Think you can solve the climate crisis? You have two hours

It only took me 30 minutes to destroy the world. Despite ramping up a clean energy transition and picking away at industrial and livestock emissions, my well-intentioned actions left countless communities in crisis, unable to adapt to the realities of a world 2°C hotter than pre-industrial temperatures. 

Thankfully, the above situation was not real but part of a new board game that aims to translate the complex challenges of climate change into something most everyone can understand… and keep coming back to for more. 

The game is called Daybreak (known in some countries as E-Mission), and unlike board games you may remember from childhood, this one does not involve rolling a pair of dice to advance down a path or bankrupting your opponents by assembling a real estate monopoly. Instead, Daybreak is part of a growing genre of “cooperative” board games where players work together to meet a common goal, whether it be defeating a giant monster, ending a global pandemic, or in this case, keeping the world’s temperature from rising more than 2°C. 

Daybreak can be played with up to four players or by yourself if you think you can untangle the most complex Gordian knot humanity has ever had to face. Each player represents one part of the world: USA, Europe, China or the Global South, here called the Majority World. Each player must strike a balance in putting resources into local projects that directly benefit themselves or global projects that benefit the others in order to reduce global net emissions or build up resilience against the ever-increasing number of disasters. Everybody wins if you reach drawdown within six rounds of gameplay; in other words, your emissions are reduced to a point where they can be safely absorbed so that global temperatures begin to drop. 

The game has been well received and in July won one of the industry’s top awards, the prestigious 2024 Kennerspiel des Jahres, or Connoisseur Game of the Year. Winning such an award translates to a global sales boost which helps ensure the game, and its message, reach a wide audience. A prize, according to one estimate, can push a game to half a million copies sold; a blockbuster in the world of tabletop games. 

This year’s prize jury highlighted Daybreak’s “brilliant” design that “shows the value of cooperation,” as well as noting the “fact that the projects and research ideas on the cards are based on real research and projects invites discussion and further education even after the game.” 

As representatives from governments and the international community gather for this year’s UN Climate Change Conference COP29 in Azerbaijan, they might want to take a page out of Daybreak’s book: to win the game, you have to work together. 

That seemingly simple message is at the heart of Daybreak’s core challenge. In addition to losing the game if the temperature rises too high because of net emissions, players can also lose if they have too many of their local communities in crisis. Therefore, each player must decide how to balance their resources: Do you satisfy the local in the short term at the expense of global projects that help in the long term? 

When I played the game the first time, my region, the Global South, had the dirtiest (i.e. least green) energy at the beginning. I wanted to completely transition away from dirty energy but if I did not have enough new green energy to meet rising demand that would put my communities in crisis and I would lose the game (not just for me but for the other three players as well). 

This simple lesson came across very plainly for all of us and is something real-life governments grapple with: you cannot simply turn off the tap unless demand is met, otherwise you risk leaving your people in the literal dark. Now aware of this, all four of us put our resources into quickly making the green energy transition happen… and we immediately lost the game. In part this was because we ignored the many, many other factors in the climate crisis: deforestation, sea level rise, extreme weather events, crisis-caused social disorder and, of course, the value of communication, coordination and cooperation. 

Already hooked on the concept, we immediately started another game and still lost, but this time lasted much longer by striking a balance in deploying our resources and using some true-to- life concepts to manage the crisis. For example, by playing the Loss and Damage Fund card, more well-off players could share resources to help others weather the proverbial storm. I played a few solo rounds myself and though I did not “beat” the game, each time the strategy I tried was a bit more nuanced, a bit more effective and made me a bit more ready for the next round. And that’s ultimately the point of the game. 

Daybreak’s co-creator, Matt Leacock, who also created the popular cooperative board game Pandemic, was well aware that in order to keep players engaged, it couldn’t be “preachy” at the expense of being fun, a trap that many games with a socially conscious message often fall into. 

“We’re not trying to create a vitamin,” he said in an interview with the website Polygon. “This is a tabletop game that we actually want people to play and enjoy. And then, as a knock-on effect, if they understand the climate stuff better, that’s wonderful.” 

What also makes Daybreak unique is that you don’t have to necessarily play the game in order to learn from it. On each of the game’s many, many cards, there is a small QR code that brings you to a website where you can learn more about the real-world concepts and crises that inspired it. Some, like Onshore Wind, are fairly straight-forward and I didn’t have to click the link to read the background about the Sustainable Development Convention card, due to the similarities with our own OPEC Fund Development Forum. Other cards such as Green Quantitative Easing I had to look up. (According to the website, this is basically the purchasing of “only assets that fund renewable energy, natural restoration, and other sustainable activities” similar to how central banks responded to the 2007/8 financial crisis by creating new reserves of money.) 

But what about the expert opinion? Do the game’s stack of solutions add up to anything? “I really appreciate how the game offers such a broad range of solutions,” said Valerie Herzog, Climate Change Specialist at the OPEC Fund. “It’s clear that we need a diverse set of approaches – there’s no single technology or project that can solve everything on its own. I was glad to see the geoengineering cards being challenging to execute, as some view this solution, like direct CO2 removal, as a quick fix.” 

Herzog also noted that it was great to see social movements and regulations given the same importance as technological solutions. 

My only criticism of the game comes from what it teaches the player about the projects themselves. Daybreak’s optimism that the climate crisis can be solved quite easily “if only we did this…” or “if only we did that…” strikes me as rather naive. 

In many cases in the game this might be a solution, but less so in the real world. In theory, something like Half Earth Rewilding seems like it would be a reasonable solution until you think about how utterly unfeasible converting 50 percent of the Earth’s landmass into a nature reserve would be in practice. Similarly, Global Project Apollo is offered as another real-world game-changing solution. However, the concept, which calls for developed nations spending 0.02 percent of their GDP on climate research, is woefully inadequate. 

Our Climate Change Specialist also felt there were some aspects of the game that were not quite in tune with the reality on the ground, namely that in an odd sense, Daybreak downplays the severity of the climate crisis. “My main concern is that the negative events portrayed in the game are actually happening simultaneously in reality, and they’re interconnected in complex ways,” Herzog said. “Take feedback loops, for example. When sea ice melts, it exposes the darker ocean surface, which absorbs more heat than ice, leading to further melting in a self-reinforcing cycle.” Despite these minor quibbles, 

Daybreak is to be recommended and not just for people steeped in the world of sustainable development, but those looking to understand the greatest existential threat humans have faced... and hopefully have fun doing it.