Designer Diary: Daybreak
<div><p>by <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/blogger/15903/matteo-menapace">Matteo Menapace</a></p>
<div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7068528"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/YU8rm_FMnKHS2GPDFvLb6g__small/img/7Y2W9IVJ3_YmOQfaoZz8XVPoUM0=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7068528.png" border="0"></a></div><i> Written by <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/135581/matteo-menapace">Matteo Menapace</a> and <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/378/matt-leacock">Matt Leacock</a></i>
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<br><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/334986/daybreak"><b><i>Daybreak</i></b></a> is a co-operative game about stopping climate change. It presents an empowering vision of the near future in which you and your friends help our societies become more resilient to climate impacts while decarbonizing the world.
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<br><i>[Editor's note: Matt Leacock pointed out to me that </i>Daybreak<i> will be played at the UN Climate Change Conference (<a href="https://unfccc.int/cop29" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">COP 29</a>) that will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan from November 11–22, 2024, so publishing this compiled diary now will be timely in the lead-up to that event. —WEM]</i>
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<br><b>Why We Made This Game</b>
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<br><b>Matteo:</b> Matt and I started designing this game in the first half of 2020, after the word "pandemic" had suddenly taken on a whole new meaning.
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<br>Around mid-March I wrote a <a href="https://medium.com/theuglymonster/what-does-pandemic-the-game-teach-us-about-the-covid-19-pandemic-bbf8a60f08a5" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">blog post</a> about the COVID-19 pandemic and what we can learn from one of my favorite games. Then I discovered Matt had written an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/pandemic-game-covid.html" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">op-ed in <i>The New York Times</i></a> about <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/30549/pandemic"><b><i>Pandemic</i></b></a>. I didn't know him at the time, but that op-ed gave me the impression we were on the same wavelength, and the courage to <a href="https://twitter.com/baddeo/status/1247232254792871940" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">reach out to him on Twitter</a>.
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<br><center><a href="https://twitter.com/mattleacock/status/1242922257258815494" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener"> <div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7081098"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/KFI3NgFNtHnVo0Xp9S5VqQ__small/img/3gryhRhtnLQhOIpZdTLH4pDuw3M=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7081098.png" border="0"></a></div></a></center>
<br><center><a href="https://twitter.com/baddeo/status/1247232254792871940" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener"> <div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7081099"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/EZUAQOb7pT2xJ3ccwCV4PA__small/img/scvmBXexHwAeEUoVIBC7JbQ7h4g=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7081099.png" border="0"></a></div></a></center>
<br>I was quite surprised when Matt messaged back:
<br><font color="#2121A4"><div class="quote"><div class="quotetitle"><p><b>mleacock wrote:</b></p></div><div class="quotebody"><i>Thanks for your really thoughtful piece. [...] I spent some time looking over your work and writing. I've started doing some research for a cooperative game on the climate crisis that I might pursue. If you're interested, I'd love to have a conversation with you about that.</i></div></div></font>
<br><b>Why the Climate Crisis?</b>
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<br>The 2019 youth strikes brought the climate crisis into the public spotlight and left many of us with an urgent question: <i>What can I do about it?</i>
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<br>On our first call, Matt told me about how he had been toying with the idea of designing a climate game, but he kept oscillating between fear and hope, overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of the crisis. At the same time, he knew he couldn't ignore it. Those feelings resonated with me. I also had been dipping in and out of climate books for years, but had not yet found an outlet for my questions.
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<br>The problem with the question "What can I do about climate change?" is how it implies climate action is like a single-player game, with you alone fighting against this huge invisible enemy. As Mary Annaïse Heglar <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/what-you-can-do-solve-climate-change/" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">wrote in April 2020</a>:
<br><font color="#2121A4"><div class="quote"><div class="quotebody"><i>Yes, it's true that you can't solve the climate crisis alone, but it's even more true that we can't solve it without you. It's a team sport. [...] Do what you're good at. And do your best.</i></div></div></font>
<br>So we could team up, do what we're good at, and make this climate game together.
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<br><b>Design Goals</b>
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<br>We started our collaboration by agreeing the game we wanted to design would be:
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<br>1. About systemic solutions
<br>2. Realistic – but not "educational"
<br>3. Co-operative with individual autonomy
<br>4. Empowering
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<br>Let's dive into each goal.
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<br><u>1. A game to explore systemic, high-impact solutions to the climate crisis</u>
<br>We both find it frustrating when climate action is promoted as a matter of lifestyle choices: eat less meat, #flyless, maybe don't have kids? We didn't want to design a game that tells players that reducing your personal <i>carbon footprint</i> is enough to match the severity and urgency of the climate crisis.
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<br>The very idea of a "personal carbon footprint" was first popularized by oil company BP as part of their "beyond petroleum" media campaign to shift responsibility for global warming away from the fossil fuel industry and onto consumers like you and me. Thus, framing climate action as an <i>individual carbon diet</i> would be playing the enemy's game.
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<br>Instead, we agreed our game should frame the climate crisis as a <i>global problem</i> and encourage players to explore <i>collective action and systemic solutions</i>.
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<br><u>2. A realistic but not "educational" experience</u>
<br>So what exactly is the global problem that players would try to solve?
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<br>Climate change is caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere — gases like carbon dioxide and methane, mostly emitted by burning fossil fuels, which turn the atmosphere into a <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/what-you-can-do-solve-climate-change/" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">greenhouse</a>. This is driving up global temperatures and making the weather worldwide more extreme and unpredictable. The effects of greenhouse gas emissions impact everyone on the planet, especially communities in the Global South who are least responsible for them.
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<br>The direct causes of global warming are therefore <i>emissions</i>, and the root cause is a global economy built on extraction and exploitation, which produces all those emissions and disrupts the fragile planetary balance on which life on Earth depends.
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<br>We decided the game would be based on <i>real-world data</i>, and while we knew that a board game cannot afford the complexities of an accurate scientific model, we wanted players to <i>viscerally</i> experience the emissions piling up on the board and their knock-on effects.
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<br>We also agreed we didn't want the experience to feel preachy. Games with an educational focus aim to teach players the "right" thing to do. Of course all games teach players something, their rules and reward systems at the very least, but there's a difference between teaching and preaching. We wanted to design a game in which players make <i>meaningful choices</i> instead of one that preaches the "right" ones, a game that people actually want to play and enjoy and not <i>chocolate-dipped broccoli</i>, as Matt likes to say.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7081185"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/jYuImnFmRFAZtUVo5ooI8w__small/img/ceK06LXh4_SvqcR6PCGZNnINEHk=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7081185.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br><u>3. Players act in total co-operation while maintaining individual autonomy</u>
<br>We know powerful economic (and therefore political) interests are against systemic change, so one could make a game in which a player represents the fossil fuel industry, for instance.
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<br>Matt and I started from another perspective. What if we (as in "collective we") had pressured our leaders to take the climate crisis seriously? What if they worked together (as our current ones pretend to be doing) to solve it? Climate change has been so marginal to the political debate for so long that we've not allowed ourselves to even imagine what can <i>possibly</i> happen when a coalition of interests that actually wants to tackle the crisis has taken power. Maybe the game could help players explore the challenges ahead.
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<br>That means <i>total co-operation</i> between all players: no traitors, no overlord, no single winner. It's a big leap from the current state of climate (in)action, but not an unreasonable one; what seems politically unthinkable today might become common sense in a few years, and we aim for this game to play a role in accelerating this shift.
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<br>Total co-operation sounds great, but even in co-op games it can enable problematic behaviors, such as one "alpha" player taking control of the game and directing everyone else. One could argue that it's a personality issue ("Just tell them to stop playing the dictator") but we shouldn't wave our designer hands because the rules we design <i>can</i> make this behavior more or less likely to emerge.
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<br>Before this could become an issue, Matt and I decided to experiment with unique player abilities and give each player ownership of one slice of the bigger problem, so that they shouldn't be tempted (or have time) to control others.
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<br><u>4. Players feel empowered</u>
<br>Empowered as you play <i>Daybreak</i> because your individual contributions are unique, powerful, and specialized.
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<br>And empowered <i>after</i> you play it – whether your team succeeds or not – because you've had a chance to explore climate science and real world solutions. You've learned that reversing global warming is an incredibly hard challenge, but that it's possible, and you're inspired to choose leaders who will take decisive action on it.
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<br>These design goals became both our compass, setting our direction, and a high-level checklist to return to each time we found ourselves in the weeds.
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<br><b>Antagonists and Impacts</b>
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<br>After Matt and I agreed on the type of game we wanted, we stood in front of a potentially overwhelming next step: Where does one even start making a game about "solving" such a wicked problem as climate change?
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<br>It made sense to start by defining and modeling the problem that players would try to solve. The science of global warming is solid, so we could begin by translating that into a simplified, playable model. Once set in motion, and without any "solving" done, that model would loop into worse and worse conditions, and eventually cause a loss for everyone.
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<br>At first we didn't quite know how it would work, but we could imagine a non-linear growth of emissions, which players would experience viscerally as tokens piling up on the board, triggering all sorts of disasters.
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<br><b>Modeling the Carbon Cycle</b>
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<br>We learned that <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">the world emits around fifty billion tons of greenhouse gases each year</a>. <a href="https://drawdown.org/drawdown-foundations" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">Roughly half of those emissions are absorbed</a> by our planet through <i>natural sinks</i> like forests, soil, and oceans. The remaining <i>net</i> emissions accumulate in the atmosphere and drive up global temperatures. The increased temperature, in turn, causes <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-nine-tipping-points-that-could-be-triggered-by-climate-change/" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">planetary effects</a>, such as the loss of natural sinks like the Amazon rainforest (meaning less emissions are absorbed) or the melting of ice caps (meaning more heat is trapped).
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7088945"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/sb2FKu7CA06LtwIJbEl6Ww__small/img/grAUmZ4i7MuOYm-xPVRle46l-VQ=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7088945.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>This game board from June 2020 exemplifies our early attempts at creating a playable model of the emissions cycle. At the top is the atmosphere, where all players dumped their emission tokens each round. From there, an arrow pointed down to natural sequestration, where green squares with trees represent land sinks and blue squares represent ocean sinks.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089152"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/2uLGLdzgwH7Bqo1qiu4pTQ__small/img/MNLP-90yKJxBA0NVwv0EzRwjGKY=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089152.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>Tree tokens representing land sinks</i></center>
<br>Players would put these tokens on top of the world map to track the state of natural sequestration. There would be a starting amount of sequestration (related to the current state of natural sinks) and the possibility for actions like "reforestation" to increase that amount.
