Highlights
- Emissions and failing events are the main threats in Beecarbonize, leading to an inevitable death spiral if not managed properly.
- To win, players must build cards with gold stars and fully complete card series in different sectors, unlocking achievements.
- Money, People, and Science are the main resources in the game, each generated in specific sectors with different benefits and costs.
Beecarbonize is a free indie solitaire card game that tasks you with completing a very important task: saving the world. Specifically, you need to save it from a looming climate disaster much like the one haunting our own. You do this by generating resources to purchase cards to fight the climate apocalypse.
But those very cards– which are based on real-world or speculative concepts– can carry costs that will set you back as well. Can you balance profits, people, and the environment? Can you save the world? With our advice, you’ll have a much better shot at it.
1 How You Actually Lose
Emissions are your number one enemy in this game, which are mostly generated by the Industry sector, but they are not the direct reason you lose. You lose when you fail to resolve an event with a Skull icon as a consequence.
Of course, as your Emissions go up, you trigger events with a fail state or the start of a fail state. As these pile on, they get harder to manage until you’re stuck resolving them instead of trying to win, which leads to an inevitable death spiral.
2 How To Win
Winning Beecarbonize is a relatively simple feat. As you play cards, you’ll find cards with gold stars on them. Each Sector has at least one such card. As you build them, they’ll unlock further cards, some of which will also have a gold star. If you fully build the last card in such a series, you win the game!
Of course, since there are plenty of possible ways to beat the climate collapse, you’ll want to try to do them all, especially since each one nets an achievement.
3 How Your Main Resources Work
You have three main resources: Money (Pink), People (Yellow), and Science (Blue). All cards are bought with one or more of these resources. Money is generated in the Industry sector and more slowly but less emission-heavy in the Ecosystem sector.
People are generated in the People Sector, and Science is generated in the Science Sector. The Ecosystem and Science sectors are idle by default and need cards to get running.
An important thing to remember is that whenever People are generated, it takes up one Money, so never upgrade your People generation too close to the speed of your Money generation. This is important because if you have insufficient Money when a People is set to be generated, you get the People Starving event instead, which can lead to a Game Over.
4 Be Careful About Industry 20th Century
Given how much of our climate issues started with the Industrial Revolution, you’d think that in this sim, you’d want to destroy the Industry 20th Century card ASAP. And while you definitely should get rid of the card, since it generates a whopping 20 Emissions when it triggers, you have to be smart about it.
Unfortunately, the card will be your most powerful generator of Money for a good chunk of any run, so getting rid of it too early can lead to starvation if you’re not careful. Before you destroy it, make sure you have a comparable amount of Money generation coming from your Ecosystem and Industry sectors first. This goes double for Hardcore mode since destroying the card starts multiple potentially devastating events.
5 Most Cards Effect Events
Almost every card in the game influences the chance of an event happening, if not outright instigating it. You can find out the names of the events they affect in the card’s encyclopedia entry, with red plus signs denoting an increased chance of having that event occur and a green minus sign denoting a decreased chance.
Unlike the events generated by Emissions thresholds, the events generated by cards aren’t exclusively problems to be solved but are sometimes opportunities to be taken. This is to say that resolving them will sometimes reward you with random cards or resources while failing them might not lead to any consequences.
6 Some Upgrades Replace, Most Create
When paying for a new card, it’s important to look at the area above the card to see whether it creates a new, separate card or replaces the card that makes it, deleting its old version in the process.
Most cards create new ones, but it’s still worth it to look closely to make sure you know what’s going to happen next. Not necessarily because you don’t want to lose the old card – the new card is almost always an upgrade – but because you end up saving a space that you can plan to fill in in advance.
7 Wildcards Are Unreliable, But Potentially Powerful
In three of the four sectors, you can create a card that will allow you to generate random cards. They are Local Solutions (Ecosystems), Idea Incubator (People), and Science Incubator (Science). Each of these cards can create one of five random cards at increasing cost every time you do it.
These cards can be found by other means, and anything created by the wildcards ignores whether you can make that card normally. This can lead to situations where you stumble onto power endgame cards super early in your run. While this is likely a good thing, keep in mind that some endgame cards may speed up or slow down your production (like of People) to the point that your infrastructure can’t actually support your shiny new card, forcing you to destroy it.