Daybreak

It’s not every day we get to play pretend at what other people think your job is. I work on climate policy so, to me, Daybreak is just that – writ large. Because Daybreak isn’t about one climate job, it’s about everything we need to do to solve climate change, on a global scale, between now and 2050. Amazingly, designers Leacock and Menapace haven’t bitten off more than they can chew.

Up to four players represent big geographical regions – not just a countries but blocs and superpowers like USA, Europe, China, and Majority World (meaning literally everywhere else). Each of these starts with its own bundle of carbon emissions – split using real world data into sectors like electricity, farming, and buildings – which players will have to figure out how to green or remove over the course of the game. Reach ‘net zero’ (or ‘drawdown’) and you win.

Sound easy? No, that’s why literally millions of people worldwide are working on this problem every day with grimly little success. Thankfully, Daybreak allows us to live in an imaginary world – one where climate change is real (represented here by crisis cards, which ramp up the effects with wrinkles that multiply as temperature rises), the solutions are real (represented here by policy cards that players stack and activate – more on that later), but the politics is easy. Each player is the leader of their region, but unlike other climate games (like Kyoto, a bitter pill of a game in which each player is an international negotiator seeking to solve climate change without their country having to do anything at all) there is maximal will to cooperate – players win together and lose together.

Some have criticised Daybreak for being too optimistic. It certainly can be a bit easy to get things done. But I don’t think that’s the intention here – Daybreak isn’t pure fantasy, it simply asks us to imagine how much could be done if we just put the effort in. The solutions mostly exist (this is true) it’s the desire to ‘do’ that’s missing. After a win, when the smog of the game has cleared and real world disaster looms back into view, I am reminded that it’s the world’s inability to do what we’ve just done – sit in a room and figure it out together – that most stands in our way.

But what do you actually have to do? In a word, it’s combos. Players start with five policy cards (things you can do) and a hand of five other cards, which can pay for actions, replace actions with new ones, or bolster actions to make them better. This big deck of cards – things like heat pumps, climate campaigning, adaptation planning, clean electricity, innovation research (you name it, they got it) – neatly represents both the stack of things humanity has to do in the next 30 years to survive, and the limited time we have to do it.

Mostly these cards represent ways to mitigate emissions – electric cars, wind farms, etc. – but that’s not all. Some make you more resilient to crises – helping you avoid either damage to infrastructure, social decay or environmental collapse. Others are about cooperation, allowing you to give clean energy or lend political capital (cards) to others abroad. All come with a tiny QR code with more information about how you can put it into practice in the real world. This is a picture of climate that’s complex, as much about juggling battles on several fronts as it is about reducing one number (CO2) to zero.

Behind all of this lies a lovely tableau building puzzle. All of the cards belong to different policy themes – broad terms like finance, energy, technology, society. Cards can be tucked behind the ‘active policies’ to lend power to them, often increasing their abilities according to the number of cards in the stack with the relevant theme. Some policies require a discard to activate, leading to agonising choices over whether to tuck behind (make what you have better) place on top (get new policies) or discard (activating powerful abilities). Order can really matter too, leading to lots of very satisfying moments as your combo comes off.

Alert readers will note that combo-ing is a heads-down activity, and it’s true that each player’s tableau can be built mostly in isolation. But this is a cooperative game without turns, leaving players figure out what to do with their policy cards simultaneously. How players approach this can be different – a mixture of loud frantic chaos or quiet private do-gooding, depending on the group. Exactly how much to communicate and involve others in your mess is itself a game choice. It’s quite a strange way to run a game but (again) it’s a good metaphor for climate policy – cooperating is difficult when you’ve got so much to do and so much to worry about in your own back yard. We are all too distracted to see the big picture. Daybreak can feel it goes too far – strength of the gaming metaphor aside, a few more ways to meaningfully collaborate would have helped.

All of this is really just describing the ‘local’ round – the red-meat (should I say soy alternative) of the game. After potentially ignoring each other for five minutes to perfectly time a combo, players must come together to do some cooperating. First, count up everyone’s emission sources and sinks, and figure out how much global warming actually happens. Watch the thermometer tick up together, grimly aware of the consequences. Work through crises that come your way, and figure out who is being worst hit. You might want to take a moment to consider how much the player to your left needs help, but think better of it once you see how many brown squares you still have left to turn green. Tipping points may start to tip, creating more ‘communities in crisis’ that risk scuppering your effectiveness in future rounds (a fractured community has fewer cards to ‘spend’). You may have little choice but to send some help leftwards if they’re one community crisis away from total collapse – in a climate game that’s your loss too.

If Daybreak can be a little optimistic about how easy it is to do politics, this is not to say it is an easy game. It more than makes it for it with another type of pessimism, one that lies firmly on our future: the climate itself becomes the barrier to progress. Later rounds (representing the 2040s ish) are fierce. Accelerating warming from thawing permafrost, say, adds more emissions to mitigate, moving the goal posts for success. Compounding crises cripple the state, upend politics and distract your resources. It might have felt great to set up a combo that decarbonises the grid and mass installs heat pumps in the space of five years (something thousands of people – me included – are right now struggling to do for one country) – but when biodiversity collapse undid much of that work two turns later I felt like I was being reminded of the bigger problems to be scared of.

It’s impossible to talk about this game outside of its climate context, making it sound more dryly educational than is fair. There is a very good crunchy game here in that deck of policy cards, and a thought provoking approach to cooperation (albeit one that is slightly light). It probably won’t be very interesting more than once without at least some curiosity about how climate action works, but the game does well to place its theories in a compact set of systems. Just don’t expect to come away from your first loss feeling good about the future.