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<br>On the world map we also represented some planetary effects: white squares are ice caps, lime squares are permafrost areas, and sand squares are desertification areas. These would be covered with double-sided tokens, at first all face-down.
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<br>From the atmosphere, another arrow points to a giant thermometer, where emission tokens are converted into red temperature cubes. As the thermometer fills up, it will trigger the random flip of planetary effect tokens on the world map.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089156"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/NZwaN8QTKO1G_S5Ymmz9pA__small/img/UCTEg0HFt28KjKMs1DH0fof9MMs=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089156.png" border="0"></a></div> </center>
<br>For instance, flipping any of these lime tokens (melting permafrost) would release extra emissions to the atmosphere. We originally represented emissions as carbon dioxide (the most common greenhouse gas): one atom of carbon and two of oxygen.
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<br><b>Setting Expectations</b>
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<br>Notice how the thermometer goes up to 3.0ºC in our early board. We quickly learned that was too lenient and the runaway loop of climate breakdown too gentle and unrealistic, so we chopped the thermometer to about 2.0ºC and intensified the growth of planetary effects to be flipped.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089159"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/u-ZrZHt-bI2noCZtRAKuSg__small/img/3eAib8SqPQw9OL274tFOnUtKolU=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089159.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>For a long time we resisted setting game-over conditions at specific points of the thermometer or of the round track. We were (and still are) convinced that when the game ends in a loss, it shouldn't be due to an arbitrary number because the world won't end in 2050 or if global warming reaches 2.0ºC. Instead, a loss should happen if players lose control of the system, that is, when its conditions have become unbearable.
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<br>Another question we grappled with was how to link game-time with real-world time. At first, we imagined each round would represent four years, the first one being set to "Today" — but what would happen when people play this game in a few years, and "Today" is the date of the second or third round? We gradually removed any reference to years from the game board, but I still like to tell players that each round is about five years in real-life, so you have about thirty years from now to stop climate change! It seems to help them tell a better (more grounded and vivid) story of their game.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089162"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/4pcDv7JneBj5ncv4rm8bLA__small/img/7BNasvdg9tKsE6YF4FDr_iYlIOc=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089162.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089163"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/QSnbkfE6rl0Lg13kvuO35g__small/img/olfDY-dsSihvexFXwn1LKjrkgug=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089163.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089164"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/fvc10Jbi6nH4N5oIM0uJhg__small/img/BLoxxDC79wUnlU3xjA6EwFaCWBI=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089164.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089165"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/41YqgHUI6vC5qG91FR-LEg__small/img/m17HD7Hw5QioTmSN1AEGlFK94bE=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089165.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>A collection of round trackers showing a variety of timelines</i></center>
<br><b>Divisions and Delays</b>
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<br><i>Playable</i> does not automatically mean <i>fun</i>, especially if math is involved. This became particularly evident in the procedural step when players convert emission tokens into temperature cubes. It's a relatively simple operation, e.g., 34 (emission tokens) divided by 3 (players) equals 11 (temperature cubes), but it's definitely not fun and it's error prone.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089176"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/FnJvupmswssXDv2G8bUCYQ__small/img/lhBymvI1McBfpDp5GHTnB5qsg_o=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089176.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>In early versions of the game, players needed to divide by the number of players to convert carbon into temperature. (Each temperature cube here represents 0.02°C.)</i></center>
<br>On top of that, a direct conversion between emissions and temperature was scientifically a <i>BIG flaw</i>, as our advisor <a href="https://twitter.com/pablosurgames" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">Pablo Suarez</a> from the <a href="https://www.climatecentre.org/" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre</a> pointed out after a playtest. Our prototype didn't model the real-world delays between emissions and temperature changes. As Pablo explained, "The change in temperatures is not determined by <i>current</i> emissions but by current <i>concentrations</i>, which result from past, <i>cumulative</i> emissions. More or less emissions during this decade will have a near-negligible impact on temperatures this decade. Even if we magically stopped all emissions tomorrow, there would still be about the same change in real-world global average temperature by 2030."
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<br>We didn't want to include extra steps to simulate delays because the added scientific accuracy would only make the game slower and increase the room for errors. Instead, this gave us the opportunity to fix the emissions → temperature conversion problem, too, by removing that conversion step altogether.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089186"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/IUGFfR8viOHbcLlzCbv_TA__small/img/EGVcXEQr8yBfy_p81hfH1yW5N_A=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089186.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>Emission tokens are now added directly to the thermometer to demonstrate the rising concentration of greenhouse gases in addition to rising global temperatures. When those emission tokens fill up a row in the thermometer, 0.1ºC of global warming gets locked in as a red temperature band. No more red cubes, and no more math.
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<br><b>Impacts on the Planetary System</b>
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<br>All this modeling of the carbon cycle would remain rather abstract if it didn't lead to consequences for players. These will be felt in two different ways: first, the impacts on the planetary system via <i>planetary effects</i>, then the impacts on people via <i>crisis cards</i> (more on those below).
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<br>For several months, we represented <i>planetary effects</i> as random flips of tokens. Those would be sitting on top of the world map in contextual locations (the ice caps over the poles, etc.), while their triggers would be embedded in the thermometer. This turned out to be quite inflexible. First, the size of the tokens restricted the amount of information and effects that we could put on them. What's more, their triggers were not only cluttering the thermometer, but also making the impacts predictable. For example, you always knew that at 1.2ºC of warming you'd lose a "tree" sequestration token.
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<br>When we redesigned the thermometer to fill up with emission tokens and temperature bands, we took the opportunity to reskin and expand the planetary effects as mini cards.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089195"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/ULVjOuZLrDIEYhAceWan8A__small/img/NLtzdOf-hcJEXT_KYXRthMYkbhU=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089195.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>This allowed us to give more flavor and detail to existing effects like "lose a tree" and introduce new effects that would increase the uncertainty of the post-emissions phase, with "tipping points" mixed in for extra cascading potential.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089202"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/oWKqr7QGKtgRZzBw3VGZ2g__small/img/Tua2d7zA5nel8KycTWmb4WuXBBs=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089202.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>We sliced the thermometer into three sections so that the higher the temperature, the more planetary effect cards players would draw each round. After a virtual playtest with <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/73364/jon-perry">Jon Perry</a> and <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/80162/wolfgang-warsch">Wolfgang Warsch</a>, we modified the rules so that you draw a number of cards equal to the number of temperature bands.
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<br>This made every 0.1ºC really matter — but it also doubled the number of cards you'd draw, so much so that it started to feel "tedious to flip that many cards, especially late in the game" as our publishers <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/74071/alex-hague">Alex Hague</a> and <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/74072/justin-vickers">Justin Vickers</a> at <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/46474/cmyk">CMYK</a> reported. Could we compress the planetary effects phase into a more tense and powerful experience, while possibly keeping the elegance of "one draw per temperature band"? In other words, could we have fewer card draws, with each card being more powerful, but also keep the same number of card draws to make every temperature band matter? Clearly not...but we might still achieve both goals if we used a different system than cards.
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<br>If we made each planetary effect more powerful, we should also let players see them coming; otherwise they would feel unfair and arbitrary. This means we should render the build-up of each effect more visible/predictable, but keep the exact moment when it triggers uncertain. Visualizing the build-up of effects pointed toward tracks, and their uncertain triggers suggested some randomized draw, but instead of drawing cards, players draw tokens from a bag. They add them to their corresponding tracks, and only when a token lands on a "tipping point" does the effect trigger.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089208"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/hExrwD4DGmVV7K9bw1yAcw__small/img/Izex1yyp2ifNDUqcvyetTni3eNw=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089208.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>With this system we were able to maintain the "one draw per temperature band" rule, and at the same time increase the tension players felt as they could see the planetary effect tokens building up towards tipping points, but they were never sure when they would detonate.
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<br>It worked a treat, but our sustainability advisor <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruth-meza-736782107/" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">Ruth Meza</a> then informed us that the cloth bag from which players draw all those tokens would add a significant carbon footprint to the game.
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<br>"What about using dice instead?" suggested Alex. We started experimenting with a D6 on which each side is mapped to a planetary effect. Players roll once per temperature band and advance the corresponding token on its track.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089211"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/S8t2ccj-7AtTesCMHKuw2w__small/img/Z78uxiOCzgM_SdyK0CZmg_AEb20=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089211.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>It turns out this maintains the mounting tension of the "tokens from the bag" system, with the extra drama that die rolls bring. The dice also resonated with our advisors as a good metaphor for the uncertainty associated with these planetary systems. Finally, we use fewer, more sustainable components.
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<br><b>Impacts on People</b>
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<br>While planetary effects make life harder for players but don't inflict direct damage, we also needed to model the direct impacts of global warming on <i>people</i>. These span from extreme weather events like storms or heat waves that cripple communities and infrastructure, to shocks like crop failures that can lead to recessions and famines.
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<br>In a broader sense, a <i>crisis</i> can be any major event or force that gets in the way of climate progress, like an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Charter_Treaty#Criticism" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">international treaty that blocks a clean energy transition</a>, or pretty much anything the fossil fuel industry does (from their core business to the disinformation they fund), as <a href="https://twitter.com/billmckibben" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">Bill McKibben</a> reminded us on a memorable post-COP 26 video call.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089831"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/dQm0Yf7-gk33wsSfhesw7w__small/img/MpenzbW82kLQO-_M9SWRkYPsC-Q=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089831.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>Back to our early game board. On the left side of the thermometer, notice a scale from 3 to 6. That is the crisis rate: the higher the temperature, the more crisis cards players will resolve at the end of each round.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089835"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/5YlHNev874FzkLtgpQKXqQ__small/img/fpvVRiN3sLbsz09GaeIwxZVTBmo=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089835.png" border="0"></a></div> </center>
<br>The "Sea Level Rise" crisis card is an early experiment in linking temperature to damage, which then became a standard pattern for crises. Not only does a higher temperature trigger a higher number of crises, but each of those crises will cause more damage, so at 1.2ºC you'd have three relatively harmless crises, but at 1.6ºC you'd have five of them, and each would be three times more damaging.
