Green New Deal Simulator is a card drawing game where you try to meet victory conditions in a limited number of turns. The creator Molleindustria is an Italian leftist famous for making games with strong political commentaries. I remember playing a browser based game called Oiligarchy back in 2008.

The Premise of this game is that you're a Democratic President Green New Deal Secretary of the United States trying to balance unemployment and the state budget while decarbonizing your economy In the midst of an increasingly unstable climate to avoid a climate disaster. Dressed up with cute anthropomorphic animals and armed with the ability to draw and deploy cards from a deck.

Your Deck starts with 9 different types of cards you can draw and another 8 that you can unlock through green lab tech. (9 but one is a joke). You only have a certain number of cards in the pile and when you run out you're dealt more. If you research any green lab tech then it will be added to your new piles but not the one you're currently drawing from.

The map is split up into 11 regions with their own traits based on the continental united states
The different regions also have their own traits which give them bonuses with specific cards or in some cases is required in order to be deployed at all. It's important to maximize efficiency by deploying cards that correspond to their bonuses. Though you can't always take the ideal approach towards your goal.

Each Region has a pie chart split into 3 different values, helpfully colored coded as red, gray and green. Red represents fossil fuel demand, such as using a natural gas powered stove. Gray represents fossil electricity, where fossil fuels are using to generate electricity such as using natural gas fired power plants to generated electricity to power an electric stove. While Green represents green energy, like using solar panels to generate electricity to power an electric stove.

You primarily reduce your carbon emissions by replacing fossil fuels with green energy. But you can only use green electricity to replace fossil electricity. If there isn't enough fossil electricity to replace in that region then any excess green energy you could produce from that green energy card is lost; Even if you have excess green energy capacity from earlier deployed cards and free up more electrical capacity it won't automatically convert that to green energy.

Regions can also be linked together by high voltage power line cards so that they share green energy production. Which is practically essential for meeting the deadline.

The bar on the left side of the screen represents your funding. You raise it by discarding cards, all cards that use a turn when you draw them give you the same value when you discard them, it's a little over half the bar at the start but as the game progresses you get more money for each card you throw away. You can't go above the top of the bar so there is no point in trying to horde money, to deploy cards you prefer later. you should never need to toss two cards in a row even if the card you draw has a greatly diminished value for electrification, green energy or unemployment it will still have some value which will be lost if you toss is for funding you can't take.

All regions have a little animal that fills red to represent their unemployment, unemployment is affected positively and negatively by most cards and if a card generates enough unemployment to go above filling the animal for that region then you won't be able to deploy that card because it would "trigger a crisis". Additionally unemployment is affected by climate events.

Events are random cards you draw with increasing frequency that represent climate disasters. Most of these will generate and move unemployment around or even generate carbon dioxide that you have to offset.

You can only draw 120 cards before you lose the game where an authoritarian boar takes control because of runaway climate change. There are two ways to win, either achieve net zero carbon emissions by running the bar on the right empty or convert all regions to 100% green electricity by turning all 11 pie charts green within the turn limit. Net Zero can be achieved by using carbon negative cards from green lab tech.

The 11 regions are obviously based on the Continental United States, Hawaii, Alaska and Territories aren't depicted, Neither is Canada or Mexico for that matter. Maybe if someone ever makes an improved version of this game we could coordinate decarbonizing our neighbors and Alaska too. I don't think the territories are super big polluters by comparison.

The traits of these regions are pretty well baked in and obvious for the most part. Though there are some exceptions that I find strange. The way the game mechanics work gives you the impression that the energy consumption and population of all these regions are identical too. So the amount of green electricity you need to generate to decarbonize California is identical to the amount you need to decarbonize the Great Plains. So the only difference is the traits.

Please note that these regions aren't named officially in game. These are names I came up with so they may not correspond with what you would call them.

California is probably my favorite region since it's so easy, the only time I have trouble with it is when I forget about it existing because it mostly manages itself. Like in real life California is basically just a better version of Texas. It's usually my first target for the public transportation card to give it a large capacity for green energy and eliminate any starting unemployment, then my first high voltage power line will connect it to the rockies so that I can maximize their wind farm output

Double Green Electricity from Solar Farms and Upgraded Solar Farms
Half Cost For Green Lab Tech
Double Electrification from Public Transportation
Can Deploy Offshore Wind Farms

Texas is a region that you have disproportionately dump resources into, it probably gets hit with the most unemployment out of any region in the game due to a mixture of climate crisis cards like refugees and the fact that it gets adversely affected by numerous cards due to being one of the dreaded oil producing regions.

