Gaming with Science

#ArkNova #CaptstoneGames #Zoos #Zoology #AnimalGames #WAZA #AZA #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Time to run a zoo! In this episode, we're joined by Ellen Weatherford (of Just the Zoo of Us) to talk about Ark Nova and all things zoos. Learn why running a zoo is probably best left to game imagination, what it takes to get accredited, how you can tell good zoos from bad ones, the enclosure preferences of tree kangaroos, and tons of other fun facts. So grab some peanuts (but please don't feed the animals), and join us for a zootastic episode of Gaming with Science. (Also, we promise this episode was not sponsored by Board Game Arena; Brian just likes it a lot.) Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 05:20 Rabbit faces & zero-g mice 10:33 Ark Nova gameplay 23:47 Zoo origins and operations 32:40 Ark Nova versus reality 38:45 Designing good animals enclosures 45:06 How can you tell a good zoo? 50:35 Nitpick corner: Poop and merch 53:45 Final grades 1:04:56 Goodbyes Links Ark Nova official site (Capstone Games) And the picture with all the bits! (Board Game Geek) Just the Zoo of Us  Space mice and muscle loss (Science Advances) The Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA)  Splash image background courtesy of Stephanie Verbeure  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:06   Hello, and welcome to the Gaming with Science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Today, we're going to talk about Ark Nova from Capstone Games. Brian  0:17   Hey, welcome back. This is Brian Jason  0:19   this is Jason Brian  0:20   and we have a very special guest with us today, Ellen Weatherford. Ellen, can you introduce yourself? Ellen  0:27   I have to make sure that I add in the sounds I'm expecting the audience be making. Brian  0:32   The crowd goes wild. Ellen  0:35    Hi everybody, it's so nice to talk to you, Brian and Jason. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited. Brian  0:41   Yeah, so Ellen, tell us about yourself. Ellen  0:43   Yeah, I am a science communicator, I'm a podcaster and a writer, and I have been the host of Just the Zoo of Us, which is a podcast reviewing animals on the Maximum Fun Network. We've been at that for about seven years now.  Brian  1:00   Could you just explain, because I know this is like the entire schtick. The what is the rating scale for just the zoo of us?  Ellen  1:08   So we have different categories, because we realized very quickly that it's hard to give an animal just one score. So we have effectiveness, which are physical adaptations, things built into the animal's body out of 10, and then ingenuity, which is behaviors, things that the animals like doing, ways that they're like navigating the world or solving problems, and then just aesthetics, which is just how nice they are to look at, which that can also often be the most contentious category, that is usually what people have the biggest feelings about. Jason Wallace  1:39   So, do the nightmare fuel animals get high on aesthetics or low on aesthetics? Brian  1:43   We had some big discussion with Brynn Devine, who loves deep sea horrible fish. Ellen  1:49   Yeah, Brian  1:50   as like, oh, they're so cute and wonderful. It's like, no, they're full of knives, they're not wonderful. Speaker 1  1:56   I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Tom Linley, who is a deep sea biologist who actually got to like discover and scientifically describe the ethereal snail fish, which is he mentioned as like the deepest fish ever found, and he described a very interesting phenomenon where there's this sort of uncanny valley effect, almost like the deeper you go in the ocean, where that you go deeper and deeper, and they get spookier and spookier and spookier and spookier and spookier, but then once you hit a certain point it loops back around and they stop being spooky and they go back into being like cute, because then you get like blob fish and snail fish and like flapjack octopus like little Dumbo octopus and stuff, like they swing back around because like you get that layer so deep in the ocean where things just become very flabby and blobby and pink and like that's when they're cute again, so there's this sort of like buffer zone of nightmare creatures, but once you pass that, it, everything's adorable down there.  Brian  3:04   I mean, I really can't argue with the Dumbo octopus as being absolutely adorable. Speaker 2  3:08   They're very cute. Jason  3:09   Agreed, Speaker 3  3:10   there's also a lot of animals that I find to be like nightmare fuel, but I also find them really like endearing and lovely in their own way, and some of them also grow on you. Sure, them are acquired tastes, Brian  3:19   literally, Speaker 4  3:21   yeah. some of them can be an acquired taste, like I personally think that, like, wasps are beautiful. I think they're gorgerous, Brian  3:29   they definitely Brian  3:30   can be terrifying, but I mean, so is a tiger. Ellen  3:34   Yeah, I think they're really beautiful in their own way, so that can be a contentious category. Brian  3:38   Ellen, one more thing, and I don't want to forget this. What do you have a favorite game? It doesn't have to be a board game or a science game, but it's cool if it would be. Ellen  3:48   I am a big video game person. Brian  3:50   Yeah, Speaker 5  3:50   I'm currently in the trenches of a Pocopia addiction. I am cripplingly addicted to Pocopia right now. I'm a lifelong Pokémon fan. OG picked it up. Learn to Read on playing Pokémon, so I've always been a Pokémon fan, but when people ask me what my, like, favorite video game is, or my favorite game, I have the most experience playing video games. Two things come to mind. Number one is Horizon Zero Dawn, very cool. Ever played Horizon Zero Dawn? Love that game, like such a great blend of, like, a very interesting story, beautiful graphics, and also really fun and satisfying gameplay. Like, it's so rare that you get all three, but they were firing on all cylinders. So, Horizon Zero Dawn is definitely one of my favorite. I have the tall neck Lego set. Brian  4:32   Oh yeah, me too. Ellen  4:34   I love that set, it's so cool. But my other one is Outer Wilds. Brian  4:39   Oh dude, we are hitting you, so you need to, you need to talk to Jason's better half, because these are literally.. this is also one of my very favorite games. Okay, Ellen  4:47   Are we same braining?  Jason  4:48   Yes, definitely. We have so both of us actually have wooden Nomai masks that I laser cut out and assembled, so as a gift to my wife, and then a gift to Brian and his wife. Ellen  5:01   Wow, how do I get on this list? Jason  5:05   You're on it now, apparently. Ellen  5:07   Yes, Brian  5:08   let's switch up our science facts to talk about Horizon Zero Dawn and Outer Wilds instead. Jason, go. Actually, no. Let's transition into our science banter topic. So, let's talk about some cool stuff that we learned about science recently, so you know, a an interesting fact, a story, a news article. You know, I am sure Ellen has a deep well of weird animal facts that she can pull from. Ellen  5:31   Deep, a deep one. Brian  5:33   Ellen, we usually let the guests host go first. Would you like, what would you like to share with the class today? Ellen  5:38   Yeah, so I was doing notes on jackrabbits recently, and I was kind of reminded of something that I had heard about jackrabbits a very long time ago, and hares in general. If anyone doesn't know, hares are different, hares and rabbits actually distinctly like different groups of lagomorphs, and the thing that I found really interesting that I had never really noticed about it is that if you look at the three sort of groups of lagomorphs that are in existence right now, there are rabbits, hares, and pikas, and if you look at them, they all have sort of differently shaped heads, where the pikas, their snout goes sort of straight out, almost like in line with their eyes, like along their sort of line of sight, and rabbits, they're sort of tilted down a little bit, their snout sort of slopes down a little bit, like 45 degrees. In hares and jackrabbits, it is like, like a straight drop off, almost like their snout points down from their line of sight, like eyes looking out at the horizon, this snout is pointed down significantly. So, in all three of these groups, you see this sort of like increasing degree of facial tilt, and that's also correlated with their speed, because pikas are very slow, they don't really move very fast. Rabbits are kind of quick, like they can, they can get little bursts of speed. Hares and jack rabbits are very, very fast, so like the faster they go, the more their snout is tilted down at the ground, and the idea is that it gets their snout out of the way, so that they can see the ground in front of them when they're running. Okay, and it, like, their whole skull shape is like completely modified to accommodate their field of view, while they're running, which I think is really interesting. Brian  7:25   So, you got to have that quake pro view, where it's just.. Ellen  7:29   I can't think of any other, like, because usually when you think of animals adapted for speed, you think of them being very streamlined. And, Brian  7:37   well, yeah, Brian  7:38   I would say, like, why do they have their face be like that, so it's not about supposedly it's about their sensory systems, not about, Ellen  7:45   yeah, the eyes, like their perception, which I think is really interesting, and I can't think of any other animal that, like, the skull is adapted like that. Brian  7:53   Can we just glue a bunch of stuff to the front of a rabbit's face and see if it screws him up? Jason  7:57   Like, I think the answer that is probably yes. Brian  8:00   Okay. All right. Well, I'll get on that with the IACUC, and we'll see what we can do.  Ellen  8:05   I do appreciate the immediate experimental design. Brian  8:08   I'm an Brian  8:08   experimentalist. I'm just like, well, that's cool. Is it true? Let's test it. Ellen  8:13   Yeah, Jason  8:14   I'm now imagining you 3D printing a bunch of prosthetics for rabbits faces. Oh, Brian  8:17   yeah. Oh, that's a really good idea. Yeah, I'll start working on that. Ellen  8:21   The Jackalope DLC, Brian  8:23   that's Brian  8:23   right, you get the rabbit and I'll print out the things. Jason, what do you have to share with the class?  Jason  8:29   I was looking, and recently I read a new story about sending mice into space. Okay, Brian  8:36   nice. Jason  8:36   But alas, this paper has no pictures of mice in zero g, which is vast failing, Brian  8:41   that Brian  8:42   is why. Do you even do it if you're not going to take pictures? Pictures or it didn't happen. Ellen  8:47   send it back.  