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<br>This <b>double escalation</b> of both crisis quantity and severity allowed us to simulate the non-linear dynamics of climate breakdown and let players experience how even a tenth of a degree in global warming can make a huge difference.
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<br>We then sketched out a mechanism for players to reduce the damage from crises. This would act like a shield: When a crisis strikes, the <i>actual</i> damage is the total damage minus the shield strength. For example, players who have social policies in place to protect vulnerable people will be able to reduce the impacts of a heatwave. Or if a hurricane hits, a player that has invested in infrastructure will shield their people from the worst effects. As our dear mentor Pablo Suarez told us, "It's not a disaster if people don't suffer."
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<br>The climate community refers to shielding people and places as <a href="https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/climate-adaptation" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">adaptation</a>. If adaptation is a process, its key property is <i>resilience</i>. We decided to experiment with three different forms of it – social, ecological, and infrastructural – which would help protect players from different types of crises.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089841"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/Y4AKCbLwSZpbJfkKOcQxdA__small/img/PPpanuAWNymRKykAfDCEdSSQVwo=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089841.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>We gradually simplified the cards to make them easier to read and quicker to resolve: one effect per card works best. We also enlarged them to tarot size so they could both support an illustration and be more readable across the table.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089843"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/_LrybMd97ATfveZVx5FeFA__small/img/xHNolS3TZwxlzxDjkne-_4H6VRc=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089843.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089846"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/YKoGoizEEtNpZO83d9bbSA__small/img/pDT7NKx2L9yrReC-w5erAW5I050=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089846.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>Notice how the language around human suffering evolved from "losing people" to "endangering communities". This highlights the societal scale of climate change impacts, which span from the most dire consequences (such as people dying) to displacement or the deterioration of health and living standards. Also, one too many playtesters confused the “people” icon for a gendered toilet sign!
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<br>Over time we've remixed the crisis card deck with a variety of effects. Most crisis cards, more than half of the deck, will <i>directly impact the loss condition</i> by endangering communities.
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<br>Some cards will <i>weaken players</i>, forcing them to lose resources.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089851"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/IWd90cruxC-VGII6IftWhg__small/img/KCgq5ZChIzmq9XyqOv_1O2XYp3k=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089851.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>Other crises will <i>worsen the game state</i> by cutting or burning down trees and releasing extra emissions.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089854"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/sXm4lX4kGaL3jxAHTn3_Ag__small/img/9snwZnB6xtYWhutCJBEoNP3X6MQ=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089854.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>A few cards will have <i>ongoing, uncertain, or cascading effects</i>.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089857"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/AK36niJsVHYJZXVV2HVQaw__small/img/WRsYE1DlxSIjYEjEK9BgPBlwldM=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089857.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>As you can see, crisis cards can unleash a combination of devastating effects on either one particularly vulnerable player or all of them at once — but apart from increasing resilience shields as a preventive action, can players proactively interact with the crisis deck? Can players even see them coming?
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<br>In the early iterations of the game, players had no foresight on crisis cards. Each round, after their collective emissions had pushed the temperature up, players would draw and resolve a number of cards equal to the crisis rate. This made playtesters feel like crises were "random slaps on your wrist", and the only viable strategy was to try and build as much resilience as temperature bands.
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<br>We then introduced some degree of advanced knowledge. The logic was that one can forecast future events, but never be certain that any of them will happen. In game terms, at the beginning of each round, players reveal three crisis cards. They then play actions, produce emissions, and finally get to the point when crises take effect — but it won't be those three cards revealed earlier. Instead, you shuffle those with a growing number (equal to the current crisis rate) of hidden cards, then resolve a number equal to the current crisis rate. During the first round, for example, you'd see three cards, then shuffle those with another three cards (matching the initial crisis rate), then resolve three out of those six cards.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089858"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/mxegb8U7kXz_G1sTWFSLcQ__small/img/JnbUzdxYc0rr5ErYlfpY_07nwf4=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089858.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>This made sense as a model of forecasting in the real world, but players didn't like it. Many told us they stopped paying attention to the forecast crises, even though they knew they were likely to happen: "Too much information, and it's not even certain, so why should I bother?" This reveals quite a lot about human psychology and our perception of risk, especially in relation to climate change.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089860"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/mMD2E4PYdCiJ-EyMpDtUpQ__small/img/u4Fs8G57nyMXSXPO_kadYPitS7k=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089860.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>For the next iteration we reduced the forecast to two cards that would be topped up with unknown cards until you reach the crisis rate. This meant players would always know for sure those two forecast crises would trigger.
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<br>That eventually proved to be too much information. It was too much to discuss at the beginning of a new round and so much advanced knowledge that it tended to deflate tension during the crisis step. We simplified further to have only one crisis previewed when a new round starts. This focuses players' attention, lowers the amount of information to process, and makes proactive forecasting much more tempting.
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<br><b>A Visual Journey</b>
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<br>The many iterations and changes described above were reflected directly on the game board. We created a two-minute time-lapse for you to see this progress over time. Enjoy!
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<br><center><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOofZCPUC4o">Youtube Video</a></center>
<br><b>Models and Resources</b>
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<br><b>A Toy Model</b>
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<br><b>Matt:</b> Our initial concept was a game in which players could convert money and political power into technologies and policies that would help them decarbonize their economies. If players could accomplish this before global temperatures rose too much (triggering a loss), they would win the game.
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<br>To get started, we needed to figure out which resources the players had and which attributes they'd need to track and how they affected each other. In order to guide the game's design, we sketched out an early model to summarize this:
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7095694"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/e4Q1oipQvEQAYxUije5C8A__small/img/p-4n9R1m7AHnGAxtC9Aco2lStac=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7095694.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>A sketch of the key resources and attributes of the game from 8 May 2020. Early versions of the game let players store, buy, and sell dirty energy and synthetic fuel from each other.</i></center>
<br>We sketched out the resources that players would need to track: financial capital, political power, dirty energy, clean energy, and carbon. Players would also need to track quite a few other attributes for themselves including their rates of income, how much energy and carbon they produced each round, their energy demand, and how quickly their energy demand and income grew.
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<br><b>Early Stats</b>
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<br>We didn't want to over-engineer the first prototype of the game but also wanted the values involved to have some basis in reality. (Our initial aim was to get roughly within an order of magnitude.) We pulled some values from <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53506838" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener"><i>The 100% Solution</i></a> (emissions and sequestration) and Wikipedia (financial capital was loosely based on GDP) to plug into the first prototype:
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7095689"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/9JsRqF0KaxrRzZKaMlBwQw__small/img/eiWyowpmMgdmym1QHcW-55_a84w=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7095689.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>A "napkin sketch" from our design journal from 15 May 2020. We had big napkins. (All of these values have changed in the final game.)</i></center>
<br>Our first player boards were set up to track all of this information. Here's our very first player board:
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7095686"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/mjRCPTDQO_hqKXcMVjM7sQ__small/img/FSAZ4QfYUHT0K1lRIzr5nPT6RiE=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7095686.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>If you've played <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167791/terraforming-mars"><i>Terraforming Mars</i></a>, you'll likely see the influence of that game. Each box on this board tracked both income (the number written down), as well as the player's current balance (represented by the tokens).
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<br>We also tracked financial capital growth and total energy demand growth and how much clean energy a player could save each round.
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<br>It was...a lot.
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<br>But we were able to get a functioning game out of it! It was a bit long and fiddly, but it was up and running.
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<br>Our next version used a whiteboard arranged with the goal of making accounting a bit easier. Dirty energy cubes could be dragged downward from a supply box to meet demand, then dragged downward again to join the "other carbon" the player generated in order to become the emissions generated for that round. We thought this was quite clever: the same tokens that were used for a resource could be converted into waste simply by dragging them across the board.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7095687"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/wmgxqXHiQOFZfQLgJ7QtAQ__small/img/ODiOZGtKeMW733ZeEoV26KuddWI=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7095687.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>This design was also functional but complex. It was also hard for other players to read from across the table and not terribly accurate. The concept of "dirty energy demand" was hard to understand and a weird way to model the problem. Also, players had to handle a lot of tokens; they needed to collect and spend a good number of financial and political capital tokens each round, and the time needed to count and collect all of those tokens really added up.
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<br>Despite all of these issues, we used variations of this overall design from May 2020 to February 2021 while we iterated on other aspects of the game.
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<br>In February 2021, we challenged ourselves to make the game "less about stats manipulation". Overall playtime was longer than we liked, and a lot of game time was spent on bookkeeping – adjusting all the numbers and token counts on the player boards. One prompt that came up in a design discussion intrigued us: What if we removed the financial capital and political power resources from the game entirely and instead used cards for the game's currency?
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<br><b>Resources at a Glance</b>
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<br>After we took that big leap, players no longer needed to track financial capital and political power. They still had to track energy and carbon, however. I took a stab at how players might keep track of those resources with the aim of making their counts easier to read across the table. One experiment resulted in this physical sketch that used puzzle pieces:
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7095692"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/3gesw3EpW-cyM0SPE1BeKA__small/img/fqvNWpJEon7kNZwFbY-6hqSFxMg=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7095692.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>An early experiment with a physical player board using puzzle pieces from 20 February 2021</i></center>
<br>The pieces here represent dirty and clean energy plants (first row), dirty and clean energy demand (second row), "other" carbon (third row), and dirty energy storage (fourth row).
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<br>The dirty energy demand puzzle pieces could fit only into dirty energy plant tokens, which was meant to make it clear that the needs of legacy infrastructure could be met only by dirty energy sources (fossil fuels). I even experimented with making the clean plant tokens wider to communicate how they were more efficient. I thought this was all quite clever. In practice it was weird, fiddly, and confusing!
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<br>We didn't have the ratios right at this point, either. Greenhouse gasses produced by sources other than electricity generation (transportation, industry, buildings, agriculture and land use, and so on) make up a much higher percentage of total emissions than we were initially playing with.
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<br>But one thing this design <i>did</i> get right was to break away from the whiteboards in order to "embody" the electricity plants and carbon sources on the table in a more physical way. We saw a lot of advantages to this: It was easier to track what other players were doing at a glance, and calculations could be made by adding and subtracting pieces instead of writing and erasing numbers. It also promised to be a more sustainable solution since we wouldn't have to include consumable pads of paper or use plastic whiteboard markers that would dry out.
