Daybreak

Setting up Daybreak involves assigning each player a distinct world power board accompanied by five initial local project cards in their play area. The central table features the main global board, tracking global temperature rise, emissions, weather systems, permafrost, and community crises. Card decks for local projects, global projects, and crises are shuffled and placed in their designated zones alongside dice, resilience tokens, tree tokens, and carbon cubes.

Daybreak is a cooperative board game where players act as world powers working together to halt climate change. The collective objective is to eliminate carbon emissions, prevent global temperatures from reaching catastrophic tipping points, build resilience to protect vulnerable communities, and successfully achieve draw down.

A round of Daybreak progresses through structured stages: Global, Local, Emissions, Crisis, and Growth. In the Global stage, players reveal crisis cards and prepare global projects. During the Local stage, players draw five local project cards and take actions in any order—playing cards in front of stacks for new actions, behind stacks to boost existing projects, or discarding them to pay action costs. Next, the Emissions stage calculates demand and sequesters carbon. The Crisis stage resolves planetary effect dice and active crisis cards. Finally, the Growth stage checks victory conditions, advances the round marker, and increases energy demand.

Scoring and victory in Daybreak are cooperative rather than competitive. Players measure progress by balancing energy demand with clean and dirty sources and tracking carbon cubes on the thermometer. Winning requires emptying the recent emissions area of all carbon cubes while maintaining active tree or ocean tokens.

The game concludes when win or loss conditions are met. Players win immediately upon achieving draw down—clearing emissions while maintaining open ocean or tree tokens and pulling carbon cubes off the thermometer. Conversely, the team loses if the thermometer fills completely and triggers unresolvable global crises.