Description

Energetic is a 4-6 player cooperative board game about the future of New York City. It comes with a map board, three card decks, 142 infrastructure pieces, and more. You play from 2021 to 2035, a turn each year. Your team must work together to balance your budget, your grid stability, and your public opinion to keep the lights on, win elections, overcome climate impacts, and build 16 gigawatts of clean power for the city. Then you will have replaced all fossil fuels, provided there is a matching reduction in demand from behavior change and efficiency.

Our objective is to give players a quick grounding in what solving climate change actually means, in a physical and social sense, based on demand of energy and the types of renewable or carbon neutral generation that can supply 8 million New Yorkers.

As you play, one thing you'll realize is that this problem is big, and our response must be too. This means, among other things, that it will be visible. Playing a single Solar piece represents building a piece of infrastructure nearly half the size of Manhattan. Playing a single Wind piece represents the construction of 167 metal structures, each nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower, miles off the Long Island coast.

We hope playing this game can make your role in the coming decade more effective, better informed, and more powerful, and that by providing a tangible vision of what part of the solution looks like, society can begin the necessary step of reorienting itself towards this larger goal. It's a lot of fun, too!

During development, Energetic was tested and enjoyed by people ages 11 to 60, including middle school students, MIT energy PhDs, former commodity traders, and leaders at environmental NGOs. The game is in use at organizations including Yale University; Carnegie Mellon University; Nature Energy; NYSERDA; Con Edison; Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC); and the British Government's Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy.

—description from the publisher