Hi friends,

Some great news: Daybreak is about to go into production!

We received our pre-production samples, and everything is looking SO good. I was absolutely floored when I saw the sample.

Here are some preview shots:



The Europe player board, with some tokens and cards (look at those colors!!!):


And the Global Project cards to the left of the central board:


Once everything is in production, we're going to pivoting over to creating a great how to play video for you, and finalizing the Daybreak website, which will have individual pages for thematic and gameplay details for every. card. in. the. game.

And if you're curious to get started early, here's the rulebook:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j_xjOoCkz7mOwelLAi7-MEG8NtCOYXal/view?usp=share_link

What's next? In April, we'll be sending out the survey where you can give us your address, add copies of other games if you like, and complete shipping.

Hope you're as excited about this milestone as we are!!!!

Alex.

Hello Daybreak friends!

This month is crunch time for finalizing all the game's components: cards, tokens, pulp trays, player boards, etc. Everything is starting to feel *very real* which is always my favorite moment of creating a game.

I know I've mentioned this before, but working on all these art files really underscores that Daybreak is absolutely STUFFED with incredible components. And we're really sweating the details of getting the most stunning, polished version of the game to you.

Here's a quick screencap of the WIP deck of local projects alone:



PHEW.

We're still looking good to deliver on schedule, so after this update, I'm going to transform right back into a squinty Adobe Illustrator goblin.

But before then, I wanted to share a recent writeup of Daybreak from the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/28/board-games-climate-crisis-daybreak

And I'm happy to say that this goes against Betteridge's law of headlines—assuming we do our job right, you'll absolutely learn a thing or two from the game 😅 

OK, that's all for now! I'll be in touch early next month to get the pledge manager up and running: you'll be able to update addresses, add on games, and all that other good stuff.

Talk soon,

Alex.

Happy holidays Daybreak friends!

It's been a minute, so I wanted to give you all a quick update on Daybreak:

• We were featured on BBC Sounds! You can hear Matteo interviewed starting at timestamp 01:11 here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0dn67jm

• We're working with Schultzschultz to redraw all game's icons and tokens to be as legible, clear, and visually consistent as possible.

Progress is about 90% finished, but this should give you a sense of our progress:

• We're 99% done with all the illustrations in the game! Phew. That was a lot of work.

We just got the near-final batch of Global Project cards from Denis Freitas, which were the last big chunk of art.

The Global Projects represent huge social, technological, and political innovations at a global level, so we wanted to them to look more futuristic and speculative than the rest, while still in the realm of the possible. 

Here are a few we love:

• We're aiming to have the main board, player board, and all components finalized by the end of this month, then onto completing the rules!

And yes, we're still right on target in terms of delivering Daybreak to you on time :)

Happy holidays and talk soon,

Alex (& Matt & Matteo & Justin)

Hello!

The campaign is officially over, so I'll keep this sort and sweet: thank you so much, from the bottom of our hearts, for backing Daybreak. We're so thrilled to be on this journey with you—and this is just the beginning!

We're going to go silent for a bit while we put the finishing touches on everything, but if you have any burning questions, definitely post them in the forum! We'll be hanging out there the entire time.

OK, time for us to get back to work! But first, some of my fav new art we've gotten in:

Matt here for the sixth and final episode of the Design Diaries. In the previous episodes we explored the design goals, antagonists, resources, players and powers, and how the game is won and lost. 

Since we've hit our 8,000 backer goal (Yay!), we're here today to share a bit more about the challenge card deck and how it makes the game even more replayable.

Say you survived your first game, but can you do it again while keeping temperatures lower, while avoiding certain solutions, or while creating an even more resilient society?

For a long time, we didn’t give the question of replayability much brainspace, as we were busy developing the core game. We just imagined players could make the game harder by starting with a higher temperature, or resolving more crisis cards each round.

While this effectively made the game more difficult to win, it was also a very limited system. So Alex suggested we take inspiration from The Crew’s mission deck and think about how we can present players a scalable set of new challenges and narratives over time.

We immediately liked the idea, and developed a deck of about 40 challenges and advantages, which players can combine to make the game easier or harder, either for individual players or for the whole team. 

The challenges span from starting values modifiers (eg: one player starts with less resilience, more emissions of a certain type, or more communities in crisis) to additional victory conditions (eg: in order to win, we have to also keep global warming below 1.5ºC, or have 100% clean energy generation, or have no communities in crisis) and rule modifiers (eg: if one of my stacks has more than 4 cards, I must discard the excess cards).

The advantages can also modify starting values, rules or win conditions, in order to give players an easier journey.

Rule modifier cards allow players to explore counterfactual scenarios. For example, who is responsible for the emissions “embedded” in all the products we buy in the Global North, but are manufactured in the Global South? What if we used a framework that doesn’t just take into account the emissions produced within the borders of a country (aka territorial emissions) but also those that are imported (aka consumption emissions)? How does that shift the game balance?

In addition to the challenges, advantages, and modifiers that affect the whole team, we added the ability to adjust the game by handing out challenges and advantages for individual world powers. You can use these on their own (for example to make the game harder or easier for a specific player or each of the players) or you can combine them with the cards that affect the whole team.

The result is a rich landscape of options for adjusting the game. You can make the game different, harder, or easier – or even harder in some ways but more difficult in others. And you can do this for each player or for the team.

As our design diaries come to a close, we’d like to leave you with this quote from Parable of the Sower:

“There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems.
There’s no magic bullet.
Instead there are thousands of answers – at least. 
You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
– Octavia E. Butler