Besides playing some more Sprawlopolis and Insel Express, NPI inspired me today to have yet another game of Daybreak.
No plastic, working organization with some egg cartons for the components.
Final image. I won the game in 3 of the possible 6 rounds. It is entirely possible to win in round 2, I don’t think round 1 is possible but with a lot of luck it just might be.
In any case, as I’ve previously stated here, I am loving this game. I have played 16 games since getting my copy and I have won 13 of those. The ones I lost, I lost badly. But one tries to fight until the last round. I’ve had 1 multiplayer only with my partner which we lost. The solo is probably a little easier (and Efka alludes to what that effectively means in terms of the story the game tells).
I have only played with challenge cards once and lost… I like the game fine on easy mode for now.
So here is how it goes.
1-4 players, play over six rounds that have a bunch of phases.
- Phase 1 where players agree on a global project to pursue–these have positive effects and often need to be activated with cards. There can be a maximum of 4 such projects and their effects range from drawing extra cards, to mitigating consequences of various disasters to enhancing the green transformation. My biggest criticism of the solo is here: about half of these need to be removed for solo because they being global and all rely on player interaction. On the other hand… for multiplayer that is really nice to have so many interactive projects.
- Phase 2 players get to draw their cards for the round and everyone then works on their own tableau, either
- playing cards to 1 of the 5 local project slots they each have as
a) a new project on top of an old or
b) beneath an old project to add the cards “tags” to it
- activate projects for their effects, these include: generating more energy, reducing emissions from various sectors, drawing more cards, rewilding forests and oceans, building resilience in social/nature/infrastructure spheres and more. It is a fun combotastic system that lends itself to long and exploitative-seeming turns. Here there are also some interactive project cards like Climate Reparations where you help out other powers by taking their communities ins crisis as refugees on your own board or give them cards. A lot of the activations cost cards. So even if someone cannot use a card they might use it to build more green energy
- Phase 3: once everyone declares they have played and activated all the cards then the global “oopsie” phase begins.
- Everyone counts how many emissions they still generate–the player boards make this really easy and then you collect as many brown carbon cubes and place them in the “emission zone”
- You then distribute the emissions to the forests and oceans which offset some of them. The number of forests and oceans you start with is player count dependent.
- The rest goes to the thermometer.
- Every time a temperature band is filled up with carbon cubes (the number needed depends on the players) the temperature rises causing more tipping points to advance and more disasters to strike. Also the strength of the disasters often depends on the number of temperature bands you have accumulated.
- The “ouchy” die is then rolled a number of times depending on how badly you already fucked up the global temperature. There are 6 global systems that have tiny tracks they advance on (sea ice, major weather systems, ocean acidification, desertification…). The die rolls randomly to advance these. On each of them there are tipping points that do some bad things to the world when they are reached like killing of forests or oceans, adding emissions or directly full temperature bands…
- Disasters happen. One of these is always visible so you can “prepare” for it. The rest are unknowns unless you have card actions to make them known in the previous phase. These usually have you lose resilience, or add communities in crisis, kill off forests or oceans or make you discard cards. There is some variabilitiy here. But there are a lot of cards that can be mititgated by resilience so it’s imperative to build that up if you somehow can’t cut your emissions as fast as you would want to.
- Phase: Bookkeeping. After the disasters there is a bit of bookkeeping to be done. Everyone’s energy usage rises by a fixed amount per world power.
You win if you ever achieve drawdown–having more emissions absorbed than you generate and survive the “Oopsie” Phase.
You loose if any player has too many “communities in crisis” or if you have reached the end of the thermometer or the end of round 6 without achieving drawdown.
The basic game is pretty easy (in solo at least) but you can adjust the difficulty upwards with challenge cards.
I love the combo-ing and also the hopeful and optimistic feelings the game produces. Yes, it’s telling a story. But not all the tech and projects that are in it are pure fiction. For example today I played “District heating” and our apartment is actually connected to such a system and if you scan the little QR code it has a pretty good explanation of how that works and where it works and why it is good in those circumstances. In the game it’s a card that requires a couple of money tags and alllows you to reduce building emissions once per round.
I highly recommend giving this one a try. It’s completely different from Pandemic (the other game by one of the designers that you have likely played) and it’s a fun combotastic game–with a message. You can’t ignore the message–it’s baked into every pore of the theme.
The BGA implementation is really good but if you want to win, reading the rules at least once is really helpful. (I tried without and… failed badly)
PS: the components are very nice, however my one component criticism–very slight one–is the board. The board is largely decorative and for playing on a smaller table far too big. I am sure that the solo community will have a printable tiny alternative soon enough because all you need is the 6 global systems tracks, a bit of space for forests and oceans and the temperature bands. On the other hand the board looks really nice and it’s great fun to absorb the emissions into the little forest and ocean tokens.
). It was great on the one side, as it gave me a hint of what Twilight Imperium could be like, but as it tends to happen to me with this big roll and writes, I end up diversifying myself too much and not managing to score very well in the end. So I ended a terrible last with only 39 points, while the owners of the game ran away to high 60s and low 70s.
Hoping that’ll change soon (though catching Covid in the middle hasn’t helped…)