Jason  8:48   But what they were doing here is they're actually trying to figure out how much gravity do you need to maintain muscle mass, because this is an issue with any astronauts that go up into microgravity, zero g. It's definitely going to be an issue if we actually send people off to Mars. Is that in zero G, Your muscles don't have to work so hard, and so they start atrophying. Your body's very efficient. You don't use something, it starts reclaiming it. No need to spend energy on something you're not using. And so they had mice, and they apparently put them at four different gravity levels by basically having them grow in centrifuges in the space station, where there was microgravity, so no additional, just free floating, free fall, 1/3 g, 2/3 g, and then full g. And the idea is that, okay, full g is basically as if they were on earth, everything should be fine, but can we get muscle mass sticking around and working okay at lower levels? And what they found is that a third g was able to maintain part of the functionality, but not all of it, but two thirds g was so, if you stick it around like two thirds g, then that, at least for mice, was enough to keep their musculature working, is able to keep the strength and such up, so that was seems to be the take home from that is that if you keep if. Presumably, astronauts at about two thirds g, then you could, in theory, maintain most of your muscle function. Brian  10:05   That's about Mars's gravity, isn't it? About two thirds, is that right? Jason  10:08   Oh, I think it's a lot less than Brian  10:09   that. Jason  10:09   It is 38% Brian  10:13   Okay, so, but that's that's in the not complete atrophy zone, right? Jason  10:17   Yes. And let me check this here. So, kept muscle mass at 1/3 g, and muscle function was preserved at two thirds g. Brian  10:26   Okay, so okay, that's weird to think about. All right, interesting. Do you guys wanna talk about a board game? So let's talk about the board game Ark Nova, which we all did get to play, although not to the point where we actually finished the game. I have been playing this game a ton. This is my new favorite game of 2026 Harmonies was 2025 Jason  10:47   and those are so different games. Brian  10:50   Well, there might be more connective tissue than you think, because it's very reactive to what's going on on that round. Ark Nova is the number two ranked game on Board Game Geek. It is played for one to four players, 90 to 150 minutes. This definitely is a lengthy game, ranked on Board Game Geek as a 3.8 out of five on complexity, which means it's, it's definitely up there on the complexity, way higher than I would typically go for. But I really loved this game. Designer by Mathias Wigge, a German board game designer, his very first game, and as far as I can tell, his only game, which, if your first game is number two on Board Game Geek, I think maybe you can rest on your laurels just a little bit. Jason  11:31   It's like he hit the top, had to retire.  Brian  11:34   I mean, I don't think he's retired, but I just like, where do you go from there? Like, there's nowhere else to go but down, right? Ellen  11:40   Oh yeah, it sucks to peek so early. Brian  11:42   Yeah, for sure. So, the goal of Ark Nova is to plan and build a modern, scientifically managed zoo to support conservation projects. That's what they describe Ark Nova as, from the publisher. I didn't really find too much about the designer diary, or like, how this game was made. I'm sure there are wonderful interviews in German that I couldn't find, like, I don't know what inspired this game. I don't know what made Mathias want to make a zoo game. You know, it said that the designer and the publisher have made every effort to be accurate to the actual science. There are notable exceptions that they make, and they say we know that they're there. Some things that get the bear tag are not bears. We know raccoons are not bears, but they're close enough. Ellen  12:25   Let them be bears. Brian  12:27   Yeah, Jason  12:27   don't koala bears also have the bear tag for that?  Brian  12:29   They use, and they point that out as well. For the same thing, it's like we know it's not really a bear. It bear is just a thing that we're.. it's vibes. There's some vibes here. Yeah, but even though they say that they don't really show it, like I couldn't find anywhere where they're really specific on sort of what principles they were using to make these simplifications, but that's okay. We'll come back to this conversation, this topic later. Okay, now let's talk about what does this game look like. Ark Nova, in front of you, you will have a hex grid that is where you're going to be building your zoo. Certain spots are blocked off with either rocks or water. There's also multiple different map setups, you know, from first game up to advance, with different layouts, different structures, different bonuses. You're also going to have these multiple point tracks that you're keeping track of. There's like so many little tracks on this game, and a place to display five cards. There are three types of cards in the game. There are animal cards, sponsor cards, and conservation projects. So, what are you going to do in this game? Well, the goal of this game is to build enclosures to house your animals and attract visitors. As you bring animals to your zoo, you'll raise your appeal, more people will want to come to your zoo. You'll also secure sponsors, recruit employees or build special structures. You'll also use workers, because embedded within our hackspace strategy game, there's also it's a worker placement game, sort of a little tiny one that happens in the middle of this larger game. You use your workers to form associations with partner zoos and universities and support those conservation projects. You will also increase your reputation to get rewards and draw some of those cards that are sitting up on the display. So, how do you actually play? Each round You're going to choose one of your five action cards, so those are build, animals, cards, sponsors, and association. Each of those lets you do a different thing. The five action cards have more powerful abilities based on their position from one to five, whichever card you use, then gets moved down to position one and will bump up any other cards that were below it to a more powerful spot. There's also four different places on those tracks, or on the board, or doing different things that let you upgrade your cards, so your action cards can be upgraded to a more powerful form. You can only ever upgrade four of them, so there's always going to be at least one action card that's not upgraded. So, there's, you know, lots of interesting choices to make in this game. The other major mechanic in the game is that you have breaks, so instead of having, like, well, everybody does this and it's the end of the round, you've got this little. Break tracker, another tracker that's marked with a little coffee cup. There are certain cards, like the cards action, will always add two to that break tracker. And then there are other ways that that break tracker goes up. When that fills up, everything resets. You have to discard down to your hand limit. You can have as many cards as you want until you hit the break. This is also when you earn more money and other aspects of the game get reset, like all your workers go back to their available spots again, so you can do new things with them. So, how do you win Ark Nova? Your score is based on a combination of your appeal, which is like your ticket prices, and your conservation points, so you kind of want to keep those in balance. How popular is your zoo. How good are you at sort of supporting conservation efforts? These are being tracked on two separate point tracks, and they each start on opposite ends, so they're kind of going in opposite directions. And when your markers cross each other for conservation and appeal, that triggers the end of the game. And yeah, at that point, there's like end game scoring, and you just kind of look at what everybody's got, and you know, most points wins. That is the basics of Ark Nova. Again, it's always fun to try to describe a visual board game in an audio medium, but it's.. it looks intimidating. I am glad that we played this on Board Game Arena, because it's doing all the bookkeeping for me. It's fantastic. Jason  16:22   Yeah, there have been several games we've talked about on this podcast where it's like this would be great on the computer to handle all the fiddly math. This is one of those, like, there's a lot of components, a lot of moving parts, and I can see why it's so popular. There are so many decision points, you can't have everything, you have to choose, do I want A or B, do I want C or D, and so there are real decisions you have to make that will definitely impact your game. The game is relatively easy to grasp at a high level, but it also rewards deep strategy and understanding how the parts connect together. But there is a lot of bookkeeping involved, and so having a computer to delegate that to does make it a lot nicer. Brian  17:02   It seems like it would be really easy to forget some act like, because you can have these sponsor cards that are like, oh, anytime anybody plays a predator icon in any zoo, gain some money, cool. I'm gonna forget that. The game's not gonna forget that. The game's gonna do it for me. It's just accurately keeping track of all the tags. It's this is not about board game arena, but oh man, it was really nice to play on board game. This is why I like this game so much, because it's so easy to play on board game arena. Ellen  17:29   I do personally benefit from physically interacting with, like, information, so I feel like now that you know, I've looked up some pictures of what the actual like game pieces look like, and I feel like I might benefit from playing this, like, in person with, like, actual pieces and stuff, but God, it looks like tracker hell to me. It is Ellen  17:50   just.. it Ellen  17:51   is a little bit of.. Brian  17:54   I'll tell you what, Ellen, if we're ever going to all be in the same place at the same time, we will buy a physical copy, and we'll let Jason take care of the bookkeeping, and it'll be fun. Jason  18:03    Oh, thank you.  Brian  18:04   You're welcome.  