Carcassonne Maps: Great Britain

The Game

Carcassonne Maps is a series of Carcassonne expansions. Carcassonne is a boardgame with no board, and Carcassonne Maps turns it back to a game with a board. You will need not only the base game but also at least one more expansion with tiles. Every Carcassonne Maps expansion requires a certain number of tiles, and those in the base game are not enough. There are some common rules across the Carcassonne Maps series, and each map has some unique rules too. Although you use tiles from other Carcassonne expansions, you won't use the rules associated with them. 

Let's first talk about the common rules across the different maps. Each map has several starting positions. You place the standard starting tile on one of these positions, and draw random tiles for the others. When placing tiles, they must expand out from these starting positions, similar to standard Carcassonne. You don't place tiles anywhere you like. Squares have been drawn on the map, and you can only place tiles in these squares. The concept of a border is introduced - borders as in the edges of the playable areas. When you place a tile on a border space, any feature touching the border is considered closed off. For example you still have an open-ended castle, but the only remaining open end is on the border. In this case the castle is considered complete and you score it. The same goes for roads and monasteries. The borders on the maps help players complete features. 

Those face-down round tokens have point values. They come in three colours, and they are worth 1 or 2 points. Not all the maps use these tokens, but quite many do. They are used in different ways on different maps. Generally when you place a tile on a space with a round token, you claim that token and score the points on it. As you collect tokens, you will be able to use them in some other way. 

The Isle of Man is the unique mechanism on the Great Britain map. At the end of your turn, you may place a meeple here to take an additional turn. Your meeples here are temporarily unavailable to you. They are freed when you have three round tokens of different colours or three round tokens of the same point value. When either of these happen, you must turn in the combination and retrieve all your meeples. You know the colour distribution of the round tokens up front - blue in the north, purple in the south, and orange in the west. So you can somewhat plan to collect the right colours at the right time. 

The maps have towns, and they are an optional variant. If you use the town variant, you lose 2 points for covering a town, but you get to take an extra turn. Also when completing a road, every town next to the road gives you 2 points. 

The Play

Most of the elements in Carcassonne have not changed. The biggest difference to me is the impact of the borders. Completing features becomes a bit easier. However since the maps do come with some features, these introduce a new challenge. When you lay tiles, your tiles must match these features. Overall I find Carcassonne Maps slightly more challenging. The features on the map include major cities which appear as partial castles. They tend to be lucrative and they entice players to expand towards and claim them. 

Our London did not grow to become a large castle, only a chubby camel. 

The point tokens and Isle of Man are simple variants. It's nice to have some alternative ways of playing, but these are not something radically different from the original. I find the existence of the map itself is the main attraction which introduces a new play experience. 

In our game, despite using the recommended number of tiles, by the time we were done, about 20% of the spaces was still not yet filled. 

The Thoughts

Well, this is an expansion, so it is for people who already like Carcassonne. If that's you, then the maps will offer a fun and new experience. It's different enough to be interesting. Before playing I had imagined gameplay to be more restrictive, since the play area is fixed. Now that I have played it, I find that you often still have many options on your turn. The concept of the borders gives you a new tool to complete features. The features on the map also give some context and create objectives you strive for. 

Ticket to Ride: Nederland

The Game

Before I wrote this blog post, I counted. I currently own 9 copies of games and expansions in the Ticket to Ride series. I had not planned to buy Nederland. Allen came across it being on sale at a deep discount. He asked whether I wanted to get a copy, and I couldn't resist. Nederland is an expansion, and you can only play it if you have the base game or Ticket to Ride Europe.  

One unique element of Nederland is how it entices (or pressures) players to claim routes early. There is a toll mechanism in the game. Everyone starts with some money. Whenever you build tracks, you must pay a toll. Most connections between two cities have two routes. If you are first to claim one of them, you pay the toll to the bank. If later another player claims the other route, they must pay the toll fee to you. This means if you are early, you get a rebate. Managing your cash and getting these rebates are important because at game end, you compare how much money you have left, and you score points based on ranking. Everyone gets points except for the last player. The player with the most leftover cash gets 55 points! 

The point values of the tickets in the game are higher than the typical Ticket to Ride game. Normally the point value of a ticket is simply the shortest distance between the two cities. On the Netherlands map this is not the case. Ticket values can go up to 34 points! So far I only know the Japan map also diverges from this convention. 

