The Carbon Cycle Review
- Dakota Hernandez
- Feb 2, 2022
- 4 min read
Game Metadata
Learning Objectives
The Carbon Cycle appears to educate the player on how carbon moves through our environment by natural or man-made causes. Moreover, the game’s mechanics imply that both time and human behavior play a role in the cycle in addition to the carbon and earth themselves. Underneath this, I couldn’t help but feel that the game was implying a grander message about climate change with its message that carbon never really “goes away.”
The game doesn’t assume that the player has much prior knowledge. Aside from being able to read English, the game explains the science behind the carbon cycle in the interactive tutorial. There is some expectation that the player knows about our environment, and knowing some ecology beforehand makes the game elements easier to understand. The tutorial informs the player on what carbon is and prepares the player with some examples of how and why it changes form.
As for transferable skills, the game’s deeper message on climate change provides the player with a better understanding of how our actions affect the carbon present in our environment. In addition to learning about one particular cycle in our environment, several aspects of the carbon cycle as a system are present in other cyclic systems (e.g. our body’s respiratory system, cellular respiration, etc.).
Game Elements
The Carbon Cycle is a strategy game played by one player or team vs a bot or two players or teams. The goal of the game is to have more points than your opponent after a fixed number of turns. Players earn points by moving their carbons (the blobs, colored for each team) to the designated goal zone. To move a carbon, players play one of their five cards (replenishing after each turn) that each indicated a carbon transition process. Players can move either team’s carbons. After both players make a move, they earn points equal to the number of carbons they have in the goal zone.
The game screen. Here, the red team is about to move a blue carbon out of the goal zone.
In addition to planning out actions on a turn-by-turn basis, the players also need to track the movement of the goal zone and the number of turns remaining. The goal moves every three turns, so players need to balance making short-term point gains with the long-term migration of their carbons. Moreover, players need to keep track of the turn count, as certain plans might not be feasible towards the end of the game and the UI for the next zone location doesn’t show anything special to indicate when the current zone’s location is the final one.
For a player-vs-player game, there is a lot of randomness in The Carbon Cycle. It seems that the cards players are dealt, the goal zone locations, and the single-player bot opponent’s moves are all completely randomized. The game feels like a small-scale version of Settlers of Catan or Civilization with mobilizing the carbons around to different locations to collect points. As a competitive person, I noticed that I started to lose sight of the game’s environmental goal and instead focused on beating my opponent.
Learning Mechanisms
While its educational content is on the lighter side, The Carbon Cycle is focused on building the player’s fluency with the various states of carbon in our environment. The game makes heavy use of anchored learning techniques, as the game board is representative of our actual world. I think the player’s learning experience would be enriched if the appearance of the world changed as the carbon level in various areas changed. When learning facts about the processes themselves, the game simply presents facts about each process, but the player is never assessed on their knowledge. To keep players on their toes, the game stops telling the player which direction the process flows and randomizes the thumbnails for each area. (In the screenshot above, you can see an arrow directing the Animals region to the Atmosphere.) To find out which direction a process flows, players can just click on the card and read a description about each one.
Overall Critique
I feel that The Carbon Cycle is a decently fun strategy game with a light educational component. As a game, the concept interests me, but I’m not a big strategy game player so I wouldn’t be able to rank it or compare it to others. That being said, my opponent and I had several issues with the gameplay: The most frustrating part of the game is that you are entirely limited by the five cards in your hand. If you don’t have a card that takes carbon into or out of the goal zone (or the next zone), there isn’t really anything you can do. There are (by my count) 42 possible transitions for the entire board but at any given moment only 11 transitions are relevant (that is, they involve either the current or next zone). However, this doesn’t account for the many transitions that don’t actually exist (e.g. Plant to Fuel) and the zones that have more than others (Earth Surface, Atmosphere, and Ocean felt like they had more cards about them than the others). This meant that my opponent and I spent several turns just throwing away cards (which we learned you can do by making trying to move 0 carbons).
As a learning experience, The Carbon Cycle didn’t really live up to my expectations. The tutorial felt like it was preparing me for a more in-depth ordeal by pretraining me with background information on carbon, but the learning components just boiled down to reading facts. There was no assessment of my knowledge of the subjects except for me moving the game to a more (or less, if I was incorrect) favorable state. However, I would recommend using it in an elementary or middle-school classroom setting for a fun introduction to ecology.
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