The 2024 Geoscience Games Night will be Wednesday 17th April, 18:00-19.30 CEST!

Find us in Room -2.31 at the European Geoscience Union General Assembly, aka EGU24.

No need to register, just bring yourself and find one of the many geoscience-themed games to play. Have a geoscience-themed game you want to share? Great! Bring it along, find some space, and find some players.

Bring a game? Let us know and we’ll add it to our list of confirmed games below.

Confirmed Games for 2024

Daybreak

Daybreak is a cooperative boardgame about stopping climate change. It is an unapologetically hopeful vision of the near future, where you and your friends get to build the mind-blowing technologies and resilient societies we need to save the planet.

Daybreak was inspired by our love of games like Wingspan, Terraforming Mars, and Race for the Galaxy. We set out to design a game in this genre to tell an uplifting story about decarbonizing the world—one where all of us can not just survive, but thrive.

This game is associated to this presentation in the Games for Geoscience session.

Climate Tick-Tock/Climate Tic-Tac

(cooperative board or video game, up to 5 players; abstract EGU24-12424): Will you keep the planet liveable until the end of the century? Come to have fun while possibly learning about this stressing topic. Players discuss possible actions among their respective hand of cards to face the situation. To win, they have to collectively keep below thresholds both the atmospheric CO2 concentration and the number of world cities made uninhabitable following damage accumulation by random hazards. Fun challenges can be attempted to improve action results.

The game is fully based on current knowledge on causes and impacts of climate change and possible mitigation and adaptation measures at various scales. The project team has been awarded the CNRS Medal for scientific mediation. English and French versions are available. Warm the mood, not the planet!

The board game version will be hosted on site by François Dulac, the game’s project manager. The video game version, developed with the Ikigai consortium, will be hosted by Thomas Planques, Development Director at Ikigai, on Zoom. Please register your interest in playing the game here.

This game is associated with this presentation in the Games for Geoscience session.

LEGO-cities: Interactive instant urban climate modelling with AI and LEGO-cities

Due to climate change, extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, are becoming more frequent. During the summer, this can lead to increased temperatures in cities compared to the countryside (urban heat island effect). This rise in temperature and heat stress can lead to health issues and excess mortality. The major challenge today is to adapt cities to counteract the increased heat stress, for example, by planning more green spaces (climate adaptation). In this game/workshop, participants can explore the impact of the land cover in the city on its temperature in an interactive way using LEGO bricks. Participants build a miniature city with LEGO, where they are provided a color code for the land cover, with green meaning vegetation, blue meaning water, and black/meaning impervious material such as roads and buildings. Subsequently, a photo of the LEGO city is taken and converted into a heatmap of the temperature across the city using Artificial Intelligence.

The participant can choose between three different game modes. The first option is to recreate a given city blueprint and then adjust it to lower the average temperature. The second game mode is to recreate a piece of the map of Brussels and investigate how the temperature behaves during different weather conditions. For the final option, the participant can do a free build and vary the scale and weather conditions to investigate the temperature of their self-designed LEGO city.

This game is associated with this presentation from the Games for Geoscience session.

Stygos

Beneath the surface, concealed in the darkness beneath our feet, a complex and captivating ecosystem exists, largely unbeknown to the majority of people. Dive down with “Stygos” and find out who lives here and how our actions above ground affect this cold and limited habitat, where survival is profound.

The game design follows a round-based structure where players navigate along the board, comprised of different layers representing various underground settings. Through the use of action cards, various environmental events and human actions impact groundwater life, including decisions made about transportation and consumption of different products, contaminant pollution from agricultural practices or urbanization, and groundwater depletion resulting from
human overuse. The players’ task is to make decisions that will not only benefit the organisms but also contribute to their collective mission: maintaining water purity.

The overarching goal of the project is to create an easy-to-understand board game suitable forboth children and adults, playable in workshops, teaching units, or at home. At the EGU 2024 we want to present the game in a first development state and hope to test the gameplay.

This game is associated with this presentation from the Games for Geoscience session.

QUARTETnary – The card game about geological time scale!

Ready to explore the history of Earth? 

Welcome to QUARTETnary – The card game about the geological time scale! 

Discover the formation of mountain ranges, the evolution of animals and plants, the changing face of the Earth through the ages and more, all captured within 60 beautifully illustrated cards. 

Playable by anyone aged 8 or over, QUARTETnary is suitable for groups of 2 to 5 players and can also be enjoyed solo thanks to its domino mode. Gameplay follows that of the classic card game Quartets (similar to Go Fish and Happy Families), where players aim to collect sets of four cards belonging to a specific group; in this case, a geological time unit.

Make the most complete timeline of the history of the Earth and win! 

This game is associated with this presentation in the Games for Geoscience session.

About the Geoscience Games Night

The Geoscience Games Night was first held in 2018 by Rolf Hut, Sam Illingworth, and Chris Skinner at the European Geoscience Union General Assembly. It provided an opportunity for people at the conference to try the games shared as part of the Games for Geoscience session.

Since then it has become a much-loved feature of the conference, with Games Night each year since, including a virtual Games Night and a Games Room during the Covid-19 pandemic.