Daybreak Brings the Climate Change Crisis to Game Night

Players play cards simultaneously during the Project phase, and once everyone is done, you move to the hard parts and see if you’ve survived to play another round. First you count all of the carbon generated by all players from dirty energy sources and other sources like livestock, cars, industry, etc., and see how much is left over after the world’s forests and oceans have absorbed whatever they can. The excess carbon cubes go to the temperature track, with every five cubes bumping the global temperature up by 0.5°C, adding another temperature band to the board; for every band showing after this stage, you roll the climate die and move markers up tracks measuring things like ocean acidification, desertification, or arctic ice melting, all of which are, it turns out, very bad. Then you check all Crisis cards if you haven’t mitigated them already, with some of them face-down until the end of the round anyway. Most Crisis cards will add the aforementioned Communities in Crisis tokens to players’ boards if you can’t counter them with other tokens or cards, and if any player has more than 12, the game ends immediately. If not, you proceed to the next round. You have to finish the job by the end of round 6, however, or you lose anyway.

Daybreak is a lot—it’s a big step up in complexity from any of Leacock’s previous cooperative games, but in this case, it’s in service of both the game’s theme and the enjoyment of playing it. Climate change is real, whether you accept it or not, and it’s a complex subject that requires a far-reaching treatment like Daybreak gives it. There are multiple ways to win the game, but in general, you’re going to want to invest in one type of clean energy (wind, solar, nuclear), reduce a few types of your carbon emissions, and attack crises early before they overwhelm your constituent communities. If you try to do everything, you’ll lose—and in reality, people lose interest if they think the task is too hard or just insurmountable. Most of the cards ask you to make choices or sacrifices, often discarding a card from your hand to activate something else, which is hard when nearly every card is valuable and you want to do everything at once. Even just meeting energy demands, which means you can’t just kill off all your dirty energy sources at once because your people will revolt, brings Daybreak back to the reality of policymaking, where most reasonable people want clean energy … but few people are willing to pay more for it, or to use less energy to make a national or global switch possible.

I love the way Daybreak integrates tableau-building and hand management without becoming too much of either. The choice of whether to cover a card or add to its strength comes up multiple times a round and will have you thinking through possibilities—do I activate the front card now, then cover it and activate the new one? Do I play a card now and hope I get what I need to activate it later? (You can exchange cards with other players only in very rare circumstances, so you get the cards you get and you don’t get upset.) Removing the brown tiles from your board that represent carbon sources is very satisfying, but it’s slow going, and if you bank entirely on that, you’ll lose because you can’t get rid of enough of them in time. The game also requires you to think ahead about unforeseen disasters in the face-down Crisis cards or the rolls of the climate die, which you can prepare for in a way by collecting various Resilience tokens or setting up other cards that might let you ignore a single die roll or Crisis card’s effects. It strikes the right balance between planning for an uncertain future while facing the demands of the present, giving you a chance to win—not an easy one, mind you, but a chance—while also giving you the thrill or terror that comes with the end of each round to see if you’ve won, lost, or just get another go.

 The game takes an hour and a half, with simultaneous plays moving things along and experienced players likely getting that down to an hour or so. It has a solo mode, which I think loses some of the interest that comes with multiple players because you see less of the deck and the starting set of Local Projects is a little boring. The game’s art is brightly colored and the text is very easy to read—there is a lot of text, however, so it’s language-dependent—while cards also have QR codes that send you to the game’s sight, with real-world context for the card’s project/crisis and an explanation of how the card works in the game. All materials in the game are sustainable, a welcome trend that has picked up steam in 2023 (Forest Shuffle and The Search for Lost Species did the same), with no plastics or textiles involved. It’s probably best for folks who’ve played a cooperative game or two before, or at least played some medium to heavy games so they’ll be familiar with mechanics like tableau-building, and I think the teach is probably not that quick. If any of that fits you and you want a bigger challenge than Pandemic or the Forbidden games, and you feel like saving the world from climate change (at least, on the tabletop), Daybreak is the hottest … um, coolest new cooperative game of 2023.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.