Battling climate change is a global affair. Nations must work together to build technologies and cut carbon emissions before the rising temperatures cause irreversible crises.
What Is Daybreak?
Daybreak is a cooperative game about climate change for 1 to 4 players, ages 10 and up, and takes about 60–90 minutes to play. It retails for $59.99 and is currently available in stores or directly from CMYK for $49.99. The game does involve understanding how to build engines and systems so it can be a bit complex depending on your experience level, but I have played with 10-year-olds and can confirm that it can work.
Daybreak was designed by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace and published by CMYK Games. The cover art is by Mads Berg, and the game includes artwork by Ajima Abalaka, Mads Berg, Denis Freitas, HifuMiyo, Kento Iida, Jia-yi Zoe Liu, Johan Papin, Rui Ricardo, Son of Alan, Wenjia Tang, Edward Tuckwell, Xuetong Wang, and Holly Warburton.
Daybreak Components
Here’s what comes in the box:
- Game board
- 4 Player boards
- 2 Player board extensions
- Cards:
- 158 Local Project cards
- 48 Crisis cards
- 24 Global Project cards
- 42 Challenge cards
- 9 Reference cards
- Cardboard tokens:
- 60 Clean/Dirty Energy tokens
- 14 Clean/Dirty 5-Energy Tokens
- 48 Resilience tokens
- 12 5-Resilience tokens
- 69 Emissions tokens
- 48 Communities in Crisis tokens
- 10 Temperature Band tokens
- Wooden tokens:
- 40 Carbon cubes
- 20 5-Carbon squares
- 6 Planetary Effect trackers
- Current Round tracker
- 4 Global Project trackers
- 4 Energy Demand trackers
- 8 DAC tokens
- 1 5-DAC token
- 8 Tree tokens
- 5 5-Tree tokens
- 8 Ocean tokens
- 3 5-Ocean tokens
- Planetary Effects die
- Geoengineering die
As befits a game about climate change, Daybreak includes no plastic components, not even outer shrink wrap or for the decks of cards. Instead, the cards all have tuck boxes, and the tokens are stored in six storage trays that are made of paper pulp (kind of like egg cartons). These work fine and can be used during gameplay too, but if you store your games vertically then there can be a little spillage inside the box. All of the wooden and paper components are 100% FSC certified. It was even shipped using paper packing materials instead of plastic bubble wrap, though I know in the first edition there were some boxes that arrived damaged—I believe CMYK Games has taken steps to correct that.
The large board depicts a map of the world with several tracks for different planetary effects like Desertification and Melting Permafrost, along with a large thermometer on one side that represents the increase in global average temperatures. Even though the board is a world map, you don’t actually use specific spaces on the map itself because it is basically one large space, reinforcing the idea that we are indeed all in this together.
The player boards are dual-layered, with recessed tracks for various things like your energy demand, energy generation, and carbon emissions. There are numbers across the top so that you can easily count up your carbon emissions based on the number of tokens in the two tracks (though it would have been slightly easier if they were between the two tracks). There are also some areas for your resiliency tokens, and your communities in crisis. Each board is actually a two-piece board that slots together like a puzzle, and two of the boards (representing China and the Majority World) have extenders in case your energy demand or production exceeds 30. The backs of the boards tell you a little bit about the nation you represent, along with an illustration. My primary complaint about the boards is that since the energy and emissions tokens are pretty small and light, it can be easy to knock them out of the track if you slide them together too quickly along the track.
About those illustrations: one of the things that really stood out to me, right from the cover and title of the game, is how colorful and, well, hopeful this game looks. Yes, it’s about climate change and its consequences and these are serious and dire. But unlike Pandemic (the game that put Matt Leacock on the map, and has inspired countless cooperative games), it also feels like the game is meant to inspire hope, with a message that we can succeed if we work together. Even if you lose at Daybreak, I feel like the artwork encourages some degree of optimism.
