Carbon and Cardboard - Episode 2 Transcript

welcome to our second episode of Carbon and Cardboard we're going to ⁓ try to take some of the ideas that we had in our first episode and and apply them to actually playing a game of Daybreak which is a pretty neat game very topical but also with some really neat game mechanics underneath it that really have surprised me, honestly.

let's do our introductions again first, just so everybody knows the voices. I'm Scott Kennedy. I'm in San Francisco, California.

And I'm Josh Book. I live in Pasadena, California, a little further down south,

I'm Nathaniel Grainer. I'm in Brooklyn, New York.

Hi, I'm Audrey Woodward. I'm from Atlanta,

And yeah, I didn't call that out the first time, but this is a project that we are starting as part of the Climate-Based Fellowship. So the first time we talked a lot about making board games a powerful way to communicate certain ideas relevant or adjacent to climate science.

We brought in a bunch of educational theory, we talked about our own experiences, and we came up with a few things rather than expecting ideas to sort of magically just come forward while we explore this ⁓ game,

let's see what happens if we focus in on one aspect

Nathaniel, if you want to start us off with this idea that is larger than this game in particular, but that you felt like really showed up.

Absolutely. Daybreak is a game that is thematically about climate change. So it's very on the nose for us. one of the things I've noticed in playing Daybreak a couple of times is there's a pretty big emphasis on, there's a couple of ways you could talk about, you could say opportunity costs. You could also think in terms of the...

time value of your choices.

as we go about playing the game, one of the decisions we're gonna have to make over and over again is which projects make sense right now.

and constantly trading off projects that might have a better short-term benefit for projects that over time might be worth more because we can do them over and over again or because they'll become more powerful over time. I do think there is one other point worth highlighting as we get ready to start the game, which I think we also talked a little bit about in our first episode.

which is asymmetry. So Daybreak has a little bit of asymmetry built into the structure of the game. Each of us, the four of us have been assigned a country or region of the world that we are playing as. So I've been assigned China, Scott has been assigned Europe. I think that's Audrey is the United States and Josh is it's labeled a majority world. I think that just means everyone else.

And if you notice, each of us has a different starting situation. So China has a large population that grows quickly, a certain constellation of existing emissions, a certain energy profile of mostly dirty energy, and certain resiliences that we have, a social resilience and an infrastructure resilience, but no ecological resilience. Contrast that, for example, and we also have an existing crisis, community crisis, contrast that with the United States, which is Audrey's.

player, which starts out with a much smaller population that grows more slowly. Less energy overall, it's also pretty dirty, a different set of emissions, and ecological resilience and infrastructure resilience, but no social resilience. So each player has a different starting situation as well as a different growth rate. And that will be pretty important as the game continues. And this majority world you can see, you know, it's everyone else. So there's a lot of people and they're growing quickly and they have a lot of emissions.

and they have a lot of crises.

I love it. I feel like I got the best one.

the

So we play a round of this before failing because America leaves the table, which make of that what you will. But notice before she does, Audrey, who is playing America, calls me out on a couple of decisions I make early on that probably would have cost us the game anyway,

Okay, great. Let's get started then. I think the first thing that we do here is vote on the global project we want to start with, My initial take on this is that we're choosing between

Solar technology at scale, this just seems like it boosts everybody once it's in place where solar will generate more electricity for us and be more effective. On the other Renewable energy, innovative partnership, basically,

once this is in play, you have converted to 100 % clean energy, you can give any amount of that energy to any other one player every round. So once things get hard and they get hard in this game, we should be very clear. We probably will not win. It gets very hard and very often a lot of cooperation becomes really necessary. So,

My first thought was this thing that boosts solar in general seems like it's going to be generating extra energy for us the entire time through for everybody without doing anything. It has a simplicity value and maybe a time value of actions in that as soon as it's active, it'll be active the rest of the game. On the other hand, the flexibility of the last one seems like it become a really big deal in the end game.

⁓ We all now make our votes

I'll vote that way. That sounds good to me. Hey, I got a quick gameplay question. The icons at the top right of the cards for our projects, those indicate a cost to

The top

right is the resource type that that card has with it. So each of those cards provides that resource. And then if you put more cards behind that project later on, you get all of the resources, not just from the top card, but all of the stacked cards.

