Much of the modern discourse about board games has finally, gloriously, arrived at the issues of meaningfulness, message and content. We’re starting to take it as read that games create a state of mind and habituate a communication of values, and those values can at the very least teach us insight and empathy and understanding of the world around us. For the most part, however, these discussions have been about things in the past or in potentia. Not that that this makes them less important to learn, just that they aren’t existing in a space where learning is the first stage to actually solving the problem. In this case, climate change has its hands around our throats and Daybreak, by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, with art by Mads Berg is a literal actual step in trying to losing that grip. Billions of lives are at stake, and here is a board game joining climate strikes, marches, gluing people to art work, blocking traffic, starting fires and being a Swedish teenager as things designed to get people to care.

Not that I expect Daybreak to strike a revolution like those other tactics, nor should it be judged for not trying to do so. There are many ways to eat an elephant, and movies and games are a softer way to spread awareness, anger and motivation. But like any political tactic, everyone is a critic. If you’ve dabbled in politics even a tiny bit you know that there is no stance that doesn’t make somebody on your own side enraged. If you over emphasise the threat of climate change you’re an irresponsible doomer, but if you take it too lightly you’re not emphasising the danger we’re in. Try to get people to take local action and you’ll be accused of letting the 1% off the hook. Try to target the rich and they’ll accuse you of trying to stop capitalism (too hard) instead of trying to save the planet. Point out that they’re nickel and diming you instead of just getting on board and they’ll accuse you of not caring about specifics or being blindly tribal. Criticise their methods and they’ll call you a traitor who is encouraging people to despair because they can’t see a united front. 

So far, Daybreak has mostly dodged these critiques, but not entirely. I’ve seen a few accusations that it is too optimistic. We also  have a new kind of political critique: online, the game is accused of being too easy. For the most part this is internet nerd nonsense from hobby gamers who are stuck in a bubble where John Company is just a little bit complicated, but it illustrates the stakes. The game needs to be simpler than average because it wants an enormously wide audience. It needs to be winnable because it is about creating hope. We are in a position where the game mechanics don’t have to just be good, they are rated on how well they might save billions of lives. This is unlike anything else in the history of board gaming. The only thing close is how much chess interacted with the Cold War. 

Expectations, to say the least, were high. Also because Matt Leacock designed Pandemic, which is not just one of the first and greatest cooperative games but also had enormously wide appeal and approachability to the general public and build a deserved empire on that bedrock of reliable relatable fun-puzzle combination. He also designed Pandemic Legacy which so established the high quality of legacy games it caused the first board game box office bomb when it outplayed its rival SeaFall straight into the bargain bin. Leacock famously used his computer game testing background to have hundreds of groups, some under constant video recording, running through the campaigns to identify every possible rough edge or pinch point. The man does not phone this in, and his legend deservedly precedes him. And full disclosure, Pandemic and Pandemic Legacy are two games that I swept me up into the full glory of what games could be and were life changing experiences for me, as well as for the industry, so that raises even more expectations. 

But the amazing thing is, there’s a sense when you look at Daybreak that every one of those expectations has been met. I may be biased since I believe in saving the earth and love Leacocks style, but this beautiful game really did understand the assignment.

For some, games are engineering puzzles and like with the automobile in the early 20th century some believe that as we move from the firehose era to the flood era, design is becoming standardised and perfected; old designs are now obsolete and it is now just about chassis . For these folks there is nothing innovative about Daybreak. I disagree on both counts but there are familiar sign posts here that work very well to walk you into the rhythm m. Each round the board gives you some indication of the troubles ahead; you then work hard to change the situation with your cards and actions and then the board punishes you. You can build shields against the punishment in three suits to hedge your bets but if you do that too much you won’t concentrate on bringing down your dirty fuel and emissions which is how you lose and win. On top of this familiar structure we have ways to decrease bad things and increase the cushion for the carbon using a hand management mechanic full of impossible but clever choices that reminds me of Mage Knight. Pandemic is a legend; adding a masterpiece seems like a win.