The bulk of the game is in the local project cards. Each one has some number of “tags” across the top, and then its ability near the bottom of the card. Many of the abilities will either require you to discard cards to use them, or are based on the number of a particular tag that you have. Each card in also has a QR code on it: if you scan these, they’ll take you to a section of the Daybreak website that provides more details about that card. It explains what the technology is and how it works, how the specific card works in the game, and provides links to additional reading on the subject. It’s an incredible wealth of information that, I’ll admit, I often skip over while playing the game, but makes the game a great resource for education on the subject.
The rulebook also warrants a special mention: at 40 pages, it looks at first more like a small magazine and seems like it could be intimidating, but it’s actually laid out in a way that is very easy to read. There’s a table of contents at the very beginning, and the pages use a lot of illustrations and a large typeface so there’s less reading than you would guess just from picking it up. The back of the rulebook is a reference guide showing all of the various icons and tags used in the game, along with some setup reminders for different player counts, which is very handy.
How to Play Daybreak
You can download a copy of the rulebook here, or watch the How to Play video.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to reach carbon drawdown—remove more carbon from the atmosphere than you put into it—before any of the loss conditions happen.
Setup
Set up the central board: place the round marker on Round 1 on the left, and the planetary effects markers at the start of each track. Put all of the temperature bands and the dice at the bottom of the thermometer.
Place trees and oceans onto the board based on the player count—it doesn’t matter where they’re placed specifically on the board, just so long as you have the right total of each.
Shuffle each of the decks separately: global projects are placed to the left of the board and crisis cards are placed to the right, with the local projects deck placed somewhere so that everyone can reach them.
Each player gets a player board and the corresponding player aid card—the rulebook tells you which of the countries to use depending on the player count. Each world power has 5 starting cards, which are placed above the player board. Fill the energy and emissions tracks with tokens based on the reference card, and also place your energy demand token and any resilience and communities in crisis tokens.
Gameplay
Daybreak lasts up to 6 rounds, and each round has these phases: Global, Local, Emissions, Crisis, Growth.
Global
Draw crisis cards and add them to the right side of the board based on the current temperature. (You start with 3, but as the temperature rises, this can increase.) The first card is placed face-up in the “Forecast Crisis” space, and the rest are all face-down in the “Unknown Crisis” spaces: you know how many there are, but you don’t know what they’ll be.
Draw 2 global project cards. As a group, decide which project to keep and discard the other. Global projects are placed on the left side of the board, and you may have up to 4 projects in play—after that, if you want to keep more, you’ll have to discard others to make room. Mark the project with a token: it’s inactive until the requirements are met, and then it will become active and players can use the benefits from it.
Local
This stage is the bulk of the gameplay, where players will simultaneously use their local project cards in various ways. Everyone draws 5 cards from the deck, and then together people can discuss and play cards however they see fit. There are three ways to use a local project card: take a local action, start a local project, or support a card.
You start with 5 cards in your play area, and you will be able to stack cards, but you are always limited to 5 stacks.
Every card in your play area (including your 5 starting cards) has a local action on it. Some require you to discard a card to take the action, in which case you can use that action as many times as you have cards to discard. Some actions just let you use an ability, but may limit the number of times you can do that per turn. (Use carbon cubes to mark the number of times an action has been used in a round if needed.) A lot of actions refer to tags—in that case, the ability is affected by the number of matching tags in that particular stack of cards.
To start a local project, play a card from your hand on top of one of your current stacks, making sure that you can still see all the tags from other cards in the stack. This is now a new local action that you can use, but any actions that have been covered up are no longer available.
To support a card, you play a card from your hand underneath one of your current stacks so that the tags are visible—this adds tags to the stack but doesn’t change the action. Global projects sometimes require support as well, so you need to tuck a card with a particular tag underneath the global project card. Some Crisis cards also require specific cards to mitigate their effects, so you can tuck the appropriate card below the Crisis card.
The local stage ends when everyone has decided they are done using cards—you may keep unused cards in your hand for the next round.
Emissions
Across your player board is a row of tokens representing your country’s emissions. There are different icons representing things like transportation, industry, and agriculture (and some cards will refer to specific types of emissions) but basically every emissions token generates carbon. In your energy track, the dirty energy also generates carbon. Add up all of the carbon that you generate, and place that many carbon cubes into the Recent Emissions section of the board.