The Play

It was only when I sat down to play that I realised it is easy to get blocked off on the Netherlands map. We did a four-player game. If it were a 5-player game, the blocking would be worse. So claiming routes early is important not only because you hope to get the rebate, it can be crucial to ensure you don't get cut off. In our game, Shee Yun was completely cut off from a city she needed to go to and she lost points for one of her tickets. 

There are loan cards in the game (top right in this photo above). When you want to claim a route but you can't afford to pay the toll, you must take a loan card. Loans cannot be repaid in this game. Each costs you 5 points at game end. Also you are disqualified from the bonus for leftover cash.

When you decide to draw new tickets, you draw five and you must keep at least one. If you have built a decent network, it is worthwhile making a gamble on drawing new tickets. Since you get to draw five, chances are you'll get something that works for you. It is not risk-free, but the potential reward is tempting. Tickets are high valued. This aspect of having the urge to draw more tickets reminds me of the Switzerland map. It's wonderful when you get lucky and draw a ticket which you have already completed. 

These were my tickets at the end of the game, all completed. 

In our particular game, most of us chose routes nearer to the sea. It might be because most of the main cities were nearer to the sea. The half of the board nearer to the sea was pretty packed. The inland half not so much. We didn't have anyone taking loans. It was partly because many of us claimed the second route of a pair of routes, which meant money changed hands among players instead of going to the bank. However I suspect loans are not too common anyway. Still something you have to watch out for, but if you are careful enough it should not happen easily. 

The Thoughts

Ticket to Ride: Nederland is exciting! There is a heightened sense of urgency to claim routes early because you want those rebates and there is that fear of getting blocked off. Drawing tickets is also exciting. That lucky draw feeling is strong here. If you like the Ticket to Ride series, this is worth a try. The numbers in the game are big, and I'm not sure whether I am being tricked by this to think of the game as being more thrilling than it actually is. I get this feeling that I am making big bets. The stakes are high. Thus the adrenalin rush. When comparing leftover cash, the point difference between first and last place is 55 points. That is huge compared to the 10-point longest route bonus in basic Ticket to Ride. The tickets also have high point values, more than other variants. The points from the routes still remain the same as other games, so this aspect becomes less important. Go draw tickets! That's where the excitement lies! 

gamer, blogger, designer, or publisher

This blog post is a note to self. I need a space to do some thinking and reflecting. 

My first physically published game is Dancing Queen, released at the end of 2022. That was followed by Snow White and the Eleven Dwarfs (early 2024) and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (mid 2024). In 2025 I am planning to publish Pinocchio and the Malaysian second edition of Dancing Queen. The international edition of Dancing Queen from Matagot will be released in June 2025. I have a fourth game project in 2025, Malaysian Holidays. This is a collaboration with Specky Studio. They are the publisher. I am the designer. When I first got into game publishing, I told myself I needed to set a 5-year plan and a checkpoint at the end of that. I was going to publish one game per year, and when I got to the fifth game I would do an assessment to decide whether and how to proceed with this publishing journey. I have already started thinking about this last year. I have been thinking about several related questions. Why am I doing this? Do I want to be a publisher or a designer? I more-or-less have an answer, but I have not really organised my thoughts properly or planned what's next. 

Matagot international edition of Dancing Queen

The why. Got to start with that. The rest follows. When I design and publish games, is that just to feed my ego? Am I looking for validation? Recently a student in my class asked a question which gave me much food for thought. "Do you do it because of the craftsmanship?" Do I do it because it is art? If this is my art, I should insist on the final work being how I have envisioned it to be. I probably wouldn't let another publisher publish my game. The game is a piece of art, not a product. Another possible why I have been thinking about is do I do this to make money. Do I want to build a business out of this? Since it is something I enjoy, I can have fun throughout the ride, but the end goal should be about building a sustainable business, a stable side income, or even turning this into a full-time business. I know these are not easy. Not impossible, but not easy at all. Sometimes I ask myself, why am I spending so much time, energy and money doing something that's not exactly profitable? Am I holding on to the hope that one day this will work out and become something sustainable? I tell myself that there is value in games. I want to spread the awareness and culture of playing games, particularly in Malaysia, where most people do not know modern boardgames. I hope more parents get to know about boardgames and play  boardgames with their children. I hope this creates happier and healthier families. I hope children learn through boardgames. They learn to communicate, to think, and to solve problems. They learn how to learn. Playing games is something valuable. Having fun and being happy is valuable in itself. I hope my games bring people joy. I hope they help people create happy memories. 

