New Catan board game introduces climate change to gameplay : NPR

A new version of the popular board game Catan, releasing this summer, introduces energy production and pollution into the gameplay.

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A new version of the popular board game Catan, releasing this summer, introduces energy production and pollution into the gameplay.

Catania GmbH

In the original version of the popular board game Settlers of Catan, players start on an undeveloped island and are encouraged to “fulfill their manifest destiny.” To win, you must collect resources and expand, reclaiming land by building settlements, towns and roads.

A new version of the board game, Catan: New Energies, introduces a 21st century twist: pollution. Grow responsibly or lose. In the new version, modern Catan needs energy. To get this energy, players must build power plants, and these plants can run on renewable energy or fossil fuels. Power plants running on fossil fuels allow us to build more quickly but also create more pollution. Too much pollution causes disasters.

Building power plants based on renewable energy has benefits in the new game, including minimizing pollution for everyone, but it also slows your growth.

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Building power plants based on renewable energy has benefits in the new game, including minimizing pollution for everyone, but it also slows your growth.

Catania GmbH

“In general, it is difficult to represent reality in a game. Reality is always much more complex,” said Benjamin Teuber, general manager of the Catan production company and co-developer of the new game Games, adds -he, must be fun.

Catan: New Energies forces players to choose between renewable energy or fossil fuel-based power plants. The latter allows us to grow faster but creates more pollution.

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Catan: New Energies forces players to choose between renewable energy or fossil fuel-based power plants. The latter allows us to grow faster but creates more pollution.

Catania GmbH

The latest iteration of Catan will be available this summer. And it aims to reflect reality in several clear ways: energy from fossil fuels creates more planet-damaging pollution than renewable energy; too much pollution leads to bad things; these bad things are felt unequally.

“Sometimes floods hit everyone, as we see (in the real world),” Teuber said. “It doesn’t matter who created the pollution. It affects everyone.”

Teuber, who co-developed New Energies with his late father, Klaus Teuber, said the game was an old idea that they dusted off during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a question that’s becoming increasingly relevant as the real world grapples with the effects of real-world pollution: a rapidly warming planet and worsening wildfires, floods and heat waves .

The game developers are aware of the relevance. “It’s a very interesting topic in all the cultures we publish in,” Teuber said.

Polls show that climate change is considered a major concern in many parts of the world. But adapting to the changes and tackling its roots has proven difficult. Teuber said he thinks board games can help move the conversation forward. Board games typically force people to sit around a communal table, read each other, negotiate and take risks, “without having serious and harmful consequences,” he said. “Unless divorce is the result.”

Climate change experienced through board games

Catan: New Energies isn’t the only new board game focused on climate change. Daybreak, the latest game from the creator of Pandemic, a popular cooperative board game, asks players to work together to reduce carbon emissions and limit global warming.

In a blog post on the Daybreak website, the game’s co-designer Matteo Menapace wrote that he and co-creator Matt Leacock were inspired to create the game because they were both concerned about the climate change and didn’t know what to do.

“The problem with the question ‘what can I do about climate change’ is that it implies that climate action is like a single-player game, in which you alone fight this enormous, invisible enemy,” wrote Menapace. They believe that tackling climate change and its causes will require a collective effort. This is why Daybreak requires “full cooperation,” Menapace wrote. “It’s a big step forward from the current state of climate (in)action, but it’s not unreasonable… and we want this game to play a role in accelerating this change.”

Catan Studio, the developer and publisher of the Catan games, is not as explicit in its intentions with its new game. The phrase “climate change” does not appear in any of Catan: New’s promotional materials, packaging, or rulebooks. Energies. “Pollution” is the catch-all term for the problem.

Teuber said they talked about adding the term but decided to focus on energy and present stakeholders with the option of fossil or renewable fuels. “We assume players will draw their own conclusions as they engage with the game,” he said.

The game studio notes in its press materials that, according to “evidence-based research and expert sources, (the) new game elements will inspire players to think and talk about important issues.”

A 2019 review of published research on board games and behavior by a team of Japanese researchers showed that “as a tool, board games can improve understanding of knowledge, improve interpersonal interactions between participants and increase the motivation of participants. However, he emphasizes, the number of studies published on the subject is limited.

Gameplay Dialogue

“What games are really powerful about is starting dialogues,” said Sam Illingworth, associate professor of science communication at Edinburgh Napier University in the United Kingdom.

In the world of video games, there is a concept called the Magic Circle, a theory attributed to Johann Huizinga, a Dutch cultural historian, who in the 1930s claimed that gaming created a separate world with distinct rules.

“It’s the idea that we suspend disbelief at the gaming table,” Illingworth said. “As in the game Monopoly, it is perfectly fine – strictly advisable – for me to want to bankrupt you, which is morally repugnant behavior outside of the gaming table, but it means that these social hierarchies can collapse and that we can have conversations that we normally couldn’t have.”

In 2019, Illingworth co-designed a playable expansion to the original Catan that added climate change and sustainability to gameplay. They called it Catan: Global Warming and published the rules and instructions on how to adapt a classic Catan game online.

In the add-on, if players add too much greenhouse gas, the entire island is destroyed and no one wins. “So this creates a game state where, psychologically, there is clear causality between actions and what happens, right?” » said Illingworth. “So rather than just having a conversation about what might happen, you actually experience it.”

In Catan: New Energies, if pollution reaches too high a level to continue, victory goes to whoever has built the most renewable energy power plants.

During workshops on the new game with colleagues, Teuber said they often played too aggressively, aiming to “grow, grow, grow”, and would build fossil fuel power plants, a he declared. “We still manage to overpollute.”

The test groups did the same. But after those games, players would often come back and say, “We had some heavy discussions afterward,” Teuber said. “We all felt a little bad, we learned a thing or two, and the next game we played differently.”