Daybreak, the board game about fighting climate change, is blindly optimistic

polygon.com:

Daybreak is the newest release from Pandemic creator Matt Leacock. He’s teamed up with co-designer Matteo Menapace and publisher CMYK (Monikers,Wavelength, Lacuna) to deliver a board game that is as optimistic as it is strategically compelling. Instead of racing to find a cure for global disease, players are tasked with working together to cut carbon emissions and stave off catastrophic climate change. The stakes are high as the world’s fate is racing toward cataclysm. While fun to play, the game ultimately leans more on fantasy than it does real-world approaches to solving a rapidly accelerating climate crisis.

One criticism regularly levied against Leacock is that, despite a lengthy career, his successes so far appear limited to an endless string of Pandemic clones. It’s a bit of a delight, therefore, to find that despite sharing the similar goal of using cooperation to save humanity from disaster, Daybreak plays almost nothing like Pandemic. This is an engine builder where players place cards into a personal tableau — a play area in front of you that contains your assortment of abilities. Cards feature technology and social policy, such as phasing out dirty electricity for clean, establishing high-speed rail, and building tree farms. In motion, the game retains all the urgency of combating a deadly virus but with a very different style of gameplay.

Each player represents a world power with a starting set of asymmetric abilities and varying levels of toxic output. Every turn, the group collectively pours pollution onto the board, piling ugly dark brown cubes up onto an otherwise beautifully composed world map. Over time, technology will reduce this dirty output and players will hopefully reach the end state known as