Daybreak

Daybreak board game box

No new updates about my game this month. What I realized recently is that I'm as much dependent on the art for this game for inspiration as I am for printing the game. It's been a long time, and maybe I shouldn't say this, but my energy around this project is flagging. Part of it is the sheer amount of work it takes to push an art update to the printer's site and/or Tabletopia. For that reason alone, I want to have the art in a better place before I do another round of work here. The short run printer I'm using makes it really tough to correctly format and update the work, so that's been a challenge -knowing I'll have to reformat it for the *real* print run. Enough of the boring stuff. I want to talk to you about a game I played recently called Daybreak.

Daybreak is a co-op board game about stopping climate change. I'm just going to cut to the spoilers and say both times I played we did not stop climate change, and the world descended into chaos. What also happened was the game got wedged really hard into my psyche to the point where I'm starting to dream about it.

There's lots of good stuff to say about the game. It plays well. It's good for groups. There's a lot of educational information on the "local project" cards (the meat of the game play) about what the different projects are, how they work and how you can get involved with them personally. Here's an example of a local project card web page. All of this information is not on the card, but the card has a code you can scan with your phone to see the full information as presented above.

There is a particular experience of playing this game where you get to see many of the different pieces that go into emissions, power generation and ways of mitigating each of these. Each round you see the emissions stack up, the energy demand go up, and then you carefully place your emissions in places where they can be sequestered (forests and oceans and to a much lesser extent, industrial carbon capture). Any that aren't sequestered are placed on a world temperature thermometer. When a thermometer band fills up, you place a piece indicating the temperature has risen 0.1C. The act of physically moving each of the pieces, of negotiating with other players, and seeing the outcomes was really powerful for me. I'm still really reaching for words to describe it, and I realize I'm not doing well. All I can really say at this point, is that the game has moved me in a way I was not expecting. I think it really raises the bar on what a game can be, and for that reason alone it's worth it. But there is a much more important reason to play: We need to understand what's going on with our planet and we need to understand how to address it. This game gives an excellent foundation for beginning these discussions.

If you want to read one climate scientist’s review of the game, you can here on Board Game Geek.