To get more specific each player has a board with five slots for card columns and showing their population, which is being provided with just enough fuel to stay alive, some of which is dirty, some clean. Below that are emissions tracked in types like industrial, car, agriculture and so on. At the end of the round carbon cubes equal to the amount of emissions and dirty fuel –  roughly twenty per player – will be added to the board. Then the trees and oceans will absorb what they can, roughly ten per player. Anything left is added to a goal thermometer tracking temperature rise, with every five cubes per player causing a 0.1 degree. If you do nothing you’ll be adding two bands a turn and hit 2 degrees rise in four turns – and lose. Your actions can remove dirty fuel, add clean fuel, remove emissions, add the aforementioned resilience and add trees and oceans to absorb more carbon. Meanwhile crises will take away resilience, pour on carbon, kill trees, choke oceans and also roll the climate dice which tracks the chaos of the planetary chaos of climate breakdown. 

And all of this is interconnected, running back into one conclusion: everything is about carbon. The strength of pandemic was always the multiuse cards creating a single resource yet one that entangled everything. The cards you needed to use to move around and build treatment centres were the very same cards you needed to cure diseases. A small step then to mage knight where now the cards can also be used to power up other cards. For example: in one of my five columns of cards I have two GRID symbols which means I can activate the front card which lets me discard any card to generate clean power equal to the number of grid cards. But the only card I have left to discard would let me convert into solar power. Putting that card on the top of the stack means I can get two clean power a turn without discarding a card, but I can only do it once per turn, per solar symbols I have in the column. If next turn I draw more solar symbols, I can slide them behind the solar power scheme and get ever more free green energy but if I instead get no solar cards and more grid symbols and more cards I can discard I might have lost vital momentum. 

On the other hand, I only need so much clean energy anyway – each turn I must produce energy to match population growth. A few green energy a turn is easy to do. But if I suddenly gut my dirty energy I need vast amounts of green energy to make it up…but a turn or two later I might get a combo which puts me way ahead in green energy while also stopping my population growth. Now I have to pivot my nation away from the whole solar plan because once a problem is solved you must deal with the other spinning plates. On the other hand I could rapidly boost my population in order to embrace tiny net zero housing, reducing the city pollution emissions but driving up my need for energy. If you like tactical games where you most constantly change horses midstream, this is delightful. But it is also an amazing puzzle because sometimes you’re not quite out of the woods but you have another killer combo you need to start and it has to be in that column. Do you iterate one more time on the old plan or scrap the whole thing because we’re nearly there? Or leave two weak plans in place one more round hoping you can buff them both next turn?

The choices are agonising and never ever simple, because everything is interconnected. You could outlaw coal tomorrow but if you can’t meet fuel needs you’ll gain communities in crisis and too many of them makes you lose the game. But it might be worth it to remove all that dirty energy, if those folks in crisis can hold on just a little longer. But then you’re so busy burning combos on getting out of coal you might not build up your social resiliency and then you’re offered a chance to build up new forests but since those trees occupy farmland for poor people your social resiliency takes another hit. That’s fine if there’s storms and hurricanes but if eco fascists get elected or democracy is captured by capitalists, your communities fall apart. All of this means that m while you’re gaining momentum against the board with combos, you’re never safe until victory. Most coop games you can tell when you have so little momentum you cannot win, or so much you cannot fail; just as in Pandemic Leacock avoids that problem with everything on a knife edge.

Unlike Pandemic, however, you cannot plan much. To avoid quarterbacking, everyone is heads down over their own boards and you can only ever see one of the upcoming crises each round. Likewise because the six kinds of climate chaos are on a six sided die you have to trust in luck that the weather patterns break down before the ice caps melt. You can get screwed by unlucky rolls or a bunch of bad crisis draws. (I’ve also seen some say you can draw a bad hand of local projects but I’ve never seen it – a bad hand is more cards to discard into the engine.) The redeeming factor here is that – like every inch of this game – it is thematically perfect. We can’t see what’s coming, and the collapse is chaotic. It wouldn’t be fair to let us control those things because it wouldn’t be realistic.

