Index
Getting Our Heads In The Game
16 December 2025
Peter Coffee
If you haven’t already finished holiday gift shopping, or even if you think you have, there’s still time to have the board game “Daybreak” show up in time for family gatherings or for get-togethers with friends. The game’s creators upliftingly call it “a hopeful vision of the near future, where you get to build the mind-blowing technologies and resilient societies we need to save the planet”; at the same time, it’s a pretty galvanizing experience to spend an evening making the tradeoffs and dealing with the dependencies that are involved in making that happen. Or not.
The good news, for people who dread board games because they can lead to challenging conflict, is that this is a cooperative game where the group as a whole either succeeds or fails. The other news is that this is a simulation of making global, geopolitical, scientific, and social choices aimed at keeping the planet a good place to live. It takes a solid hour to play, probably longer the first once or twice as the flow of the game gets learned, but I can anecdotally report that even pre-high-school students clamor to play it again – whenever there’s a big enough block of before- or after-dinner time to do so.
Among the key ideas that the game turns into gameplay are
Resilience: social, ecological, and infrastructure. Some of the actions that are useful to take will make demands on systems and stakeholders. Building a willingness, and a capacity, to meet those demands may be as much of a challenge as building and deploying the technologies involved.
Engagement: some of the actions that are useful to take will depend on the people with the money to make it happen, and the markets that can help that money find opportunities within reasonable frameworks of regulation. Winning the game doesn’t just happen by agreeing on what would help; there are also mechanisms of incentives, alignments, and cross-border cooperations that have to be recognized and energized.
Tipping Points: this is a big one. In each round of the game, carbon that’s been added to the environment must be either offset (for example, by having planted trees) or reflected in global temperature increase. When specific effects, like ocean acidification or Amazon forest dieback, hit various thresholds then there are step-change consequences. These are invariably Bad Things.
I don’t want this to sound like daunting complexity: there is negligible math involved in the game, mostly just being able to count small numbers to figure out if certain projects can proceed and to represent environmental changes. The math in a game of Monopoly is a whole lot harder.
Among the reasons that I’m using this week’s sharing slot to talk about this game is that new stuff keeps happening that makes this game look downright precognitive. For example, a December 10 article in the journal Nature adds a new phrase to my climate change vocabulary: “hypertropical,” a climate in which hot droughts put a forest into a state where trees can no longer circulate nutrients. From a well-written December 11 summary in Popular Mechanics (yes, really),
The main problem at the heart of this emerging biome is that extended droughts will drop soil moisture content by volume. Once this number reaches a threshold [below which] only a third of the soil’s pores are filled with water, transpiration rates in trees drop rapidly, which greatly increases stress. This causes trees to shut down carbon capture entirely, which either effectively starves them or creates air bubbles in the tree’s sap, the latter of which the authors describe as a type of plant-based embolism.
“Normally, plants are pretty good at trying to compartmentalize and just say, ‘OK, I'm willing to sacrifice that branch to keep this core piece alive,’” Jeffrey Chambers, the lead author of the study from the University of California Berkeley, said in a press statement. “But if there are enough embolisms, the tree just dies.”
(My boldfacing added to the above)
As I was reading this, Daybreak’s “tipping point” element immediately came to mind. Sometimes, as Hemingway famously said about bankruptcy, things happen “gradually and then suddenly.”
This is why, as noted in this space a few weeks ago, some things need to be treated as urgent even before they’re too big to ignore. The Daybreak game board offers us a map, literally, on which to make those urgencies understandable. Recommended.