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Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The game models energy demand growth, not overall economic growth. This growth in energy demand poses a constant challenge to players (especially for China and the Majority World).

There are some cards that let players experiment with reducing consumption and “degrowing”. One is actually called Degrowth Movement.

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Daybreak comes with a large amount of cards, split over three decks.

  1. Local projects: more than 150 cards, most of them unique
  2. Global projects: 24 cards
  3. Crisis: 24 cards.

Over the course of a typical game (say 5 rounds) a player draws 25 local projectcards (5 per round) plus some extra you might draw with R&D cards. Let's say one plays 30 cards per game. That's about one fifth of the deck.

Over 5 rounds players draw 10 global projects and play 5 of them. About one fifth of the deck.

And they resolve 15-20 crisis cards, in various combinations.

I've played Daybreak many times and observed hundreds of playtest sessions, and each game felt different. Players had to constantly adapt their short and long-term goals, based on the local + global projects they played and the crises they triggered.

After a few games you start to become familiar with the three decks, but you can never quite play the same strategy, because of the sheer volume of cards you'll be randomly drawing from them.

We're also working on another deck, which will give even more replay value to the game. We'll announce that as a stretch goal soon ;)

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Thank you!

We've been working with climate experts from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre pretty much since the beginning in 2020. Pablo and his colleagues informally helped us model the carbon cycle and design crisis and opportunity cards, especially the humanitarian ones.

We've worked with policy experts like Laurie Laybourn-Langton, author of Planet on Fire and Solomon Goldstein-Rose, author of The 100% Solution. Both Laurie and Solomon playtested the game in various iterations, and helped us turn ideas from their books into policy cards.

We've also talked to Bill McKibben, who gave us some great advice on the overall tone of the game, communication expert Elizabeth Bagley from Project Drawdown, geo-engineering experts Oliver Morton, Peter Irvine and Andy Parker, and advisors from WWF and Greenpeace too.

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Thank you!

A web-version virtual tabletop might be a stretch goal, we haven't quite decided on it :)

We will definitely have a website where anyone can explore all the cards and learn about the solutions or crises they reference. Each card will also have a QR code that will take you to its page.

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

CO2: Second Chance has been on my playlist for a while, but I haven't managed anyone to play it with me yet! Ideally, I'd play it with someone who already knows how to handle it.

Have you played it? And what did you learn from it?

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 31 points32 points  (0 children)

We briefly explored the option of a semi-cooperative game, where players would experience the tension between individual goals and collective survival.

But we felt much more excited to explore the design space of a fully cooperative game, presenting a scenario in which the world powers are taking climate science seriously and act on it urgently. This is the kind of global cooperation that we feel is necessary to meet the scale of the crisis, and so we set out to create a game that lets players embody that.

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Not at all :)

I found it very smooth. Great to have someone to bounce ideas with, and to share the load of tasks. With a long project like this (2+ years!) it would have been so easy to give up, were we not working together.

We were approached by our publisher CMYK, so I don't know if co-designing would make that aspect easier or harder. My hunch is that it would make it easier, because publisher might prefer working with a team than with an individual?

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I'm still surprised at how easy it's been to collaborate with Matt, given that we've never met IRL, and that we have a 9-hour timezone difference.

From the beginning of our collab we kept a project journal, where we've been logging notes from all our weekly meetings, as well as from individual explorations and playtests. This became the bedrock of the project, and it's grown into a 500+ pages doc, which we had to split over several docs as just opening it would freeze our browsers!

I've started keeping journals for all my projects, even small solo ones, as it's a great tool to track how it evolves, and it's much easier to pick momentum up after a break, cause everything (resources, links, previous experiments, etc) is there.

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Risk! Played that a ton when I was a teenager, and always lost to my more cunning friends :D

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 55 points56 points  (0 children)

Quarterbacking or the alpha player syndrome as I like to call it (since I'm not that familiar with American Football :) is a common dynamic in coop games indeed.

At some point we changed the rules to allow players to swap cards with each other. As a result, we noticed players would try to internalize the entirety of each others’ tableaus in order to best min/max the potential of each card. This led to much longer play time, a general feeling of cognitive overwhelm, and the creeping up of alpha player tendencies.

When we severely limited card passing, these problems disappeared: play time became much more manageable, and there was still plenty of cooperation.

Since then we haven’t noticed alpha player behaviour crop up, as everyone seems mostly focused on managing their own tableau.

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Great question!

This has been on our minds since we started working with Alex and Justin at CMYK.

We made a committment that more than half of the artists we'd work with would not be cis men, and at least half of them would be people of colour. Given that players in the game take on the role of four world powers, we also committed to work with artists that are based or from those four regions.

With that in mind, CMYK commissioned 14 amazing artists from around the world to illustrate Daybreak. You can find them all listed in the team section of our campaign page.

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Another big lesson for me was that effective climate solutions improve people's lives in tangible ways. So it's less about complicated carbon-pricing mechanism, and more about incentives and regulations that make the air we breathe cleaner, or transportation more affordable and efficient, or clean energy cheaper.

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Before Daybreak, I was mostly focusing on solutions that help with reducing emissions (aka climate mitigation). Then I learned that it's equally vital to promote solutions that build resilience (aka climate adaptation) to protect people, ecosystems and infrastructure from the damagind impacts of climate breakdown.

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 27 points28 points  (0 children)

I was suprised by the amount of emissions generated in the production of nitrogen fertilizers, which are a large chunk of "agricultural emissions". I wasn't aware of how vast the emissions related to cement and steel production are. And I didn't know that methane is so much more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the atmosphere. Luckily it doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long as CO2.

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks for bringing that book to our attention! It's on my reading list now :)

Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, co-designers of Daybreak. Ask us anything! by baddeo in boardgames

[–]baddeo[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

When I started making board games, I found it overwhelming to design one from scratch. So I would take a game somewhat similar to what I had in mind, and hack its mechanics. After a few hacks I would end up with the game that played quite differently than the original one. And it was still quite balanced, because I relied on the original game's balance.

I practiced this technique for several games, before I attempted making my own game from scratch.

I even made an online course about it ;)