Before we can create a better future, we must imagine a better future.

That was my mantra as I discovered Daybreak, the recent board game co-designed by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace. I first played it only days after finishing Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Both of these artifacts, board game and novel, are about confronting climate change through some combination of hard work, human ingenuity, and international cooperation. Early reports on the board game were mixed. It seemed Daybreak didn’t capture the same highs as Leacock’s previous cooperative titles — a tall order given his authorship of Pandemic. More importantly, it seemed that Daybreak may have tipped the scale from hopeful to sanguine. One critic went so far as to declare it “blindly optimistic.”

I’m of multiple minds on all counts. Daybreak isn’t Leacock’s finest plaything; with apologies to his many Pandemic and Forbidden Island/Desert/Sky/Jungle fans, that would be Era: Medieval Age. What it is, rather, is his most conceptual and most clear-headed design, a board game with a thesis, a tone, an intended takeaway. As prognostics go, I suspect it may well prove too optimistic — but for a different reason than some others have concluded. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Take that, oceans!

The twin villains of Daybreak are a chemical element and those who produce it — which, if you’ve been paying even the slightest bit of attention, also happens to be the same people who are now dedicated to reducing that production. Carbon. Expressed as charcoal cubes, atmospheric carbon is the result whenever humankind generates power, manufactures luxuries, herds continent-spanning quantities of cattle, operates cities with hostility toward pedestrians and cyclists, or, well, does most of the stuff that keeps our modern society chugging along.

Carbon is your core concern at every step. When Leacock and Menapace’s game was announced, much was made of how Daybreak departed from the formula that Leacock cemented with Pandemic. You know the type: during your turn you can suppress three problems, but each round adds four or five problems, which according to basic arithmetic means you should probably hustle and solve the root causes of the zombie apocalypse. And it’s true enough that Daybreak isn’t quite like Pandemic. Nor is it quite like Leacock’s Forbidden series. Here the rising tide is that unceasing influx of carbon. Except in Daybreak, your goal isn’t to escape. Unlike the models found in Pandemic and Forbidden, which imperiled the player with a spreading infection or rising waters while tasking them with solving some separate problem, here there’s no way off the island, no panacea to discover at the last minute. To succeed, you must press the waters back into the sea.

Mother Earth can pull her weight. Trees and oceans pull carbon from the atmosphere each turn, blunting the sting of humanity’s rapid expansion. But this can only accomplish so much, and along the way she may become injured. When forests catch fire, the planet’s ability to subtract carbon is diminished, while also releasing those forests’ carbon into the air. When the oceans grow too warm, the churn that sucks carbon downward is stilled. Your goal isn’t merely to remove the threat of carbon accumulation, but reverse it entirely. This is drawdown, that elusive moment when more carbon is being subtracted from the atmosphere than added.

A session of Pandemic where you win by removing every infection cube sounds very dull indeed, necessitating a novel approach. Unlike Pandemic and the Forbidden series, there is no geography to consider. Rather than occupying a definite space, the entire world is your domain. You play as one of four entities, each geographically bounded in fact but not in terms of play. China, the United States, Europe, and the Majority World all occupy an identical non-space. You are everywhere and nowhere at once. As such, your projects have infinite reach, applying their effects to the global balance sheet of carbon regardless of any real-world concerns. To wit, the setup shows trees and ocean currents dotted across the map, but spreading them around has no gameplay effect. It’s easier to pile them all in one place, the better for counting.

China begins turning their industry around.

The absence of any definite position in Daybreak’s world has a mixed effect. On the one hand, it’s abstract in a way that some of Leacock’s previous games have not been, which is quite the thing given the game’s real-world subject matter.

On the other, this emancipation from geography is refreshing, permitting factions to be identified via subtler markers than location and encouraging a sense of global fraternity. Where geography can prove limiting, here you are a citizen of the entire world, and the effects of your actions are felt everywhere. China produces huge amounts of dirty energy thanks to its role in worldwide manufacturing, but has the right starting cards to pivot rapidly. The United States has an outsized luxuries market, requiring very little energy in theory given its tiny population, but drives so many cars and eats so much steak that its emissions are considerable. Europe is small and nimble, and stands as a gateway for imperiled communities across the globe. Everyone else, represented by the Majority World, is underdeveloped and has soaring energy costs, but may choose to develop more flexibly.

It’s in this light that Daybreak’s abstraction comes across both as its greatest strength, its most important thesis statement, and the source of some critics’ insistence that its worldview is hopelessly naïve. There is no “semi” in front of this game’s cooperative mode. To play as one faction is to play as the whole human race. Daybreak presumes that Europe and China and the United States have it within themselves to care about the global south and one another. Within the game’s fiction, there is no room for, say, the fantasy that one nation could secure itself from the coming catastrophe with a regional haven. There is no point at which one nation will declare that they’ve labored enough and turn against the others.

Indeed, in gameplay terms, the moment one player-nation falls behind is when the game sparks to life. In one session, China was battered by so many disasters that its board nearly overflowed with communities in crisis, one of the game’s many routes to failure. Europe was proud to step in, first migrating those communities into its own borders, then alleviating their beleaguered status. This depiction of responsible global citizenship was the finest moment Daybreak presented. Another session saw the favor repaid as China generated impressive amounts of clean energy and then exported them to the other nations at the table, single-handedly driving a green revolution.

Environmental tipping points tend to cascade into real trouble.