Jason  18:04   Yeah, no, I found on Board Game Geek, there's an image where someone composed all the bits, all the zoo pieces, all the cards, all the meeples and cubes, and everything, and it is beautiful, and so incredibly intimidating, because this thing takes up an entire table when you lay it all out like that, Ellen  18:21   it's a lot of information. Brian  18:23   Yes, for sure. One of the metrics that Jason, I informally use when we're ranking games, is the bowl of chip factor. Is there room on the table for a bowl of chips? Ellen  18:34   Oh, that's Brian  18:34   funny. Having played only on my.. I actually play on my phone, believe it or not, I don't even play on my laptop. I really severely doubt that there's much room for chips. Ellen  18:45   This game does not seem like phone activities; this seems like big screen activities. Jason  18:50   I am shocked that you can play this on your phone. Brian  18:52   I love playing it on my phone. I'm just used to it at this point. Does anybody else have anything they want to point out about Ark Nova? Anything they feel like I missed, or anything that they want to bring up. I mean, obviously, we've got like 130 animal cards in this game, which is really cool. And, obviously, we're going to talk more about that. I guess one thing I'm going to mention now is that all of the animal cards have a sort of all of the cards have a tag system on them of some kind. So, let me go over those. So, we've got the continents, Antarctica doesn't get to play, and they have compressed the Americas into south and north as just the Americas. It is a European game, so they have kept Europe and Asia separate, which, to be fair, very different animals live there. So, I think that that's legitimate. That's also true for North and South America, but whatever, the animal types - we've got birds, reptiles, primates, and then predators and herbivores, which really more specifically is mammalian predators and mammalian herbivores. I did check everything fits into those categories. There is a weird subclass called bear, which includes bears and a few other things like raccoons, coatis, and weirdly the wolverine, Brian  19:59   which. Again, Brian  20:00   just, just based on vibes, I suppose. Ellen  20:02   Yeah, that's a mustelid. Okay, that's a, that's a weasel. That okay, Brian  20:06   it is a weasel. And it's like, well, if you're gonna put the wolverine on, like, I don't know if you have a honey badger, but you should also get, let that be a bear. And, like, European badger doesn't get to be one, though. So it's like they balanced bears in a strange way. Ellen  20:20   Yeah, Jason  20:20   I am beginning to think that there was some sort of like bear lobbyist that was a friend of the game designer or something, or maybe they just like bears, because this bear category sounds excessively broad.  Ellen  20:34   Big bear got to him. Brian  20:37   The other thing that I'm thinking about is that bears don't - you're never just a bear, it's always bear plus something else. Bear is a subcategory. There's also petting zoo animals, which covers a huge range of like the cute and the things that will let you touch them. And then there's not bears, there's no bear in that category, as far as I'm aware. There's research, and then there's also icons for like ones that need water and ones that need rocks, so like when you build your little enclosure next to something, like, oh, this animal requires its enclosure to be next to water, for instance, or next to a rock, you can't just play the animals willy nilly, some of them have pre requirements, right? So if you want to play a lion, that's cool, it's kind of the metaphor of the game, I think, is a lion. You have to have other predators in your zoo already before you're gonna get a lion. I think it's the idea of, like, you gotta have, you gotta know what you're doing with predators before they let you have a lion. Ellen  21:33   You can't go straight to lion. Brian  21:35   No, you don't go straight to lion. You can go straight to cheetah, though. For some reason, Ellen  21:39   cheetahs do are quite like built different cheetahs, are like the chillest big cat. Brian  21:47   Oh, is that right? They do need a lot of space, though. They need a huge Brian  21:49   enclosure. Ellen  21:50   Yeah, Jason  21:51   yeah. And I think there is a bit of a story in what these prerequisites are. I mean, the rock and the water requirements are the most obvious, but like one of the cards I played was a shoe bill, and I had to have two research icons already in my zoo, so I don't know what the story behind that is, but apparently you need to have a pretty good research program in order to actually be able to keep and maintain shoe bills. Ellen  22:12   I've heard that they're very difficult to breed in captivity, so it could be that it could be that, like, because I know that there has been some difficulty in getting them to like successfully breed in zoos, so maybe it's something to do with that. Brian  22:26   Could be there were some other ones that are similar, like Galapagos turtles, were the same way. You got to have some research representation in your zoo, right? Jason  22:33   Yeah, and another way they do it is that some animals can only be played after you have upgraded your animal card, so if you don't upgrade it, you simply can't play an African elephant or other similar animals, Brian  22:43   you have to have a partner zoo in Asia before you can even have a giant panda, that is true, Ellen  22:48   right? Yeah, I found the partner zoo requirement interesting because it reminds me a little bit of how, like, for the AZA, like one of the AZA requirements is often that, like, you have to be actively participating in some sort of, like, species survival plan, yeah, which usually involves having, like, some sort of affiliation with, like, on the ground research or conservation, like, you have to, in some way, be partnered with actual conservation, where that animal is from, and be working towards the overall long-term benefit of the species, whether that's like breeding them for, you know, genetic diversity Ellen  23:29   or bringing Ellen  23:29   them for better fitness for sport, like you have to be like participating with actual conservation for to like get AZA accreditation, Jason  23:41   and the AZA is the what the American Zoological Association? Ellen  23:44   I think it's the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Jason  23:47   Okay, Brian  23:47   which used to be the American that transitioned from another name. Hey, wonderful transition. Let's talk about zoos. Okay, I have a little thing of just like, so where did zoos come from? Why does zoos exist? The tradition of zoos really gets born out of menageries, nobles for kings, for queens. I think you could probably also get the impression from that that it is difficult, expensive, and challenging to maintain a zoo. Right, this is something that really only the rich and the powerful were doing. Now, those original menageries really weren't anything about, well, obviously they weren't about science, but they weren't even really about animal welfare, right? These were trophies, these were treasures, these were things that were put on display, they were maintained just for that, of like to show how cool and rich you are, right? Ellen  24:35   They were decorative, yeah, Brian  24:37   decorative, right, like a museum piece, like anything else that you would capture and display from a far off land. The first really public zoo. Actually, does anyone want to guess what was the origin of the public zoo? This is not you. I don't usually do quizzing, but I'm just curious. Ellen  24:52   Yeah. No, I'm trying to think of where the first one might have been. It does seem like something they do in the UK. Okay, it does seem like maybe London, maybe Brian  25:04   that's a really good guess. It was actually during the French Revolution.  Jason  25:08   I should have said that.  Brian  25:09   Basically, it was the reappropriation of menageries and reformation of those into a public zoo. My friend Tara is going to rip me over this pronunciation. The first public zoo was the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes during the French Revolution in 1794 So, we'll see how well I did my French there. Now, even then, the first public zoos, this idea of zoos as things for the public, they still were not for the animals, really. Attitudes about that didn't change until after World War Two. A lot of zoos were sort of destroyed during World War Two, and people started just having different thoughts about that. Also, studies about animal cognition were kind of right around that time. And then this idea of zoos having this mission of conservation, that really comes out of the 1970s environmental movement. So it really hasn't been that long, even though those sort of zoo moments are older than that, this idea of zoos having a mission of conservation is sort of a 1970s and forward thing. Ellen  26:09   Yeah, when ethics were invented, Brian  26:13   when environmental ethics were invented, anyway. But yes, you're right. Jason  26:17   Well, when environmental ethics in the West were invented. If you look in other traditions, they go back much, much further. Brian  26:23   Let's talk about this now. How do you actually.. let's say you want to open a zoo. Ellen, do you want to open a zoo? Ellen  26:30   My blood pressure just rose thinking about it, because, like, I feel like I've read through enough, like, handbooks on care and, like, enclosure development and stuff like that, that, like, I know a little bit too much about what has to go on behind the scenes to make it, like, possible, and make it work, and just the thought of having to do all that myself, or even think about it, just immediately made me stressed out. Brian  26:53   Oh yeah, for sure, which I think is why there are games about this, because something that people love to think about doing, and nobody actually wants to do it. Ellen  27:02   Love it as a concept. Brian  27:03   Yeah, so it is, as you can imagine, an exceptionally expensive thing to take on. So we can kind of go into it. What does it actually take to open a zoo? The first thing is just legal permitting, right? You cannot display wild animals. You need to talk to the USDA. You need to have permits from the endanger, based on if you're going to have endangered animals by the Migratory Bird Act. There's all these different legal requirements that cover it, not to mention purchasing the land, developing all of the enclosures that are going to be there. There's no good way to really give a universal estimate for what it costs, but I did do a little bit of research that says it is not atypical for a zoo to have to have a daily operating cost of 10 to $20,000 Jason  27:47   and we should say all those regulations and stuff are of course US-based, because that's where we're based, and we have easy access to all the regulations, Brian  27:54   very true, Jason  27:55   presumably there are very different ones, depending on which country you're in, and local regulations, and such, Ellen  28:00   even within the US, they vary a lot state to state, so like in some states their rules on that are much, much, much chiller, and on some states they're much more, so like I'm from Florida, and Florida had notoriously lacks laws on exotic, even just pet ownership, right, like not even for a zoo, but like, it was the barrier to entry was, in my opinion, too low. A lot of people were basically having private exotic pet collections and calling them a zoo, so that they could sort of justify being allowed by the USDA to keep, like, you know, lions and tigers and whatever weird stuff they wanted to have, even if it was basically just like glorified, like their own private collection, they would like be able to call it a zoo, and like it was just I feel like from state to state, you know, the laws are very, very different, Jason  28:55   so they were basically recreating their own menagerie,  Brian  28:57   yeah, yeah, just calling it a zoo, continuing with that, okay, great. So you can meet that minimum legal requirement to have a zoo. You've spent an enormous amount of outlay of funds to secure the land, build your enclosures, and everything like that. Now, let's say you want to be accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Now that is a very different process, so you can open a zoo legally, is it a zoo, like Ellen was saying, where it is animal welfare is