Or maybe I just want to play boardgames. If I go back to just being a regular gamer, plus doing some blogging to share my journey, that would be perfectly fine. Why go through all that trouble designing, testing, producing and selling games? Sometimes it seems designing and publishing games is for people who have too much time and money on their hands. This is not just in Malaysia. It's the same everywhere else. If you don't have a stable job, it's probably not a good idea to jump full-time into designing and publishing games. Unless you have set aside some savings that can sustain you for a while. Only people who really love boardgames and have spare time go into game design. I wonder whether going into game design a symptom of my mid-life crisis? 

My upcoming game Pinocchio

Considering the various whys above, the first one I can deprioritise is money. I know it's hard to make money from doing game design and publishing. I'm not counting on it to become my livelihood. At the same time, I also don't want it to become just an expensive hobby. I don't want to be the kind of person who burns money for an ego boost. So I want the games I publish to be quality games. Games which offer something of value. Games that people do want to buy, and will truly enjoy. I sometimes imagine being able to achieve what Oink Games of Japan has achieved. I read an interview of Jun Sasaki and was greatly inspired. He started his boardgames business as a side hustle, and now it has grown to become a company that can support a large team. They have released many good and successful games. If money is not the most important goal, then between being a designer and being a publisher, the latter is less important. Being a publisher involves a higher risk because you are putting your money on the line, but if things work out, you make more profit.

Should I just go back to be a normal gamer? Being a gamer doesn't directly conflict with being a designer or publisher. It is just about how I allocate my time. If I enjoy both, I can do both. I don't need my design and publishing work to feed my family, so I can do it at my own pace. I do enjoy doing it, and I can enjoy it like it is a hobby.  

The remaining two whys are creating art and promoting boardgames. Yes, creating good games is important to me. I do want to create something special, something that I can be proud of. This might conflict somewhat with promoting boardgames. When promoting boardgames, I need to think of the general public, the mass market, so the games I make will need to be games which they can understand and enjoy. If you want a summer blockbuster, you probably shouldn't be making artsy type films. It is not often we have films like Lord of the Rings which are artistically superb and at the same time also widely loved. Creating awareness of boardgames in Malaysia is a gargantuan task, certainly not something I can do singlehandedly. I just hope to be one of the contributors in this, playing a small part. Being able to find others who also want to do this together is wonderful. It is fun and not at all like the trip to Mordor. I sometimes tell follow Malaysian designers that if we the current cohort can persist until the local market grows to be more robust, we would by then be the makers and movers in the industry. We would have survived many hardships, learned many lessons and accumulated valuable experience. Pardon me - I am still thinking a bit about creating a profitable business here. How long will it take for the Malaysian boardgame market to be big enough to sustain a game designer or publisher? Five years? Ten? As Malaysian designers and publishers, we have a dilemma. If we want to make a living out of this, we probably should think internationally, because the local market is too small. But if we don't develop the local market, it will never grow to be a strong economical base.  

With my priorities clearer, it is easier to decide what I should be doing and what I should not be doing. What kind of games should I make? To promote boardgames to a wider audience, I should use themes which are attractive to them. I need to make easy games. I need to set prices which non-gamers find palatable. One thing I plan to do is to explore collaboration with a friend who is in the premium gifts business. We want to propose boardgames and card games as corporate gifts or merchandise. Some organisations use gifts for promotions and for marketing or branding. Recently ZUS Coffee in Malaysia gave away a simple card game as a promotion. By leveraging large organisations, I can put games into the hands of more people. When I designed Sabah Honeymoon for the STTOS competition, I imagined it being sold at souvenir shops. It is a game which tourists will buy and it will make them remember Sabah fondly. I chose to publish Pinocchio as my next game because it is a simple game which non-gamers can pick up easily and find the fun quickly. The price point is set low so that people who are only browsing can decide easily to buy a copy to try. 

Malaysian Holidays prototype. Photo by Choon Ean.