But the bad luck can, every ten games or so, feel a wee bit frustrating. Cards with the Regulation tag are 23% of the deck and I needed just one to activate a project and couldn’t find one in drawing ten cards in a row, and that will happen about 8% of the time. But the game is short and a spot of bad luck can be ameliorated by turning to a friend having good luck, in true co-op spirit – but this is balanced out by higher player counts giving you more risk of one player having a weak point. It is a little isolated compared to talkier coops because trading cards is not a given, but you do get a strong sense of camaraderie. I assume this is why the board is bigger than it needs to be, since the map does nothing: so people have a talking point so they keep meeting each other’s eyes. And if you do get bad luck as mentioned, the game is short (under 90 minutes mostly) so it’s no crushing loss – you can just start again (I want to do that every time the game finishes). And because of the titanic nature of the task and the randomness of climate change, you don’t feel cheated – and you feel good about every inch of progress made. It always feels like you did something, and it always feels FAIR.

Once I got into a heated discussion on Twitter with a Dutch climate scientist who was criticising the movie Don’t Look Up because it was too “silly” in suggesting that people don’t think climate change exists or is important to deal with. I live in Australia where we keep building coal plants and nobody is doing anything. This game is at the opposite end of Don’t Look Up: it exists in a world where everyone cares, is trying to save the planet and taking big steps to do so. It exists in a world where we just know that oil companies lie and cheat, where media collusion is accepted as truth, where we have cards that let us change our governments to not scapegoating immigrants and to invest in solar. Against that has to be the unflinching reality of how hard this task is, and how many millions of people are going to die and have already died. By combining that reality with the fantasy of a world acting for change, I never mind losing. The mechanics are so clean and beautiful I want to immediately play again anyway but also just to spend an hour actually fighting, acknowledging the scale of the problem but also all the things we can do – that is paradise.

And not just a fools paradise. Every card in the game has a QR code to the website page about it, explaining in simple terms what the card means, what we are already doing to get this going, and how you personally can add your strength to those projects. Is that over optimistic? Neither I nor the game thinks so. If we turn off the news and government propaganda we know there’s more power in us than we believe, and more than just despair and surrender. We can change things. 

That’s what this game says. I find nature documentaries paralyse me with fear and political arguments drain me of strength but when I play Daybreak I have hope and I believe. This game changes the human soul in a time when the lights are going out and as such it is a significant work of revolutionary art. It’s not enough of course on its own to save humanity; Goya’s Third of May didn’t stop war and The Tin Drum didn’t stop fascism, but they raised a fist and said “this far and no further”. May all of us game designers be inspired to do the same. May we live in hope, and play to believe.

An ongoing series about the gaming lessons in every episode of Bluey

1.11 Bike, 1.12 Bob Bilby and 1.14 Takeaway

These three episodes are both good examples of the fact that Bluey has good lessons and good lessons apply to everything, including games. Bike is about how hard it can be to learn a new skill and Takeaway is about how to think differently about losing – and just enjoy the chaos.

Of course these days we’re playing more and more games and rarely taking time to get good at them. This rewards memory and awareness of rules elements and natural abilities at certain skills. It also means games can’t teach us important skills about resilience and working harder. 

And Bob Bilby is a reminder that we spend too much time reading or watching about or shopping for the new hotness instead of just playing games. 

1.15 Butterflies

Blueys reputation as a show that hits the emotions like a freight train really begins here. When Judo next door comes over to pretend to be butterflies and butterfly catchers, the more selfish Judo pressures Bluey to be mean to her younger sister. Bluey goes along with it until she realises what she’s done. Everything ends happily but this is a hard episode to watch. I think everyone has been on all three sides of this equation at some point: the cruel leader, the swayed follower and the bullied victim. Recalling the first two leave us brittle with shame; recalling the last one just … hurts. 

