, so you have about 30 years from now to stop climate change! It seems to help them tell a better (more grounded and vivid) story of their game.

Divisions and delays

The change in temperatures is not determined by current emissions but by current concentrations, which result from past, cumulative emissions. More or less emissions during this decade will have a near-negligible impact on temperatures this decade. Even if we magically stopped all emissions tomorrow, there would still be about the same change in real-world global average temperature by 2030.

We didn’t want to include extra steps to simulate delays, because the added scientific accuracy would only make the game slower and increase the room for errors. Instead, this gave us the opportunity to fix the emissions→temperature conversion problem too, by removing that conversion step altogether.

Impacts on the planetary system

This allowed us to give more flavour and detail to existing effects like “lose a tree” and introduce new effects that would increase the uncertainty of the post-emissions phase, with Tipping Points mixed in for extra cascading potential.

If we made each planetary effect more powerful, we should also let players see them coming, otherwise they would feel unfair and arbitrary. This means we should render the build-up of each effect more visible/predictable, but keep the exact moment when it triggers uncertain. Visualising the build-up of effects pointed towards tracks, and their uncertain triggers suggested some randomised draw. But instead of drawing cards, players draw tokens from a bag. They add them to their corresponding tracks, and only when a token lands on a “tipping point” the effect triggers.

“What about using dice instead?” suggested Alex. So we started experimenting with a D6, on which each side is mapped to a planetary effect. Players roll once per temperature band, and advance the corresponding token on its track. When a token lands on a “tipping point” the planetary effect triggers.

Impacts on people

While planetary effects make life harder for players, but don’t inflict direct damage, we also needed to model the direct impacts of global warming on people.

Crises span from extreme weather events like storms or heatwaves that cripple communities and infrastructure, to shocks like crop failures which can lead to recessions and famines. In a broader sense, a crisis can be any major event or force that gets in the way of climate progress, like an international treaty that blocks a clean energy transition, or pretty much anything the fossil fuel industry does (from their core business to the disinformation they fund), as Bill McKibben reminded us on a memorable post-COP26 videocall.

The climate community refers to shielding people and places as adaptation. If adaptation is a process, its key property is resilience. We decided to experiment with three different forms of it — social, ecological, and infrastructural — which would help protect players from different types of crises.

We gradually simplified the cards, to make them easier to read and quicker to resolve: one effect per card works best. We also enlarged them to tarot size so they could both support an illustration and be more readable across the table.

Other crises will worsen the game state, by cutting or burning down trees and releasing extra emissions.

A few cards will have ongoing, uncertain, or cascading effects.

Can players even see them coming?

We then introduced some degree of advanced knowledge. The logic was that one can forecast future events, but never be certain that any of them will happen. In game terms: at the beginning of each round, players reveal 3 crisis cards. They then play actions, produce emissions, and finally get to the point when crises take effect. But it won’t be those 3 cards revealed earlier. Instead, you shuffle those with a growing number (equal to the current Crisis Rate) of hidden cards, and then resolve a number equal to the current Crisis Rate. So for example during the first round you’d see 3 cards, then shuffle those with another 3 cards (initial Crisis Rate) and then resolve 3 out of those 6 cards.

For the next iteration we reduced the forecast cards to 2, to be topped up with unknown cards until you reach the Crisis Rate. This meant players would always know for sure those two forecast crises would trigger.

A visual journey

The many iterations and changes described above were reflected directly on the game board. We created a 2-minute time-lapse for you to see this progress over time. Enjoy!

That's all for today 

🪩 Free web edition of Daybreak (5,000 backers)

🌊 Screenprinted tokens (6,000 backers)

🛟 2x crisis cards (7,000 backers)

💪 Challenge card deck! (8,000 backers)

When a real pandemic hits start a new project!

Thanks for your really thoughtful piece […] I spent some time looking over your work and writing. I’ve started doing some research for a cooperative game on the climate crisis that I might pursue. If you’re interested, I’d love to have a conversation with you about that.

Why the climate crisis?

Design goals

1. about systemic solutions
2. realistic – but not “educational”
3. cooperative with individual autonomy
4. empowering

1. A game to explore systemic, high-impact solutions to the climate crisis

2. A realistic but not “educational” experience

3. Players act in total cooperation while maintaining individual autonomy

4. Players feel empowered

That's all for today