⁓

if you have two or three of this social resilience symbol in the stack, you draw one card. If you have four or five of them in the stack, you draw two cards. If you have six or more in the stack, you draw three cards.

Mm-hmm.

One of the game mechanics I found really interesting in this game is building these little machines. Many of these games you build machines, but the way that it works in this is pretty interesting to me. The way that those tags stack up,

we talked about notion of succession and this is really neat because you might start to put your social resilience tokens in that stack, right? Because only the ones that are in that stack are gonna make this card more effective. So you sort of concentrate them there. if you put another card which also uses that social resilience stack, it's gonna,

be a lot more powerful coming out of the gates. So this is really neat notion of technologies which essentially succeed each other in powerful ways, which I thought was pretty interesting from a lot of our, you know, energy and climate transition discussions as well, really well modeled here.

So why don't we lock in our global project choice so we can start the first round. So we need each, everyone's gotta hit lock on their vote. There you go. All right, so now we've each been dealt a hand, and we can all see each other's hands in each other's projects.

Yeah, let's do it. Let's get going. ⁓

Alright.

And one interesting thing about this game is we play at the same time and we all just keep, you keep going till you decide your turn is over. Generally that happens when you're out of cards in your hand or out of projects you can use. But kind of we can just each get to work looking at our own cards and think about what we want to do. Now we did pick that solar project and I noticed that I do have one card with solar.

Mm.

I know, I voted for it and now note that I do not.

I also don't have any solar. A lot of mine has to do with kind of people and moving movement.

So like a plus house plus one on the house means like my population is increasing

Yes. And at the end of each round, you need to make sure that the amount of electricity you are generating is at least as high as the number of population you have. That's total electricity. It doesn't have to be from either source, but of course dirty electricity is going to generate emissions and those are bad.

OK, I'm going to do a time.

Value of action decision I feel like getting rid of the dirty Energy is certainly useful but kind of only at the beginning of the game and we didn't choose the one where that was such a huge deal whereas building up this ability to arbitrarily give people Any of the three stability tokens seemed like it's gonna be powerful the whole time especially when we get into crisis mode

Does anybody need any stability options yet? I still only get to give one.

I'm going to give Audrey a social resilience token.

Yes.

⁓ thank you.

and what does that do for me?

So those three resilience tokens, when bad things happen in basically three broad categories, social unrest, ecological problems and infrastructure problems, they basically are like armor. They will prevent the impact of some amount of the bad things happening.

Okay.

Okay, and then I guess I have a question maybe y'all could help me with I have a card that's methane removal and if I get rid of two cards, I guess it's getting rid of one carbon block per Would it be a good idea to put that on top of my clean energy R &D? Just because then I'm adding more.

Yeah, so the challenge with

that methane removal card is it's just a very expensive cost each turn to use it. So like two cards from your hand. That's just a lot. The other thing is it's a temporary, so you're removing the emissions you're removing are from your personal emissions when we calculate them each round. What we're not doing is a removing.

Yeah.

emissions that are already out on the board some for example, if you plant trees, then every round those trees absorb emissions, whereas here, to get this benefit, you're going to have to pay two cards every round to get the benefit. that's the trade off there, you'd have to decide if it's worth it.

I would focus on cutting emissions more. You've got your clean electricity plant stack. You'll get to add to that stack so it'll get faster and faster over time. I would say you probably want to focus on cutting emissions if you can, if there's a way to do it.

So I guess I can do it here with my hydrogen power factories. But I'm not sure exactly what this is telling me that for every plus one on the house.

decarbonize one industrial emission. You've got, okay, well have quite a few of those. You have six industrial emissions. So cutting those would be good. But each time you use this project, it will increase your population by one.

Mm-hmm.

which increases your energy needs. And your energy needs already grow, your energy needs already grow quite quickly. Your energy needs grow three per turn.

Got it.

Scott, you don't want me asking, for your local projects, why did you put reforestation behind carbon tax dividend? you know, why are they?

Yeah, probably for no good, not for great reasons.