Gaming and sports are one of the few arenas in our lives – at least prior to social media – where we find ourselves measuring our abilities against others. It’s easy to want to ditch the folks who can’t keep up, and even easier to feel stupid. Almost everyone I’ve asked about why they don’t like to play board games said the same thing: winning made them feel mean, and losing made them feel stupid. 

Butterflies is about deliberate cruelty but the same emotions are key, and it is because Bingo isn’t as capable that Judo gets bored. I was a gifted child which meant I was often superior to others but just as often mocked when I got something wrong that I was “supposed” to know. I’m also right in the middle of gaming ability: I completely outclass the average non gamer and am completely out classes by the average strategy gamer. All too often I will sit down with a stranger and be utterly obliterated while they sit confused because they’ve never played against someone who can’t see the things they see without thinking. Despite the Hollywood stereotype, autistic people like myself are often found over-explaining because they are always between two worlds and, because they feel isolation and rejection so strongly, are fixated on lessening these blows to others. 

That, ultimately, is the point of ludic intelligence. To understand how we relate to games so we understand can stop hurting people or getting hurt.

1.16 Yoga Ball

Bandit plays too roughly with Bingo, but Bingo can’t find her voice to say so. More than anything else, consent is complicated. It can’t be protected with something as simple as an X card or a safe word, on their own. That doesn’t mean that someone who violates consent has done a consciously cruel thing. Consent is like politics: everyone can and will make mistakes, and safety includes not just safety rails and warning lights but conversations and check ins and education and apologies and forgiveness. 

And every time we play, any kind of game, consent is an issue and mistakes can be made, no matter how great our intentions. The rules alone will not keep us safe and nor will “gg”-rituals or aphorisms that it’s just a game. Those are all important but we rely on them to be perfect and they can’t be. We need ludic intelligence and ludic vocabulary to talk about these things.

Bluey gives us that, by example. Bingo learns to yip real loud when her dad goes too far. If we can start to learn from Bluey, from the beginning, we can build better gamers. 

1.17 Calypso 

Sometimes Bluey is about life lessons; sometimes Bluey is about game design; then we have episodes like Calypso and Doctor which are about shared storytelling. In Calypso, the titular teacher moves effortlessly between the children at the care centre where each group is playing out a different story or activity. As she does so she adds difficulties to stories that are too simple, adds solutions to stories that have stalled, and links the stories together where they are apart.

When roleplaying games first appeared, the sociologist Gary Fine described them as not unlike the folie a deux, the concept in psychology where a dominant individual pulls a subordinate one into their delusions. The subservient person may not have delusions or hallucinations but they act as if they do. The connection to shared imagination play is in taking everyone else’s stories seriously; behaving as if their fantasies are real and important. That’s what Calypso does: she reacts as if they have meaning and builds meaning by doing so, and by weaving the stories together so the children follow her example. But nobody is forced to engage with any one else: the terriers want to defend things but nobody wants to be defended and that’s okay. But as soon as defence is needed, Calypso calls them in. Likewise the little pug doesn’t want to play for a long time, and that’s okay. Calypso supports that totally. And when he does play she’s in full support for that as well. 

The game master in rpgs is often a facilitator, and this role is also given to the person who chooses what to play and teaches the rules. They look after more than just safety and consent but also (ideally) encourage and support and help each player find the fun, or their fun. But in a world of strong ludic intelligence we might realise that like any joint activity we should all work for everyone’s enjoyment. It’s not usually possible for everyone around the table to play such distinct games but we can move between different games without the idea of making people “suffer” through ones they dislike, when we might instead support them to find fun without pressure, sure in the knowledge that when we move to their favourite game they will be right there to help us get the best from that experience.

