The problem we’re working on

Climate change is the largest collective-action problem in human history, and most people meet it through statistics — a graph, a percentage, a 2030 target. The trouble with graphs is that they don’t make you feel a trade-off. They don’t make you pick between cheap coal in round 3 and a clean grid in round 18. They don’t put a Drought card in your hand right when you were about to build hydro.

Watts and Wealth was built around a simple hypothesis: if you can play the energy transition — with cards, dice, money, pollution, and four other people looking at the same board — you understand it differently than if you read about it. You feel the gambling. You feel the policy lag. You feel the moment your opponent drops Net Zero Movement and your three coal plants suddenly earn half the tolls they used to.

What’s in the box (or, in this case, the browser)

• 79 cards spanning Events (38 crises that befall the drawer), Policies (33 active powers the drawer holds — including regulatory cards and tech breakthroughs), and Mitigates (8 reactive defenses).
• 12 facility types — coal, oil, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, floating-solar, biomass, waste-to-energy, and offshore drilling. Each trades cost, energy output, and pollution differently.
• 4 eras: Industrial Dawn (rounds 1–6), Oil Rush (7–13), Nuclear & Early Renewables (14–19), Sustainable Future (20–30). Available facilities and terrain unlock by era.
• 4 endings: Bankruptcy (solo loss), Tipping Point (collective loss at 600 pollution), Renewable Pathway (co-op win at ≥60% renewables and <300 pollution by round 18), or Round Limit (richest empire at round 30).

Why we built it

The game began as a tabletop prototype for a class project on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It went through 22+ playtest iterations between paper, Unity, and now the browser — each cycle refining the same instinct: make the trade-offs legible at the table.

What surprised us at every playtest: players who started the session saying “I’ll just go all-coal and win” never finished it that way. By round 12 they were buying mitigation cards for someone else’s coast. The game doesn’t lecture. The board does the work.

Who it’s for

• Classrooms — secondary and tertiary climate / sustainability / economics curricula. Plays in ~60–90 minutes; pauses cleanly on any turn.
• Model UN clubs, debate societies, policy workshops — the policy/event card pairs invite real-world reference and rebuttal.
• Energy & sustainability practitioners — most playtesters with industry background reported the system “feels right” even when they were losing.
• Anyone with three friends — yes, it’s also just a board game.

How this version exists

You’re looking at the browser-based hot-seat edition. One device, four seats, passed between players. It installs as a PWA. It runs offline after first load. It uses no server and collects no personal data. The full source — game logic, card data, art pipeline — will be published after the competition review period.