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<br>After quickly abandoning the puzzle pieces, we tried a board with an extendable channel to hold the plant tokens next to a pegboard number line to track energy demand. The best feature of this design is that players wouldn't need to do sums – they could physically rack up their plants to see whether they met their demand.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7095685"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/J9PGLF_yJvTXedhy7bmVhg__small/img/aPesvwxBU7gH8VI-vris3X-jU6w=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7095685.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>This was the last design that featured the concept of "dirty energy demand". We abandoned that concept after conversations with Justin Vickers (who is an energy transition lawyer by day and a game publisher by night) and decided that players could simply generate one carbon cube per dirty plant each round provided they still had the plant on their player board. This was a better match for reality; any plants not shut down or mothballed (taken off of a player board) would continue to generate carbon.
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<br><b>Different Emissions Sources as "Resources"</b>
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<br>In March 2021, Matteo had the brilliant idea to further refine what we had been calling "other carbon" into the different categories of emissions sources that comprised it: transportation, industry, agriculture and land use, buildings, fossil fuel extraction, and waste. We updated the prototype to represent the proper amounts for those emissions using test "emissions by source" data.
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<br>This led to this design, which was a real breakthrough:
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7095684"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/RarhJzIWl6solM9O7uyiGg__small/img/ryG6wPQFX3QWhdEOQsFsu612mEE=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7095684.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>This board featured only one type of energy demand and introduced different emission types. We also abandoned the concept of energy storage here given the scale and timeframes involved*</i></center>
<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7095688"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/feEQV2Ld1MpS36k8vg4bIg__small/img/pJlE1OVIyvRVm3OYqCU8hK54PPc=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7095688.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>ClimateWatch data in our <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17FFNOiU1iluzf5rBDMARfre-j3wZ1OyJC5EpPNVeH8E/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">spreadsheet</a> helped us balance various emissions sources across the players.</i></center>
<br>The introduction of these new categories opened up a rich array of policies and technologies that could target those specific emissions. The game no longer centered only on shutting down fossil fuel plants; it was much clearer that it was about decarbonizing your entire economy.
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<br><b>Fine Tuning</b>
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<br>Once we had this design, we tried out a number of different arrangements so that we could quickly do emissions accounting, track resilience, and count the number of people or communities in crisis.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7095693"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/m2kyB7WyvSHDjp0iJ7gARw__small/img/7oG25wjjt-Bh7A2mT1z_ypw4LKQ=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7095693.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>An experiment that used pegs to track resilience; we abandoned this approach since it communicated an arbitrary cap, felt more "mathy", and was harder to read across the table</i></center>
<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7095690"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/0JzReSydwPK_N4wjFN_CIg__small/img/AMu9gq7j7zOC4i3Ddg4K1q9eSh0=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7095690.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>Emissions were easier to count in this design since they shared the same number line</i></center>
<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7095691"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/DIlhbwJ8c_deuvx8srML5Q__small/img/Mi2wqq2ZpUHv4oJHSm5yjiKoEq4=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7095691.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>We simplified the Communities in Crisis area and added labels so players could more easily speak the language of the game (e.g., "social resilience" instead of "handshakes".) This is the last version that we built for the prototype.</i></center>
<br><i>*Although we dropped the concept of storing energy from round-to-round, we do make an attempt to model how grid infrastructure is required to scale wind and solar due to the intermittency of those energy sources.</i>
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<br><b>Players and Powers</b>
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<br><u>Who should the players represent?</u>
<br>We agreed the game should have a global scale, so it made sense to first explore the idea of each player taking on the role of a government. Each player would be in charge of a country or group of countries — in a realistic or imaginary world, we weren't sure at the time — that uses political will and financial capital to roll out policies and technologies from an opportunities deck.
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<br>Players would have individual agency over their economies, but their emissions would be added to a common pool (the atmosphere), which would tie everyone to the same global engine of doom and create a strong incentive for players to co-operate.
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<br>Given the practical requirement of a 1–4 player game, we needed to work out a list of world powers for the players to represent, but splitting the world into four pieces is not simple! We wanted to include as much of it as was reasonable, giving players meaningful options and agency without reproducing the Western idea that only wealthy "developed" countries had a role to play.
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<br><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8502390"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/HGNOaFS3pLmKYuQCer1HcA__small/img/oRHAX2DPDG4U3tDhAdCT4CCArUg=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8502390.jpg" border="0"></a></div>Our list was heavily influenced by Solomon Goldstein-Rose's book <a href="https://www.solomongr.com/" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener"><i>The 100% Solution</i></a>, which outlines four major players in the struggle as the United States, China, Europe (plus other "developed" countries), and India (plus other "developing" countries).
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<br>We wanted the Global South – not a country, but a block of countries with broadly similar trajectories – to have a seat at the table. Those are the countries the least responsible for the climate crisis, yet the most affected by its consequences. We expanded India to include all of the Global South, then renamed it to the <a href="https://sadafshallwani.net/2015/08/04/majority-world/" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">Majority World</a>, which better reflects its scale and highlights that it represents most of humanity.
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<br>We didn't want to perpetuate the myth of a level playing field sustained by many games, so we imagined that the players would have asymmetrical starting values and abilities. We also figured this would add variety and texture to the game and potentially give each player a kind of role to play – similar to the roles in <i>Pandemic</i>.
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<br><u>What can players do about the problem?</u>
<br>We began with the premise that there would be a collection of standard actions that players could do, along with special actions that would be printed on policy and technology cards. Players could put these cards into play by spending two currencies: financial capital and political power.
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<br>In the first iteration of the game, this menu of standard actions was pretty simple:
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<br>• Add energy capacity.
<br>• Buy and sell energy.
<br>• Exchange ideas.
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<br>Players could produce energy, sell it to the other players, and hand their cards to each other.
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<br>By version 1.17, this list had blossomed into a much bigger menu:
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<br>• Buy dirty energy plant.
<br>• Buy clean energy plant.
<br>• Decommission dirty energy plant.
<br>• Give foreign aid.
<br>• Share opportunities.
<br>• Buy or sell energy.
<br>• Reforestation.
<br>• Sequester carbon.
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<br>This was a pretty heterogeneous list, and since some of these actions took place at different steps during the order of play or adjusted certain values, the player aid began to look pretty complicated.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7104149"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/uPg6xqZR9LMvvIqdM2XxrQ__small/img/pk2vgx1weev8LlCA36RbpPSatXM=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7104149.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>An early player aid: numbers in yellow circles referred to financial capital; numbers in pink squares to political power</i></center>
<br>This was functional, but a bit awkward and certainly not something you'd describe as elegant or easy. The complexity of this system and all of the resource manipulations that were required made for a much longer playtime than we wanted.
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<br>In February 2021, we embarked on an experiment to simplify the game by removing its two main currencies: financial capital and political power. We moved to an economy that instead used <i>cards</i> as currency. Players spent opportunity cards, and as a result, each action now had an "opportunity cost". In a sense, this was like turning <i>Terraforming Mars</i> into <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28143/race-for-the-galaxy"><i>Race for the Galaxy</i></a>.
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<br><b>Standard Actions Become Starting Projects</b>
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<br>Around this time, we also decided to move all the standard actions of the game onto a set of starting project cards for each player. In doing so, we were able to eliminate the menu of standard actions altogether. If an action wasn't on a card in your tableau, you couldn't do it. These starting project cards were also the perfect surface for differentiating the players; all we needed to do was give each player a different set of starting cards.
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<br>Here's an evolution of the starting cards for the U.S. player:
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7104150"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/ckfG1RayAtwvQ6E4fBfR4g__small/img/F6bjr7qxra1B0-3g5Fi9e-Ypi1s=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7104150.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>Here, we've moved the standard actions onto the starting cards, but have not yet abandoned the two currencies: financial capital (yellow) and political power (pink)</i></center>
<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7104154"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/7xaUgzGZDRsDS1T67sfZ-Q__small/img/eoSqGx6zba6i6OYKqSrSDkzAswE=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7104154.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>In this set, all costs have been converted to cards (the number in the blue rounded rectangle)</i></center>
<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7104153"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/CU04FNSQW3ffFWwYEojDWQ__small/img/5XY4UMfblfAVaFckq3NkC8eD8Ak=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7104153.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>Here you can see the five starting cards for the United States from the final prototype</i></center>
<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7104152"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/Ma9-P2VTXtfmZHGoc2c6kg__small/img/3WjjYVfi63mcUULXqa-ZeVoN4FM=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7104152.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>And here are the five starting cards for the Majority World. These cards share some common patterns with the United States ("Clean Electricity Plants" and "Dirty Electricity Plant Decommissioning"), but while the U.S. is better at R&D and can pay off climate debts by passing cards to other players, the Majority World is set up for growth if it invests in its societies ("Youth Climate Movement"). It also has more potential for adaptation by building resilience ("Women Empowerment") and developing Early Warning Systems.</i></center>
<br><b>Fostering Communication and Co-operation</b>
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<br>In our early prototypes, co-operation was limited to swapping cards and buying and selling energy. Once we started to lean into our new design that featured a starting tableau of differentiated player powers, we found lots of new opportunities for players to assist each other right from the start of the game:
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<br>• <b>The U.S.</b> is good at R&D and can discard cards to go "fishing" for solutions that might benefit another player. They can then pass that card to the other player using their Climate Debt Repayments card.
<br>• <b>China</b> starts with the ability to export clean energy technology, which can help other players meet their electricity demand.
<br>• <b>Europe</b> can help by giving other players resilience tokens and can help pull the other players' communities out of crisis.
<br>• <b>The Majority World</b> can forecast upcoming crises that often affect every player.
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<br>We did notice one issue crop up repeatedly in playtesting: Once players received their initial hand of cards, they suddenly got tunnel-vision – it was difficult for players to propose ideas to the group since they tended to get hyper-focused on their own hands, tableaus, and player boards. This came up in several post-game debriefs: Players expressed frustration with an inability to make proposals to the group. It was like the opposite of the "alpha player" problem; players had so much autonomy that they found it difficult to talk about the big picture.
