No Poverty

SDG 1 sits in Watts and Wealth as a secondary axis — the game’s economic system models the bankruptcy / capital-access dynamic, but the deck does not aim to teach poverty alleviation as its primary target.

Mechanic-level grounding

The Bankruptcy ending fires when a player’s token balance hits zero with no recoverable facility. Playtest debriefs frequently surface this as the moment a session shifts tone — the eliminated player typically becomes a strong advocate for the Renewable Pathway co-op win because they have just felt the asymmetry between facility-rich and facility-poor seats.

Energy_Subsidy is morally ambiguous on purpose. As an era-1 Policy it drops every build cost by two tokens regardless of source — propping up a struggling player’s empire (SDG 1.3 social-protection lens) at the cost of pollution discipline (SDG 12.c subsidy-reform lens). The card teaches the trade-off rather than picking a side.

Foreign_Investment_E1 and Foreign_Investment_E2 are era-tiered Event cards that drop fifteen tokens into the drawer’s account — cross-border capital flows that bootstrap a low-resource player back into competitiveness.

Why this is secondary

SDG 1’s core sub-targets (1.1 extreme poverty, 1.2 multidimensional poverty, 1.3 social protection) require a level of socioeconomic modelling the game does not attempt. Watts and Wealth shows poverty as a consequence of facility-mix and policy decisions, not as a system to be directly engaged. Classrooms using SDG 1 as a primary lens should pair the game with supplementary material.