important, where you are contributing to conservation, where you are doing all of those things that we think of when we think about zoos, all of the positive things that they bring, so you have to be in operation for five years before you are even eligible to be considered for operation, you have to be operating well above the legal standards with animal welfare. First, you have to be participating in conservation. A three-person team of evaluators is going to come to your zoo for multiple days. That's going to include a veterinarian, an animal welfare specialist, and like an experienced zookeeper. They're going to go through your zoo, look through all of your records, then they are going to take their report, as well as probably a ream of paperwork, to the AZA, where a panel is then going to determine if you have qualified for AZA accreditation or not, and then that has to be renewed every five years, right? With all of that, so that's just to become accredited. Now, I also learned, so this game in particular, Ark Nova, they talk about WAZA instead of so in America, it's the Association for Zoos and Aquariums. WAZA is the world association for zoos and aquariums, which actually is an umbrella organization that every one of these.. so there's CAZA in Canada, right? There's EAZA in Europe, they all have wonderful logos, by the way. Actually, you should get little patches of every one of them. Ellen  30:43   AZA, my inbox is open. Please, please send me merch, AZA. I would love it. Ellen  30:48   I advertise for you guys all the time for free. Give me some merch, please. Brian  30:53   And I was very happy to hear that the AZA in the United States is, in fact, part of WAZA. I would not have been surprised if it was not the other way around, where like everybody else is all into this umbrella organization, but the, the US version, no we do our own things in our own accreditation, we're not going to talk to anybody else. So Ellen  31:09   I think that when you get into like AZA is very like conservation global, like they have that vibe, like they would definitely be like linked up with all the other worldwide organizations, they are definitely, they seem very like, because they are focused on, I guess, global conservation. That doesn't super surprise me. Brian  31:26   No, no, no, no, no, that's true. So, let's see. So, what are they going to look for? Species-appropriate habitats and enrichment programs, qualified veterinary care. Man, what does it take to be a zoo vet? That seems like that's a very special thing. Ellen  31:40   Yeah, I have heard some people that have like exotic pets that have said that they had to like take their pet to the zoo because like the vet at the zoo was the only one who could see their like weird pet. Brian  31:50   Trained professional staff, conservation education, and research programming as a key part there. This is one of those things we're going to come back to later. How much do they spend on conservation and how much does it impact? That's one of those things that occasionally people talk about, and that's someplace where we might see some differences between Ark Nova versus the day-to-day operation of a zoo. So, another thing that I thought was interesting to me, looking this up, of the AZA zoos, just over 50% are nonprofit, so they are presumably receiving funding from cities, from the government, from the state, things like that, but like almost 50% of zoos are for-profit enterprises, and yet they are AZA accredited. So that's kind of a brief overview of the history of zoos. What does it take to be one of these like we consider ideal zoos where conservation is at the core of what you do? So yeah, what do we talk about? Like, what do we think about how zoos are represented in Ark Nova? Do we think that they're doing a good job? And then I also want to talk about the animals, because I think that the animals are a little vibe-coded, rather than like pure accuracy. When you're playing Ark Nova, the things that you're really trying to balance are your appeal, which is basically like how many people are coming to your zoo right versus your conservation, like these are the two things that you're supposed to be doing, and I know that zoos participate in conservation, but I don't really know if that direct interaction with conservation is really what that is part of what zoos do, but I don't think that's really the majority of what zoos do, I definitely don't think it's a 50/50 balance, the way that it's kind of being portrayed in Ark Nova, Jason  33:23   I mean, we'd really need someone from a zoo to come on and tell us, like, what percentage of time, what percentage of energy, what percentage of money is going to one or another, and probably most of the money is just going to maintenance, it just costs a lot of money to feed the animals, hire the staff, all that sort of stuff, so, but the fact is, like, the good ones are probably still putting significant numbers in. I mean, I'm sure many of them have partnerships with universities and veterinary schools and such to have people come get training, to have internships, all sorts of stuff like that. Brian  33:55   Yeah, I think that's right. I think that some of the reports say, you know, it's like less than 5% of their gross budget, but that's the gross budget, like a zoo is not like I said, it's very, and like, okay, another thing in Ark Nova, you build your infrastructure, and that's it, it's built forever, you buy your animal one time, and that's it, and that's forever, Ellen  34:14   right? Brian  34:14   So they're not really accounting for maintenance costs, or like just upkeep, like at all, it's all put a bundled into that single cost. I have no idea what these credits are, either. I wouldn't be it. We often try to figure out what is our analogy here for costs. I kind of feel like one of those has got to be somewhere between 100,000 and like a million dollars or something, Ellen  34:34   right? Because these are assets that you're not just like, it's not just a, you're not just like acquiring an asset that's just yours forever. These are like assets that, first of all, will require a lot of maintenance. You'll basically just be having to like continually upkeep this asset, but also the asset will naturally expire, you know? Like, it's just gonna get old and die eventually, so like it's not like you're gonna have it forever, and also. In a lot of zoos, sometimes they don't have that animal, you know. Sometimes they'll have an animal, and then, you know, something happens, maybe it passes away, or you know, gets transferred to a different zoo, or something like that. And then they've got this enclosure, this exhibit sitting there with nothing in it, like, because they just don't have anything to put in it. And then it could be like a way long time later, that finally they get some other animal that then they're like, well, we have an empty enclosure, and they put a new animal in there, so like I have seen that happen like in zoos a lot, so it's yeah, it's not as permanent, but I can't think of any way for them to do that in Ark Nova without adding another tracker. Brian  35:39   Well, I would routinely have empty enclosures, or they were, you, we didn't get to do this, but they're one of the conservation programs, our release program, and you would actually take an animal, you would take an occupied enclosure, you would get rid of that animal, and you would turn it over to its unoccupied side, so it changes your tags and everything, so there is a yes, this enclosure is now empty, of course, you're only emptying things by releasing it into the wild, which, Brian  36:02   right, Brian  36:02   in reality, captive breeding programs definitely an important part of what zoos do. You know, there's a, a small but critical number of success stories. The, the California Condor, being like the big one, right? Like, brought back from what was it, 23 individuals or something horrible, Brian  36:19   that Ellen  36:20   it was like in the double digits, yeah. Brian  36:21   Okay, to actual breeding populations in the wild, but a lot of times the problem these release programs can be really difficult for certain animals, like particularly animals with a lot of complex behavior, complex mental process, animals with culture. It's very hard to take something like that and expect to be able to rear it in a way that it can then survive in the wild, right. So, but sometimes you can do it. Sometimes it's really important, and, and I feel like the real value of zoo is is the inspiration quotient, and I don't know if it's necessarily a captive animal's job to do that, but like the education that that inspiration of the next generation of people who want to work with and preserve animals. I feel like that's a value that's very hard to put an actual number on, Ellen  37:04   right? I do, and I do think it does make an actual, like, impact on ideology, like I think getting to see, for kids, especially for young people, getting to see, you know, real these very impressive animals, very charismatic animals, especially, and being able to see them in person and perceive them as being like actual living, living, breathing things right in front of you, sharing a space with you. I think is going to make you care more about the world, and also like understand the world outside of your neighborhood, right? If you like are growing up in the USA, you and you get to see giraffes and rhinos at the zoo, right? Like, I think that will inspire you to like actually visualize the world outside of your immediate surroundings, and so I do think it is really important just for like broadening a worldview, I think, was which is valuable in itself, and and also like inspiring young people to care about their environments and teach them about conservation and things like that. I don't know about you guys, I, as a kid, I was always at the zoo. I was not a sign reader. I'm sorry, guys, I'm not Brian  38:11   really.. you're not a Brian  38:12   sign reader, you're not a sign Brian  38:13   reader, Ellen  38:14   not a big sign reader. I was there, I was not.. I was not reading all the signs, I was there for the vibes, I was there to look at the animals and watch, and, and yap at the zookeepers. I was always talking to the zookeepers, so the zookeepers would talk to me. That's how I'm learning, but, like, I'm not a big stand there and look at the sign person. But, but, yeah, I do feel like I was a kid who grew up going to zoos, and it hugely affected, like, the trajectory of my life. So, I do think it makes a real impact. It's not really a money-making impact, but it's there. Jason  38:45   Playing off that a bit, I think the quality of the zoo also plays into that, where if you see animals in a more rich environment, something where they can really engage with it, it's better. Whereas, like, I remember when I was a kid, we were going.. I don't even remember which zoo this was that, but most of it was fine, but then we got to like the one thing where it's like this enclosure for a crocodile or something, where the enclosure was completely bare and only just slightly larger than the animal itself. I'm really hoping it was just a temporary housing while it