Daybreak is a cooperative board game that models technological, political and social responses to climate change. It was designed by Pandemic creator Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace. Throughout the game, the Earth’s temperature begins to rise. Simultaneously, players must contend with crisis events, such as droughts, wildfires, rising sea levels, each exacerbated by Earth’s rising temperature.
Players assume the role of national superpowers or coalitions (the United States, China, Europe, or the Global South), which each have their own needs as well as opportunities to combat the ecological circumstances. For example, the United States offer research and development and China has direct economic control. Players divide their investments between carbon emission mitigation and adapting their societies to environmental changes. Based on the game’s design, every country needs to contribute or players collectively lose.
While the game’s positive outlook on climate futures has been appreciated by many reviewers and players, a few review (e.g. https://www.polygon.com/23944065/daybreak-board-game-review) critiqued this stance as naive and/or take issue with the logic of technological improvement, of ‘outgrowing’ existing economic but also societal challenges over time.
Daybreak has been praised for not only for its design but also for its production which prioritized sustainable materials. According to its designers, the original design called for many components: a board, four player boards, many cards and punchboard tokens, as well as a cloth bag that was used for a chit pulling mechanism. About three quarters of the way through the game’s design, the game’s publishers CMYK commissioned an impact analysis of all these components which revealed that the cloth bag had the single biggest environmental impact on the game. As a result, the design as modified to use a single, wooden die to replace the chit pull. The resulting design proved to be easier to understand and set up, and (according to the advisors on the project) the die was a better metaphor for the chaotic planetary effects they were modelling. Matt Leacock (one of the game’s designers) and Alex Hague (CEO and Co-Founder of the game’s publisher CMYK) talk in detail about sustainable design at Spiel 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP-ooQAvwng.
References
The Green Games Guide, v1.1 (March 2026): https://greengamesguide.com/the-guide/