Description

Pollution is an interactive strategy game about building & powering cities, and lobbying for political influence. Players strategically leverage their cities and power plants to amass wealth in each of the 6 rounds. However, they need to be careful about the pollution they produce: Without proper management, they'll be faced with a hefty fine at the end of the game. Political influence is used to gather permission for the construction of new power plants.

Different kinds of power plants — nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, and coal — each come with their distinct pros and cons, thereby influencing gameplay strategy. Building a power plant automatically unlocks the next development level, offering you an array of upgrades including more advanced versions and special abilities.

Players compete with each other in various ways but every competition brings lots of opportunities for synergies. On the lobbying side players inadvertently help each other in their attempt to influence politicians. On the building side player interaction is made possible by a shared map where each player can attempt to be the new energy provider for an existing city or use idle power plants for their new building project. Since a city and its corresponding power plant do not have to be built by the same player complex decisions quickly emerge.

Finally, there are a number of different methods to deal with pollution, from natural carbon sinks to decommissioning old power plants. These actions have to be carefully planned though as they require special circumstances to be most effective.

Changing setups and goals provide a high replayability factor and long-term planning.

Gameplay:
The game is played over 6 rounds.
In each round, players use their workers to perform one or two of four possible actions:

"Lobby": Gain political influence
"Build": Spend resources to build a city or power plant.
"Offset": Implement a carbon offset project
"Decommission": Shut down one of your power plants.

Each action requires one worker. The round ends when all players have run out of workers. Now players take back their workers and gather income from the cities they have built, their lobbying efforts and the energy their power plants produced.

After the final round, a special income round is triggered which involves fines for all the pollution that is produced by each player. The player with the most money wins.

—description from the designer