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<br>We solved this by creating the conference step. In this new step, players could forecast upcoming crisis cards, debate global project cards, and generally talk strategy together. Crucially, this step occurred before any player had their new hand of playing cards. This gave everyone time to focus on the bigger picture together. Thematically, this change resonated; it gave the feeling of the world coming together at a COP conference where they could make plans and promises that they could try to fulfill — but since they didn't yet have their hand of cards, they didn't have 100% confidence.
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<br><b>Making the Players Feel Powerful</b>
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<br>Once we changed our currency system, we identified another benefit. In the old design, cards were typically purchased and their effect was recorded on the player board – then the card was largely forgotten. In our new design, cards could be put into play for free, but players would need to pay a cost in order to activate the action on them. This meant that we could design <i>recurring</i> actions.
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<br>This, in turn, led to experiments in which we tinkered with different ways the cards could scale using the tags printed on them. Prior to this, the tags were more like passive categories – sometimes they mattered, but that was the exception, not the rule. With the new card design, we could let players put a new card into play quickly (but fairly inefficiently), then let them scale it up into something far more powerful. Here's a comparison:
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7104151"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/ByUCjPSCiMVoRnbkS_PBOw__small/img/KrRO-HZZ5oRTy37HagFDFhB4B7k=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7104151.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>The card on the left, from an early prototype, cost 5 financial capital and 4 political power. When it was played, the player would increase their clean energy production by 3 and their political power income by 1 each round. The card was then put in a loose tableau of cards that the player had rolled out, where it could essentially be forgotten.
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<br>The card on the right, from the final prototype, can be played for free on top of any stack. Once played, the action on it can be used if a player discards a card from their hand. This will gain one clean energy plant for each solar tag in that card's stack. Since the card already has a solar tag, the player can discard one card and gain one clean electricity plant right away.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7104155"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/FkLlDftPDfghMBqN-En6_w__small/img/dmvd42mlLvpOcnRd2xD_8yv4yYA=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7104155.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>On the left is a more extreme example. Here the player can gain two clean electricity plants for every solar tag in this card's stack for each card they spend. In this example, that's six plants per card! The only limit to the number of times a player can do this is the number of cards they have to spend.
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<br>We also let players play cards on top of existing stacks. The example on the right shows what would happen if a player placed a "Clean Energy Portfolio Standards" card on top of their "Major Solar Program". This card lets the player remove one dirty energy plant for each clean electricity tag in the card's stack each round — in this case, four dirty plants, for free, each round.
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<br>This ability to add cards on top of other cards led to an understanding that your new solutions could be built on the foundations of your older solutions, which also conveyed an exciting feeling of momentum.
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<br><b>A Diversity of Solutions and Tradeoffs</b>
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<br>As we worked through the design of these cards, we wanted the game to make it clear that there is no single solution to the climate crisis, that many different solutions all working together at the same time would be required.
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<br><u>More than just decarbonization</u>
<br>We wanted to get across a key lesson from our research: Many climate solutions aren't just tied to decarbonization and energy. While we decarbonize the world, it's equally vital to build resilient communities, restore ecosystems, improve infrastructure, and bolster international co-operation. For instance, expanding access to healthcare means vulnerable people will be more protected from the impacts of climate change. (Think of heatwaves, fires, and storms, as well as food shortages and epidemics.)
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7105838"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/wVVgckqFlb_9Wn4shkPtgQ__small/img/5kv5UK80f3gHjN_TMsJro0Tjpf4=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7105838.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>A sampling of the many different types of projects in the opportunity deck not directly related to decarbonization</i></center>
<br>Here's a small sampling of cards that look beyond decarbonization and energy:
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<br>• "Women's Empowerment", "Rewilding", "City Greening", "Regenerative Agriculture", "Universal Access to Healthcare", and many more that build resilience.
<br>• "Environmental Movement", "Social Movement", and "Community Wealth Building" projects as well as various climate finance projects that increase opportunities to roll out future solutions.
<br>• "Community Recovery Policies" and "Climate-smart Immigration Policies" that pull communities out of crisis and care for them.
<br>• "Indigenous Peoples' Forest Tenure", "Mangrove Restoration", and "Peatland Protection and Rewetting" that increase land-based sequestration.
<br>• "Foreign Aid", "Climate Debt Reparations", and "Patents Regulation" that help players share opportunities with each other.
<br>• "Adaptation Programs" and "Early Warning Systems" to help predict and mitigate upcoming crises.
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<br>All told, we came up with over 130 different opportunity cards and two dozen starting projects!
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<br><u>Tradeoffs</u>
<br>But these solutions couldn't all be equally valid at any given time. We also wanted the players to make difficult tradeoffs! Through many rounds of playtesting, we were able to hone these and increase their importance in the game through the design of the actions on the opportunity cards. Some key tradeoffs included:
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<br>• <b>Perfect the enemy of the good?</b> Should you design high efficiency projects that will take longer to mature, or do as much early action as you can – even if it's less efficient?
<br>• <b>Mitigation or adaptation?</b> Should you focus on mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions) or adaptation (build resilience)? Both are needed, so what's the right balance?
<br>• <b>At home or abroad?</b> When should you help another player achieve their goals or protect their communities when it would mean less investment in your own economy?
<br>• <b>How much risk is right?</b> Do you invest only in technology, hoping the crises this round will be mild and spare your communities? Do you start a project which requires a lot of future investment that you may not be able to afford? Will this geo-engineering project work? Should you invest in R&D even if it might not pay off this round?
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<br>We noticed that we started to read climate news articles with the dynamics of the game front of mind. Just about anything, it seemed, could be turned into an opportunity card (or a planetary effect or a crisis card). By the time we finished, we had a huge suite of opportunity, global project, and crisis cards on our hands.
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<br><b>Managing Complexity</b>
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<br>The new play patterns and the diversity of options made the players feel far more powerful and creative. Over the course of development, however, we found that the problem space needed to be bounded to prevent players' heads "from exploding". (We have footage of several people using this exact phrase before we solved this problem.)
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<br><u>Natural restrictions and simplifications</u>
<br>We found helpful and natural restrictions and simplifications bound the problems into a more human-manageable size:
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<br>• <b>We limited the number of card stacks</b> that a player could manage (at first four, then five) and ruled that only the topmost card in each stack was available. When we started, <i>all</i> of the cards in each player's tableau were spread out in a large pile and the player might need to evaluate <i>every</i> one. We also tried limiting each stack's depth but found that this was unnecessary.
<br>• <b>We didn't allow players to move cards in their tableaus.</b> Doing so would have meant players would have to re-evaluate every card and its position. Far too time consuming!
<br>• <b>We severely limited the players' ability to exchange cards</b>, making it a special action they had to unlock in order to use. This felt wrong to me, initially: I figured this would be an essential component of co-operation. Initially we let players hand cards to each other at the cost of 1 political power, then we let players simply swap cards whenever they wanted — but this often meant players would attempt to internalize the entirety of each others' tableaus in order to best min/max the potential of each card. This led to a much longer playtime and a tendency for some players to attempt to direct the action (the "alpha player" syndrome). When we added the card-passing restrictions, these problems disappeared, playtime became much more manageable, and there was still plenty of co-operation.
<br>• <b>We reduced the number of ways you could play a card.</b> We experimented with cards that had "instant effects" (that were played, then discarded) and cards with rollout costs that you'd have to pay in order to add the card to your play area. We removed all of these exceptions in favor of a single, easier-to-understand system.
<br>• <b>We moved global project cards out of the opportunity deck.</b> The global project cards used to be mixed in with all of the opportunity cards. Players would draw them into their hands, then have to try to make a case to the group for rolling them out – while everyone was focused on improving their local economy. We pulled these out of the opportunity deck and into their own deck when we introduced the conference step.
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<br><u>Abandoned Ideas</u>
<br>We also tossed a number of ideas from the game to reduce complexity and better model what was going on. Here are some of the many ideas that got the ax:
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<br>• <b>An elaborate model of battery technology</b> which attempted to model how intermittency could be mitigated. We scrapped this after discussions with Justin Vickers for a <i>much</i> simpler system that also made for a better model.
<br>• <b>Clean energy storage.</b> Turns out, you can't store electricity (at least in these quantities) for 4–5 years anyway.
<br>• <b>Buying and selling energy.</b> Early versions of the game allowed players to buy and sell dirty energy and (with some technology cards) clean electricity with each other.
<br>• <b>Financial capital and political power.</b> These currencies bogged the game down and were presented with a level of fidelity that was largely just made up. We replaced them with a system that used opportunity cards as currency instead.
<br>• <b>Dirty energy demand.</b> This represented the fact that legacy systems that run on fossil fuels can't run on electricity. We ditched the idea of "reducing dirty energy demand" in favor of representing these sources of emissions directly with different tokens. We were then able to model <i>electrification</i> by removing these tokens in exchange for increasing electricity demand.
<br>• <b>Innovation checks.</b> In earlier versions, many of the cards that used speculative technologies had a system in which you'd pay for the card, then draw further cards to see whether you succeeded using a system similar to <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/180263/the-7th-continent"><i>The 7th Continent</i></a>. We simplified this system considerably and limited it to only the R&D cards.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7104148"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/WVUXZOTco8sJQKoPORtXEA__small/img/xcDBkIoCWEIaQB7qD3vOk8_yRlU=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7104148.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>An abandoned concept. This track gated the reduction in cost of new clean electricity plants by the number of battery tags (in aggregate, across players) that were in play. One of four different tracks was used, depending on player count. It was inelegant, awkward, ugly, and incorrect.</i></center>
<br><b>A Long Evolution</b>
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<br>Here's a visualization of how some of the starting actions evolved over the course of <i>Daybreak</i>'s development:
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<br><center><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mBwrjub3Fc">Youtube Video</a></center>
<br><b>Winning and Losing</b>
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<br><b>Matteo:</b> <i>Daybreak</i> has one way to win and three ways to lose.
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<br>In order to win, players need to cut their emissions until they have reversed global warming.
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<br>At the same time, players have to protect their communities from a crescendo of crises so that they can win before it gets too hot, it's too late, or too many communities are in danger.
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<br>Endangering too many communities is the core loss condition (more on this below). The other two – too hot or too late – are ancillary, but worth exploring first because they are tied to the question of when and how the game ends.
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<br><u>When is the game over?</u>
<br>Often one resource in a game acts at the <i>clock</i>. It gradually depletes, and when it runs out, the game ends.