was this real one's being prepared, but I don't know, I was like 10, and like that it can have the opposite effect, and so along those lines, like what are the sort of things that are needed to do a high quality animal enclosure, like what does an animal need for that enclosure to provide stimulation, or whatever it is that the animal is looking for in its environment. Ellen  39:37   I do think that, like, exhibit design is very interesting. I actually just a few weeks ago had got a chance to talk to Dr. Lisa Daybeck, but she got to - she's a researcher who has worked with research in Papua New Guinea, and she helped design the new sort of like tree tops, like cloud forest to. Exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo here in Seattle, which is close to where I live, and I got to ask her about, like, what kind of thought process went into, like, designing exhibits for tree kangaroos, because she was a tree kangaroo researcher, and you know, she talked about the fact that, you know, tree kangaroos live in, obviously, trees, so they need a lot of climbing structures, but she said that you can't just do vertical structures, because they don't just climb straight up and down, and that's it. They need a lot of like diagonals, they need a lot of horizontal space, they need a lot of like, you know, sort of catwalk style, like trees that they can walk across. So she talked about how they need that sort of structure. Whenever I look at exhibits for things I'm always trying to look at, like what are the containment, like how are they trying to like hide their containment, like I'm trying to think of like how are they not, how are they making it so this animal can't escape, and also doing that in such a way where they're not just like behind iron bars, right, like finding the balance between like security and aesthetics, because aesthetics are important, like what humans are perceiving is very important in the zoo, right? Like, it has to look nice, and also it has to photograph well, you know? Like, if you've got like an enclosure that's like surrounded by a chain link fence, then all of the pictures are going to be seen through a fence, right? And then all the pictures are going to come out kind of like, you know, people. it doesn't look as impressive, so I do think that that, like, exhibit design is very interesting. I just got to go to a few months ago, I got to go to the San Diego Zoo. They invited me, I was so excited to go see their new - they have a brand new elephant exhibit, and this exhibit is huge, like when you are in, yeah, they better be right, like they need a lot of space, and so it's like the sort of thing where, like, from the walkway you can't see the other side of, like, the enclosure, like you really can't even see, like, where the enclosure ends, and some of that, I think, is like clever, like putting the sort of fencing on the other side of a hill, right, so that, like, you really can't see where the fence is, but it is just a massive exhibit, and they had, I want to say, like, eight elephants in there, and we could not see all of them. There were, we could only see probably, like, four of the elephants, and they were like, "Oh, yeah, there's a bunch more somewhere. So,  Jason  42:17   I'm sure they have cameras tracking every single one of those elephants. Ellen  42:20   I'm sure they knew exactly where those elephants were, but we couldn't see them, which I think is like, if your exhibit is big enough that four elephants cannot be seen, I feel like that is like a good amount of space. How are you hiding four elephants? Brian  42:34   Yes, good question. I guess the other thing is, like, but you also want your guests to be able to see the animals, so that's kind of a problem too, right? Ellen  42:43   Yeah, I've seen some of them get kind of like clever with it at Northwest Trek, which is, which is an AZA accredited zoo here in Washington. They have, they have a lot of like little nocturnal creatures, so like they have like skunks and like American badgers and like beavers and stuff like that, creatures that would be more likely to be active at night, so what they have is they have this sort of like shaded nighttime den area that they can go that's dark, but then there's like glass that like you can see them in their little den, oh actually in San Diego Zoo, at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Park, which is like the second, like, location in Escondido, California. They have a platypus, they have a platypus exhibit, apparently only zoo in the world outside of Australia that has platypuses. Brian  43:31   I was thinking, I've never seen one, Ellen  43:34   right? Brian  43:34   This is why Ellen  43:35   I got to see them in San Diego, and they have an interesting thing, because, like, you mentioned, you have to, you want the guests to be able to see the animal. This is a nocturnal animal. Platypuses come out at night, so the platypus exhibit is actually completely enclosed. It's all in like a building, and the lights in the building are reversed in like a day-night cycle, where the lights are off and it's dark during the day, Brian  44:02   and just like Australia, they're just keeping on local time. Ellen  44:07   They like, they have like reversed like day-night cycle, so that the platypus will be active when the people are there. Brian  44:14   That's cool. I've seen this in, like, bat, yeah, and like bat enclosures. You'll go in, it's all like red light, so that the bats can be, Ellen  44:20   yeah, you were telling me a little bit about, like, the idea of, like, you know, zoos being good versus bad, and I feel like I have seen such a wide spectrum of zoos, like Jason, you mentioned seeing one that had, like, a really terrible crocodile exhibit that was just, like, you know, I'm sure it was probably with just, like, a concrete pit, probably Brian  44:39   A concrete pit with a crocodile in it. Ellen  44:41   I've seen a lot of concrete pit zoos, and I've seen, you know, the San Diego Zoo, and I've seen, like, honestly, I'm from Jacksonville, Florida. I think we had a world-class zoo. The Jacksonville Zoo is fantastic. So, like, I've seen great zoos, I've seen terrible zoos. So, like, I really don't think it's the sort of thing that you can say, like, blanket, like they're all great or they're all bad. Head, because, like, I've seen ones that do it really, really well. I've seen ones that I thought should be shut down. Jason  45:06   So, aside from looking for, like, accreditation, how can people know if a zoo is good or not before they go, before they give them their money? Ellen  45:14   Oh, there are a lot of things you can look for, because I have had people mention to me that, like, if they work at smaller zoos. If it's a small zoo, like you mentioned, Brian, AZA accreditation is a huge process. It is. It takes forever. It's also very expensive, and a lot of, especially smaller zoos, don't have that kind of budget, and maybe cannot get AZA accreditation, which doesn't mean that they're bad. Like, it doesn't mean that they're not doing the right thing, it just means that they probably don't have that kind of budget, which is, you know, fine. So you have to put a little more legwork into making sure there are some red flags that I've learned you can kind of look out for. One of them is doing paid, like hands on contact, particularly with animals that you shouldn't have hands on contact with, so like predators, right, like hands on contact with like a big cat, that's a big no no, hands on contact with a very young animal that's a big no no, like those those sort of like paid opportunities where you can like pay to stress an animal out, like, is usually Ellen  46:22   that's Ellen  46:22   kind of like that's kind of a red flag, you know, like, and I've seen some zoos that have, like, ambassador animals, where they can pay a little extra money and go, you know, hang out with, like, a Galapagos tortoise, is probably going to be fine, they don't care that you're there, you know, they'll have, like, or they'll have, I did one, actually, actually in Atlanta, at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, my husband surprised me with a the behind the scenes sea otter tour, where you could like go to the behind the scenes of the sea otter exhibit at the Georgia Aquarium, and you do have to pay extra for it, and you do sort of get hands on contact, but the way they do it is interesting, they have this sort of like plexiglass like barrier between you and the otters like tank, and you're basically spot training where you like put your finger up to the hole and the otter comes up and boops their nose like onto your finger, so it's a very like animal lead, it's like if the animal doesn't want to do it, they're not going to do it, so it's like it's kind of up to them and it's not stressing them out, but you do still get to like boop an otter with your, with your finger, which is very, very nice. Jason  47:25   So, like, I know so many people that would pay extra money to boop an otter's nose. Ellen  47:30   I did. It was worth it, was worth every penny. So, there are things you can look out for, especially like those sort of money grab opportunities, like if they're asking you to pay extra money to like stress an animal out on purpose, that's usually a red flag. I also kind of look to see, like, okay, what, where are you getting your animals from? That's a huge thing, like, are you only taking in rescued animals from other places, are you like breeding them, you know, like, I, you can look into a little bit, like, if they'll, if they say on their website where they get their animals from, that can be helpful if they're not saying it might be because they don't want you to know, usually places that, like, are getting their animals either, like, from a rescue situation, or if they're participating in a species survival program, they'll be very, like, upfront about that, that information will be, will be very available. Jason  48:21   Yeah, we actually have a very tiny zoo here in Athens that is a purely rescue zoo. It's a small free zoo. It's, it's not gonna make anyone's list of like top 100 zoos in the nation. It's very tiny, but it's it's full of rescued animals, and they're very open about that. These are all animals that are not able to be released to the wild because they have critical injuries or whatever, and so they're kept here to have a good life. Ellen  48:44   We had a there was a big cat sanctuary like that from in North Florida, and one thing that, like, also something that I would see in places that I consider to be red flags were like not using proper safety protocols between their staff and the animals, where like if the staff is like in an enclosure with something like a tiger or a lion or a big cat or something like that, like with the AZA, they have like what do they call it, protected contact or something like that, or like there are steps basically where they're there, they should never be like in the enclosure with certain animals, there's some where it's fine, they're not going to do anything, but if it's something like I had Marco Wendt on, who worked, who works at the San Diego Zoo, and he was talking about