Base price: $60.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 1 – 2 hours.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 13
Full disclosure: A review copy of Daybreak was provided by CMYK.
New week means new reviews! I’m actually pretty excited for this month; I’ve been playing a bunch of great stuff at home and at work and at OrcaCon, so I get to tell you about all the awesome games! And the month isn’t even over! I have a really special one for you next week.
You’ll have to wait and see on that front, though. Right now, we’ve got Daybreak, coming from CYMK!
In Daybreak, players take on the roles of various world powers, trying to fight off global heating and protect their citizenry from the various consequences of global heating throughout the game. You’ll need politice, technologies, and each other if you want to successfully sequester some carbon and start drawdown. Will you be able to clean up all of your dirty energy?
Contents
Player Count Differences
I wouldn’t say a ton stands out to me, player-count-wise, with Daybreak. The game’s systems are pretty balanced for player count, and even though you get access to more cards at higher player counts, you have to deal with more emissions (and consequently more problems as a result). I think the game balances the play nicely though, and higher player counts are a great way to teach the game since you have a bit of insurance with other experienced players. I’d probably prefer to learn it that way than the way I learned it, which was losing like five two-player games on BGA because neither of us felt like reading the rulebook (which ended up being a good rulebook!). This is all to say that I don’t have a particular player count preference for Daybreak; we ended up enjoying it a lot with multiple players. I do think that it’s nice that even as the player count changes, you can adjust the difficulty of the game to match.
Strategy
- Draw as many cards as you can. This is my go-to strategy. More cards means more icons means more actions usually also means more cards. The more you can get, the more you can do.
- Keep an eye on your emissions. This is the thing that you don’t want to end up out oif sight and out of mind. Too many emissions, too much carbon, too much warming, bad times. So keep an eye on it and your opponents’, so that way you know what you’re dealing with.
- Dirty energy can be useful to get rid of, but not having enough energy for your population is bad. You still need to meet your minimum energy requirements, so dirty energy is almost always a decent thing to keep around while you’re building up your clean energy system. Once you have the clean energy generation in place, you should start actively getting rid of dirty energy so that you can lower your emissions.
- Look for synergies among your cards. One of my favorites is placing a card on top of a copy of itself right after I exhaust the bottom card. Now, I can use the top card the same amount, and usually +1 given that I just covered its duplicate. That’s great for the Draw 3, Keep 1 card that’s relatively common.
- You, ideally, want a way to get a lot of green energy relatively quickly, since your demands are not often going to decrease. Like I said, the more green energy you’re making, the more helpful you can be. You don’t have to make it like, 90 or 100, but sometimes it can be around or over 30, especially by the end of the game.
- I don’t personally bother with geoengineering cards; high risk, high reward. They have cool effects but they’re fairly rare, so I never quite get enough tokens to combo them together.
- Keep an eye on your Resilience Tokens! These tokens reduce the effect of crisis cards, helping keep yourself afloat for longer. That said, sometimes you want to do things like discard cards so that you can clear off the front of your stacks, but largely more Resilience is better.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Love the theme. The gang gets together to solve the climate crisis! Nice and topical, though hopefully less specifically prescient than Pandemic, I suppose.
- Also really enjoy the art! The game is very engaging; it looks great, it’s got great colors, and it really just draws the eye and gets you excited to play. Great all-around.
- Surprisingly not as complicated to learn as I expected. I really thought this was gonna be a doozy, but it’s just an icon-based engine-building game with some round-to-round resolution effects. I appreciate that, though I’m being a bit reductive.
- The rulebook is very pleasant. It’s useful and it looks good. Is such a thing even possible?
- I appreciate that they didn’t use any plastic in the game, not even for shipping. I think my copy arrived a tiny bit scuffed, but honestly, someone’s gotta push the envelope on sustainable practices. I’d rather have a slightly scuffed game than use plastic to ship, if I’m given the option.
- The feeling of drawing 40+ cards in one turn is incredible. That’s what I love about engine-building; there’s always a chance for a BIG COMBO that just wins you the game. One time we got down to -21 net Carbon in one turn, which was preposterous.
- The difficulty settings seem to be fairly smartly designed. I like how flexible and modular they are, but there’s also a good set of ways to tweak difficulty at both large scale (changing setup options) and small scale (Challenge Cards). You can do a lot of possible configurations with just those two.
Mehs
- I pretty solidly hate tuckboxes for cards. I understand why they’re using them here, but I don’t like it. I just end up ruining tuckboxes and they stress me out when I try to open them and can’t do it well. I’d rather have had cardboard inserts of some kind, but I imagine that’s more expensive.
- Sometimes you just have an unlucky draw, and that can kind of suck. I think it feels a bit worse than in competitive games because having a particularly bad turn can hurt the entire team, unfortunately, but that’s just card luck, sometimes. You should usually be able to make at least one card work, but if not, see if another player can pass you something helpful.
Cons
- There are enough moving parts that the game can seem daunting to new players. A lot of it is faux-complexity, I think; for instance, the entire die-rolling part of the game where you decide what terrible thing happens is largely perfunctory. There are some effects that occur, but if you aren’t paying a ton of attention you likely won’t miss much. Similarly, it feels like there are a lot of cards to learn, but once you play a few times you’ll notice how many of them are equivalent or repeat cards. Once you get the hang of it, it’s smooth sailing though; I have three simultaneous games running on BGA even now.
Overall: 9 / 10
Overall, I think Daybreak is fantastic! It really pivots from the Pandemic model of you just being constantly underfoot and suffering under the weight of the daunting task in front of you to the kind of incremental problem-solving that helps your team believe that they can get the job done. If only solving the climate crisis were so easy. I do appreciate that some of these technologies are fairly fantastical and a little far-off at times so that it doesn’t risk making light of the serious state our climate is in, though. Like, there are real problems, but there are also small steps and big steps that can be taken to make progress on them. So thematically, I think they did a really nice job making sure the gameplay reflects that. The art helps, as well. It’s bright, colorful, diverse, and upbeat; again, these are choices made to make the challenge feel less daunting, and I think it lands wonderfully. Within the game itself, there’s also a lot that I like. I don’t typically love engine-building, as a mechanic, but here it’s delightfully well-executed. Players are often looking for their own broken combo to keep cycling on each round to draw a ton of cards or produce a bunch of green energy or reduce all of their emissions. And you can get there, but you have to build it up. Having the cards’ icons determine the strength of the engine is also very nice. The crisis and die systems are fun and challenging, though they take a little bit more effort to figure out. I think I took for granted that Board Game Arena was handling that for us for the first few games so I didn’t bother to figure out how it works, but you actually do want Resilience Tokens for gameplay reasons. Whoops. The both micro and macrosystems of the game work together to create an experience that’s engaging, fun, and compelling, but without so much complexity that I get overwhelmed. It’s solid! I look forward to many more plays of Daybreak, and if you’re looking for a cool cooperative game, a bright and colorful game, or you just like building amazing card-drawing engines, I’d definitely recommend it!
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