Then, sequester carbon: each ocean, tree, and Direct Air Capture on the board can remove 1 carbon. If you have removed all of the carbon in the Recent Emissions and there is more to sequester, you can remove them from the thermometer, even reducing the temperature if you remove enough of them.
If you have 0 carbon left in the Recent Emissions after sequestering, you have reached Drawdown! Flip over the round marker to the Drawdown side—if you survive the crisis stage this round, then you win the game.
If you have carbon left over, it is now moved to the thermometer, and if you fill the row (based on the player count) then you’ll need to add a temperature band. Note that as the temperature increases, it will affect the crisis stage immediately. For instance, if you add the fourth temperature band, that is the threshold for going from 3 to 4 crisis cards, so you would need to draw one more immediately. If you ever place the eighth temperature band (representing a 2°C increase), then you lose.
Crisis
First, roll the planetary effects die a number of times based on the current temperature. For each roll, move the corresponding tracker up one space. If the tracker lands on one of the “tipping point” icons, then it triggers the effect shown above the track. Planetary effects can do things like add even more crisis cards, add carbon to the thermometer, or remove trees or oceans from the board.
Then, it’s time to resolve the crises! One at a time, from bottom to top, resolve each crisis card. Each card will indicate who is affected, either all players or the player who meets a particular condition (like having the least infrastructure resilience). Ties are broken by rolling the geoengineering die. Some effects are reduced if you have particular types of resilience. Note that you don’t spend the resilience tokens, you just reduce the effects based on how much resilience you have. After resolving the crisis, discard it (along with any local project cards tucked under it, if any).
Some crisis cards will add communities in crisis—place those tokens onto the bottom section of your board, starting with the top row. If you have tokens in the second or third row, you will draw fewer cards at the beginning of the local phase.
Each time you must lose resilience and you don’t have enough, add a community in crisis. Each time you must remove a tree or ocean from the board and there aren’t enough, all players add a community in crisis.
Growth
Check to see if you’ve won: if the round marker was on “Drawdown” and you’ve survived to this point, you win!
Otherwise, advance the round marker, and then increase your energy demand. Each country has its own growth marked at the start of the demand track: US and Europe grow 1, China grows 2, and Majority World grows 3. Better produce more energy next round!
Game End
If you reach Drawdown and survive the crisis stage, you win!
You lose if the thermometer reaches 8 temperature bands, any player reaches 12 or more communities in crisis, or you get to the end of round 6.
Game Variants
The challenge cards can make the game harder or easier, letting you tune the game somewhat to your playing group. There are cards that make things easier or harder, and they’re also marked to change the difficulty for the entire group or for a single player. There are also some cards that simply add some variety—again, for the entire group or for a single player. So you could make it easier for one player and harder for another.
Another way to change the difficulty is through the selection of the world powers and how many trees and oceans you start with—there’s a chart in the rulebook for adjustments that you can make.
The solo game plays basically the same way, but you will remove cards with a “no solo” icon on them, and always increase energy demand by 2 regardless of which world power you are using.
Daybreak is GeekDad Approved!
Why You Should Play Daybreak
Matt Leacock’s Pandemic is one of the most well-known cooperative games. It wasn’t the first, but it came at a time when there weren’t a lot of them on the scene, and many cooperative games still borrow from some of its mechanics. When it was first released, it was quite challenging, especially for players who weren’t accustomed to its collaborative demands; I remember reading that Leacock had set the difficulty at a level that he hoped people would win only about a third of the time. Of course, over the years, as people have had time to gain experience, I know there are a lot of players who find Pandemic easy now, but I still think it can present a nice challenge for a broad audience if the theme isn’t too off-putting now that we’ve all experienced a global pandemic ourselves.
While several of Leacock’s subsequent designs (like the Forbidden series) used some similar mechanics, Daybreak has some significant departures from those. For one, the simultaneous play means that there’s a phase of the game where everyone is mostly doing their own thing—but it’s still important to talk to each other even at that point. (It also mitigates the quarterback problem, where one overly enthusiastic player can end up dictating moves to everyone and it ends up feeling like watching somebody play solitaire. I agree that this is as much a problem with the gaming group dynamics as it is with the game, but many cooperative games since Pandemic have also tried to put in mechanics specifically to make quarterbacking more difficult.)
