How to play Carbon City Zero: World Edition

Bought our game, but not sure how to play? We’ve made a video to walk you through the process of setting up game play and running through a turn. In the caption below the video you will see timings for different elements of the game - feel free to skip through to the relevant section. If you still can’t find your answer, see our FAQs below.

How to play FAQs

When do I get to use cards that I have purchased from the Marketplace?

Purchased cards are not used on the turn on which they are bought, but instead go straight into you’re your personal Recycle Pile. Whenever your personal Draw Deck runs out of cards you shuffle your Recycle Pile to make a new Draw Deck to draw from, and from that point on your new cards will become available.

Sometimes you have insufficient funds to buy anything, do you still add up your Carbon and recycle your cards?

There will likely be turns when you can’t (or don’t wish to) purchase any cards from the Marketplace. On these turns you still total your Carbon and recycle your cards as normal.

What happens when the Market Deck runs out?

Should you ever use the last card in the Market Deck you should shuffle the Discard Pile and use those cards to create a new Market Deck.

What is the point of the yellow Snag Cards?

Snag Cards represent outside forces that might act to derail your attempts to make a carbon zero city and over which you have no control. In the game they will begin to clog up your hand and prevent you getting out more powerful cards. Some also have minor negative effects. Thankfully other cards exist that enable you to discard these from your hand!

What function do factories have - if you buy them do they cost you carbon? Ditto for the ‘Stock Exchange’ card.

Some cards have negative impact but they also come with benefits. In the case of factories, they do increase Carbon but also give you additional funding and in some cases allow you to draw cards from your Draw Deck. It is a delicate balancing act!

In the collaborative mode, how does difficulty scale according to player count?

In the early phases of the game a higher player count means that you’ll be more likely to hit the Carbon ceiling and lose turns in which to complete the game. Nonetheless, the game tends to get slightly easier with larger numbers of players. In playtesting those unfamiliar with deck builders still found the game challenging, but those more familiar with this type of game might wish to reduce the number of turns in which to complete the game as the player count goes up (or play the competitive variant where this doesn’t apply). Indeed, experienced players will likely want to set themselves more challenging targets whatever the player count. At all player counts winning in seven turns is perfectly possible (six is the lowest we’ve recorded). As a starting point, we suggest:

·       Four players = Seven turns [in our playtests this would give a 40% win rate].

·       Three players = Eight turns [40% win rate].

·       Two players = Nine turns [our win ratio statistics don’t show a great deal of difference between two and three players. Nine turns would yield a 60% win rate so for a more challenging game we’d actually suggest 8 turns].

If you have a question which isn’t on this list, please get in touch with Hannah at hannah@wearepossible.org - she should be able to help.