Daybreak's shining cooperative play
Thematic integration is a hallmark of Daybreak's board game successes.
Daybreak is the latest cooperative effort from arguably the genre’s greatest designer and one of its most prolific, Matt Leacock, who designed the game in conjunction with Matteo Menapace. It’s a game that positions players as world powers fighting the climate crisis. It ties its thematic elements deeply into the game, and there’s an optimism here about the feasibility climate action.
The game functions largely as a tableau-builder; you’ll play cards from your hand that impact your board state in various ways. These cards might help you provide energy to power your section of the globe, they might give you greater resilience to various crises that occur, they might give you more cards, and they could help reduce your emissions, among a plethora of other effects. When you play a card, you’ll choose where you’re going to play it in a pile: Will it be underneath the other cards, providing only its resource symbols in the corner as a benefit, or will you play it on top of the other cards, gaining the benefit shown on the card’s face?
The core of the game rests in these decisions. Planning your actions is the difference between gaining one benefit and gaining several. Can you make use of three or four cards if you sequence them properly? Are cards worth holding to between turns to give you better options? Will you play a card for a minimal benefit but a big payoff?
At the end of each turn, you’ll measure the emissions each player creates, reduce emissions as possible with trees and oceans, increase the global temperature according to the total emissions remaining, and encounter various global crises. The game divides this into roughly three sections, bookending player actions with global events. Player actions take place simultaneously, which is a welcome approach that reduces downtime considerably.
Among the things that work well is the considered visual design. Symbols on all cards are clear, easy to read at a glance, and non-ambiguous. Where symbol-heavy games can become difficult to parse at a glance, the team behind Daybreak went to considerable efforts to ease those difficulties.
If a dominant strategy has emerged in Daybreak, I’ve yet to encounter it in my play. There are some courses of action I prefer, as with any game; I prefer local projects that enhance my card draw abilities, for example. If you can manage to get more cards in-hand — and there are a lot of cards that provide that particular benefit in various forms — your options will grow, and your opportunity to succeed should grow, too. That’s not to say it’s a perfect strategy, as delaying removing emissions early-game has a knock-on effect of making the game a bit more difficult later.
By virtue of the numerous cards in the game, your progression will vary from game to game. The ways you seek advantage over your situation will necessarily need to adapt. Success is found in your ability to adapt to your changing environment. Global projects similarly allow players to influence the way the game progresses. Great players will tailor their strategy to the global projects that emerge, taking advantage of their situation. It takes work to get to that point, but when you’ve seen the game a few times, useful patterns can start to emerge.
It’s one of the many ways the game sneaks in thematic elements into the gameplay. It feels unexpected, but there’s a precision to the way it puts players in predicaments.
Daybreak shines when it positions players in thematic predicaments. While crisis cards can seem arbitrarily limiting, they mirror the unpredictability of global politics. Local projects might be drawn randomly, but people at a local level are likewise unpredictable.
A question has regularly emerged about Daybreak: Is this just multiplayer solitaire?
Before I can really answer that question, we should first define “multiplayer solitaire.” On its face, it refers to a multiplayer game with no meaningful player interaction. Is it a meaningful criticism, or is it a pejorative leveled at games for not involving as much player interaction as perhaps one would like? I would wager the term here is both a meaningful criticism and a pejorative. Let’s talk about it.
Daybreak has been called multiplayer solitaire several times — it’s not hard to find that particular criticism leveled at this game. In some sense, there is an accuracy to the accusation. Most of Daybreak is spent focused on local state, and as a result, it becomes a heads-down game. The scope of what you can impact is generally focused tightly on your play area. The occasions upon which you can influence the global state bookend your turn. In this way, it can tend toward multiplayer solitaire.
I would argue, however, that success in Daybreak requires at least occasionally lifting your head from your area and coordinating with the world powers sat beside you. You may be able to make some impact individually, but collectively, but you can have a greater impact collectively. Perhaps a fellow player can give you a card, but you haven’t communicated what might be of help. Maybe it’s reversed, and you’re holding a card that would unlock somebody else’s strategy. It’s another way in which Daybreak’s deep thematic integration comes to the fore.
There’s a term in the classic video game Civilization that is an excellent litmus test for any game in which you’re building and optimizing an engine. When your game ends, supposing you weren’t defeated, you’re given an option to continue playing — Just one more turn, the game tempts you — even though the result of the game won’t change. You won’t get more points, you won’t get a higher ranking. The game continues, but your progress stops. That appears to have never dissuaded anyone in the 33-year history of the game from continuing, and it certainly never dissuaded me.
It’s not even that a game must simply be fun to achieve this effect. There are a great many games I love to play, but I am reasonably happy when they end. At the end of a game of, say, Agricola, I don’t find myself wishing I had one (or several) more turns. I’m usually just pleased that I’ve made it through the game able to feed my family. In Azul, I don’t find myself wanting a few more turns to fill out my board.
There are board games where that feeling takes hold. In Matt Leacock’s classic Pandemic, we often find ourselves wanting to eradicate the four diseases, not just cure them. Daybreak amps up that feeling more than any board game I can recall: At the end of Daybreak, I want to see if I can eliminate my emissions, handle any crisis, and return the globe to its original state. When I feel like I’m doing well in Daybreak, I don’t want to celebrate a victory, I want to continue playing.
Thank you, as ever, for reading Don’t Eat the Meeples. We’re nearing a big landmark — nearly 400 of you have subscribed! Can you believe it? I don’t know that I can. I appreciate your sticking around over the years as this newsletter has morphed and shifted. I’m excited to continue down this path, and I hope you are, too.
Next week: Another entry in my Replacing the Classics series. You sunk my — well, I don’t want to spoil too much!