I didn't have a bunch of other cards to power up the deforestation one. So it's choices that you make, you pursue one technology and it comes at the expense of other projects, which is, think, familiar to everybody looking at the climate.

world and I think it's one of things this game does really well. it's always a choice, right?

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, so this nuclear seems very valuable, but I can't do it yet. ⁓

And it's only

valuable if it goes on a stack that has two policy cards and a social card and more nuclear. So I, one of my, I think that this game is very opinionated. I know they've tried to make things accurate. ⁓ They tend to not love geoengineering solutions and they tend to not love super high tech solutions. So I think that the allure, the allure of right, the allure of nuclear.

Yeah.

Mm.

That's interesting. It's very expensive to do it.

is there, but then it's like only if you get a bunch of other nuclear cards will it really be valuable. And there aren't that many nuclear cards in the game.

⁓

For nuclear, is that like a short term versus long term? You know, if we have projects, should we roll them out quicker than invest in something else?

Yeah, I think it's

I'm sure

it is, yeah.

more of like a strategic of like, you're going all in on nuclear, but there's like a luck element of like, will you actually get more nuclear cards or not? So it's more of, to me, it's more of like a risk of you're committing and if you just don't draw those cards, well.

We've got to commit.

Yeah, it's almost more like they're hinting at fusion, like, this would be incredible, but we don't know if it's actually gonna happen.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, or when, when it's

gonna happen. Yeah.

Okay, so

Yeah.

what's happened here is we've gone up to one full rung on our thermometer and almost all but one block on the next rung. That has caused us to roll the tipping point dice and we rolled the loss of Arctic sea ice, which has meant we've reached a tipping point on Arctic sea ice. And what that does is it generates seven more, eight more units of carbon. That has in turn pushed us into the next degree.

great. Tipping point.

Which caused us to roll that die again, which has now caused us to roll the thermo for that We've reached a permafrost permafrost tipping point which is gonna release even more carbon But this carbon is carbon that's gonna sit for the next turn So that's all very fun.

one of the ideas that we talked about for this podcast is that notion of feedback loops, right? Which just shows up everywhere. And the way that the crisis stuff gets handled is such a great example of that. We had a little bit of a crisis, but that made the Arctic sea ice have a problem. We crossed another tipping point and the crisis generates another crisis. And now we're really in the thick of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I'm being forced to sacrifice things and discard things.

Absolutely. And keep in mind, this is one of the only times in the game where you actually can discard things. So this is the only way often, if you don't like which project is in front, you can change what projects in front somewhere.

Unfortunately, I think I have to hop out. I don't know what that's gonna do to the game.

Thank you so much for being here.

well good luck! Thanks

We'll miss ya.

guys!

We are not well on our way to winning, I'll say that.

Hahaha

Yeah, I'm

not I am. I'm pretty screwed. ⁓

I felt like

I really laid into preparing the audience for that eventuality. One of these days we're going to win it and just be like, wow, we are the best at climate. We win.

Yeah. ⁓

Yeah, I mean, I do think that one interesting aspect of this game, you know, talk about time value of cards, we start, the starting condition of the game is that we're emitting 80 units of carbon and sequestering 40. Which means unless you reduce your carbon or can do things like plant trees, you know, we're gonna have 40 units of carbon on that first turn. And we actually had 39, which is what took us

one full band and almost a second band. rolled the die for that first band. We had a tipping point. It released more carbon. So now we're two bands up. So that first term is pretty catastrophic. I feel like if you're starting situation is such that you can reduce a lot of emissions on that first turn, that's really powerful. ⁓ And our starting.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I think

Mmm.

it's so neat. Like you can see that in the game mechanics and it is such a like reflection of things that we've we've heard about, right? Like from the project drawdown people of like, hey, I don't care if this is going to be the best technology ever in 10 years. It is worth more to do something simple to reduce emissions now because I get that 10 years of reduced emissions and you can just see that in the game mechanic.

Yeah, start early.

Right, right, because each round, each round,

the emissions you reduce, that's not just one point for this round, it's another point next round, another point next round, another point next round. The earlier you reduce emissions, the overall number of negative points from those emissions goes away. But unfortunately, the cards we were all dealt just did not allow us to do very much emissions reductions on that first turn.