It’s very easy to get into a head-down mode in the local phase. You’ve got some systems in place, you’re trying to reduce your own carbon emissions and make sure that you’re generating enough electricity for your growing demand … and then it’s easy to forget things like the global projects, or trying to mitigate the known crisis. There are some abilities that can reveal the unknown crisis cards so that you can better prepare for them—but if everyone has already played all their cards before somebody uses that ability, then it can be too late. Daybreak is complex enough that you can have a lot to do on your own board and aren’t necessarily watching what somebody else is doing, but it turns out that checking in with each other can be crucial to victory.
That really feels like the message of the game: we can fight climate change if we work together, but things fall apart quickly if we get too focused on ourselves. In particular, the Majority World player has a huge energy demand and starts with a lot of emissions. They’re the only ones who can reveal unknown crisis cards right from the start, but it costs a lot of cards. If the United States doesn’t use their starting ability to give cards to other players, then it’s easy for the Majority World to get hit hard by crises because the other major powers were too focused on themselves. Sound familiar?
The first couple times I played Daybreak (with 2 players), I felt it was too easy: we won both games handily and I wondered what the challenge was. I assumed that it was part of the design: hey, it’s an optimistic game about climate change! Let’s make it easy to win first, and then you can mix in some challenge cards to make it harder, rather than the other way around. But then I played a four-player game, and I saw how things could spiral out of control if you don’t get a handle on carbon right away. With only 2 players, it’s a little easier to communicate what’s happening and to keep an eye on the whole board, but with 4 players we realized we weren’t all checking in with each other, and there was a lot of inefficiency.
There are some tips that feel universal: reducing emissions and changing out your dirty energy for clean gets you toward the ultimate goal—carbon drawdown—but also helps to keep things from snowballing. Every carbon you add to the thermometer works toward increasing the temperature; increasing the temperature causes more planetary effects and crisis cards; planetary effects can add more carbon and crisis cards; crisis cards can tear apart the systems you’ve built up. But aside from reducing emissions, there are a lot of different possible approaches. Building up resilience helps you weather crisis cards more easily, but planting more trees sequesters more carbon. Geoengineering can take a lot of cards to build up, but also has some of the most powerful effects once you get them built. Some cards let you dig through the deck and draw more cards, since cards are resources that you need to pay for a lot of actions.
Another important tip is to make the most of your cards. If an ability can be used for free (without discarding a card), then make sure to use that as much as possible, especially if you are about to cover it up with a new card. Sometimes you have several cards with the same tag and you’re planning to stack them together—you can play them one at a time and use each one before it’s covered up.
I really appreciated the way that real-world information is incorporated into the game, showing the complex web of cause and effect. There are a lot of different tags on the cards, showing the types of technologies and tactics required to implement them, from types of energy (like solar, wind, and nuclear) to broader concepts like society, ecology, and regulation. One way this plays out in the game is that there are 12 different tags, but you only have 5 stacks of cards. So you’ll have to pick and choose which of the tags you really want to focus on. If you build up a big stack of cards with infrastructure tags, that doesn’t help this new local action that requires innovation. No single player is able to do everything, so you have to decide how to work best with the cards you’re dealt.
I know some people aren’t interested in games about the real world, because they want games to be more for escapism. Who wants to think about global crises at game night—we get to think about that the rest of the time, right? But I personally like the challenge of solving a tricky puzzle, trying to figure out how a system works, building an engine that can drive change—and if that comes wrapped with some real world concepts around climate change, that feels like a bonus to me. I think the world could use some more cooperation and creative thinking, and playing Daybreak with kids feels like one way to help move us in the right direction. (And, hey, imagining a world where everyone is working together to fight climate change does feel like a bit of escapism at the moment.)
I’m giving Daybreak our GeekDad seal of approval because I think it’s an enjoyable puzzle of a game with a valuable message; I also appreciate the commitment to the environment both in the theme and in the material choices for the game components themselves. It’s a thought-provoking game that I hope many people will take the time to try.
For more information, visit the official Daybreak website.
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
