Designed by Dr Paul Wake and Dr Sam Illingworth (Edinburgh Napier University) with graphic design by Matt Bonner and artwork by Tony Pickering, Carbon City Zero was commissioned by the climate action charity Possible and co-created with key stakeholders to generate dialogue about decarbonisation.
Carbon City Zero: World Edition is a collaborative deck-building game for 1-4 people (aged 8+), in which players develop a sustainable city by greening transport, transforming industries, getting citizens on board, and showing world leaders how it’s done. Each player starts with an identical deck, buying additional cards from a shared marketplace to create a more sustainable city. Balancing the need to generate income with reducing carbon, players can follow numerous paths to victory, but collaboration is key. You’ll need to bring together governments, industries, and the public. And if you can’t bring carbon levels to zero before it’s too late - we all lose. The stakes couldn’t be higher…
Image (C) Tony Pickering: https://www.pick-art.co.uk/#/illustration-in-game-and-ui-design/
The game was released on Kickstarter in 2020, followed by a second (collaborative) edition, Carbon City Zero: World Edition, in 2021. Since its release on Kickstarter (where it raised over £30,000 from over 1,000 backers) Carbon City Zero has been made available as a free Print and Play game on PNP Arcade where it has been downloaded over 5000 times, and as an online game on Tabletopia. The game was presented at the 2021 Now Play This festival, and has featured in the science journal Nature Energy (here), on numerous blogs (e.g. here and here) and podcasts (e.g. here and here), and in high profile media publications such as Wired and has been translated into Dutch and Italian. The game has been used in universities across the world (including The University of Manchester, The University of Western Australia, and TU Delft in the Netherlands) as part of higher education teaching and learning for climate change and sustainability.
Further Information
Visit the publisher website here.
Download a free copy of the game here via PNP Arcade.
Play the game online here via Tabletopia.
Related Publications
Fell, M.J., and A. Schneiders (2020) ‘Make fun of your research’ Nat Energy 5, 552–554 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-020-0623-8
Holmes, A. (2020) ‘Board Games as Science Communication’ Meeple Mountain: https://www.meeplemountain.com/articles/board-games-as-science-communication/
Heron, M. (2019) ‘Carbon City Zero – Case Study in Accessibility’ Meeple Like Us: https://www.meeplelikeus.co.uk/carbon-city-zero/
Illingworth, S and P. Wake (2021). Ten simple rules for designing analogue science games. PLoS Computational Biology. 17(6).
Illingworth, S. and P. Wake (2021) ‘Carbon City Zero: World Edition – Design Notes’ Sciculture: https://sciculture.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Carbon-City-Zero-World-Edition.pdf
Illingworth, S. and P. Wake (2019). Developing science tabletop games: ‘Catan’® and global warming. Journal of Science Communication. 18(04), pp.A04-A04.
Kinne, O. (2020) ‘Carbon City Zero Board Game Review’ There Will be Games https://therewillbe.games/articles-boardgame-reviews/7888-carbon-city-zero-board-game-review
O’Donoghue, N. (2021) ‘Green Players: The tabletop studios and designers incorporating sustainability into board games’ Dicebreaker: https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/board-game/feature/board-games-sustainability-environment-eco
Shin, H and Heather C. (eds) (2021) Energy Communication Toolkit, A Publication in Association with the Science Museum, London, UK: http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/mce/research/energy-communication-toolkit/
Styles, C. (2021) ‘Carbon Countdown – Using games to recontextualise “wicked problems”’ SciCulture: https://sciculture.eu/carbon-countdown-using-games-to-recontextualise-wicked-problems/