Unfortunately it also lacks any significant positive traits. It's slow to electrify because it doesn't get any bonus to public transportation or biomass. The only advantage it has over California is that you can deploy Direct Air Capture Plants in the region, which don't do a lot to help manage the unemployment.

Double Green Electricity From Solar Farms and Upgraded Solar Farms
Can Deploy Offshore Wind Farms
Can Deploy Direct Air Capture Plants
Oil/Gas Producing Region

The Rockies are my preferred region for developing wind farms since it directly connects with California. Wind Turbines are generally better than solar farms for generating electricity in this game. They also have all of the utilities of the advantages of the great plains at their disposal. Sometimes I will also use them for pumped hydro if Appalachia has low unemployment or isn't connected to the grid.

Can Deploy Direct Air Capture Plants
Can Deploy Pumped Hydro Storage
Double The Output of Wind Farms

This is my preferred region for abusing the Direct Air Capture Plant but it's also a good source of electricity being the only other region to get the Wind Farm bonus. Unfortunately it's doesn't get the bonuses to Green Biomass or Carbon Farming you would expect from such an agrarian region

Can Deploy Direct Air Capture Plants
Double The Output of Wind Farms

The Southwest gets a lot of unemployment and it's difficult to manage because the region lacks any bonuses except for Solar Power. I like to hook it up to the California grid as soon as possible so that controlling their unemployment is less wasteful by allowing their solar farms to push electricity into other states.

Double Green Electricity from Solar Farms and Upgraded Solar Farms

This region on paper looks strong with a number of bonuses but geographically it's heavily isolated by only being connected to California and the rockies, The good news is that it rarely gets unemployment. usually I dump a green tech lab onto it early in the game and ignore it unless unemployment gets high. If I have nowhere better to place a high voltage line I will connect it to the national grid so that other regions can send their excess capacity their way. Once in a blue moon I will deploy pumped hydro if Appalachia has no unemployment.

Can Deploy Pumped Hydro Storage
Half Cost For Green Lab Tech

The Deep South is one of the easier regions to manage because it is both a solar producing region and agrarian. So while it can't use public transportation you can electrify it and keep its unemployment under control by dropping cheap biomass plants on it all the time. Since you can use public transportation on The Midwest this is generally where you will be placing it unless there is high unemployment in the midwest.

You can also augment this with carbon farming to passively reduce your carbon footprint and unemployment along similar lines

Double Green Electricity from Solar Farms and Upgraded Solar Farms
Half Cost For Carbon Farming Program
One Third Cost For Clean Biomass Plant
Oil/Gas Producing Region

The Midwest is like California except it doesn't have any high capacity renewable energy bonuses like Wind or Solar. But thanks to the public transportation and clean biomass you can quickly electrify the region to create demand for electricity from other regions. It also has extra unemployment causing events which make it a bit more difficult to manage in that regard, making it one of the best choices for targeting with a high speed rail to push that unemployment into more productive areas.

Double Electrification from Public Transportation
Half Cost For Carbon Farming Program
One Third Cost For Clean Biomass Plant

Appalachia doesn't have much going for it but it ends up being an important crossroads late game thanks to its lack of resources and unemployment problems making it the most common choice for pumped hydro once it is connected to the national grid.

Additionally its position makes it a good choice for any card that affects neighbors since it's connected to two isolated regions and four total. Things like high speed rails, EV infrastructure and smart grids

Can Deploy Pumped Hydro Storage

This region can usually be left pretty isolated, it doesn't get a lot of unemployment, in fact it's likely to lose unemployment with certain disasters. Deploying public transportation is my first choice and then if I have researched Offshore wind farms the region can sustain itself, or I will connect it with a power line to sponge up some energy from a productive region.