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<br>In co-operative games like <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/30549/pandemic"><i>Pandemic</i></a> and <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/71836/onirim"><i>Onirim</i></a>, the clock is the player deck. In <i>Daybreak</i>, we have a large deck of opportunity cards from which players draw each round to build their solutions engines. Since we encourage players to mine the deck in search of good cards (a.k.a., R&D actions), it wouldn't make sense to make the game end when players run out of cards. It would also send a strange message, as if opportunities for climate action emerged at random, then expired if they were not immediately seized.
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<br><u>What about running out of time?</u>
<br>For several months we resisted setting hard stops in the game. It felt wrong to tell players they have X rounds to solve climate change because the world won't end in 2050 (the current horizon of many governments' plans).
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<br>However, we observed that the length of the round tracker would set strong expectations...and often false ones. Some players would say "We have ten rounds to fix this" at the beginning of games that would end after 3-4 rounds. While some felt relaxed about their time allowance, others were concerned about how long the whole game might take. ("If the first round took us thirty minutes, we'll be still here past midnight!")
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<br>To guide players' expectations and instill a sense of urgency, we progressively shortened the round tracker (from 12+ to 6 rounds) and defined a hard-stop point: <b>If players haven't won by the end of the sixth round, then it's game over and you all lose.</b> In all likelihood, though, if players haven't won by round 6, they have <i>already</i> endangered too many communities and triggered the core loss condition.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7089165"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/41YqgHUI6vC5qG91FR-LEg__small/img/m17HD7Hw5QioTmSN1AEGlFK94bE=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7089165.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br><u>What about running out of carbon?</u>
<br>You can think of the thermometer in <i>Daybreak</i> as your <i>carbon budget</i>. Since (carbon) emissions are directly linked to global warming, in early prototypes we set a cap on the total amount of carbon players can emit before the game is over and lost.
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<br>But as with time, we know the world won't end if global warming reaches 2.0ºC, although we also know that at those levels the conditions for humans (and many other species) to thrive will be severely impacted, and many places on our planet rendered <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">uninhabitable</a>.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7110900"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/ZIhbQVAGz9hl4GRnWFI1Rw__small/img/yuIvCagr94MZSfNArTkgjPW3nMI=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7110900.png" border="0"></a></div> </center>
<br>While setting a loss condition at 2.0ºC might feel arbitrary — or "disturbing" as <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26189312-the-planet-remade" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">Oliver Morton</a> once told us — it helps us communicate that the higher the temperature, the more future generations will suffer. As with the other ancillary loss condition, we tuned the game so that it's rarely triggered. Normally players win or lose way before that point.
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<br><u>What is the core loss condition then?</u>
<br>When we started playtesting our initial prototypes with family and friends, the (only) loss condition was set at 2.0ºC.
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<br>At the time, we also reached out to the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre to seek their advice on how the game was shaping up. In our first meeting, Pablo Suarez made the unforgettable comment that climate action is "not merely a war on carbon", which was a good summary of our game at that point. We realized that while the game was modeling the emissions cycle and energy transition, it didn't include the human suffering and loss caused by climate shocks. Additionally, we lacked a way to represent the efforts to protect people and places from the impacts of those shocks.
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<br>We had to include these dimensions in the game, so we gave each player a set of people tokens and introduced a new loss condition: <b>You lose the game if players collectively lose N people.</b> This centered protecting lives as a core climate goal.
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<br>We didn't want to map people tokens to real population numbers. Doing that would have forced us to give each player a ton of tokens, especially to the player representing the Majority World. We also didn't want the game to suggest that their entire population could be wiped by climate shocks.
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<br>Instead of trying to model populations, we wanted to focus on a threshold of suffering and loss, beyond which the consequences are unbearable or unacceptable.
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<br>Setting that threshold as a <i>collective</i> number would indicate that people are equal, no matter which part of the world they are in. If people in the Majority World are suffering, it doesn't matter how safe people in Europe or in the U.S. are because the game will be lost by everyone when that collective threshold is reached.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7110898"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/YoKiybWbE8scinVPbu4v-w__small/img/7A8fagvMtsn_EnyOoepkfk31cJs=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7110898.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>Each player's people started on their player board, surrounded by resilience tokens</i></center>
<br>This is how it worked. Each player would place an equal number (ten) of people tokens in the middle of the resilience "doughnut" on their player board, then when a crisis would cause some people to become "lost", the tokens would be transferred to a coffin-shaped area on the game board.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7110895"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/bsceD-U6vrdcNylJYtYOjA__small/img/R2skMQIR_xFFkDk9zr0fwuTGImU=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7110895.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>When people were lost, they were piled in a coffin in the upper-right corner of the game board</i></center>
<br>It was a rather macabre metaphor — and also a misleading one. As our advisors pointed out, people don't have to be dead in order to be in trouble. It's much more common for people to be displaced as a result of worsening climate and living conditions than to be killed. To reflect this reality, we changed that state from being <i>lost</i> to being <i>in crisis</i>. This opened up the possibility of people <i>recovering</i>, either being rescued by humanitarian interventions or improving their conditions thanks to socio-economic policies.
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<br>Still, when "people" became "people in crisis" they were moved from the center of each player's attention to the game board. That distance was both physical and psychological: once <i>over there</i>, it was harder to track how many tokens were in the crisis zone, and it felt like they belonged to nobody.
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<br>We realized we wanted players to feel attached to their people, both when they are safe and when they are in crisis, so we changed the loss condition: <b>Everyone loses the game if <i>any</i> one player has N people in crisis.</b>
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7110899"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/Q44ucONat9YdmfvU25IogQ__small/img/lOYugfAOdyBSiWUWDeisQTQrdWs=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7110899.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>The resilience "doughnut" showing people at risk and in crisis</i></center>
<br>This shift meant changing the boards, too. People in crisis would now fall through the cracks of the resilience doughnut, sitting unprotected outside of it. We noticed players would care much more about <i>their</i> people with these rules and layout, but it was still hard to grok how many tokens were in the crisis zone, i.e., how close each player was to triggering a loss for everyone.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7110896"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/e5cRQfSKaM_3a5g6raSx8w__small/img/JCWnHjd89gdJJKgRW7pTC84yVHg=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7110896.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>We then experimented with a more conventional track in which each token in the crisis zone would occupy a designated space, and the danger level is easy to read.
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<br>At that point we changed language and icons from "people" to "communities" to highlight the societal scale of climate change impacts. Also, one too many playtesters confused the people icon for a gendered toilet sign!
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<br>We wondered how granular we could go in representing the human-suffering dimension of climate change. One experiment was a sliding scale in which communities could move from safety, to risk, to crisis and (hopefully) back. This proved too complicated for players to operate.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7110897"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/zrfZ4SmecADmQP80Xc4WRA__small/img/lMFQtWo6ue-hB-6_MIvt7DFCvyw=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7110897.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>Another experiment was to peg the number of communities in crisis to the number of cards people would draw each round. This works well because every additional community in crisis can have a meaningful impact on players, while making it harder and harder for them to win.
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<br><u>What is the win condition then?</u>
<br>The victory condition defines what players should strive for, and therefore what really, ultimately matters in a game. When it comes to climate change, what does it mean to win? What is the ultimate goal of climate policy?
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<br>Our planetary climate system is breaking down because for centuries, certain human activities have been generating <b>more greenhouse gas emissions than our planet can absorb</b>. To prevent catastrophic levels of global warming, cutting those emissions at their source is imperative.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8502320"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/lCOavf-VU9d_U443BMTLLQ__small/img/qYsLeSihBJMne34q9w_sbVKpP2o=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8502320.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>In <i>Daybreak</i>, each round all emissions from all players are dumped on the game board. Some of those get absorbed by carbon sinks on the world map, then the remaining <i>net</i> emissions drive up global warming on the thermometer. This causes a cascade of crises, from extreme weather events to global crop failures and political shocks, which if left unchecked will overwhelm players.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7110894"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/7JU4absZOwdo_9MVerdYrg__small/img/swj26jjNN2fVHqmI4y8IxIRSSIQ=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7110894.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>Each player starts with a vast amount of emissions based on the real-world emissions of the world power they oversee. Round after round, they are challenged to reduce their own emissions, while preserving and boosting collective carbon sinks.
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<br>We decided the win condition would trigger the moment emissions stop accumulating in the thermometer and start to decline instead. In other words, when the planet, through its carbon sinks, can <b>absorb more emissions than human activities generate</b>. That moment is called <i>drawdown</i>.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8502322"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/mwZs8z1ZEpDrz6v4oAIdkw__small/img/2Vw2H75zH_c50kUtOPO_HgQ2IT8=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8502322.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>Drawdown represents a vital milestone. It means we have stopped global warming and reversed the dangerous trend of the last couple of centuries. In the real world, drawdown doesn't mean the job is done. In order to make our planet habitable for future generations, we must continue to bring down greenhouse gas concentrations to pre-industrial levels. We decided the game won't model that phase, but instead will focus on the urgent, existential challenge of stopping emissions levels (and therefore temperatures) from rising.
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<br>What's the difference between <i>drawdown</i> and <i>net zero</i>? Net zero was originally used by climate scientists to describe the moment when the sum of all emissions produced globally by human activities is equal to the amount of emissions absorbed by carbon sinks. Since then the phrase "net zero" has become a rather abused phrase as many governments and corporations have been dressing up their emission-accounting tricks as net zero pledges. Indeed, we found players tend to be more familiar with "net zero" than "drawdown". That meant our definition of net zero could well be different from what some players might have heard in other contexts. "Drawdown" allows us to avoid any potential confusion (which is rather important when it comes to evaluating a win condition). The term also feels more evocative and ambitious; instead of min-maxing their carbon accounting to reach neutrality, we encourage players to cut emissions as deeply as possible.
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<br><u>And how does it <i>feel</i> to win?</u>
<br>In our early prototypes, the game would end immediately after players achieved drawdown. While this made for a clear and explosive moment of joy, it also meant that crises (which come after emissions in the round order) could be ignored by players when they felt they were close to drawdown. This rule was sending the misleading message that once we reach the drawdown milestone, everything will be solved — no more extreme weather events, no more suffering. It also drained a lot of tension from the endgame.
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<br>We therefore moved the victory check after the resolution of the last round of planetary effects and crisis cards. To recap, when players reach drawdown, they know this is going to be the last round...but it's not over yet as they still need to survive one last crisis step. Will they make it?
