Energetic: A Cooperative Board Game
After all the heat and smoke, would you like to learn how to solve climate change in the fastest, most complete, and most fun way possible?
Energetic is the cooperative board game that's used to teach energy literacy at universities around the world, including Carnegie Mellon, Fordham, Vanderbilt, Pratt, and CUNY, and at Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science.
Energetic has been featured in the New York Times, on NY1, and in Skylight. Staff at NYSERDA, NY Renews, and NYPA are players. The game has been amazingly predictive since its development in 2018, and is currently updated to the 2026 - 2040 time span, matched to real world data.
You play a turn each year. Your team – an Activist, a Politician, an Entrepreneur, and an Engineer – must work together to balance your budget, your grid stability, and your public opinion to keep the lights on, win elections, overcome climate impacts, and build 16 gigawatts of clean power for the city. Then you will have replaced all fossil fuels, provided there is a matching reduction in demand from behavior change and efficiency.
Come join us to practice building a zero carbon New York City, with a game based on a future that we can make happen.
People find learning how to actually do it to be therapeutic. Five facilitators will be on hand during the evening to guide you through the coming decade on the game boards.
Elbert Gong is the evening’s host; Elbert discovered Energetic at a DSA game night earlier this year, played at every game night since, and has joined us as a facilitator and ambassador. Elbert’s day job is as a software engineer at Google. His invite.
Isil Akgul is an architect at Corgan, an expert on urban sustainability, and creative director of Energetic. Isil looks forward to replicating this game for other cities around the world! See her interview on NY1.
Cindy Ye learned to play Energetic in Mark Henderson’s Climate Literature class at Stuyvesant High School and joined City Atlas to become a podcast host and then a game facilitator! Cindy made a YouTube short of her class. She is now a rising sophomore at Cooper Union studying mechanical engineering.
Marie Fadeyeva is a product manager at iCapital and a recent graduate of Columbia University. Marie began working with City Atlas while at Columbia, hosted our podcast, and has facilitated games of Energetic at several of our events around NYC, including at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island.
Patrick Lewis is the eMobility Program Coordinator for the New York Power Authority. Patrick discovered Energetic at our November game night at Ethical Culture, and told us “I bet the more we can make climate and decarbonization into a game, the more people will want to be part of our movement in real life too!”
Anew is a gathering space and discovery center for the social impact community.
Limited edition sets of Energetic are available for sale in the café, should you want to teach your friends after the evening is over.