Half Cost For Green Lab Tech
Double Electrification from Public Transportation
Can Deploy Offshore Wind Farms

You'll probably forget this region even exists for the most part. It's similar to new England but it can't even deploy Offshore Wind Farms, making it only good as a sponge for electricity if you have nowhere else to send it

Half Cost For Green Lab Tech
Double Electrification from Public Transportation

Green Electricity Cards are cards focused on displacing fossil fuel demand for electricity production(gray) with green energy sources(green), In terms of gameplay mechanics When you activate these cards on a region it will replace Fossil Electricity up to a certain value as long as there is capacity available to be filled. It however has no effect on the red portion of a region's pie chart, So you need to balance green electricity with Electrification so you don't end up with an oversupply in one sector versus another.

Green electricity production directly decreases your carbon footprint so you can use it in conjunction with carbon negative cards to reach net zero or you can also win by converting all regions to use 100% green energy. The carbon emissions bar doesn't get completely emptied when you reach 100% green energy in every region most of the time. I believe this is because certain events will increase carbon intensity.

Solar Farms could be considered your most basic Green Electricity Resource. They have the largest number of bonus regions of out any Green Electricity but they're pretty middling in terms of performance, You get more Green Energy from wind or any unlockable resource. Something to keep in mind is that you're not really deleting unemployment with these cards either, you're pushing it into other regions since you're generating one unemployment for each neighbor.

It's pretty common to end up getting "sunlocked" where unemployment piles up in the solar regions and you're unable to deploy solar panels efficiently. Forcing you to waste cards, This is less of a problem with wind farms since you only have two wind regions which can absorb unemployment from each other and then delete it when you alternate wind farm deployments.

Wind Farms give you more bang for your buck than solar farms and the upgraded wind farms from the Wind Turbine Factory are a worthwhile investment dramatically increasing the value of the energy produced. The only real problem with wind turbines is that since you only have two places to deploy them you can end up generating unemployment by getting them and placing them on low unemployment regions to get their maximum output.

Pumped Hydro is a part of the starter deck so you're always going to be drawing these cards. The thing is that these are very much useless until you have a specific set of circumstances late game. Since it relies on existing green energy capacity and being connected to multiple regions if you have a large amount of green energy and a lot of interconnection then pumped hydro can end up decarbonizing a lot very quickly. It also deletes a small amount of unemployment completely where wind and solar will shift unemployment to neighboring regions.

Unfortunately due to limits with the game design you start getting diminishing returns once a region is completely green, pumped hydro can't use the high voltage power lines to add 10% to 100% of a region's green energy and then push that excess capacity into another region. So you get the best returns when you have a lot of regions with 90% or less green energy

The only real downside to Offshore Wind is the fact that you have to research it when there are other options available. It also has arbitrary restrictions to 3 coastal regions even though it should be deployable on all 6 coastal regions, but it would be even more powerful if you did that.

In terms of direct stats offshore wind costs more but gives you more energy than wind farms, equivalent to upgraded wind farms. But the real key, is that offshore wind deletes unemployment, instead of creating unemployment in neighboring regions like wind and solar farms do. This gives you the advantage of removing unemployment especially in places like Texas where it's always a problem.

Nuclear Power Plants are a very good way to remove unemployment, they also generate a lot of green electricity independent of their location, I think the most out of any building. The only problem with them is their astronomical cost. Not only do you have to pay for the nuclear power plant, but you also have to pay for the nuclear plant commission to even draw the nuclear power plant card, granted the commission does remove some unemployment and doesn't take up a turn so it's sort of like a Job Transition Program with benefits. But it does happen a lot where you will get multiple nuclear power plants back to back and end up having to throw one of them away. Which hurts a lot more than if you throw away a less valuable card.

Smart grids are a nice cheap addition to your green energy capacity, Usually what I end up doing with these cards is hovering them around the whole map to see where they will provide the most electricity, which you can measure by looking at the emissions bar. Planting it where I get the best result. It's not really my first choice but if my alternative when my draw is solar panel factory or nuclear fusion research I will take what I can get.

Electrification cards convert the fossil fuel demand(red) of a region to fossil electricity(gray), This represents replacing fossil fuel demand with demand for electricity which is still being supplied by fossil fuels. eg. converting a gas burning heater to electricity but then supplying that electricity from a gas fired power plant. This creates demand for electricity which can then be met with green energy to reduce your carbon footprint.

