I have been searching for ways to get people to engage with the risks to humanity created by nuclear weapons.
The whole issue seems to collide with the affect problem: the commonplace intuitive belief that talking about good or bad things causes them to happen, or simply the instinct to move away from and avoid unpleasant issues.
Pleasant or not, nuclear weapon issues need to be considered. With the US-led international security order smashed by Donald Trump’s re-election and extreme actions, the prospect of regional arms races in the Middle East and Southeast Asia has never been greater and the resulting risks have never been so consequential.
To try to get over the ‘unwilling to talk about it’ barrier, I have been writing an interactive roleplaying simulation on nuclear weapon proliferation called Rivals. I am working toward a full prototype and play-testing, and to that end I will be attending a series of RPG design workshops at next month’s Breakout Con conference in Toronto.
I am very much hoping to connect with people who are interested in both the issue of nuclear weapon proliferation and the potential of this simulation as a teaching tool.
That is brilliant Milan. It could become a most useful and sought after teaching tool.
Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro in AI Studio did an interesting job of simulating playthroughs of Rivals in the new global context following the Israeli and US strikes on Iran. It misuses some game mechanics from the rules, but definitely captures the kind of creativity in strategy and diplomacy the game is meant to allow.
It also has very smart ideas for countering the likelihood the game will develop into a race toward the bomb by all parties, though implementing something like this would require having secret parts of the rules or perhaps a ‘player spoilers’ section in the Ref guide…
The Islamic Republic of Iran serves as a perfect illustration. Over the last two decades, Israel and the United States have tried to persuade the world to stop treating Iran as a normal country and to instead treat it like the international system’s leading danger. The result has been constant denunciations, crushing sanctions, threats of military action, and, most recently, military operations against its territory—carried out during diplomatic negotiations between Tehran and Washington. Iran, in response, has been forced to devote more resources and attention to defense. It also increased uranium enrichment in defiance, to show that it would not be pressured into submission. The external securitization of Iran has fed into a parallel dynamic at home, as the state adopted a stricter approach in dealing with domestic social challenges, responding to these challenges with tighter restrictions.
The result is a securitization cycle: a vicious spiral in which Iran and its adversaries feel compelled to adopt more hostile policies in response to each other’s behavior. This phenomenon is somewhat like the security dilemma, in which one government’s decision to bolster its capabilities prompts others to do the same. But with the security dilemma, each side is reacting to material increases in the other’s capacity. This cycle begins with rhetoric. The target country is portrayed as a threat, and then is treated as a threat. And in response, it turns to activities—such as bolstering its missile capabilities or increasing enrichment—that can be used to corroborate the initial allegation. The cycle, in other words, produces a self-fulfilling prophecy. The securitized country gradually distances itself from independent agency and becomes trapped in a series of reactive behaviors.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/how-america-and-iran-can-break-nuclear-deadlock
The “AP Launderer” (Mercenary Strategy)
**Best for:** Xenon (Turkey)
**The Concept:** Xenon uses its neutral position to become the “Banker” of the simulation, profiting from the conflict without participating.
* **The Mechanics:**
1. **The Setup:** Xenon maintains neutral relations (0) with everyone.
2. **The Service:** Xenon offers to be the intermediary for “Share Expertise.” Since sharing requires “Friends or better” ($\ge$ 5), Neon and Argon (Enemies) cannot share tech.
3. **The Laundromat:** Xenon friends *both* sides. Neon shares Level 2 tech with Xenon. Xenon shares that Level 2 tech with Argon.
4. **The Fee:** Xenon charges 1 or 2 AP for every transfer, payable via envelope.
* **The Exploit:**
* Xenon accumulates massive AP reserves from the desperate belligerents.
* Xenon spends this “dirty money” on “Domestic Quality of Life” and “International Do-Gooding.”
* **Winning Condition:** The belligerents stall each other out or get sanctioned. Xenon finishes with a pristine economy, high World Reputation, and maxed-out domestic popularity.
Daybreak as a comment on climate change
It can be difficult to make a satisfying boardgame about a real issue. After all, most boardgames are primarily evaluated along the basic lines of the game itself, but a game about a real danger also winds up getting considered based on how well it wrestles with that threat. Perhaps this is why so many boardgames prefer fantastical or at least lightly fictionalized settings: if you’re playing a boardgame with your friends in which you are all working together to repel a horde of zombies, you probably won’t have many moments when someone says “I don’t think that would really work” or “it was too easy to win” or “this is too unrealistic.” Alas, when you’re playing Daybreak you’re quite likely to have moments in which someone says aloud “I don’t think that would really work” or “it was too easy to win” or “this is too unrealistic.”
