Learning through play? What board games reveal and conceal about climate change

Board games bring pleasure through collaboration, simulated action, fun and challenge and are receiving increased attention for their role in climate change education and awareness raising. This article reports on a critical discourse analysis of commercially available board games: Carbon City Zero, Catan: New Energies, Daybreak, Kyoto and Tipping Point. We find that ahistorical, collaborative ‘problem solving’ discourses are present in climate change board games, with mitigation and adaptation possibilities often enabled or constrained by economic considerations. There is relatively little attention to representing inequalities or tackling the colonial and capitalist roots of the crisis. Tensions exist between reflecting realities and possibilities, and between representing the seriousness and absurdity of climate (in)action. The more radical reimagining of society that is possible through Daybreak suggests the value of future work to identify what sorts of societal projects and climate actions players value and how they perceive differences between the game world and real world. There is room for more playful imaginings of climate change and climate action in board games, and for the use of devices that make transparent the role of corporate actors and the tactics used to promote narratives of deny, delay and doom which obstruct climate action.