The electrification program is great in the early game, it's relatively cheap and switches a lot of fossil fuel capacity to fossil electricity, about half of that current region's consumption. The problem is that it's always a flat 50% of a regions fossil fuel consumption. So if you're going for a 100% green electricity run you need to keep in mind that this will never clean up the place entirely.
I usually deploy these on spaces that don't get a bonus from public transportation since public transportation will do the same thing for those guys. Sometimes I will use it late game if I need to break an unemployment lock but for the most part it's a throwaway card.
It also creates one unemployment in the Rockies, Appalachia and Texas from disrupting natural gas demand

Public Transportation delivers a large hit to unemployment and switches about a quarter of a region's pie chart to electricity, half of the pie chart of california, the midwest, mid atlantic or new england. It also generates one level of unemployment in Texas and the south due to reduced oil demand. It also generates a small amount of green electricity too, though nothing too significant this is a nice bonus.
The reduction in unemployment and the fact it doesn't give you diminishing returns means it's still viable in the late game unlike electrification program. at that point it's better for its unemployment benefits.

The clean biomass plant isn't really an electrification card, but I use it as such. It's incredibly cheap to deploy on the midwest and south and displaces a small amount of fossil fuels and generates a small amount of green electricity. It's never bad to draw this card because it will give you some tiny benefits or you can throw it away and use the money to deploy a more powerful card down the line.
Typically I will spam these in the south which helps to offset the unemployment penalties they get and electrify the region without having to invest as much into it. If I have higher unemployment in the midwest and I already used public transportation I will use biomass there too. The only time I don't use it early game is when I am low on funds and will have to throw away my next card.

The High Speed Rail provides a small amount of electrifiction in the deployed region and all neighbors. It's great late game if you have multiple regions with just a sliver of red left on their pie charts. It's also unique because it redistributes unemployment between the neighboring regions. I believe the way it works is by shifting unemployment around until it's averaged out between the affected states. So it doesn't help if you have high unemployment everywhere but it can break up stubborn unemployment in one region effectively. I especially like deploying them in Appalachia because it will draw out unemployment from the comparatively worthless regions of new England and the mid atlantic so they don't start causing unemployment locks.

EV Infrastructure works like Public Transportation except it also affects neighboring regions to half of its value instead of getting a double effect on certain regions. This is easily the fastest way to electrify but like nuclear power plants it requires a lot of investment and in every run I have used EVs I ended up electrifying far faster then I could produce green electricity. It also generates 3 levels of unemployment in oil producing regions.

Carbon Negative Cards are 3 Green Tech Cards that you can add to your deck which directly reduce your carbon footprint. Reducing the demand for Green Electricity to reach net zero. In my opinion using these cards is the strategy to win the game in as few turns as possible, with 100% Green Electricity being slower to achieve. This is how I got my 84 Turn run.

While you don't get as much carbon reduction as the cement factory or direct air capture Carbon Farming is almost free it's so trivially cheap, it basically lets you eliminate the unemployment in the midwest and south passively and will practically guarantee you win, it's a safe bet but it's just not as fast as direct air capture.

Direct Air Capture consumes 25% of the green energy pie chart and reduces carbon emissions. But it's restricted to Texas, The Great Plains and Rockies. The consumption of green energy seems like it would be bad but since it's net negative this really just means that you free up more green electricity capacity for future deployments so you can be more liberal with where you use green electricity.
Alternatively you can exploit the fact that you get more decarbonization if you have less green electricity available in a region than the direct air plant consumes. Which means that you can get over twice as much decarbonization by leaving a region on fossil fuels.

This place really can't compete with carbon farming or direct air capture. it lacks the advantages of either alternative, even though it's not region locked it's rarely a good value sadly. I might even pick solar panel factory over this for the unemployment benefits.

Upgrade Cards are cards you can activate which don't do anything directly, instead giving you upgrades down the line working directly in conjunction with other cards

Power Lines are the highest priority in the early game, I use them in every run. You don't need to think about if you are going to deploy them as much as where you will deploy them. I always branch out from my starting connections too which is usually connecting the Wind and pumped hydro potential from the Rockies to the Solar and Offshore potential from California along with their quick electrification from public transportation. But you could do something simpler like connecting two regions individually instead of connecting them to the larger grid.
Something else to keep in mind is that there is no system stopping you from placing redundant power lines, while on the map you can only make one connection between two different regions you can still loop around and make two connections to the same region from other regions that are also connected to one another. Since power lines don't affect unemployment or anything this means you wasted a turn if you deploy more than 10 power lines, which is what you need to connect all 11 regions. So after you get all your power lines down the cards become completely useless and should be discarded.

