Want to build clean energy fast? This board game lets you

On a recent Friday night, after hot veggie stir-fry and cold drinks, my husband, a few friends, and I broke out a new clean energy board game. Called Pampero, the game is all about harnessing wind power in the South American country of Uruguay, which has made some of the most rapid progress toward decarbonizing its grid of any nation. The game itself is named for what residents call the strong winter wind that blows from the south and west across the continent’s plains.

We unpack the pastel board, revealing a map of Uruguay. Each of us is a private investor looking to build wind projects and strengthen the country’s national power grid — and secure the most lucrative contracts possible. Naturally, the player who makes the most money wins.

As we play, the board gradually fills with colorful wooden wind turbines, electrical towers, bulldozers, and other pieces. It’s a blast being wind industry titans. Yet for me, the game’s most captivating feature — and what makes it unlike any other I’ve encountered — is that it reflects a true story: Uruguay’s wildly successful wind revolution in the 2010s.

Besieged by high oil prices in the 2000s, Uruguay’s leaders sought to escape the grip of fossil fuels. After flirting with nuclear but ultimately discarding the idea, the country instead dramatically grew its wind energy fleet. Almost nonexistent in 2008, wind power has blossomed to account for nearly 40 percent of the country’s current electricity mix — one of the highest shares in the world.

The supercharged scale-up, which saw 7 percent annual growth between 2013 and 2018, was the fastest seen for wind or solar of any country, according to the World Resources Institute.

Wind has enabled the country of 3.4 million to run its grid with low to no carbon emissions. In recent years, Uruguay has gotten from 85 percent to a stunning 98 percent of its power from renewable sources: hydro, wind, bioenergy, and solar. (The proportion has been higher in wetter years.) From July of last year to April of this one, the country had a remarkable 10-month streak of 100 percent fossil-fuel-free electricity.

“We managed to do something that’s an example for countries around the world,” said Julián Pombo, Pampero’s Uruguayan creator.

A professional board game designer, Pombo has never worked in the wind industry, but he couldn’t help witnessing the country’s energy transformation. No resident could. At the height of the wind-farm buildout, trucks hauling gigantic wind-turbine blades and other components would stop traffic, he tells me. Pombo, who lives in the tiny village of Zapicán, pedals past the twirling blades of wind farms whenever he goes for bike rides through the countryside.

Uruguay is a ​“very small country,” he says, just about the size of Missouri. So now, ​“anywhere you travel, you will see a wind farm.”

Playing with wind power

Pampero gives players the chance to reenact Uruguay’s wind energy boom. The award-winning game is filled with delightfully nerdy nods to the nuts and bolts of building a clean electricity system. Pombo has meticulously thought out the game’s mechanics, and while simplified, ​“everything in the game represents something that happens in real life,” he says.

In Uruguay, private developers began by building smaller wind farms in the north of the country. After they gained experience and trained the local workforce, they were able to construct bigger wind projects farther south, delivering more power, Pombo says. In Pampero, you follow the same trajectory.

The game also throws a spotlight on the power grid. ​“I wanted to show that improving the grid is as important as building wind farms,” Pombo says — a sentiment frequent readers of Canary Media know well. The slow-to-grow electrical network in the United States has been a big bottleneck to its moving to clean energy; according to the Department of Energy, the U.S. needs to roughly double the capacity of its transmission grid to meet climate goals.

The U.S. isn’t building power lines fast enough, but on the Pampero board, I can. It’s satisfying to enact a climate solution that’s been so elusive in real life.

As you add your tiny transmission towers and erect your wind farms, you can deliver more power to people who need it — and make more money. But land to build on comes at a premium in certain regions, reflecting real conditions in Uruguay, Pombo says. Some of the most lucrative contracts exist in the coastal resort cities, but ​“very nice beaches” make for very expensive wind farms.

When you snap up a contract, you agree to provide power to customers in a particular spot on the map. And that’s where you plonk down a substation. Represented as tiny electrical transformers in the game, substations are critical grid infrastructure. They utilize transformers to step down the high-voltage power that transmission lines carry over long distances to low-voltage power that the distribution network sends to homes and businesses.

If your grid isn’t robust enough, beware — you’ll be restricted in how many substations you can deploy. Here again, the grid is pivotal to rolling out clean energy.

From there, Pampero’s intricacy deepens. The game has many other features, including charging up batteries, exporting wind power to neighboring Argentina and Brazil, and pursuing an infusion of venture capital if you run low on funds. As in life, you might not want to rush into borrowed cash though: One friend regretted it when we played, saying the need to pay investors back hung over him for the rest of the game. 

A growing number of board games are showcasing climate change solutions. CO₂: Second Chance (2018), Daybreak (2023), and Catan: New Energies (2024) — a cult favorite with a twist — all emphasize clean energy as part of a winning strategy. But Pampero differs from these other games in that it’s about actually generating, selling, and delivering clean power, Pombo says. It’s now available for pre-order if you want to try it at your game night.

Pampero, with its realistic depiction of energy development, swept me up in Uruguay’s wind transformation. As we played, donning active roles in the country’s pioneering past, the game reminded me that a clean energy future for the U.S. and the world is possible; we just need to build it.