When players sit down to Daybreak they are not only bringing with them their past experience playing boardgames, they are also bringing with them their own thoughts surrounding climate change which will deeply inflect their experience of the game. If you’re just playing Daybreak as a boardgame, you can easily overlook the specifics of the cards you’re playing as you focus instead on taking the action that (on the card’s face) appears most beneficial. Yet, if you’re playing Daybreak as someone who cares deeply about climate change you might find yourself somewhat put off by this simple game mechanic.
To the climate activist who has spent years organizing marches and actions, all of the work that goes into building a movement might feel annoyed by the simplicity of playing “Environmental Movement” or “Social Movement.” To those with experience in the policy domain the ease of playing “Clean Energy Standards” might make them wonder how such standards were actually passed and enforced. To those with a well-informed skepticism towards unproven geoengineering technologies, the idea of playing “Stratospheric Sulfur” might seem to elide the unknowns and the potential risks of geoengineering. To the fan of Andreas Malm’s work—or who admired the Children of Kali from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future—all of the actions may appear too above board. To the person playing Daybreak as the fourth year of a pandemic becomes the fifth year of a pandemic, the idea that the crisis card “Pandemic” can be so quickly handled, might seem contradicted by their own lived experience. Climate scientists who are always insisting that 2℃ of warming, while bad, does not represent a literal game over for humanity will likely be annoyed that in this game hitting 2℃ of warming triggers the literal game over. And to quite a few people, that the player boards in Daybreak are the US, Europe, China, and “Majority World” might seem like an almost offensive reduction of billions of people in distinct regions into a single simplistic “Majority World.”
If you approach Daybreak as just a game, you can easily overlook questions about whether or not this or that would really work, and you can easily overlook all the work that would be required to make a card like “Clean Energy Standards” or “Environmental Movement” happen. But if you approach Daybreak as someone who is deeply invested in questions of whether this or that would really work—not to beat a boardgame, but to actually address climate change—these questions seem to linger uncomfortably.
Daybreak features a certain techno-utopian ethos mixed with an optimistic “what if we could all just work together?” philosophy. The techno-utopian element of the game is clear in how the game frames itself at the start of the rulebook, where it notes “In Daybreak, you’ll build the mind-blowing technologies and resilient societies we need for a warming planet.” The term “mind-blowing” really does not seem accidental, and the deck of cards from which you’re drawing is packed with cards that represent shiny technological solutions. The game seems to take an “all of the above” attitude towards “mind-blowing technologies” by freely lumping renewables with nuclear with geoengineering. While the “what if we could all just work together?” philosophy is embodied by the gameplay itself, wherein the players all need to work together in order to win, and in which there’s really nothing preventing the players from all joining hands and singing as they take their turns.
The “work together” aspect of Daybreak is what makes the game simultaneously hit home and feel frustrating for those who care deeply about climate change. After all, it seems fair to argue that the world really could handle climate change if everyone put the common good first and genuinely worked together, but at times Daybreak feels hopelessly naïve with the seamless way that all of the players (who are ostensibly representing different countries) easily cooperate. It’s lovely to think of all of these countries rising above crude nationalistic self-interest to save the climate, but that feels more unrealistic than many of the “mind-blowing technologies” you are deploying in the game. With this flattening out of different national perspectives feeling particularly odd for the “majority world” player who is ostensibly representing many different countries spanning multiple continents. And if any player is sitting down to Daybreak after having spent much time reading the news (environmental or political or international) its hard for their playthrough not to feel haunted by a recognition that the cooperation that takes place in Daybreak is a far cry from what is currently on display at COP28. Cooperation is the point, cooperation is the dream, but the international cooperation in this boardgame makes it feel more fantastical than a game in which you trying to banish eldritch horrors.
There are some painfully complicated boardgames out there, but most boardgames are in the end fairly reductive. They may incorporate beautiful art and interesting thematic elements, but they tend to give a player a fairly straightforward role and a fairly bounded set of actions that they can take. And this makes Daybreak simply feel far too simplistic and reductive to be much of a real intervention in discussions around climate change. As an exercise in “what if we worked together” mixed with a sizable dash of techno-utopianism, the game functions as a playful exploration of those hopes. And earnest techno-utopians may seize upon at least some aspects of the game to highlight how easy it would be to fix climate change if we all just embraced nuclear energy and geoengineering. But even those who accuse anyone 5% more pessimistic than they are of being doomers will likely chafe at how easy Daybreak makes solving climate change seem.