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<br>If any player's resilience is low or if they have a dangerous number of communities in crisis (as often happens in the late game), then the tension is high and you bite your nails until the last crisis card. To use a football analogy, it feels like a 3-2 victory when your team has scored the last goal ten minutes before the end, and relief comes only with the final whistle.
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<br><b>Playful Activism</b>
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<br>Designing a game about the climate crisis feels like trying to photograph a rapidly moving subject. News both hopeful and terrifying keeps erupting, so we could tinker on this forever — but we also couldn't wait to share this labor of love with the world to see what you make of it.
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<br>As we chased this subject over the last couple of years, we started to filter news articles and net-zero pledges through the lens of <i>Daybreak</i>. We realized what we've built is an interactive model that helps us make sense of what is happening (or not happening) on the climate front, and to have deep conversations with our friends about the future of our planet.
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<br>We were over the moon to hear from testers, weeks after they played <i>Daybreak</i>, that it changed how they understand the problem and its potential solutions — and they told us that while the game doesn't shy away from the loss and destabilization ahead, it's empowering to play out the <a href="https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2018/10/special-climate-report-1-5oc-is-possible-but-requires-unprecedented-and-urgent-action/" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">rapid and far-reaching transformations</a> required to stop global warming, to build a sustainable future where everyone can thrive as well as survive.
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<br><i>Daybreak</i>, in its playful blend of climate science, tech, policy and internationalism, reminds us that all this is <i>possible</i>. If we can imagine it, we can make it happen.
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<br>Climate change is here, and it won't go away if we ignore it, but getting involved in climate action doesn't always have to be serious. We can be playful activists. Taking part in social change can be fun!
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<br>We hope playing <i>Daybreak</i> helps you zoom out from the chaos, understand the climate crisis, and join the conversation.
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<br><b>Replayability</b>
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<br><b>Matt:</b> Let's say you survived your first game. Can you do it again while keeping temperatures lower, while avoiding certain solutions, or while creating an even more resilient society?
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<br>For a long time, we didn't give the question of replayability much brainspace as we were busy developing the core game. We just imagined players could make the game harder by starting with a higher temperature or resolving more crisis cards each round.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7131460"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/vb-ZflFMU_Jnxn6PdbOdOg__small/img/m2yKCpT1Bmcl5-uOe-hBpfJo5xM=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7131460.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>Early versions used a variable thermometer to increase difficulty</i></center>
<br>While this effectively made the game more difficult to win, it was also a limited system, so Alex suggested we take inspiration from <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/324856/the-crew-mission-deep-sea"><i>The Crew</i></a>'s mission deck and think about how we could present players a scalable set of new challenges and narratives over time.
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<br>We immediately liked the idea and developed a deck of about forty challenges and advantages, which players can combine to make the game easier or harder, either for individual players or for the whole team.
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<br><u>Group Challenges, Advantages, and Modifiers</u>
<br>The challenges span from <b>starting values modifiers</b> (e.g., one player starts with less resilience, more emissions of a certain type, or more communities in crisis) to <b>additional victory conditions</b> (e.g., in order to win, we have to also keep global warming below 1.5ºC, or have 100% clean energy generation, or have no communities in crisis) and <b>rule modifiers</b> (e.g., if one of my stacks has more than four cards, I must discard the excess cards).
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7131458"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/WvaRB-Dy4sXv21S1_j4qjQ__small/img/5FjFoGCoBPESkGgBUlgFcMLXKm8=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7131458.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>Sample team challenges</i></center>
<br>The advantages can also modify starting values, rules, or win conditions in order to give players an easier journey.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7131457"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/nVKH5h_XVbOSBLr5-f90uw__small/img/n98vx-IAYPSHkutQijPcwZiBgw0=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7131457.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>Sample team advantages</i></center>
<br>These cards also allow players to explore <b>counterfactual scenarios</b>. For example, who is responsible for the emissions "embedded" in all the products we buy in the Global North, but are manufactured in the Global South? What if we used a framework that doesn't just take into account the emissions produced within the borders of a country (a.k.a., <i>territorial emissions</i>) but also those that are imported (a.k.a., <i><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">consumption emissions</a></i>)? How does that shift the game balance?
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7131459"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/X8DzJ6vvIsoMfXqfUME7cQ__small/img/ur3OwCEgVKjEvMMEE4uISX8wxrk=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7131459.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>A sample team modifier</i></center>
<br><u>Individual Challenges and Advantages</u>
<br>In addition to the challenges, advantages, and modifiers that affect the whole team, we added the ability to adjust the game by handing out individual challenges and advantages. You can use these on their own — for example, to make the game harder or easier for a specific player or for each of the players — or you can combine them with the cards that affect the whole team.
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<br>The result is a rich landscape of options for adjusting the game. You can make the game different, harder, or easier — or even harder in some ways but easier in others. And you can do this for each player or for the team.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7131456"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/Mu99r9CcsWQxSWybnk6IkA__small/img/X8eltgr8PT4Di-uqRhIHP9QrlBE=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7131456.png" border="0"></a></div></center><center><i>Sample challenges and advantages for individual players</i></center>
<br><b>Wrapping Up</b>
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<br>As our designer diary comes to a close, we'd like to leave you pondering this quote from "<a href="https://commongood.cc/reader/a-few-rules-for-predicting-the-future-by-octavia-e-butler/" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">A Few Rules For Predicting The Future</a>" by Octavia E. Butler, author of the seminal novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Sower_(novel)" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener"><i>Parable of the Sower</i></a>:
<br><font color="#2121A4"><div class="quote"><div class="quotebody"><i>There's no single answer that will solve all of our future problems.
<br>There's no magic bullet.
<br>Instead there are thousands of answers — at least.
<br>You can be one of them if you choose to be.</i></div></div></font></div>
Designer Preview: Res Arcana Duo
<div><p>by <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/blogger/614/tom-lehmann">Tom Lehmann</a></p>
<div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8380702"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/V9wZrr2DgH26_1VRNjy6jQ__small/img/ataWjYzshYJYwwlO5qyEbZD8I2Y=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8380702.jpg" border="0"></a></div><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/427345/res-arcana-duo"><b><i>Res Arcana Duo</i></b></a> is a two-player version of <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/262712/res-arcana">Res Arcana</a>, a game in which players build artifacts in a fantasy version of the early Rennaissance with both alchemy and magic being real.
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<br>Additionally, <i>Res Arcana Duo</i> is <i>Res Arcana</i>'s third expansion, with all new cards that can be mixed with it.
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<br><b><i>"To Run Where the Brave Dare not Go..."</i></b>
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<br>When I met with <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/40312/sand-castle-games">Sand Castle Games</a> to discuss a possible third expansion for <i>Res Arcana</i>, they surprised me by asking for a product that was both:
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<br>• A standalone game for two, suitable for brand new players, and
<br>• An expansion for experienced <i>Res Arcana</i> players.
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<br>Further, since this product couldn't be priced much more than the previous expansions, it would be nice if it also A) didn't have lots of material and B) was fairly portable — something you could slip into a backpack and play at a café.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495619"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/MO4yDDlHS-TEyFUp7Aw2Pg__small/img/FJDd4M0s-r9XmQmgCi2kQ8GLbWQ=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495619.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br><i>Gulp!</i> I replied, "Um...I'm not sure if I can pull this off, but I'll try."
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495601"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/16Rs4wT1XPc50FVoJ1twBQ__small/img/qMPY04PwFKCsp-2K2ewZuKGTnNE=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495601.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495602"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/E5XXeLaahVO-FdwUQhZ41A__small/img/qe5p4yOZX88AR1ka9daLEkdR8jE=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495602.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>Luckily, <i>Res Arcana</i> is extremely extensible. Most of its components — mages, artifacts, monuments, and Places of Power — are randomly selected each game. Could I devise a set of simple but interesting items that would work for both audiences?
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<br><b>Two-Player Considerations</b>
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<br>While several of my games, such as <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28143/race-for-the-galaxy"><i>Race for the Galaxy</i></a> and <i>Res Arcana</i> itself, are often played two-player, they were designed for more players.
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<br>Many two-player-only games (except wargames) don't feature direct confrontation, as often players — particularly couples — prefer a more constructive experience.
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<br><i>Res Arcana</i>'s attack powers counter one-dimensional strategies based on a Place of Power and just one of the five essence types. For <i>Duo</i>, I decided to not have any single essence Places of Power and therefore no attacks. To further reduce complexity, <i>Duo</i> also has no react powers. (In <i>Res Arcana</i>, these occur out of turn.)
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<br>Instead, I started by devising two artifacts that gain essences or gold based on the number of artifacts or monuments that your rival has in play.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495603"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/wqfRnJNUwhXAuZqGVJ-YHA__small/img/wIqvqVSJsE9ktEU9k_Tc96X0uE0=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495603.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>This gives players a way to piggyback on their rival's strategy, a non-attack form of interaction.
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<br>The Gold Key is quite flexible; it can be used either to enhance a monument strategy of your own or to both profit from your rival's monument strategy and, by using the gained gold to buy monuments yourself, interfere with it.
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<br><b>Material Considerations</b>
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<br>The previous expansions, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/288168/res-arcana-lux-et-tenebrae"><i>Lux et Tenebrae</i></a> and <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/340375/res-arcana-perlae-imperii"><i>Perlae Imperii</i></a>, each had 4 mages, 4 monuments, 12 artifacts, 2 double-sided places of power, 1-2 new magic items, plus something "extra" (scrolls or pearls).
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<br><i>Duo</i> supplies 4 more artifacts and 3 more monuments than these expansions do, plus 5 duplicate magic items from the base game (in a reduced size with a different background color to avoid mixing issues).
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8380709"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/Yf_ejIYFBcFRn5jIm0pOgg__small/img/NdUQNxdmrKf2VTRhNzBliyn5f5c=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8380709.png" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>With rules, reference cards, a mini-essence tray, and 60 wooden essence tokens, this is enough for a two-player game.