cassowaries, and like cassowaries are like Jason  49:30   those are basically dinosaurs, Ellen  49:32   yeah, so especially places will post on social media, like they'll usually tell on themselves on social media where they'll like post a lot of videos of their keepers, like in the enclosure with like a live tiger or something like that, and you're like, okay, you shouldn't be doing that, because if they're not, if they're not using good safety protocols with their staff, I feel like there's probably some other things they're not doing probably super responsibly and safely either. Brian  49:59   Well, it also just. Makes you wonder, it's like that. If that is a wild animal acting like a wild animal, you shouldn't be around it like that, right? Ellen  50:07   Yeah, Brian  50:08   like, so why isn't that animal attacking them? Or anyway, Ellen  50:13   I've seen, I've heard a lot of horror stories about like tourist traps that will, like, sit like heavily, heavily sedate animals, so that they can like take pictures with them, and have their cute little moment. Do your research, like, look into a place before you visit them. I think is my big takeaway, right? Just like, look into them, see what you can find, see if they're being cagey on their website. Brian  50:35   Is there anything else we want to talk about about the science that is represented in Ark Nova? If there's not, I would love to step into our nitpick corner, because during the course of our conversation I found mine. Ellen  50:45   Oh, Jason  50:46   all right. Do tell. Ellen  50:46   Yeah, let me hear it. Brian  50:47   My nitpick about Ark Nova as a zoo management game is that there's not nearly enough poop. Ellen  50:55   I would like to see more like management Sims deal with Brian  51:01   everything that I've seen and researched, everything that I did getting ready for this says that being a zookeeper is about 50% poop management. Ellen  51:09   Yeah, it's mostly poop management. Yeah, Brian  51:12   so I feel like maybe that break tracker needs to be based on it's actually the poop tracker, it should just be a little poop emoji, and when you reach a certain amount of poop, that's it. You've got to stop, clean out, and that's in between rounds. Ellen  51:24   It should be like it's like a, it's like a flood tracker that like the poop level rises gradually. Brian  51:32   I thought of one more nitpick, and if nobody else has one, I'm gonna list my, that my second Brian  51:37   one as Brian  51:37   well. Jason  51:37   I think I would need to play the game a few more times to pull out, I mean, there's there's enough depth in this game that I don't think I can make a good saying of what I would fix until I understand it better. Brian  51:52   Okay, that's fair. Then next time I invite you to play, you got to accept my invitation. Okay, I've got two games running right now. Anyway, my other nitpick, then, and then we can be done with nitpick corner. You can build all of these structures in the game, specialized enclosures and things, for like, there's a meerkat den, and there's all these things that give you special powers in Board Game Arena there's an arcade that actually, like, do you know what they don't have all those special structures, they don't have a gift shop, and that's crazy. Ellen  52:24   Would like to see that. Brian  52:26   Have you ever been to a zoo that didn't have a gift shop?  Jason  52:29   Isn't that what the little kiosks are? I mean, they generate income for you. It might be like pretzels and slushies, but it may also just be a bunch of merch. Brian  52:36   I think they're selling pretzels and slushies. I did find an image of a kiosk from some kind of bonus tile, and it was definitely a place where they had like little tables, and they were selling like cotton candy and stuff, but no, I need, I gotta go buy a stuffed animal, and you know, a little battery-powered fan that's gonna break the next day, like that's what Ellen  52:55   , yeah, I need, I need a carrot at the end to encourage my kid to lock in while we're at the zoo, like I need something to encourage my kid to just like chill out for a few minutes, like don't worry guys, if you, if you guys can lock in and get through this zoo trip with no ridiculousness, I mean, there could be a stupid little knickknack in it for you, Jason  53:17   so it sounds like the love of zoos and talking to zookeepers may not have passed on faithfully. Ellen  53:25   No, my kids are goblins, which I don't know where they got that from. I have no idea. Jason  53:32   You say that, and I don't know exactly what it means, but it sounds like they're trying to eat the animals. Ellen  53:41   Some of them, I catch them licking their lips a little bit. Brian  53:45   That snake looks delicious. All right, let's.. well, then let's move on to grades. Ellen, if you don't want to grade, you don't have to. We, Jason and I, are professors, so we give two grades. We will grade on fun, and we grade on scientific accuracy, so we'll just do this back to back, and I actually would like Jason to start this time. Jason  54:08   Okay, so I'm having to think again, like I really feel like I need several more plays throughs, which is a big ask in the game that take can take two plus hours for a single playthrough to feel this in depth. What I saw of the game, I would be comfortable giving it probably about an A minus for science. It's like they, they seem to have done a good job trying to tie things together. They have a good amount of actually, they don't have a good amount of information on the animals that they have pictures, and they have some tags. Brian  54:39   They have tags and where they're from, that's about it. Ellen  54:42   It's like a Yu-Gi-Oh card. Jason  54:45   Yeah, I think there would be opportunity there. So many games like this nowadays, they have that little line of flavor text that tells you about the animal, Ellen  54:52   I'd like to see more flavor text, for sure. Yeah, Jason  54:54   or a genus species or something, those little things that are not necessary parts of the game, but that you let. You layer it on a little bit more, and I think that they easily could have done that, because at least most of the cards that I was looking at seemed like they had extra space available to do so, Jason  55:10   and again, they were electronic versions, so maybe the physical versions do not have that, but it seems like there would be a very easy opportunity to just add a little extra layer of it, there, which is what I'm going to put out, an A minus, because largely I think it does what it wants to do, as far as being accurate, and the fact that the rule book says, like, they tried to be accurate, they acknowledged some of the places they, they diverged, I think that's fine, I guess going back, I do have the one nitpick, is just the bears, someone just likes bears too much, and it just wants to draw that circle wide, Brian  55:45   but again, bear was just a subclass, nothing was a bear, everything was a bear plus x, although I don't really know what that means, Ellen  55:52   but the fact that the bears are like the only subclass is very funny to me, Brian  55:55   that is true, it's like bears, no, you're right, there's no reason it should just be bears, Jason, let's do fun before I, before I derail us completely. Jason  56:04   Okay, so I will preface this by saying that I feel very inadequate to give a fun judgment on something that is number two on Board Game Geek. It's like I think the general geek culture has spoken, however, people do have different levels of fun. I can definitely see this being in the A category for fun. It definitely, there are a lot of moving parts, which will turn some people off, but for people who like a lot of moving parts, who people who like a lot of replayability, a lot of decision making, where every game is a little bit different based on what you get and what's laid out there's it has a nice mix where there are several parts that are randomly arranged, including what cards you get, how your starting actions are laid out, where some of the upgrades show up, there's a lot of that limited randomization that makes it so that no two games are exactly alike, and you can pursue a bunch of different strategies, so I can definitely see this being one that it deserved an A in fun, I think, assuming that this is the kind of game you like. I think it is a solid A. I would not mind if they had maybe the light version that was about an hour to play. Brian  57:14   Yeah, that's fair. Jason  57:15   But then I don't know if that would be as fun, because you'd have to drop some of the fiddly bits. Brian  57:18   Well, honestly, all you would really need to do, if you wanted to play the game shorter, is just reduce some of those tracks. Do you know what I mean? Like, you would just, if you want to play, it's a lot of tracks, but just literally, like, your appeal and your conservation points are just going to cross in half the time. That's there's a shorter game, right? You don't get that depth of strategy. Maybe you got some crazy people who rush the game, I don't know, Ellen  57:42   speed running Ark Nova,  Brian  57:44   speed running Ark Nova. Hey, you can do it. I have played so many. This is my new favorite game. I know that sounds crazy to you, Jason, because you know my previous favorite game was Harmonies, which is very chill, little landscape building games, where you like balancing points. The thing is, is that for me, and again I'm playing on Board Game Arena, so it's doing all of my bookkeeping for me, so I don't have to worry about setting up a game that's going to occupy an entire table and sitting down to play it for two hours. The thing I like about Ark Nova is that sort of you strategize, but only for a couple of rounds, it's very reactive, you have short-term strategies that those will change based on cards, based on what comes up, based on what you're able to optimize. Like, I don't have to think 20 steps ahead, I am fine thinking three steps ahead. That's, I can deal with that. That's the level of forethought that I like to deal with. So, solid A for fun, no question from me. For science, I think that I don't know if I want to ding it for the, they, they didn't show their work, and they didn't give me any place to see where they were going to show their work, in terms of, like, how did they, how did you make these adjustments, like, where did you simplify, the animals are all very vibe coded, in the sense that, like, they'll code the animal's abilities. There's like 20 different animal abilities. One of them is like snapping. Okay, so that's cool. What animals are going to snap? Crocodiles snap, right? And there's a couple other things, a couple under lizards in the game. Snapping is when you can just grab a card from the display anywhere, right? So the animal snaps, and they're tying that to the mechanic. It's not really accurate to the animal. Do you know what I mean? That's what I'm saying. It's like it's very vibe coded. Jason  59:23   Yeah, some of them were though, like I played the little capuchin monkey that had the pilfering ability to let me steal stuff from you. Yeah, and that is totally true. When I was in