Another idea I have been toying with is to develop games about social issues. Games are a medium of communication. They can be a tool to bring awareness to important topics, and to trigger discussion. Think Daybreak. I can collaborate with organisations which champion specific issues, and use boardgames to support them while at the same time spread the awareness of boardgames. There are many boardgames which are designed to teach entrepreneurship and financial literary. I have seen some and I must say I feel disgusted, because from a game design perspective, they are bad games. However as gimmicks which attract potential buyers and as engagement tools during workshops, they serve their purposes. I hope I don't make this kind of game. Maybe I should work on a financial literacy game with modern boardgame sensibilities. Not yet another modified Snakes and Ladders please. 

I participated in many events last year. Many took up much time and energy, but were not very productive. I now tell myself to be more selective. I will skip some events. However I also need to remind myself that the value of an event is not just about the profit or achieving breakeven. If it is something that helps promote and spread awareness of boardgames, there is value. Whether I manage to sell many games is one measure of how well I have spread boardgames, but it is not the only measure. 

I needed to write all this to organise my thoughts. In my full-time work I sometimes coach and guide my students. I need to apply the same techniques to coach myself. I realise I should not think of myself as a gamer, blogger, designer or publisher. I should think of myself as a boardgame ambassador.  Working on boardgames is meaningful and valuable, and I'm going to keep at it. 

Santa Maria

The Game

Santa Maria, first published in 2017, was nominated for several international awards in 2017 and 2018. It did not catch my attention then, because it looked like yet another Eurogame about developing your colony. How boring can these Eurogame publishers get? Allen bought a second-hand copy of the game, and asked me to read the rules. And boy now I'm glad I had the opportunity to give it a go. 

Santa Maria is a game about developing your colony (sorry). Everyone has a 6x6 grid on their player board. You start with some buildings and you will build more throughout the game. Buildings let you collect resources and do other things. You use dice in the game to activate buildings in numbered rows or columns. As you construct more buildings you will collect more resources and do more things as you activate your rows and columns. Resources can be shipped for points. Some buildings let you convert resources to points. At the end of the game you also score points based on how well you have developed your colony.

This is your player board. The game is played over three rounds. Every round you will be able to draft three white dice from a central pool to activate columns on your board. Activating a column means activating every building which does something from top to bottom (e.g. produce resources, ship resources, train conquistadors, train monks). After you activate a column, the die used is placed atop the last building activated, making it unavailable for the rest of the round. Rows are activated in the same way, but by using blue dice. You start the game with only one blue die, and you get more when you do some monk training.   

Taking and using a die is only one of the actions you can perform. On your turn, you may also choose to spend resources to buy two-square or three-square tiles to add to your colony. These tiles have buildings, roads and terrain. The buildings give you more abilities, and the other aspects of the tiles may also help you fulfil end-game scoring criteria. On your turn you may spend money to activate a single building. When buildings are activated this way, the money spent is placed onto the building, disabling it for the rest of the round. 

This is the main board. Near the top of this photo you can see yellow four shipping order tiles. When you perform a shipping action, you fulfil one of these orders and claim the tile, placing it next to your player board. Tiles claimed this way give you benefits when you retire from a round. 

There are two tracks on the main board, the conquistador track and the monk track. Some buildings let you advance your markers on these tracks. Advancing on the conquistador track gives you gold (a valuable resource which can be used as a wild resource) and allows you to score points at the end of a round if you do better than your opponents. Advancing on the monk track gives you blue dice and monks. Monks can be used to claim special abilities and activate additional scoring criteria for yourself. 

The six monk-related tiles along the top edge of the main board are randomised every game. Three of them are special abilities which you can claim using your monks, and the other three are additional scoring conditions you can qualify yourself for. There is some competition for these spots. The first player to claim a spot gets it for free, but subsequent players must pay the early birds. 

You will gradually run out of things you can do in a round, and you will eventually want to retire from the round. There are five retirement actions. These are benefits you claim when you retire. Each of these spots can only be claimed by one player, so if you want a particular spot, you may want to be first to retire from a round. The positions of these five retirement actions also determine the turn order for the next round. 

