Three board games for the climate – A greener life, a greener world

By Jeremy Williams

We were playing a board game the other evening as a family, and my daughter chose Carbon City Zero. It’s an educational game about climate change, but it totally stands up as a form of entertainment. This isn’t always true of educational games, and climate change isn’t the easiest thing to make a game out of either. So here are three board games that get the balance right. Play these with friends and family, and you’ll learn something new about climate change, open up a conversation about it, and you’ll have a good time too.

Create a carbon zero city

Carbon City Zero – Developed by the climate charity Possible, I supported the crowdfunding for this, and it’s now on its third iteration. It’s a deck-building game where you have to balance spending power and carbon, buying and deploying various solutions for making a zero carbon city. It’s colourful, easy to pick up and quick to play, and rounds can be competitive or cooperative. 

At one point during our game this week, my daughter had her head in her hands because her favourite card had come up in the marketplace, and someone else would buy it before she had a chance to. The card in question was ‘building inspectors’, and if you’ve managed to get a child excited about the role of building inspection, you’ve done something pretty unusual.

Choose climate actions 

Daybreak – this is a more complicated one, in which players run their own game with cooperative rounds. You have to choose which climate actions to invest in, and reduce emissions across a range of sectors.

Unusually, everyone plays at once rather than in turns, so it keeps moving. It’s from the same game designer as Pandemic, so if you’ve played that, you might recognise the sense of escalating jeopardy as the game progresses.

There’s a level of thought behind Daybreak that is second to none, with a huge range of possible actions that impact each other and multiply their effects. You could play this with no interest in climate and enjoy the mechanics of a well-crafted game, but the climate geeks will enjoy it more.

Bonus points for its plastic-free production too, with little wooden pieces and cardboard trays.

Building a civilisation

Catan New Energies – The original Settlers of Catan was something of a gateway experience a few years ago, when a growing number of people discovered that there was more to board games than rolling dice and hopping around a track. There have been multiple variations on the game since, and the latest shifts it from its medieval setting into the present day. 

Players still place their settlements and harvest resources, but now they have to choose how to power their growing civilisation. Fossil fuels are cheap but polluting, and the pollution affects everyone. I haven’t had a chance to play this yet, but I can see how it would work.

I’m sure there are other climate board games out there that I haven’t discovered yet. 

First published in The Earthbound Report.