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<br>With only two Places of Power on offer each game, I was concerned that <i>Duo</i> play would sometimes devolve into "each player goes for a different Place of Power" or "one person goes for a Place of Power while the other builds monuments". I wanted more scoring possibilities, so players could earn a mix of VPs from several sources.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495605"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/J6vnu20RsrlFne19GT8jCw__small/img/S57G8Q-PMFr2yq3cGbjIgLHHIFQ=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495605.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>While a few <i>Res Arcana</i> artifacts are worth 1 VP, the Robes is the first artifact whose VPs scale. Of course, the Silver Key allows a rival to piggyback off of it...
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<br>The Crown of Command is the first <i>Res Arcana</i> artifact that can gain monuments, either at half-price (all monuments cost 4 gold and are worth 1-3 VPs) or for 5 death essences. It encourages acquiring monuments over several rounds, which makes the Gold Key more interesting, either to support or to piggyback off of this strategy.
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<br>Together, these artifacts encourage players to both go for a combination of Places of Power, monuments, and artifacts that score points, which increases tension over which player can grab a desirable monument first from the two currently face-up monuments.
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<br><b>Creatures and Dragons, Oh My!</b>
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<br>Some <i>Res Arcana</i> artifacts are also either creatures or dragons (or both). <i>Duo</i> continues this.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495606"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/Su4cTCX4vXeZVXe2Voj7GA__small/img/M3Pt5wyPdgTmEjdBiXEqlS3aSDQ=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495606.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>(Several <i>Duo</i> artifacts have the demon type for compatibility with the <i>Lux et Tenebrae</i> expansion, which added demons.)
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<br>Two Places of Power are designed around creatures or dragons.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495607"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/mTXVj7I0KitKVT5Y5SuOtw__small/img/1tSZGG8qfQ8Vbn8I4pKaVRW43CY=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495607.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>The Druid Circle rewards having lots of creatures to use its first power several times in a round, while the Dragon's Cave requires a power to straighten it in order to use it with two dragons in a round (or two straighten powers to use both it and the same dragon twice).
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<br>I've used the obvious fact that tiles have two sides to shape play in both <i>Res Arcana</i> and <i>New Frontiers</i>. Should these two Places of Power be on different tiles or on the two sides of the same tile?
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<br>Here, I assigned them to the same tile, so that either creatures or dragons always synergize with a Place of Power in every <i>Duo</i> game, but not both. This provides variety from game to game.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495608"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/u0KMxG0BHvhAjY1oIM9Nvw__small/img/J7SrZY5WY7tBtTIJqDkD7I08cs4=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495608.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>Similarly, the Dwarven Forge provides card draws while the Elvish Heartwood, on its tile's other side, has a power that involves discarding a card from hand. This affects the value of cards with retrieve (gain a card from your discard) or draw powers from one game to the next.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495609"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/5yMH27j2FRd0LP9AWDufZg__small/img/_ODuCXOx96XA4wtZPxJl4KrCgAc=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495609.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br><b>Drafting for Two</b>
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<br>In <i>Res Arcana</i>, each player has their own deck of eight artifacts to either build or discard for essences. With <i>Duo</i> having exactly sixteen artifacts, any artifact that one player doesn't have in their hand or deck has to be in their opponent's hand or deck.
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<br>We took advantage of this to devise a new way to draft artifacts to form each player's personal deck. (We supply preset hands for new players' first few games.) In <i>Duo</i>, the sixteen artifacts are shuffled and dealt eight to each player. They each then draw two, keep one, and set the other artifact aside face down for their rival.
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<br>For example, a player might draw:
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495610"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/mEMCMH3TwFqSELvCXkttig__small/img/bgQvzUBloXeVYxuqmb-glg4gaVM=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495610.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>and must pick one to keep and the other to go to their rival.
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<br>Each player does this four times. They then examine the four cards they kept plus the four cards they got before shuffling them to form their personal deck.
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<br>This new draft worked well. It's fast and simple enough for newer players — with just four choices to make — while still producing interesting decisions for experienced players familiar with all sixteen <i>Duo</i> artifacts.
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<br>Suppose after picking between the two artifacts above, you then draw:
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495611"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/AlEuBwGrOahB_okYLA0UCA__small/img/02_2PPheMGF1c5c2PnuUI7VruCg=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495611.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>Which do you keep, and which would you give to your rival?
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<br><b>Something New, Something Revisited</b>
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<br>The <i>Res Arcana</i> dragons all had attack powers. For <i>Duo</i>, without attacks, I could make a cheap dragon with no powers (the Faerie Dragon above), but what interesting power could I give a costly dragon?
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<br>Let's suppose this big dragon is sleeping (and therefore not attacking anyone). What if it provided one gold each turn, representing its horde being quietly stolen, one piece at a time. That's a bit abstract, but okay. However, what if you could use your mage to sneak in and steal a second gold?
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495612"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/5QAyA5Job5EDsxqm3WRJ2w__small/img/ogVUeJjJMWJF6kwrtR7ZTLUn74Y=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495612.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>Now, do you use your mage for its own power or to get an extra gold? What if other powers existed that could straighten your mage? Powers involving mages are a new <i>Res Arcana</i> concept, which made me quite happy as I wanted <i>Duo</i> to not be just a simplified <i>Res Arcana</i>, but to offer new experiences as an expansion.
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<br>The Crown of Command, Crucible, Gold Key, and Sleeping Dragon differ from the "mass gold" strategies in <i>Res Arcana</i>, where a player turns a large number of one essence into the same amount of gold, then proceeds to buy all the monuments one after another in a single round.
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<br>Mass gold is still possible in <i>Duo</i> via the Mystic Font's second power, while the Squared Circle enables a player to put an essence on a Place of Power to score another VP.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495613"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/DvDbtat-ghV7VY3gJY6C3g__small/img/ix_Ol8RlQbis19RM5G71Os7YBUM=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495613.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>These two artifacts also provide compatibility with the <i>Perlae Imperii</i> expansion, which added pearls. The Mystic Font's first power, when playing with <i>Perlae Imperii</i>, can be used to gain a pearl instead of four life. The Squared Circle can place any essence on a component which includes, in <i>Perlae Imperii</i> games, possibly a pearl on the Pearl Bed Place of Power (where it will score 3 total VPs).
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<br>In <i>Res Arcana</i>, players often pursue strategies that run at different rates, where one strategy might be slower to reach 10 VPs but produce more VPs than the other one. Victory checks occur at the end of each round — which means "more VPs later in the same number of rounds" should win — but a few powers produce victory checks in the <i>middle</i> of a round.
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<br>This allows a player who reaches 10 VPs first to possibly win before their VP total is surpassed. Previously, all check-victory-now powers have been on Places of Power. For <i>Duo</i>, I put one on an artifact and one on a monument:
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495614"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/XA08PfTBEDRYa8xNnMLGOg__small/img/11LnTGd9v8CP3eHMHbOxGyydmvk=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495614.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>This gives players increased agency over when a game ends.
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<br><b>Testing, Testing...</b>
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<br>As I developed <i>Duo</i>, testing proceeded along three tracks:
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<br>• Improving the <i>Duo</i>-only experience,
<br>• Making sure <i>Duo</i> worked as a <i>Res Arcana</i> expansion, and
<br>• Validating that <i>Duo</i> works for brand new players.
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<br>There's enough variety in <i>Duo</i> that players new to <i>Res Arcana</i> can replay it many times, perhaps fifty times, as they discover new interactions and become more proficient. Then, if they want more content, they can always add <i>Res Arcana</i> itself for sixty new game cards and ten more Places of Power.
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<br><center><div style=""><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8495615"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/4UNx3d1h4Q5Gkuwsbh87nQ__small/img/gFOSf7sH08QU-DbpRS9FIdGjiOk=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8495615.jpg" border="0"></a></div></center>
<br>One concern I had was whether experienced players would enjoy exploring <i>Duo</i> on its own or whether they would simply merge it with <i>Res Arcana</i>. I was reassured by reports from experienced players that they enjoyed playing <i>Duo</i> about 15-20 times on its own, exploring its new content and draft, before merging it in.
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<br>This is due to the "tightness" of the draft and just two Places of Power (compared to four for two players when playing with other expansions), plus the new cards that buy monuments incrementally, leech essences off your rival, and check victory now. These combine to produce an interesting, tense feel a bit different from <i>Res Arcana</i>.
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<br>The result is that experienced players get two successive enjoyable experiences with <i>Duo</i>: first, as a standalone, then after mixing <i>Duo</i> with their other cards, the fun of finding new combos with them.
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<br>Two pairs of remote testers — Alex and Jessica Chen, and Theresa and Thomas Pantle — did a fantastic job of finding broken combos when adding <i>Duo</i> to the rest of the <i>Res Arcana</i> cards, as well as providing valuable feedback throughout. I'm grateful for all the testers who played and commented.
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<br>Brand new <i>Res Arcana</i> players often take five or six rounds to reach 10 VPs, while experienced players typically reach 10 VPs in just four rounds. To ensure that games don't drag on for players brand new to <i>Res Arcana</i>, <i>Duo</i> recommends that these players initially play to just 7 VPs.
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<br>This allows new players to play a couple of quick games with preset hands before removing the "training wheels" and playing to 10 VPs using the <i>Duo</i> draft.
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<br><b>Finishing Touches</b>
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<br><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameartist/11886/julien-delval">Julien Delval</a>, as always, did an amazing job of illustration while <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/12519/cyrille-daujean">Cyril Daujean</a> produced great graphics.
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<br>If you don't sleeve your cards, you can still fit <i>Duo</i> and both previous expansions in the base game box. If you do sleeve, you will need to either remove its insert or store some cards separately.
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<br><i>Duo</i>'s card well is designed to hold thirty sleeved cards, so it can be used for storage and — since the <i>Duo</i> box is small enough to easily slip into a backpack — also become a travel version.
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<br>Experienced players who own all the expansions, before heading to a café or away on a trip, now can grab <i>Duo</i>, with a random set of cards and tiles in it, and enjoy exploring just those cards and tiles <i>Duo</i>-style.
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<br>Our hope is that <i>Duo</i>, at US$25 MSRP (compared to the base game's US$40 MSRP), will entice more people to try <i>Res Arcana</i> while still providing a good value as an expansion for experienced players.
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<br><i>Res Arcana Duo</i> was a challenging product to design and develop. It's both a standalone game whose expansion is its original game, as well as an expansion for players who already own <i>Res Arcana</i>. Enjoy!
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<br><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/150/thomas-lehmann">Tom Lehmann</a>
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