You'll probably know the drill by now. Highest scorer after three rounds wins the game. Here are the various ways you score points. Some actions during the game will get you victory point tokens. The shipping you do (i.e. fulfilling contracts) gives you points. Sets of different ships give you points. Complete rows and columns in your colony give you points. There are three monk actions which may allow you to score points based on how you have developed your colony, for example in our game every row or column with all four terrain types scores 3 points, and we could score up to 12 points using this monk tile. 

The Play

Now so far, from all that description above, this sounds exactly like yet another multiple-ways-to-score-points, individual-player-board-development, resource-generation-and-conversion, contract-fulfilling Eurogame. And I would say yes, all these are pretty accurate descriptions of Santa Maria. This sounds exactly like a game I wouldn't enjoy, because I have played too many games just like this. However, to my surprise, I greatly enjoyed the game. The game doesn't have any particularly ground-breaking idea. It does have some interesting ideas, and they are implemented and balanced well. I like how the various subsystems in the game are closely linked. They all affect one another. I like that there are many things you can do, but you can't quite do them all. You are kept busy and engaged enough trying to fully utilise the resources you have. 

Generally I know I should buy tiles and lay them on my board before I use dice to activate my rows and columns, because then I will be able to use the buildings on those newly laid tiles. However if I don't have the resources to buy the tiles themselves, then I need to active some rows or columns first. I know I should get my second and third blue dice as soon as possible, so that I will have more actions every round. That means I need to advance on my monk track, which in turn means I need to activate rows with monk actions. When taking a monk action, you may pay one grain to advance an extra step on the monk track. If you want to be efficient, you want to make sure you always have spare grain. Then this means you need to active rows to take grain first. So many things you want to do, but you can't do everything at once. You have to plan carefully the order of taking actions. 

In our game I spent much effort working towards the monk tiles which were additional scoring criteria. I was deliberate in trying to fulfil those criteria as I developed my colony. This was a tricky puzzle because I tried to fulfil multiple criteria at the same time. While juggling these, I also needed to be aware of the dice available for the round, and placed tiles in rows I could activate, so that I made as much use of those tiles as I could. So you can see how the many elements in the game are closely linked. 

This was my colony at the end of the game. I had completely filled the board! That was immensely satisfying. My life work was done! 

The Thoughts

In many ways Santa Maria feels like an old school Eurogame. There are many familiar elements. The theme is certainly an overused one. The art style too. One thing that I admire is how well the graphic design is done. I mean in terms of useability and helping players understand how the game works. This makes learning and playing the game a joy. It almost feels like I'm playing the game on a reference sheet. The visual reminders really help. 

I like how the various mechanisms in the game are tightly integrated. The game might have started with the row activation and tile laying aspects as the core, and other aspects were added to complete the game, but these other mechanisms blend in well. It is a fun puzzle working out the series of actions you want to take. The game is a little multiplayer solitaire. You are developing your own board and don't directly attack your opponents. However there are still many elements where you compete - the common pool of white dice, the monk spots, the conquistador track, shipping, and the tiles available to be purchased every round. But yes, this is the pretty Eurogame type of player interaction. 

Santa Maria is an underappreciated gem. I highly recommended it.   

Cili Padi Games has landed in Sabah

My games are now available in my home town of Kota Kinabalu, Sabah! Salt x Paper is a stationery and gift shop in town, near the old Tong Hing supermarket. I need to thank Choon Ean from LUMA (designer of Kaki Lima, Bansan) for this connection. She recently brought some stock to KK, and I have just delivered some more too when I returned to visit my parents. So friends in KK, please visit Salt x Paper to look for Malaysian designed boardgames! Location on Google Maps

When I delivered the top-up stock, I took the opportunity to check out the shop. It has a lot of nice merchandise and souvenirs. Post cards, stickers, tote bags. Lots of lovely art work. Tourists will love this place. If I were a tourist I would have bought a lot of stuff. Most of the art is based on local themes. 

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Snow White and the Eleven Dwarfs are in stock at Salt x Paper now. So are several other Malaysian games like Furmation of Rome, Kaki Lima Downtown KL, Petal Plotters and Trishaw Frenzy. 

20 Apr 2025. I participated in a local art festival at KEDAI KL. It was a three day event, but this time I couldn't booth for the whole event. I was only there Sunday afternoon. 

The crowd wasn't very big. Most visitors were young people. This wasn't a boardgame specific event, so the visitors are the general public and not gamers or people specifically interested in games. It is good and also important to introduce boardgames to non gamers. This is something we in the local game industry need to work on - create awareness of and love of boardgames. 

