https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/04/new-catan-game-has-overpopulation-pollution-fossil-fuels-and-clean-energy/
If pollution levels go too high, the game ends for everyone. It's a fun escape!
This is real. I saw news about it maybe 1-2 months ago or so. Catan has largely rotated out of my group's play pool, but I still remember it as the game that kinda got us into resource-based games 20 years ago.
I have yet to play the game Daybreak, but I bought a copy of it from my FLGS because of the monumental effort they put into their game about the effects of climate change; each of the more than 200 project and crisis cards has a QR code which links to a web page on the game's site that gives details about that card, provides links to articles and research on the topic, and directs readers to groups where they can become an advocate for/against that topic.
It's a very different type of gameplay compared to Catan, but I'm interested in seeing how faithful this New Energies game is to teaching about climate change.
I've played a few rounds of digital Daybreak on BGA. It plays pretty nice, though difficulty seems to increase a lot outside the solo version. I worry that fiddling with CO2 tokens could get tedious in the printed version. The QR Code idea is nice.
The CO2 tokens aren't that bad really since you can trade five individual tokens for a single square "5" token.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
There wasn't direct conflict or battle, but there were scarce resources, and the savviest player could corner the market for them.
While it is "rooted in classic Catan mechanics of trading, harvesting, and building," there are some decidedly 2024 issues at play now that the Vikings have settled in for more than a millennia.
“Very often at the end of the game, you see everybody completely freaking out, like, ‘Oh man, we’ve got to save the world!’” Benjamin Teuber told Fast Company.
If you haven't played a Catan game in a while or missed most of the variants and alternate settings, New Energies might provide a distinctly fresh experience.
And the new systems look like they'll provide some new layers of strategy for those who might feel too familiar with the core Catan concepts.
At a minimum, you can test your friends' patience and sense of humor by playing as a game-ending cheap coal villain.
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