I

so now we're going to see if we can even continue playing without Audrey. ⁓

One entire

region of the world has fallen off.

And it's the US, how appropriate. US is no longer at the table.

It's the

god!

You guys didn't come to the job.

2015 Paris Accords.

This is incredible. Good role playing everybody and seeing.

I think we literally cannot continue.

We can't continue without the United States. How sad.

How sad.

Yeah.

but narratively,

narratively solid.

Narratively ironic.

Just to sort of recap, we saw a really big feedback loop trigger pretty early on.

And I think Nathaniel, you were pointing out that a lot of that was that we had a lot of emissions and dirty energy pretty early on and weren't able to do much about it that very first game and that helped.

Well, yeah, to get more

specific on that first round, we ended up with a net carbon of 39. Now each of these bars takes 20. So this bar filled up with the first 20 and then we had 19 on the second bar. When you fill up a bar, you have to roll the die here and you move up on one of these tracks. Some of the tracks have an immediate crisis. Some of them don't. We happened onto a track that had an immediate crisis. Tipping point, I guess they're called. And

The particular tipping point we got was one that contributed carbon immediately, which meant that because we were sitting at 19 out of 20 here, that immediately pushed us into the next band, which forced us to roll that die again. So that was a particularly unlucky course of events. But if we had been able to cut our carbon by, because we cut it by one, if we'd be able to cut eight more carbon on that first round, which is achievable with four players,

then the first tipping point wouldn't have pushed us over that threshold.

Mm.

and so he would have not had a second tipping point on the same turn.

Yeah, I think that was really interesting. What else did we want to call out? There was some really neat stuff with the succession mechanics. We saw the choices being made. If you're going to pursue one technology, it has impacts on others.

And we saw, the interesting impact of the regions, right? We saw that Joshua started the game out with a very different set of immediate concerns and abilities. And that was really interesting to see play out.

about nuclear.

Yeah, I I saw some interesting stuff here around, you know, I had this card that should have helped me get a lot of solar, but it just didn't. And so my solar bet really kind of went nowhere. Meanwhile, I also just trying for nuclear, which also didn't go where I wanted it to. But this is an interesting point. This has happened to me every time I've played the game. You know, with each round, you need to make sure your total electricity is at least as high as your energy demand from your population.

And it's very tempting to want to just like start building, building, building renewable energy, which is good. You need renewable energy, but that does nothing to cut your emissions.

and then.

Yeah. And do you remember just to sorry to tie that back into some of the climate stuff we've talked about? Do you remember that big simulation? It's the wonderful simulation of global policy and all that interlocked systems. And one of the things she demoed the end roads. Yeah, which was a whole we should do a whole show on that because I was I just fascinated by that. But the thing that I remember really blowing me away.

Mm-hmm.

Are you talking about?

was her using it to demonstrate exactly that. She was like, okay, everybody, what do you want to do? Let's build lots of green energy. Great. And we ramp up all the clean energy. We were generating solar. We're doing all the right things. Then she's like, yeah, check it out. In 2050, you are still in the tank. Why? Because exactly what you were just saying reflected in this game, you're still generating all that dirty emissions and it's just not enough.

to add green capacity because people will want to use all the capacity that's there. So if you're not getting rid of the dirty capacity, it's just going to keep getting used.

Right. Well,

and this is a really important point too, that like this is exactly what is currently happening in planet Earth, is that we've reached this really cool point in the transition where we are actually starting to generate huge amounts of renewable energy just in the last couple years even. And this was actually, there was just a report out in June or July of this year that for the very, very first time the

absolute emissions of think of coal went down ⁓ or maybe it was renewable versus fossil. I'll have to look at what the exact report is. Maybe I'll bring it up right now so I can say something intelligent. up until now, we've only been adding renewable energy and yeah, maybe we're adding more renewable energy than adding fossil energy. But regardless, if you aren't fossil energy, then you aren't reducing emissions.

Hmm

we're still adding fossil. Yeah.