I need to thank Trixie of The Lepak Game for this connection. She is releasing a new edition of The Lepak Game. It has a more compact box and also new art. 

As is my standard practice now, whenever I have the chance to promote local Malaysian games, I bring my bag of local games to showcase. This time I managed to sell a copy of Knights and Rebels for Nick. 

The presentation day for the STTOS Sabah game design competition was Sat 19 Apr 2025. I took a screenshot when I did my presentation. The judges gathered in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. I did not fly to my hometown to do the presentation, so I did mine online. I was physically in Kuala Lumpur. Some contestants including two of my friends Jon and Buddhima flew all the way to KK to do the presentation. They did a day trip. 

boardgaming in photos: Through the Ages, Sabah Honeymoon

This was my submission for the Sabah game design competition organised by STTOS - Sabah Honeymoon. The box is just a regular plastic document case that can be found in most stationery shops. I did not spend much time creating a nice box cover. My game components are functional but not exactly pretty. I hope the competition stays true to being a game design competition and does not turn out to be an art or graphic design or crafting competition. 

These are my game components. I have a sell sheet which summarises what the game is on one page. 

The map is roughly the size of four A4 sheets. This is double the size of the first version. There is much more space for the player pieces and this is much more comfortable. I added a reference chart at the bottom left to remind players of the card combinations that can be used as a joker. 

By the time of this blog post, I would have done the presentation of my game to the judges, and I would be waiting for the final results. The city of Tawau in the photo above is the city I was born in. My family moved to Kota Kinabalu when I was three. Although I grew up in Kota Kinabalu, I visited Tawau every year when I was little, because we had many relatives there. 

My game in development Taking Sides has now been renamed to Rebels of the Three Kingdoms. I have an updated prototype, and one of the elements added is the names of the characters. This is much more immersive. Also now I have two prototypes, in English and Chinese. I am thinking about a two-player variant for the game. I need to start playtesting it. 

Younger daughter Chen Rui played Through the Ages with me. This was her first game and she did well, scoring over 300 points. We played a full game and not the shortened version recommended for first time players. 

There was a period when my wife Michelle and I played a lot of Through the Ages. At the time we had an earlier version of the game. However it is not too different from the current latest version. 

My early leaders were Moses and da Vinci. 

2-player game

Father and daughter

This end turn process reference chart on the player board is a great idea. 

My civilisation at game end. I had many colonies. 

Chen Rui's civilisation at game end. She had more wonders than me. 

Daybreak

The Game

Daybreak is the 2024 Kennerspiel des Jahres award winner, the German Game of the Year award for the expert gamer category. It is designed by Matt Leacock (Pandemic, Forbidden Island) and Matteo Menapace. This is a game about saving the world from environmental disaster. It is set in the modern day, and it is about managing carbon emissions. You play the United States, China, the European Union or the Rest of the World, and you need to work together to achieve net negative emission. That's how you win the game. To lose, there are three different ways. If global warming gets too much, you lose. If any player has too many community crises in their country / region, you lose. If you complete 6 rounds and still have not achieved net negative emission (also called drawdown), you also lose. 

The game board is a world map, but this map doesn't actually serve much purpose. The game board is just a series of tracks. You have the thermometer to keep track of the global temperature. You have a game round tracker. You also have tracks for six ecological systems, e.g. the Amazon forest, the oceans, the Arctic circle and world weather. Every turn a die is rolled to see which of these systems get damaged irreversibly. The higher the global temperature, the more times you have to roll the die. 

This is a player board, which represents your country / region. For simplicity I'll just call this your country. The little blue house is your energy demand. This demand goes up every round, and you need to make sure you generate enough energy to meet the demand. If you are short, you will have community crises. The green and grey tiles with lightning bolts are the clean and dirty energy respectively which you produce. You have many other grey tiles which represent pollution from various sources, e.g. factories, vehicles, farms and housing. All grey tiles produce carbon, which is what you need to control. The three types of shields at the bottom represent resilience in three different areas - social, ecological and infrastructure. You need resilience to protect your country from events. They can reduce the impact of events (which are mostly bad). If you don't have enough resilience, events can create community crises for you (those pentagons at the bottom right). 

