o-Mission
What does a board game tell us about the new age of climate overshoot?
Daybreak (e-Mission in German and Italian) is a cooperative game about stopping climate change. Players take on the role of the US, China, Europe, or the Majority World, and play combinations of radical policy cards to decarbonise the global economy, while protecting everyone from the impacts of climate breakdown.
Matt and I started designing Daybreak in 2020, and it got published in 2023 by CMYK. Since then it has been translated into 12 languages and played by more than one million people. It also picked up a few awards, such as the Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024 and the Lizzie Magie award 2025.
Entering the age of overshoot
Since Daybreak was published, global heating breached 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This critical limit was set in the Paris Agreement (in 2015, when the temperature rise was approaching one degree) to avoid catastrophic impacts.
In Daybreak global heating starts at 1.2°C (the level at the time we designed the game). Current levels are hovering between 1.34°C and 1.41°C, but 2024 was the first year in which all months were above 1.5°C.
In climate jargon, this is called overshoot because we are going past the safety limit into uncharted and dangerous territory.
Obsessing over tenths of a degree might clash with our daily experience of temperatures: a couple of degrees don’t usually make a big difference, and we almost certainly don’t feel the variation of a fraction of a degree on our skin.
But 1.5°C of global heating is not a small increment in a thermostat. It also doesn’t work like an on/off switch where staying below means winning, and going above means losing, despite 1.5°C being often described in binary terms.
Instead, with every bit of extra heating, extreme events (heatwaves, fires, floods, storms, droughts) become much more frequent and intense, escalating threats to human health, food, and water security. The communities that have done the least to cause global heating are often the ones experiencing its worst consequences, losing their homes and livelihoods, or being forced into climate migration.
Every bit of extra heating also risks tipping planetary systems into more unstable states, like a Jenga tower on the verge of collapsing. One of those that risk collapsing at around 1.5°C is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which works like a vast central heating system for the Atlantic Ocean, moving heat northwards and keeping the UK warmer than similar latitudes. Such a collapse would extend Arctic sea ice as far south as the Netherlands and eastern England, devastating UK food production. Globally, AMOC collapse could also destroy over half the world’s ability to grow essential crops like wheat and maize.
It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of fossil capitalism
Overshoot is happening because we (or shall we say, a profit-driven subset of us) are refusing to stop the extraction and burning of fossil fuels that powers our ever-expanding economy.
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A core assumption baked into the integrated assessment models (IAM) that inform climate policy around the world is that a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, which would involve stranding assets and destroying investments worth trillions of dollars, is simply impossible. Leaving all that profitable poison in the ground is just unthinkable (good news: not in Colombia) and therefore overshoot becomes the plan: the 1.5°C limit is breached with a promise to return to a cooler, safer level in the future thanks to technologies that barely exist in the present.
All models are wrong, but some are useful
A game can also work as a model, one that people can play with.
In Daybreak 1.5°C is not a win/lose limit, but it causes a step change in the brutality of the climate crisis. At 1.5°C, and with every further tenth of a degree, the potential damage and loss felt by players increase exponentially. If the situation feels manageable until 1.5°C, beyond that “the wheels start to come off” as Matt likes to say, and players get caught in a derailment dynamic: their efforts to treat the symptoms of the crisis take over the core mission of attacking the root causes. The transition away from fossil fuels takes a back seat, and the compounding crises risk overwhelming them.
Players learn that there is no viable alternative to decisively reducing emissions (the clue is in the German title).
Dicey geo-engineering
Or maybe there is an alternative, maybe one can reduce temperatures and the impact of crises with geo-engineering. This refers to technologies that seek to alter the climate by, for example, injecting artificial clouds into the stratosphere to dim the sun and therefore counter the effects of global heating.
Despite the “engineering” in the name, this is the only strategy in Daybreak that hinges on chance. If you’re lucky, temperatures are reduced but only for the current round, so that next round you will have to re-attempt this risky operation in order to avoid termination shock. And if you’re not lucky, you get no cooling benefit and instead trigger an increased number of crises. The message underlying these dicey mechanics is that you can’t control nature on a planetary level.
The Daybreak model of geo-engineering is unilateral: one player can decide to deploy it alone, even if the negative consequences might be devastating for other players. It’s possibly the only element in Daybreak that can break the cooperation between players. This is useful because it is also how solar radiation management might (will?) be deployed in the real world, despite the claims of its promoters, who predict a rational deployment, scientifically managed and UN-governed (as if the UN has so far been capable of corralling states to meaningfully address the climate crisis).
Unilaterally America
Much more likely is that the US will start the sun-dimming operations. This challenges a core assumption in Daybreak, namely that the US can be a leader in climate action.
While I acknowledge that many Americans (including the amazing people I had the privilege to collaborate with) want a fossil-free economy, what I mean by the US is the state apparatus, the powerful corporations influencing its policy, and (an omission in Daybreak, and in official emissions accounting) its military.
In this sense, the US cannot be a leader in climate action for at least three deep structural factors, as argued by Malm and Carton in The Long Heat:
- The post-WWII US empire was built on controlling fossil fuel access.
- As the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels, the massive industry and its powerful lobby resist policies that would strand trillions of dollars in assets.
- The US military is the world’s largest institutional fossil fuel consumer, and it depends on petroleum especially to maintain its aerial supremacy.
This blend of power, profit, and security, means that giving up fossil fuels would pose an existential threat to the United States’ position as the global hegemon. This imperative explains why the US has consistently obstructed and diluted climate agreements, even during the Obama and Biden years. This is an analysis I would have struggled to consider only a few years ago (propaganda works), but with Trump back in charge the imperialist mask has fully come off.
In 2025, a game that starts with the US playing a positive role in climate politics feels like sidestepping a fundamental issue. While Daybreak was designed to foster a much-needed space for playful possitopia, the question for the overshoot age is: can the world go green despite the US?