Yeah. Gosh, just I continue to be impressed with how

It's not like the game is sort of saying, here's what we know is true about the climate. It's just built into the mechanics that all this stuff that we've been talking about and learning about. I mean, it's not shocking. They went and did their research, but it's still really interesting to see how you could come to this game not knowing or caring anything about climate. But if you wanted to play the game well, you end up having to think about the fact that you can't just build green capacity. You've got to get rid of the old dirty capacity. It's wonderful. It's really interesting. ⁓

Yeah, I think

all the mechanics and the balancing mechanics of it really serve it well. you just can't like focus in one specific direction. And then the asymmetry of it, that every region is, you know, starting with its own set of circumstances, some more challenging than others.

I'm curious if for every starting condition that players are set up with, there is a winnable set of choices that people can make.

Hmm.

Yeah.

I suspect this game is complex enough that there's no way to actually mathematically calculate that from a practical standpoint. ⁓ There's so many cards and they can be stacked up in so many different ways that the game tree is pretty expansive here. ⁓ It's not like chess where there's two players and each one's making one move per turn.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

It's interesting to think about you could, I mean, it is just big data. It's not complicated data, right? I could imagine playing with maybe a limited number of players and you could just enumerate all the possibilities and Monte Carlo it out.

I just be hard to do period. I suspect it is computationally fraught. Yes. How much, how much, ⁓ how many emissions are we willing to put in the atmosphere to calculate that?

Mm-hmm. You would need very high computation power.

Well, great.

Any last call outs you noticed in the game or thought about with climate that we haven't talked about yet?

I think that the way that one wins this game is by going extremely slowly and collaborating on every step with every player and by having however many players who are experienced in the game.

I think it, I think it requires all of those things. Well, maybe not the experience component that that's just another slow down. If you don't have that, it's going to take a long time to get everyone ramped up. ⁓ but I really think it's like each individual decision. the, the sequencing matters so much here. what order you do things in matters if you do something before someone else needs it, you know, it's like there's, there's.

There's opportunities to optimize every little individual tiny move in this game. ⁓ And so that coordination, think, is probably, unless you get very, very lucky on cards, it probably requires just very careful consideration and coordination.

Mm-hmm.

If you were playing it in person, there's some physical components that would actually help a little bit to make things more clear. Whereas the digital versions of them, you have to notice that that's there and like, that's what that is.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I think in closing, It's really amazing at teaching some of these climate ideas. It's got some amazing game mechanics.

It is very hard, but it's fun. The engine building, the mechanics in how the card stacks work and the different symbols interact with each other and the different game flows, feedback with each other is really neat. It's a genuinely fun game, even if it's difficult

I won't even say that it's hard, it's complex, there's a lot of bits to learn about, but they all make sense. And once you know them, it's not hard, like taking a turn is not hard. ⁓ Winning, it's hard to win.

Right. Why, yeah,

And there are difficulty settings, which I think we've only ever used the standard. Is that right?

I'm really curious just about the actual game design mechanics of making this game easier and harder. There's both. The other thing that I think is really fascinating, we talked a little bit about Go last time.

One of the things I have always deeply loved about Go is that you can have a very even game between a great player and an OK player. There's a balance mechanic that evolved, which is just fascinating. This has the same thing. The easy, standard, and difficult setting can be set for the entire game, but you can also do it per player. So you could actually have a thing where you've got two experienced players playing normally.

Hmm.

Hmm.

And then you could put three players, two players, in easy mode, which is really interesting. For playing with people that haven't done it much before, and family and stuff, in the service of getting people to learn about climate stuff, supporting having experienced players play with newbies and have it be fun for everybody is a really big feature. So that per player difficulty is fascinating. I would love to explore that. Yeah, it's a great call out.

I'm curious how the difficulty works. But yeah, I've been walking through this game I played with my family that we had to abandon, but it looks like, if we had played one more turn, there's a reasonable chance we could have gotten there.

so so I think winning might be possible, but it takes a long time. And a lot of luck.

No, think so. We have to believe

Yeah, yeah.

that. We have to believe that in the climate fellowship, Nathaniel.

Thank you so much for joining up everybody, and thanks for playing.

Yeah, thanks for hosting. See you next time.