Green Lab Tech gives you a random selection of 3 out of the 9 unlockable cards to add to your deck. It's really only 8 because you shouldn't use nuclear fusion. The card is also a good way to eliminate unemployment in the university regions, which there are 5 of on the map. Depending on how you are conducting your run you can plan to use as many or as few green lab techs as possible, meaning you either get free money from throwing them away or a wide variety of options late in the game. My favorite strategy is to focus on 1-2 techs and throw the rest away. You don't need 5 different ways to generate green electricity or 3 different ways to offset carbon after all.

The Solar Panel Factory halves the future cost of deploying solar panels (i'm not exactly sure on that I haven't paid enough attention to tell specifically), I may be missing something but the way money in this game works is more like a timer where you have a number of turns before you have to throw away a card and the amount of solar panels you build means that you're not getting anywhere ahead noticeably by using upgraded solar farms versus regular farms.
I did a run where I deliberately selected the Solar Panel Factory card to test it and ended up throwing away the upgraded solar farm when I got it because I had an unemployment lock in the sunbelt and couldn't deploy it anywhere. The wind turbine factory feels better because you get huge chunks of power from each wind farm, in the same run I ended up using wind turbines to decarbonize the pacific northwest while it wasn't connected to my grid because I had already decarbonized all of my connected regions before I got the power lines for it.

This is the superior factory for boosting your green energy. I don't know the exact numbers but I think you get about 60% of a region's power in the green if you deploy upgraded wind farms in the rockies or great plains and 30% if you deploy them in a normal region. This is probably the most versatile upgrade in the game since you also don't have to pay a lot like with offshore wind or nuclear.

This isn't a joke card like nuclear fusion it's actually pretty potent. Every time you deploy this card it adds one Nuclear Power Plant card to your deck and eliminates some unemployment. Nuclear usually isn't my first choice so I need to do more runs with them but it seems to be good at reducing unemployment since it bites out a huge chunk and can be deployed in any region efficiently.

This is a prerequisite to unlock the EV infrastructure card. It comes with a massive unemployment hit to the midwest. It's so bad that even if you deploy it in the midwest you still get a little unemployment, but otherwise it's unremarkable and you should deploy it immediately so you can start using the EV infrastructure card

This is a joke card that doesn't do anything. This is the only one you should completely avoid using ever. It's thrown in there with the unlockable cards from the Green Tech Lab so just avoid it when you see it.

Carbon Tax gives you free green electricity in exchange for generating unemployment, you unlock it if when you get your emissions low enough, where it will then appear at the top of your next deck while your Gecko advisor tells you about it. You want to use it whenever possible since it doesn't take up a turn and it costs nothing. Your best options are places where you don't generate a lot of unemployment, also it gets wasted if you place it somewhere with too much green energy

This directly eliminates some unemployment in exchange for a little bit of money, it also doesn't take a turn and you don't get anything for throwing it away. You only unlock it if your unemployment situation is really bad and it helps, but it's hard to claw your way back when you're that far gone already.

This is what I used to get my 84 turn run. This is where you exploit the Direct Carbon Capture Plant. Direct Carbon Capture Plants consume 25% of a regions green electricity converting it to fossil electricity while also eliminating some carbon from your emissions bar. But if the region you deploy Carbon Capture on has less than 25% green electricity then you actually get significantly more carbon reduction from the card. I would assume that this is an unintended side effect because the carbon reduction value of the card had to factor in the loss of the green electricity by reducing the value of 25% of green electricity.
With this in mind the strategy I used was to sacrifice the great plains by not investing into its green energy at all and instead just dropping direct air capture where it would be isolated from the wider national electric grid to get that fat carbon reduction, this combined with good RNG allowed me to get down to 84 turns.

This method is definitely overpowered and I wouldn't mind if this was disqualified or if the developers patched it out in the future.

Nukecelling is when you unlock nuclear fission and prioritize it as a form of electrical generation to get 100% green energy in all regions, since you can brute force your way through unemployment and regional supply and demand by just electrifying a region and then dropping a nuclear power plant on it this is one of the more efficient methods for doing a 100% green run.
Since nuclear power plants provide so much green electricity you can just throw away most of your solar farm cards.