Climate Action
Playing for Change: Board Games to Save the Planet
October 27, 2025
Imagine, one Saturday evening, four people were selected to represent the United States, China, Europe, and the Majority World (all other nations). In sixty to ninety minutes, they would have to set aside their political differences, and personal ambitions, to sit down and come up with ways to ‘solve’ climate change, or the world would end.
That might seem impossible, but in the 2023 game Daybreak, you and your family and friends are tasked with this exact challenge to save a smaller version of our world. Every player begins with Dirty Energy tokens that emit carbon, raising global temperatures, which in turn will force players to draw Crisis cards, and, for each added 0.1 degrees Celsius, roll a Planetary Effects die. This reflects real-life climate feedback loops, which occur when climate change triggers environmental effects that further warm the Earth. Players win by reaching Drawdown, when they absorb more carbon emissions than they produce.
In recent years, some new board games have shifted towards social justice themes, covering a whole range of issues, including environmentalism and climate change. CO2: Second Chance allows players to act as energy CEOs who must transition to renewables. KEEP COOL has players act as groups of countries, negotiating with oil lobbyists, environmentalists, and each other. Even the famous Catan franchise has released Catan: New Energies, in which players hurry to get victory points through energy production, with the catch that, if players overuse fossil fuels, the world will burn before anyone wins.
Making Difficult Things Fun
One might wonder if something so existential, and so frighteningly real, as climate change could make for a fun board game. But games and reality often merge together in this way. Famously, the creator of Daybreak, Matt Leacock, has experience in this regard. His hit game Pandemic was released in 2008. Twelve years later, as the reality of COVID-19 became all too real, his sales surged by 469% as COVID-19 lockdowns spread around the world. While this reflects a broader shift towards board games at this time, as families were forced to amuse themselves and stay indoors – the spike in his game say between 2019 and 2020 was still more dramatic than most other games.
Likewise, the appeal of climate change games may not be in spite of the grim real-world backdrop, but because of it. By transforming a daunting issue into something tangible — and maybe even conquerable — these games can foster a greater sense of optimism about the future. This is especially important for young people.
A 2021 multinational study found that 56% of young people believe climate change has already doomed humanity. While this issue can’t be solved just by games, the ability of board games to educate and empower young people could be activist’s ace in the hole.
PULLQUOTE: “I’ve got a big opportunity to come up with a cooperative game that makes a difference. I don’t want to blow it.”- Matt Leacock, on designing Daybreak
The Climate Museum UK praised Daybreak for such hopeful themes, which reflected their commitment to “possitopian thinking.” This philosophy is not about being “positive” towards the future, but rather, expanding our imagination of what the future could be, beyond the binary of all-good utopias and all-bad dystopias.
It is about being realistically hopeful, aiming to “create a viable path for humanity amidst the shifting and uncertain realm of the ‘Possible,” which is exactly what these board games attempt to do by having players fix real-world environmental problems, in a fun and meaningful way.
Beyond Winning
Many well-known board games — including Sorry!, Clue, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, The Game of Life, and Risk — are fun because they create a charged, competitive atmosphere. Players are often pitted against each other (even where cooperation would make more sense, like investigating a murder) because competing with friends offers a chance to prove one’s skills or enjoy the thrill of conflict without real consequences.
However, the cooperative format of Daybreak and other environmental-focused board games reflects a crucial point about activism – working together!
One of America’s most famously competitive (and famously hated) board games, Monopoly. isa source of family conflicts worldwide, and was not initially designed to be fun. It was based on “The Landlord’s Game,” created by a woman named Elizabeth Magie in 1903, to warn its players how people gain riches often through sheer luck and then continue to accumulate wealth and influence, and ultimately overpower those around them. It was meant to critique the capitalist American dream by showing how, when a few individuals accumulate mass wealth, the majority of the people around them will struggle to succeed.
The cooperative nature of many of the new environmental board games helps us imagine a different way of living — one where, instead of competing for success and ignoring the consequences of our actions, we work together to produce goods and solve our problems.
It questions the idea of winners and losers, fostering cooperation and dialogue instead. Although this may not be reflective of an uncertain, competitive world, where solutions may not unfold so easily, it can help people learn how to negotiate, organize, and work together, which is important for any activist movement.
These cooperative games also teach people to appreciate the planet as it is, not just as a means to an end. From the colorful hues of Daybreak or the sunny, bright green fields of Catan: New Energies, we remember that the beauty of our planet cannot be replicated. Broader nature-themed games, such as Wingspan, Photosynthesis, or Cascadia, which incorporate both cooperative and competitive elements, primarily focus on teaching people about our world and showcasing its beauty and diversity. While these are not explicitly about climate change, their rising popularity could reflect people placing more value on our ecosystems.
The creator of Wingspan, Elizabeth Hargrave, said she created her game, in which players race to create bird collections, because the space-themed or medieval-themed settings common in board games did not reflect her interests. She was apparently not alone, because when Wingspan first came out, its publisher had to apologize to customers for not producing enough of the game to meet the public’s demand. Since then, she has created Undergrove, a game about the underground mushroom-tree networks that help each other survive by exchanging nutrients.
Wingspan draws attention to endangered birds by giving them more value in gameplay, while Undergrove uses cooperation to illustrate a natural network threatened by deforestation, making these games, despite their surface-level silence on climate change, a way to inspire people to take action for the environment.
From The Table To The World
A recent study where thirty children and thirty adults played climate change-themed games found that these games may help build emotional resilience through hopeful storylines, and help people learn more about the environment. The study was limited by the small number of people, and did not track long-term changes, but its implications are promising. Others have found that climate change games help people understand the causes of climate change, and why denying it is a problem.
Teachers also say that these games help ignite student interest in climate change, and are good conversation starters. In 2024, the maker of Climate Cooldown, a cooperative card game with over 70 vocabulary words, introduced the game to several private and charter schools around Los Angeles County. As a result, students paid more attention to environmentally-focused lessons, and some were inspired to learn more. Moments like these prove that, though the fate of our warming world is not uplifting to talk about, the fun, inspiration, and joy created by the little cardboard worlds of board games could play a role in saving it.
To spread more fun, learning, and activism, consider supporting our CLIMATE EDUCATION project! We provide resources for educators at all levels, around the world, to learn about why keeping our planet is so important. Like these games, our materials spark conversations, and inspire people to keep our Earth protected, and we can all be winners.