This isn’t easy! Not if we want to set up an environment where we also play as hard as we can to win, which is also valid. We don’t want to just be Calypso, always in support and always checking in. But we can’t build any kind of fun by just expecting it will happen because of the rules. Sometimes, no matter the game, we should all put our Calypso hats on and check in on everyone.

1.18 Doctor

Doctor makes an excellent companion piece to Calypso. Whereas the previous episode shows how to facilitate fun for others, Doctor is about what happens when you just don’t seem to be having fun. Bingo is playing doctor with Bluey as the receptionist. Indi wants to play but can only imagine a sore arm. The other kids imagine huge emergencies like being eaten by a crocodile so Indi finds herself being bumped down the list. Not getting any interaction she becomes frustrated and doesn’t want to play any more. Bluey sits beside Indi and notices Indi swaying her feet. Blueys enjoyment of this encourages Indi to find her own fun in doing a dance – which Bingo declares a medical emergency, pulling Indi into the game.

Games, as opposed to play, tend to be rigid structures where there isn’t room for the Indis among us to do our own thing without ruining the fun for others. But the pathway to Indi finding a way in is by Indi tapping into what she loves and does well. Sometimes the key to ludic intelligence is and gaming harmony is self-knowledge but also championing what others are great at. We tend to approach game preferences as a matter of negatives: I don’t like those kind of games; I can’t do that kind of puzzle; I’m bad at the math; I have no fun bluffing; speed games make me anxious. And when we look at positives, we tend to go straight for skill levels which can sound like bragging or become equally isolating: don’t play this game with me, I will crush you. I’m no fun because I’ll shut you down and find the best combos too fast.

What if we focussed more on what we love, what we enjoy and what helps us express ourselves? I love engine builders because it feels satisfying to make a machine. If we play the slow mode I will thrive. If we take care not to get bossy I have way more fun in co-ops. It might sound selfish at first: we couch our language in negativity because we’re taught to apologise for our needs so we have to emphasise that we are miserable for our desires to be taken into account. “I’ll have more fun this way” sounds like a terrible demand if everyone else has agreed to play something they all enjoy. But if we learn to have a different culture altogether about picking a game to play, one where we plan and choose by expressing how we thrive, not how we suffer, we can stop seeing our pleasure preferences as a burden. 

1.6 Weekend

Bluey is about games and play, but it has plenty of themes, and another big one is wonder. Bingo wants to stop playing a chasing game to show her father a beautiful insect, and he misses it. Our values shift and change, and games can wait.

We also find out in this episode that Bandit can easily lift a six year old and a four year old in one hand each, which makes him incredibly strong…

1.7 BBQ

The Heeler family has a BBQ and Bingo has to make a pretend salad. This episode is important in world history for being the first appearance of Muffin. It also brings up another common theme in the show: imitation. Every time the dogs think about real life salad they realise they need to improve their play-salad. Much of the pretend that Bluey engages in is a direct copy of the world around her, and this theme will be developed more and more as the show goes on. Even at its most abstract level, play has referential elements, if only to how in real life we do win and lose sometimes, and compete and collaborate. Often the referential elements are much stronger though, and the copying becomes more important.

1.8 Fruitbat

Bluey doesn’t want to go to bed, she wants to stay up and be a fruitbat. Her dad uses games to get her to into bed and along the way she discovers how her Dad has sacrificed playing his favourite sport to spend more time with his children. Play is often seen as expendable and the first on the chopping block when “responsibility” calls. Being a grown up still comes with very Victorian ideas of putting away childish things. But just as we know we need rest and self care we also need play. Bandit has not really sacrificed as redirected: his play needs are found with his children, not away from them. 

The larger lesson is that there are many ways to play and we should see them as a continuum with much in common. A tournament of bridge and a high stakes poker game might not feel a lot like playing house nor might the latter feel like a whole day of playing Diplomacy or a game of touch football. What makes something play is a large topic we can’t explore here, but we can suggest looking for similarities and understanding how gaming feeds our needs, whether that’s differently in different modes, or similarly despite those different modes. All play is defined by its nature of being outside reality where no stakes exist; in pretending things that don’t matter do matter. And that matters a great deal.

