Biosphere Guardians 2050 - A Review

15 May 2024

This month I had the pleasure of playtesting Biosphere Guardians 2050, the new TTRPG by a collaboration of youth groups across Wales, Germany, Italy and Ireland. I was already a fan of Trickster’s Net, which was a similar project made by the Welsh and German organisations previously, so I was super excited to check out this follow-up game when I heard they were doing public playtests!

Biosphere Guardians is set in a solarpunk future, where humanity is recovering from a climate apocalypse that left concepts like nations and currency in the dust. The survivors mainly live in biospheres, small communes that form in the skeleton of the old world, and they are dedicated to healing Earth with science, art and passion. Players take on the roles of the titular Biosphere Guardians, solving problems and helping to rebuild society using their knowledge, skills, tech and optimism.

Biosphere Guardians is currently still in the design process, so anything I say here may not be true for the final release. I think I played something around version 2.1? It was a little different to version 2.0, which is currently the most up to date version on the game’s itch page.

Our scenario was written and run by Myfanwy Moore, and took place in the National Museum in Cardiff, which was also where we were sat playing the game in real life (very charming!). I was joined by friend and fellow Cardiff-based game designer Gwyllgi, with whom I hadn’t yet had the pleasure of actually playing a TTRPG with, despite us discussing games together plenty. There were also three other players who I believe had previous experience playing together (and playing with Myfanwy, our GM). Tom Burmeister, who leads the Welsh department of this project, was also present to keep things running smoothly and to provide us with atmospheric music and sound effects from the neighbouring table.

A choice of pregenerated characters were provided for us (I played Rex, a pacifist paramedic), and we set off to the abandoned Museum in an attempt to establish a new Biosphere there!

The game uses a simple d6 roll under system and each character has 10 abilities who’s values range from 1-5. Each character also has an ability and a piece of gear, both determined by their career (this game’s classes). My paramedic’s ability was “Not Today!”, which allowed me to prevent fatal injuries, and my gear was a first aid kit, which allowed me to heal the other players. You also have Optimism Points which are gained from completing objectives and rolling crit successes (a 1 on the d6), they can be spent to use your ability and gear, or reroll skill checks if you fail. Instead of hit points, physical wellness is measured with conditions. If a character gains 4 conditions, they are incapacitated until they are healed. There is no mechanic for permanent death.

This probably comes as no surprise, but my favourite thing about this game is how proudly it wears its ideology on its sleeve, and every mechanic in the game seems to reinforce this. My personal favourite mechanic that highlights this is the career options: medic, researcher, ranger, activist and creative. I think this does an amazing job at saying “these are the heroes that will save our world”, and the game clearly positions activism and creativity as just as valuable skills as medicine and research. Optimism is also a great mechanic for this. I would be interested to see rules for reaching negative optimism, but I’m not sure if this is the kind of game for that.

The adventure we played was also really fun! It was kind of a surreal experience to see a building that I am so familiar with be turned into a dungeon crawl, but I loved it and it’s certainly changed how I look at some of the rooms in the museum!

There were 8 pregenerated characters for us to choose from, and out of the 5 that we picked, no one had a nature skill higher than 2. This was obviously just bad luck, but it felt especially unfortunate in an adventure filled with so much biodiversity, and I think it highlighted an aspect of playtesting that I had never really considered: how important it is to make pre-generated characters that suit the story you’re trying to tell. I would have loved to know all about the animals that we were encountering, but no one wanted to try and learn about them because we were all likely to fail the check anyway.

As much as I love the career options, I felt my two medic abilities were a little too similar to each other. My first aid kit allowed me to treat wounds and my Not Today! ability allowed me to prevent fatal injuries, although I never needed to use it. After the game, I saw that the other choice for the paramedic ability was Bedside Manner, which lets you spend an optimism point to guarantee that you leave a good first impression on someone you’ve just met. I would have much rather had this ability than Not Today!, as I definitely would have used it more.

Overall I really love this game, though! For a game still in playtesting, the fact all my criticisms are so specific is very promising. I adore the setting and already feel like I have a lot of stories I want to tell in it. I can’t wait for the final version, and I’d be more than happy to playtest the game more if they’ll have me!

Thanks to Tom for setting this up, thanks to Myfanwy for being a great GM, thanks to Wayne O’Connor for the art in this article and thanks to everyone else working on this project for making a really cool game! Once again, you can check out the game’s Itch page here. Give it a download! Give it a rate! Add it to your wishlist! Tom says that makes them look good to the funding bodies!

Thanks for reading my review, get the game on Itch and let me know your thoughts in the comments!