When we think about solutions to climate change, board games aren’t usually top of the list – but that might be changing. Sitka climate scientist Elizabeth Bagley has been helping to develop an unconventional tool in the fight against climate change.
On a clear evening in Sitka, a group of friends hunched over a dining room table are reeling from a die-back in the Amazon rainforest. The earth’s temperature has just risen by a tenth of a degree Celsius, and it looks like a hurricane is on the way.
The group of friends is playing Daybreak, a new game released by designers Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace. To play, global superpowers – represented by the US, China, Europe, and the “majority world” – work together to alleviate the climate crisis before the earth’s temperature rises by two degrees Celsius. Players win as a team by reaching drawdown, when no net carbon is going into the atmosphere.
“Let’s see, what does that mean?”
Elizabeth Bagley is peering with furrowed brows at her board, which is labeled “majority world” – she’s trying to figure out if she can offload some dirty energy while still meeting demand. Across the table, her husband Justin generously tosses a couple of China’s excess clean energy tokens to the majority world.
The game was released just last month, but Bagley has been playing a version of it for the past two years as a beta-tester. Bagley is a climate scientist with Project Drawdown and a former children’s game designer for the company LeapFrog. She learned about Daybreak after giving a talk about her career trajectory to a group of young professionals.
“One of the people in the audience emailed me and said, ‘Hey, given your background in climate solutions, and your background in gaming, you might be really interested in this game by Matt Leacock,” Bagley says. “He was assuming I knew who Matt was. I mentioned it to Justin, and he said, ‘Wait, Matt Leacock as in like, the most famous cooperative game designer in the world?’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I think that’s the same guy.'”
Leacock, who is most well-known for the games Pandemic and Forbidden Island, didn’t initially intend to create a game about climate change.
“I’d been hearing all sorts of news about the climate crisis and wanted to know what I could do about it,” Leacock says. “It felt like this big problem, and I wanted to better understand it, and I think one way I looked at the problem was, well, maybe I can learn about it and turn it into a game.”
Early prototypes of the game took upwards of three hours and involved a lot of calculations.
“I think some of the early ones would take like four and a half hours to play,” Leacock says. “And you had little whiteboards that tracked a lot of different statistics for your world power.”
The Bagleys received an early prototype of the game in winter of 2021. With a camera and microphone set up on their dining room table, they recorded their game play. Leacock would review the recordings and send back changes – a few new cards here, a minor rule change there.
“Matt would ask us things, he would watch our play-throughs, and he would say, ‘Okay, I want you to play again, but I want you to take out these cards,'” Bagley says. “Or he would say, ‘I’d like you to play again, but I want to see what happens when it’s just two people, and I want you to play as these countries.”
Sometimes, they identified cards that were too powerful, like the “Stratospheric Sulfur” card, which became a weaker card in the final version.
“Justin really kicked butt by playing Stratospheric Sulfur in the past, right, Justin?” Bagley says to her husband.
The final version, which the Bagleys have unboxed for the first time tonight, is much more streamlined, with vividly-colored tokens and cards and no whiteboards in sight. Leacock says that simplifying the game without sacrificing accuracy was a big challenge.
“I mean, there’s hours and hours and hours of discussion and debate about like a single card, like how best to represent the risks involved, and the effects and how good it should be,” Leacock says. “It was kind of fun to kind of geek out on that stuff, but then also, you have to remember that it’s a game.”
Input from play-testers like Bagley, as well as a host of scientists and social workers, helped shape key parts of the game. He remembers one pivotal piece of feedback from a climate organization that focuses on community resilience:
“They encouraged us to look more broadly that the stakes weren’t, you know, just about carbon but also about human beings, and communities and so on,” Leacock says. “And that really helped us widen the lens and the scope of the game so we could look at how, like, universal health care is a climate solution, because it helps build resilience to things that affect your societies and so on, so when you have a big, extreme weather event, your societies can absorb the impact.”
But while years of research went into the game’s development, Leacock didn’t want Daybreak to feel like homework.
“The way we approached it was to get a bigger audience and have a bigger impact, and then more people were intrinsically motivated to play it,” he says. “You know, they weren’t like, ‘Oh, let’s eat our broccoli now and learn about climate science.'”
In the game, collaboration is the world’s best shot for success – the only way to win Daybreak is to work together. Leacock says he believes the same about working together in the real world.
“This is the biggest conceit of the game,” he says. “Really, the conceit that we put forward is a big one. It’s like, people are gonna get along and collaborate and cooperate. And you know, it’s not impossible. We do show though, if you do take that for granted, it’s still kind of hard, right?”
It’s a bold move to try to condense a global, multi-faceted problem into a cardboard box, but on this Thursday night, the group of players is deeply invested and optimistic about winning – and Leacock considers that a win.
“Because if all you do is read doom and gloom, then you just kind of feel helpless, he says. “And here we’re painting like, ‘Hey, here’s this possibility.’ We’re not saying it’s going to happen, but you as the players are given agency, and then hopefully, that feeling of agency can bleed off into the real world.”
Back in the living room, Bagley is cheerfully negotiating a global offshoring agreement for the table. She’s also optimistic.
“I think a great lesson is that all of us have a role to play,” she says. “And there’s no one right way. There’s lots of ways that we can stop climate change, and the best thing to do is start. If starting means playing a game with people you know and love, then that’s a fantastic way, because even talking about climate change is a great step in the right direction.”
Just a few notches short of the two-degree mark, the group abruptly – and somewhat surprisingly – reaches drawdown. Cheers erupt. The climate change crisis has not won, at least for today.
