In Earth 2053: Tipping Point, players represent countries that work together to prevent a global climate catastrophe. The main scoring happens on a physical seesaw board where "prevention" tokens are placed on one side and "pollution" tokens on the other. Filling the prevention side lets all players win (with optional placements based on who contributed the most). However, if the board tips towards the pollution side, all players lose.
Each player has their own country board with their own special ability, where they track their economy and their population's need fulfillment. Increasing the fulfillment levels of certain needs will unlock more and more powerful rewards, but at the same time threatens to create additional pollution.
One of the major goals of the game is to use your country's board setup to create "influence" tokens which can then be used to prevent climate events from (such as species extinction) from occuring in a negotiation about who is willing to invest how much per event. Stopping these events creates prevention points, while failing creates pollution.
The primary way of increasing need fulfillment is playing cards onto a grid shared between all players. Some cards have special effects depending on which other cards they are played adjacent to. Playing cards of the same category next to each other comes with its own set of bonuses.
—description from the publisher
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