The core of the game is hand management. Depending on the country you play, you get a set of five starting cards laid out before you. These represent the capabilities of your country at the start of the game. Every round you draw five cards. There is no concept of turn order. Everyone performs actions in any order you want. You can discuss. You can strategise. You can perform as many actions as you wish, as long as you can pay the required resources. You have some ways to help one another, but not many. You mostly need to take care of your own country. Ultimately you work together to reduce emission and achieve drawdown. 

You will always have five stacks of cards before you, representing five projects. These stacks start with just one card each, i.e. your starting cards. You can perform the action stated on the card. Some actions can be done as many times as you wish. Some can only be done once. Some can be done several times depending on how many of a specific icon you have in the stack. You can play a card onto a stack. This means you are replacing your current project with a new one. You won't have access to the old project anymore, but the icons on the old project are still in effect. Your card stacks must be staggered slightly so that all icons on all cards are visible. The icons are in the top right corner. This is important because some projects require you have certain icons in the stack. The effects of some actions are magnified if you have many of a specific icon in the stack. You can also tuck a card to the bottom of a stack. This means you don't intend to use the card power, but you want to use the icons on it. Some powers require a card to be discarded, so cards are also a form of currency. When you run out of cards and powers you can use, you will have to end your action phase. 

Once everyone is done with their actions, you proceed to do your carbon emissions. Every country produces carbon. First, some will be absorbed by forests and oceans. If you produce so little carbon that the forests and oceans absorb them all and then also absorb some from the atmosphere, then you are on the way to victory. If you survive the rest of the round, you win. However if there is leftover carbon, they will be moved to the thermometer. Every time you fill a row on the thermometer, global temperature goes up by 0.1 degree. At different temperature levels, you will need to execute a certain number of events (which is bad), and you also need to roll the planetary effect die, which damages ecological systems and can result in bad effects. You may trigger more carbon emission or damage to forests and oceans. 

The grey cubes are carbon. The grey square tiles mean 5 carbon. The trees and the waves are forests and oceans respectively. They absorb carbon. 

The Play

Of all the games I write about, it is rare that I play a game more than 10 times before I write about it. So far I have played Daybreak 11 times. My first play was online using BoardGameArena.com. I did a 2-player game with Jetta. We did another 2-player game right after. Later I tried the solo game, also online. I played 7 times. After receiving the physical game, I did one 4-player game, and then one 3-player game. So I have tried all player counts. Yet I still don't exactly know how I feel about the game. It is complicated. I played it so many times because I wanted to figure out whether I liked the game. If I simplistically look at the number of plays, then this certainly should be categorised under games I like. But I am not sure. I have been doing a lot of thinking and struggling. Let me start with what I don't like. 

I find the game too easy. Once I have grasped two important strategies, it seems I cannot lose anymore. I'm not going to spoil the game by explaining my strategies. If you haven't tried the game and it sounds interesting, do explore it yourself. In my first game, a 2-player game, Daybreak felt crazy hard. We were both new, so we flailed around somewhat. We lost horribly. We immediately played again. This time, we found one strategy which was highly effective, and we won easily. Admittedly we were also a little lucky how well that strategy worked. It felt anticlimactic. After that I tried the solo game. I lost twice, but I learned from those plays. Equipped with a better understanding of the game, I went on to win my third solo game, and the subsequent four more solo games. Before I started playing the game online, I had already ordered a physical copy. When it arrived, I asked my family to play the 4-player game with me. They were all new to it. I explained in broad terms the most effective strategies. We won pretty easily, and that was without me quarterbacking. Shee Yun's situation got a little hairy, but it wasn't a close call. When I did a 3-player game, I added a variant to make it harder. We still won quite painlessly. So far, by applying two or three general strategies, I have been winning consistently. The game feels solved. When you play a game and already expect to win before you start, that's no fun. It feels like a problem I have already found a standard solution to. Solving that same problem again and again seems pointless. 