Venezuela, that we went to a park that, where they had monkeys, and the monkeys had obviously learned that the tourists would feed them like little plantain chips from a bag, that just little like snack bag, you get like potato chips, but the capuchins had definitely learned that there were many more chips in the bag than in the tourist's hand, and so then they'd steal the bag out of your hand, then they'd run off into the trees, Ellen  59:52   a Looney Tunes scene. Brian  59:54   Yeah, a lot of the animals that are venomous have a venom ability that you use and you put it on your opponent, and it like depowers some of their cards, so like again, it's all there. I don't think any of it's wrong, it's just very vibe coded. Ellen  1:00:08   I do like the idea that you are deploying your animals to like personally attack your competitors. Brian  1:00:15   Yeah, you are Ellen  1:00:15   that is really funny to me that you are like sending out your army, that like, because in the context of the game, you are sort of like CEO, you are like admin of the zoo, and I'm imagining that you are sending monkeys to go steal from your competitors' home, Jason  1:00:32   release the capuchins, Brian  1:00:33   fly my pretties, fly, Ellen  1:00:35   yeah, like it's a very funny mental image to both like be in the role of this sort of like top down administrative position, but also still having the animals like having sort of personal like individual level powers is really funny. Brian  1:00:53   There is actually a special sponsor card called Quarantine Lab that protects you against all of the negative effects: pilfering, venom, constriction, so at that point none of the negative effects of your opponents can hurt you anymore, because you've got a quarantine lab in place. on science, I think I think I'm gonna give it, I'm gonna give it a B, maybe I'm being too harsh, but I think that the intentions there, and that's always good, but I think that little bit of room for improvement. Jason  1:01:20   Yeah, I guess your metric is, will people learn something wrong from this, and do you think that will happen? Brian  1:01:26   a little bit? Mostly just this catch and release thing isn't really like true to how a lot of these programs actually work. Ellen  1:01:34   Yeah, most of the animals in a zoo are usually not releasable. Brian  1:01:37   No, no, they're not. So I think I'm comfortable with my B, even though I absolutely love this game, and I love what they've done. I just think there's a little bit of room for improvement there. What about you, Ellen? Do you want to give grades or do you want to abstain? Ellen  1:01:49   I think I would like to abstain from a grade. I did find the game, once I started to get the hang of things, I did find it very fun. I did feel that that catch, like, when you're, when you're just getting this, like, the hang of a board game, and you start to feel like eager for the next turn, rather than, like, when you start to feel like, oh, like I'm excited for to be my next turn, because I have this thing I want to do, you know, the first few turns, you're kind of just like struggling to get your bearings, and you're like, oh god, it's my turn again, oh, what do I do, like, I started to like get into the groove of it, and I sort of see, like, okay, yeah, I see. Where you know someone who probably has a good grasp of the game would probably.. I was doing a lot of fumbling. I also found it difficult to remember the different categories of things because they're not very well explained. I feel like on the card, like I often would look at a card and I'd be like, I have no way of knowing whether this is association or sponsorship, and I couldn't remember which one was which. Like, I struggled a little bit with remembering, like, sort of the admin stuff behind the game. Once I started to get the hang of it, I started to get the hang of it. My only thing that I wish the game had has done a little bit more of, and this is more of a thing for my own personal, this is a personal taste thing. I actually wish they had a more unique sort of like aesthetic, like I wish they had a more clear aesthetic direction, like everything seems kind of like generic and like default and like basic in aesthetic, whereas I'm thinking of like I play a lot of very artsy games, like I play like Wingspan or something, which has this sort of like a clear aesthetic direction, everything has this cohesive like a color palette that all works well together, there's like a style that like everything is illustrated and in these, like, really like, like this watercolor illustrative style, and everything kind of like works together to make like very artistic, like game pieces and stuff, and everything in this feel in Ark Nova feels kind of like aesthetically generic, especially because they're all stock photos, right, like all the all of the cards are all stock photos, like everything, all the assets are just stock photos, and I would have liked to see illustrations, or I would have liked to see more like original art, or like an original artistic direction. Maybe I would have been a little, like, I don't know, maybe giving me a little eye candy would reel me in a little bit, but if that is not the sort of thing that matters to you, if you don't like artsy fartsy games, then you know that's fine, that's neither here nor there, that's just my own personal, I like, I like a little bit of like, I like something unique, and I like something like artsy, and I would have liked to see a little bit more of that. Brian  1:04:43   We talk a lot about how, like, look, you play with your eyes first, right? You eat with your eyes first, and a pretty little game is totally, is totally legitimate. Ellen  1:04:52   They do use very good pictures. The pictures are lovely. Brian  1:04:56   All right. Well, I want to thank you, Ellen, for coming on to talk. To us about this awesome zoo game, it was really fun conversation. Uh, thank you for all the wonderful insights about animals and zoos. It just, it's great that you take the time to come to, you know, our little science communication podcast. But where should people, where should people find you? I mean, I obviously there's just the zoo of us, but how do people, how do people follow you, or your, your impacted your science communication. Speaker 7  1:05:22   Sure, I'm on social media, I'm most active on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm also on Discord. We have a, we have a just the zoo of us server on Discord with a lot of really cool people. Some of them don't even listen to the podcast, so Brian  1:05:38   Ow wow, how'd you manage that? Speaker 7  1:05:39   It's just some people are like, hey, I'm, you know, a friend of mine told me this server is where all the cool animal nerds hang out, and you know, people just end up hanging out in there and having a good time. So, yeah, links are just search up just the zoo of us on any of those social media platforms, and you'll find it. My handle is usually elksneedle, all one word, and I do have, you know, some some projects coming up this year. Also, if you live in the Seattle area, we do little meetups. We've got a tide pooling meetup, we've got a Max Fun meetup, we got all, we do little stuff in the Seattle area throughout the year. So, do come follow me on social media if you live in Seattle and want to want to come meet some animal nerds, Brian  1:06:21   absolutely, and we will definitely put that, those links in the show notes as well. Speaker 8  1:06:24   Sweet, thank you. And thank you, Brian and Jason, for having me on and showing me this really cool game. I had not heard of this game before you told me about it, so I'm really glad that you did. All Jason  1:06:34   right, you're welcome. I'm glad to have you on. Brian  1:06:36   Okay, so I think we're gonna cut it there. I wanna thank all of you listeners for tuning in. I hope you have a great month and great games, Jason  1:06:43   and as always, have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. Brian  1:06:48   This has been the Gaming with Science podcast. Copyright 2026 Listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non-commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to Gaming with Science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you. And have fun playing dice with the universe. Ellen  1:07:11   Do you want, do you want a dice roll for the, for the recording Brian  1:07:15   dice roll? Yeah, why not? Speaker 8  1:07:17   Where you say, like, have fun playing dice, rolling dice with the universe. Hold on one sec. Yeah, it does every time. Ready for Jason  1:07:22   The mic might pick it up. Zoom might not Brian  1:07:24   zoom might cancel it out. Speaker 8  1:07:25   It's okay. It'll be on my.. it'll be on my local recording. Brian  1:07:27   Ah, Speaker 9  1:07:29   it's.. it's metal, so it'll hear. Okay, it's on my waveform. I can see it. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

#PangolinScienceGames #TheMatingGame #SexualSelection #BoardGames #Science #Bonus Summary In this bonus episode of Gaming with Science, we’re joined by Dr. Andrea Roth Monzón and Dr. Andrew Thompson of Pangolin Games to discuss their upcoming Kickstarter project, The Mating Game. We dive into how they’ve translated complex evolutionary concepts like sexual selection and reproductive trade-offs into a vibrant, cartoony tabletop experience that’s as much a teaching tool as it is a game. From the strategic nuances of "flashy" versus "sneaky" mating behaviors to the challenges of designing for a K-12 classroom, Andrea and Andrew share their eight-year journey of balancing hard science with high-energy fun. Whether you want to learn why an elephant seal dresses like a luchador or how games can foster a lifelong love of discovery, join us for a look at the wild world of sexual selection with The Mating Game. Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 03:52 - Game vision and origin 11:57 - Balancing science and fun 17:01 - Tuning complexity 23:31 - Tabletopia and classroom accessibility 26:41 - Favorite other games 31:50 - Kickstarter pitch Links The Mating Game - Pre-launch page and Tabletopia  Pangolin Science Games on Instagram and Facebook, and Bluesky Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:12   Today, we're having a creator interview with the creators of the mating game by pangolin games. Hey, welcome back to a bonus episode. This is Brian. Jason  0:22   This is Jason Brian  0:23   and today we are joined by Andrea Roth Monzón and Andrew Thompson, the creators of the mating game. Why don't you introduce yourselves? Andrea  0:31   I'm Andrea, a researcher. I've worked with a very broad different kinds of things. I've done anything from like herpetology to more like evolutionary ecology stuff to basically parasitology, which is where I'm at at the moment. And I've always been interested in teaching science and getting people interested in science, specifically from an experiential point of view. I think science is to be discovered. And so I think games create an opportunity to discover, basically science, to have an opportunity to discover the process before you actually learn about it through a game.  