1.9 Horsey Ride 

When Bluey tries to distract her cousin from playing roughly with Bluey’s favourite toy, creative imagination games don’t work, but racing and roughhousing do. Games, like emotions, can be more or less activating, and even deactivating – Bluey playing in her imagination in Fruit Bat helped her ‘power down’ for the evening, but only a riotous change can distract little Socks from an equally boisterous wrestle with a toy. Even in board games, games can be boisterous or quiet, activating or relaxing, open with lots of opportunities or frustratingly full of blocking and disaster – often regardless of what the theme may suggest! Calico, for example, has a cute theme but is full of frustration and failure, and that makes it often a poor game to end the evening on. Of course, people can react to different mechanics differently – the claustrophobia of Calico can be a shared bonding experience, and others might find the expanding choice space of Guild of Merchant Explorers to be more exhausting than inspiring. Ask yourself how a game makes you feel in the specific, not just the general. Fun is too vague. Look up the eight kinds of fun as a good way to start, but also just examine your feelings closely. Listen to who you are. This, too, is ludic intelligence. 

1.10 Hotel and 1.13 Spygame

These two focus on another common theme in the show: Bluey being bossy, and the usual target of that bossiness being Bingo. In this, they represent a counter-argument to Shadowlands (see part one). There, Bluey demanded everyone follow her rules because they made the game better. But Bluey isn’t always right about what makes a good game. And, what is more, it’s not about being right. 

The improv exercise of “yes and” is designed to teach the skill of following and not to “block” as it is known. Blocking is when you shut down or redirect a scene because you think your idea is just better or funnier and it is easier to do than most people think. It can be done in lots of subtle ways too, without appearing to be a bully. Most of us, even if we think we are polite or good at sharing, care a great deal about what we think is a good idea. In roleplaying and story games a large amount of my design work goes into shutting off or short circuiting this instinct because it really is more interesting when more voices come through and we must actually improvise.

Blueys friend Mackenzie likes to improvise and switch the story around. But just as in Shadowlands this isn’t always the right answer either. In a world of make-believe, rewriting the story too much destroys it. One cannot say yes and to “and then all our problems are solved”. Similarly in strategy games we might fudge the rules to accomodate a younger or weaker player but we must not risk the point of play, in the challenge and the risk. 

Collaborative strategy games often run into the problem of “quarterbacking” where some players who know the game better or can think of faster can, even when they try not to, advise so much they take away the spotlight from others. Reminders to value social goals can only go so far if keeping those social goals means other players don’t feel like they can control their experience, that others are failing at the game and they cannot stop it from happening. 

There is no perfect solution to this but Spygames shows one good response: recognising individual player roles and special powers. This is in fact the most popular mechanic listed on Board Game Geek and for good reason. Not only does it let players feel special and unique it can also let players play to their strengths: a leader player can take a character that can give actions away to others. A follower can be happy to have a power everyone else wants to put in the spotlight. In Spygames Bentley is the best at shouting “PASSWORD!” so she makes the best guard. With a player down the game suffers because the players can’t find a role that suits them – for their needs and to push the game forward. 

Whether competitive or collaborative, often what we mean by “I don’t like this game” is we can’t find a way for our play style to move the game forward, or the play style the game wants us to adapt is just not one we like or are suited for. Weirdly, we often judge people for this, because if three people want to play a certain game it is coloured as being selfish not to want to “lump it” and join in. But with so many games now we have more options (and games often have modules within them) do if we discuss this going in we can often find a way to keep the game but satisfy that player also. Or at least understand when those players are out of their comfort zone and deserve to pick the next game. Ludic intelligence means listening to not just what we like but what others like, and empathizing. Even with your favourite game.