In Daybreak all you really have to do to hold climate change in check is to play the right cards, but as anyone engaged in climate work knows it’s a hell of a lot harder to build an “environmental movement” than it is to simply play a cute card that says “environmental movement” on it.
What is missing from Daybreak are people. Yes, there are lots of beautiful illustrations of people on the cards, but the game isn’t really about people. Each of the players (who is themselves a person) takes on the role of an entire nation (or a continent, or a collection of nations), and the sorts of actions players take (even if they have a suggestion of people) are for the most part massive technological projects, big regulatory changes, or significant economic policies. People kind of creep into the game in the form of the social resilience tokens you need to be stocking up on to protect yourself from a crisis, or in the form of the “communities in crisis” that appear on your board if things are going badly. But regular people don’t really have much of a place in this game. In fairness, one could argue that all of the people are ostensibly in the background of Daybreak, and that it was massive mobilization and actions by people that has led to the world in Daybreak where there is enough political will and power as to force through these policies, build these technologies, and make all of the governments work together. Daybreak doesn’t really put much emphasis on the actions of people, and nor for that matter does it really engage particularly with the sufferings of people—if you have too many “communities in crisis” it might mean that you get to draw fewer cards on your turn, but this feels like a rather crass way of thinking about a situation wherein a climate crisis has caused a refugee crisis. While it is good that Daybreak doesn’t try to frame climate change as something that can be solved by you (yes, you) remembering to bring a reusable bag to the grocery store, it is also a game that makes it feel like the most a regular person can do is sit around and wait for the “mind-blowing technologies” to be deployed at scale. In its quest to provide an optimistic game about climate change, Daybreak winds up sunnily glossing over the very real harms already being caused by climate change. At risk of being unfair to Daybreak (it is a boardgame, after all), it’s a hell of a lot easier to play a card that helps to build social cohesion and societal resilience than it actually is to build social cohesion and societal resilience.
Daybreak is set at a moment in time when the necessary international political will exists, when the powerful economic interests blocking action have been tamed, and in which a range of speculative technological solutions are no longer speculative—and yet Daybreak is also ostensibly set in our present moment…but our present moment is one in which those aforementioned conditions have not come to pass. This is not to say that our present moment is hopeless, but it isn’t quite as hopeful as the situation portrayed in Daybreak.
Within climate discourse a major topic of concern in recent years has been anxiety around apathy. Fear, not just of the climate crisis itself, but fear that certain responses to the climate crisis are leading people to become apathetic and disengaged. These accusations are usually thrown the hardest at activists practicing confrontational tactics or those whose opinions get them labeled as “doomers.” And yet the assurance that those at the top will fix the problem in time, the promise that “mind-blowing technologies” are right around the corner, and easy gestures towards resilience as being the only thing we need to weather the crises facing us, can also convince many people that they don’t need to do much of anything. Can despair lead to inaction? Certainly. But false hope can lead to inaction as well. To strike the right balance between urgency and hope is a major challenge within contemporary climate discourse, and it’s a hard balance to strike in a boardgame.
Beyond its strengths and weaknesses as an actual boardgame, as an intervention into climate change discourse the problem with Daybreak is that it makes climate change too easy. It has too much of a “institutions and technology will save us in the nick of time” ethos and not enough of a “we must mobilize in the present to push those institutions to act” ethos. Its version of a world where politics has vanished and every world power is perfectly cooperating feels laughably unrealistic, and the game’s faith in high-tech solutions seems naïve. While the game itself is hardly about apathy, there is a danger that playing the game encourages a certain kind of complacency by hiding all of the on the ground organizing work that is necessary in favor of presenting the situation as one wherein you just need to play the right cards. The risk is that people will come away from their game of Daybreak feeling like climate change has been beaten, when all that’s been beaten is the game. Or that people will come away from a game of Daybreak thinking they know what needs to be done, but not thinking that they have any real role to play in making that happen.
Those who are drawn to Daybreak by their own interest in climate change will likely read the game through their own analysis of the climate crisis and what needs to be done to address it. And yet from the most optimistic climate communicator to the busiest climate organizer to the most pessimistic self-proclaimed doomer—it seems that all will come away from playing Daybreak wishing that climate change is as easy to beat as this game makes it seem.
At the end of the play session, for those who care deeply about climate change, the fundamental problem will always be that Daybreak is a game. And climate change isn’t.