Daybreak: replayability
📗 Design Diary part 6 — Say you finally won Daybreak, but can you do it again while keeping global temperatures lower, while avoiding certain technologies, or while creating an even more resilient society?
Daybreak is a cooperative game about stopping climate change. It presents an empowering vision of the near future, where you and your friends help our societies become more resilient to climate impacts while decarbonizing the world.
In our previous episodes we discussed why we made this game, how we modelled the climate crisis, how we designed interfaces that help players track their resources, who the players represent and what powers they have, and how the game is won and lost.
In this last episode we explore how Daybreak can be made easier or harder, either for individual players or for the whole team.
Replayability
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.
While this effectively made the game more difficult to win, it was also a very limited system. So our publisher Alex suggested we take inspiration from The Crew’s mission deck and think about how we can present players a scalable set of new challenges and narratives over time. We immediately liked the idea.
We developed a deck of about 40 challenges and advantages, which you can mix and match to make the game easier or harder, either for individual players or for the whole team.
Group challenges, advantages, and modifiers
The challenges span from starting values modifiers (eg: players start with less resilience, more emissions of a certain type, or more communities in crisis) to additional victory conditions (eg: in order to win, we have to also keep global warming below 1.5ÂşC, or have 100% clean energy generation, or have no communities in crisis) and rule modifiers (eg: if one stack has more than 4 cards, you must discard the excess cards).
The advantages also modify starting values, rules or win conditions, in order to give players an easier journey.
Rule modifier cards allow players to explore counterfactual scenarios. 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 (aka territorial emissions) but also those that are imported (aka consumption emissions)? How does that shift the game balance?
Individual challenges and advantages
In addition to the challenges, advantages, and modifiers that affect the whole team, we added the ability to adjust the game by handing out challenges and advantages for individual world powers. You can use these on their own (for example to make the game harder or easier for a specific player or each of the players) or you can combine them with the cards that affect the whole team.
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.
So what’s the answer?
Daybreak is all about trying to puzzle out how to achieve victory given the set of problems and potential solutions that the game deals you. With over 150 opportunities, 48 crises, 24 global projects, 24 planetary effects, and however many challenge or advantage cards you want to mix in, it’s a different problem each time.
Like the real world, there’s no one way to solve the climate crisis.
As our design diaries come to a close, we’d like to leave you pondering on this quote from A Few Rules For Predicting The Future by Octavia E. Butler, author of the seminal Parable of the Sower:
There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems.
There’s no magic bullet.
Instead there are thousands of answers – at least.
You can be one of them if you choose to be.