Let me compare Daybreak with two other cooperative games. When playing normal difficulty Pandemic, I am generally optimistic I can win. The board situation can be very different from game to game. I don't have absolute confidence to win because sometimes bad luck gets in the way. In Daybreak the problem or the situation is more static. Every game the countries start with the same distributions of polluting tiles and the same projects, and the world starts with the same number of forests and oceans. America has many cars. China has many factories. Energy demand in the Rest of the World goes up very quickly. You start with the same problem, unlike Pandemic which has a variable setup. In Daybreak variability comes from the event cards, the die rolls and the cards you draw. The event cards and the die rolls ultimately give you more carbon or community crises. So you go back to these two problems to manage. In Pandemic because there is board play, the variability is bigger. In Daybreak I feel as long as I follow those few broad strategies, the variability introduced by events and die rolls are just minor details. Yes, if you get unlucky with them, they will delay you a little, but once you get the broad strokes right, they can't stop you from winning. 

The other game I want to mention is Regicide. I have played that many times and I am familiar with the tactics. Yet every time I play again, I am not sure I can win. In fact my win rate is below 50%. But then that's what makes the game exciting. I wonder whether Daybreak was not balanced well enough, or it was balanced for families and not hardcore gamers. This is a complex game with many moving parts, and I must say balancing a game like this is difficult. 

Here is what I like about the game. I really enjoy the card play in Daybreak. You can make all sorts of powerful combos. Cards which let you perform multiple actions depending on how many icons you have are good. Cards which become more powerful because you have more icons are good too. This is engine-building. As you progress, you collect more icons and make your card stacks more powerful. It is satisfying to build and then run your engine. Your actions become more and more powerful. You do have many aspects to consider and often you need to make tough decisions about what to focus on. Increase your card draws? Build up resilience? Remove polluting tiles? Increase clean energy production? There are many things you want to do, and you can't do all at the same time. You can have at most five active projects. You have to decide carefully how to use your five slots. You need to consider the event cards too. With multiple players, you have opportunities to help one another. You can specialise somewhat, which can be more efficient. 

The many projects, events, technologies, and social issues in the game are all very real current-day topics. This game is simulating our real world. This is an educational game. I have considered using this in my training work. It is a topic that many organisations care about. The first time I played the game, I decided it wouldn't work for the kind of training I do. This is too complicated for non-gamers, and it does not convert well to a big group activity. 

The early game is tough. You have not yet built up your engine. The world seems to be going to hell and at times it feels hopeless when you keep getting hit by one bad incident after another. You do your best to reverse the trend. The game ends the moment you manage that, because once you manage that, the rest is easy and uninteresting. So it is the best time to end. There is always a sense of satisfaction the moment you find that you have reached drawdown. All the carbon of the current round is absorbed by the forests and oceans, and they then start to absorb carbon in the atmosphere from previous rounds. 

The publisher CMYK chose to produce Daybreak adhering to environmentally friendly principles. No plastic used at all, which means no shrink wrap around the box or the cards. The game is true to its theme. I am not yet used to this, but I certainly support it. 

These containers are made from a cardboard material. 

Cards come in three different sizes, and they are packed tightly in three tuckboxes. Compact and no waste at all. The tuckboxes are a little fragile though. I have accidentally torn one corner of one of them. 

My wife and my daughters played Daybreak with me. Now I'm not interested to do the solo game any more because there is only one setup and I have won too many times too easily. However I still want to play some multiplayer games. I want to try countries I have not yet played. I am definitely going to add variants which make the game harder. 

Theses are the variant cards. Question mark means a variant which changes things a little without changing the difficulty. Plus sign means making the game easier, and minus means harder. Some variant rules affect everyone, some just one player. 

This variant rule adds a criteria. Everyone must have phased out dirty energy before you can win. 

The online implementation on BoardGameArena.com is pretty good, and it's free to play. The computer takes care of much of the logistics so you can play quickly. 

The player board is simplified to this. 

The main board is simplified to this. 

The Thoughts

This is a game I will have difficulty giving a rating to, because a simple number cannot express my complicated feelings. This is a game I feel I should like, and I was eagerly anticipating it. I do like the card play. It gives players much freedom and also satisfaction in building powerful engines. There are many details in the game which show that the designers have done a lot of homework, and I appreciate these details. I complain that the game is too easy, that once I understand a few key strategies, winning feels guaranteed and replayability goes down. Yet I have played it more than 10 times in a short period. This is already good value for money for a game. And if you ask me whether I'll play again, I'd say yes. I have yet to play China and the European Union. I also want to try other variants which make the game harder. Do I like the game or not? Weeeeell...... it's complicated.