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.