These moments are Daybreak at its best, but they’re rarer than they ought to be. In sessions with multiple players, as opposed to the solitaire mode, there are only so many points of interaction. Everybody picks a shared project each round, but these are minor enough that they constitute the most easily forgotten phase of the entire game. Other than that, players often spend the majority of the game’s playtime with their heads down, laboring in relative isolation to get their card engines running. The gameplay itself is straightforward and compelling, if uninteresting to talk about, dominated by card-play redolent of Terraforming Mars and Ark Nova, sending everyone into the deck in search of cards and tags that trigger off one another. The effect is that of a toolbox that rewards a good rummage.

As rewarding as its cardplay is, however, it’s easy to imagine a version of this game that featured more interlocking concerns, such as cards that relied on a neighbor’s involvement to reach their fullest effect. But that isn’t the game we got, and the absence of significant cooperation makes the game’s collaborative worldview seem even more distant. There are opportunities to foster kinship between player-nations, and in those moments the game proves its thesis of mutualism. It provides a path forward by demonstrating how we feel good when we work to elevate someone else’s position or alleviate the suffering of our fellow humans. But such moments are fleeting and may not even manifest in any given session. If the game had better exemplified its own emphasis on collaboration, maybe it would have evaded some of its critiques.

For my part, however, the game’s collaborative optimism is only half of the story, and it’s a donnée I can accept readily enough. The other half has to do with means.

There was a moment in our last session that demonstrated my feelings. I mentioned earlier that every round the table picks a single shared project to work on. There are heaps of these in the deck. (Really, there are heaps of everything, covering such a gamut of technologies and programs and possibilities that it’s entirely reasonable that the flavor text has been hidden away behind a QR code. One could easily spend hours poring over the game’s text and not get bored.) In this case, we were getting ready to select our shared project. I drew one off the deck: a sustainable policy convention. Per tradition, I read it aloud to the table. If we enacted this policy, we would need to invest two funding cards, but it would let us freely share cards with the regulation tag. Good stuff, and a pathway to greater collaboration between players. I then drew the next proposal: an eco-fascist government. I started to read the effect, only to quickly realize that I’d drawn from the crisis deck instead of the project deck. This was one of many troubles that could beset us, alongside collapsing infrastructure and heatwaves, not a policy we could vote into effect. I tossed the card back into its stack and drew from the proper deck.

We did it, fam!

But a thrill had gone through me. Not because I like the idea of fostering an eco-fascist government. Eco-fascism is just racism in a new package. As the climate crisis becomes harder to ignore, far-right figures can no longer dismiss it as alarmism, and instead attempt to pin its effects on the developing world. Eco-fascism is about locking down borders and punishing other people, not about checking our own consumption and responsibilities. It goes against Daybreak’s core messaging.

That thrill, however, had been real. It was the thrill of seeing the game’s optimism not only presented, but tested. In The Ministry for the Future, a heatwave that kills millions spurs climate radicals to begin destroying cruise ships and private jets. In Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, one of last year’s most gripping films and a fictionalized demonstration of Andreas Malm’s controversial book of the same title, people from disparate backgrounds come together to destroy oil infrastructure in an act of “self-defense.” These stories emphasized cooperation, yes, but also questioned which activities were sufficient or ethical in order to effect change.

By comparison, Daybreak feels so very much like a board game. A good board game, one that covers great swaths of research and information and new ground for Leacock, but still a board game, complete with the assumption that board games ought to declutter the tangled ethical landscape of their subject matter for ease of consumption. Daybreak was made without plastics, instead using biodegradable containers and cards, wooden and paper components, and stickers in place of shrink. This is a laudable effort, and I applaud CMYK as a publisher for actualizing their game’s message in production. But its approach to climate justice has been as carefully curated as a bonsai tree. For me, Daybreak’s great hurdle of optimism isn’t that rivals can come together to fight an anthropogenic disaster. It’s that those united rivals will agree so readily on a course of action that happens to coincide with Leacock and Menapace’s sensibilities.

Getting hot in here.

In this regard, Daybreak represents something interesting indeed: game design as climate advocacy. And not any old climate advocacy, but a very particular cross-section that’s collaborative, pacifistic, and, above all, legal.

There’s plenty to be said about how such an approach favors those in positions of relative security and comfort. Despite being filled with ideas about how to combat climate change, it evades the topic’s most uncomfortable questions. Ironically, this emphasis on legal courses of action is very much the point. Although Daybreak edges into simulative territory, it isn’t actually striving for simulation. Nor is it agitprop. All ethical considerations have been removed because it’s a call to individual action — and not the pig of “reducing your carbon footprint,” or whatever initiative an oil company wants to persuade you will have any sort of impact. Rather, it’s a call to get involved in the sciences, to understand which technologies and programs hold promise, to lobby for change. Above all, to begin imagining a world that isn’t overrun with smokestacks and pools of arsenic and rainwater filled with microplastics.

Do I find that goal too optimistic? Too naïve? Too absent of ethical depth? Too, dare I say the word, privileged?

Oh, who cares what I think. Daybreak is a game I can’t help but enjoy despite my reservations. Like all board game models, the one presented here is limited and imperfect. But it does something remarkable. It eases the path toward climate action. Everything about the game is geared in that direction. The career descriptions behind those QR codes. The way the gameplay reinforces urgency but evades despair. The lovely rulebook, with its careful introduction that details how everything works rather than slamming its reader with a list of components. Daybreak wants to show players how they can take a hand in pioneering a better world. It’s a beautiful vision. Maybe even a board game can help us imagine it.

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A complimentary copy was provided.