Earth Rising is live (Sustainable planet)
Update: Earth Rising: 20 Years to Transform Our World is live on Kickstarter and the campaign will run for 29 days. You may pledge for a copy of the game, or get it together with educational material if you'd like to use it for teaching classes.
Our preview post below was published on April 22.
Earth Rising: 20 Years to Transform Our World is a 1-6 players cooperative game in which you are trying to make our planet more sustainable by balancing the needs of the people with the Earth's resources. It will launch on Kickstarter on April 26.
The board in Earth Rising is divided in 6 different sectors: Energy, Industry, Agriculture, Infrastructure, Culture, and Politics. Each of them is connected to a minor and a major burden (problems like climate change and biodiversity loss). Every minor burden starts with 2 strain tokens, and every major burden with one. The maximum strain the minor burdens can take is 5, and minor burdens always have to have tokens equal to or more than the major burdens.
Each sector starts with two unsustainable practices (e.g. energy inefficiency in the Energy sector). At the centre of the board, the population pawns represent poverty. Every practice in a sector, whether sustainable or unsustainable, takes two population pawns out of poverty. Population and unsustainable practices will eventually cause more strain in each sector.
Each character has a unique ability, and they start the game with two Social Influence cards. On your turn, you draw two new cards from the draw deck and then perform up to four actions: Disband an unsustainable practice that also decreases population support, Create a sustainable practice that also increases population support, Clean up 4 strain from any ecological burden, Give a card to another player, Draw an extra card, or Shuffle the discard pile back into the Social Influence draw deck.
After you take your actions, the population pawns cause strain: one strain token for every three pawns at the centre of the board goes onto the minor burdens. If too much strain piles up, it may cause environmental collapse. You win the game if you manage to save the world and get rid of the burdens before the end of the 20th round.