Sling cards to save the planet in this free ecological strategy game

Beecarbonize is a free real-time card game that launched earlier this month with an interesting proposition: Manage industry, ecology, society, and science to take on your ultimate opponent: Climate change. Your ultimate goal is to find any of a number of hypothetical, practical, and fanciful solutions among the cards, and producing such a "golden card" will lead you to victory.

At the same time your various cards produce carbon each cycle, and that carbon stacks up to cause ever-more-dangerous events to occur. Those events can be solved via spending coins with various consequences: Ignore a refugee crisis and it'll cost you people every cycle. Ignore coral reef collapse and you're on a fast track to game over.

It's a nice and quick little game, managing to make the subject approachable and interesting at the same time. I found my legs after a few failed attempts and found a lengthy way to an ecological solution—but there were some rough times and resource shortages along the way. Other solutions were more fanciful, which I appreciated—goofy plans like genetically engineering babies to survive the new world.

You might find that less appealing if you're taking the subject very seriously, but the included database of cards and the like does make it clear when some solutions are pure hypothesis or the stuff of science fiction. Either way it's a fairly functional, simple version of a real-time card game and one that's everyone's favorite price: free.

You can find Beecarbonize on Steam.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.