Brian  1:05   Awesome. Thank you.  Jason  1:06   And some vocabulary for our listeners. So herpetology is the study of like snakes and lizards and reptiles and stuff. Parasitology is the study of parasites. So it basically sounds like Andrea studies creepy crawly squiggly things. Brian  1:18   Herpetology is my favorite paraphyletic science. When I talk about jargon, it's a group of things that are not actually related to one another, right? Because you got amphibians and snakes and lizards and all the things that crawl across the ground, all the vertebrates that drag their bellies, Andrea  1:32   but you also have all the cool stuff. I still tell people they're my first love, and would always be my love. Brian  1:39   What about you? Andrew?  Andrew  1:41   Yeah. So my name is Andrew Thompson. I actually met Andrea in grad school, so that's where we started this venture together. My background is in microbiology, and I transitioned from microbiology as an undergraduate into biology, and I did some microbial ecology in soils, and I also did some astrobiology. So I got the opportunity to work down antarctica with the largest ice free region in Antarctica, and we were studying soils down there to understand kind of fundamental ecological processes, because it's a lot the diversity is so reduced to that you can actually ask some of these big questions. that led into astrobiology. And I've always been a big kind of sci fi idea guy, and so that fit really well. And after grad school, I decided that I was kind of tired of research, and I liked ideas more than I liked research. And so I've been transitioning since then towards more of a sci fi author, game entrepreneur thing, but I still am actively researching my postdoc right now, doing some computational biology work with soil food web modeling and also some more soil environmental microbiology. Brian  2:38   So just to clarify, you guys are both PhDs, correct? Yes, yes. Okay, so you're Dr Andrea and Dr Andrew.  Andrew  2:46   Yes, that's correct. Brian  2:48   Okay, but I did want to follow up. So you worked at, were you at McMurdo Station?  Andrew  2:52   I was yes, in the dry valleys.  Brian  2:55   I actually, I wonder if we know some of the same people. Brent Christner is somebody who I work with on cryoconite soils that were collected from Antarctica when I was an undergraduate. Brent Christer, well, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Jason  3:08   Don't worry. Like, when we were undergrad, this is like the stone age period, so, like, they hadn't accumulated enough geological layers yet to be that interesting. Andrew  3:18   I sure that we know some people who know the same people. Okay, I don't remember that name specifically, but I'm sure that if he was working on cryoconite holes in the dry valleys, and he was working with the leadership that I was working with, for sure, because they've been there for a long time. Brian  3:30   And Jason and I actually have a unpublished preprint on bacteria that were recovered from immured glacial ice at some point. And Jason does soil microbiology, and we're both microbiologists, so there's more connections here than we even realized. Awesome. That's cool.  Jason Wallace  3:45   Sorry Andrea we do plants, so we don't work with lizards and snakes and stuff. Andrea  3:49   Sorry, that's fine. I do fish now. So Jason Wallace  3:52    all right, well, let's talk about this game you've put together, the mating game, which I must admit, I was confused at first, because when I started looking this up, we need to work on your search engine optimization. I was like, I look it up, and I first find, like, a 1959 romantic comedy, a 2005 paranormal romance, some BBC nature special. And then apparently, a 1969 Hasbro board game that beat you to the name by like, 40 years. Brian  4:16   Hopefully, the copyright on that's already expired, though, so it shouldn't.  Jason Wallace  4:19   One should hope so. What is the mating game? Tell us about this game that you put together. Andrea  4:24   So the mating game is basically a game in which every single player is a multiplayer game. It works better with bigger crowds than smaller crowds. It's meant to be enjoyed by several people, and it's up to six players. So every player has basically a deck of cards with male traits, and then your strategy depends on how you basically choose the trait, because what you want to do is basically attract the ladies, right? This is an attract the ladies. Let them come to you so that you can mate, and then you can pass your genes on to the next generation. But there are risks, right? The environment plays a. A little bit here, and there will be risks. So the environment may give you very little resources, so you may not be able to invest in in such mate, or they may also kill you, or they may not be enough females for you, right? So it is a competition, and that's kind of had the gist, like the general gist of it, I would say, Andrew  5:16   Yeah, I would say that our the mating game is our attempt to bring in evolution. There's natural section and sexual selection. It's our attempt to bring this much less talked about, but still very important concept to a broader audience. And for the most part, I mean, there's the male side and the female side. The mating game focuses on the male side, the selection that males experience. It's animals, not humans. We get that question a lot, weirdly enough, and so the game is just trying to simulate what it's like to be a male and what it's like to invest differently in different strategies, to try and convince the females that you are worth taking a chance on so you can pass on your genes. And so it's trying to simulate that aspect of sexual selection and teach the concepts that are often taught in college courses in a game format. Brian  5:57   So what is the story of the mating game? How did you guys come to this game in particular? Tell me the origin story of the mating game. Andrea  6:05   So when I was in grad school, there was this class for teaching students, and so I was taking this class that it was meant for you to be a better professor. And so that kind of got us started. In this class, we were asked to do an activity to show our actual like research. And so I was doing competition at the moment, so nothing to do with mating, and I decided that I was going to do a competition game. And when I saw how well that work in the class setting with like other grad students, they were like, so happy and so excited about it. I started thinking about sexual selection, because sexual selection has been one of my favorite subjects in evolution, because I think it brings some of the coolest traits that people also don't know. I also think it brings a lot of like, misconceptions, the amounts of times I've talked to people that said, like, Oh, that's not natural, like in nature, like an animal doesn't do that. And I'm like, well, there's always exceptions, like, there's fish that change sex, there's full communities of all females. And so I've always been like, I feel like it is wrong that this is not known. And so I wanted to build a game that kind of showed that part that I felt was less conspicuous. And then, happily enough, I ran into Andy, who was also into games for science, and we started talking, and that kind of got us to refine it into a better game, because it wasn't as good as it is. Now, when we first started, Andrew  7:21   that is for sure, true has been eight years ago. We've been working on this game for eight years, which I don't know that I really want to admit, but it was definitely a very fun, iterative process. I remember many hours in the evenings, we'd get together and we'd just work on this game. Yeah. So for me, the desire to do science games started before the mating game, back in 2014 when I was actually traveling abroad, I saw this tree. It was called a cabbage trees in New Zealand. And I thought, wouldn't that be cool if that was on a card when I grown up playing card games like Magic, the Gathering in Pokemon and back then, back in 2014 and it's still true today, but there's a lot of controversy about things like climate change, and I wanted to figure out a way, or I thought games would be a really good way to engage people who may have been turned off by simple articles or lectures or who wouldn't get access to information about science in a non threatening way, where they could kind of experience why species diversity mattered, and learn the value of species diversity. And I thought games would be a great way. So I actually went home after that experience, and I started tinkering around with the game. The game part never worked. I made the cards and stuff, and they looked cool. I could never make a community ecology game work, but Andrea actually saw my prototype on my screen as I was working on it one day at work. And she was like, Hey, you're making a game. I have a game idea. And so we put our heads together and start talking about the mating game, which turned out to be much more tractable.  Brian  8:33   Do one of you want to describe the mating game? How do you play it? What does it look like? Just in brief, I Andrew  8:39   think the most important thing to know, if you're not seeing the mating game, is that the mating game was first and foremost designed to be fun and engaging. And I think when you look at the cover of the game, that's what comes across. I personally want to steer away from very descriptive art. I love descriptive art of natural phenomena, but I wanted this game to look fun, and so the colors and the designs are a bit more cartoony than descriptive, and very bright and vibrant. This is supposed to be inviting to people who are not, maybe, who are not really used to science necessarily, like Andrea mentioned earlier. It's a card game where you are selecting different strategies that you see in real life, so things like large feathers or massive body sizes, and you're trying to say, Hey, can I use this to survive the physical environment and then also convince the females on the board that I am worth taking a chance on. So the goal of the game is to gain as much offspring as you possibly can, and to do that, you have to out compete your competitors, your other males, and convince the females that you are actually worth mating with. And to do that, you you invest your food, your energy, into the traits. And so some traits cost more, some traits cost less. There isn't a better or wrong trade. It's just you're up to you to decide what's the best way to manage that. Brian  9:45   Let me see. So things are split down into three major categories. There's combat, there's flashy, and there's sneaky. I'm gonna pick out a couple of my favorites. So obviously, flashy is your peacock, right? Your gigantic Display feature. To try to attract attention. for combat I think my favorite is the elephant seal. Just absolutely ridiculous differences between males and females, like monstrous males just beating the crap out of one another to try to maintain control of the local female population. What's some of the best sneaky strategies? Because I definitely saw something about sperm competition on those cards. Andrea  10:23   So I think I don't know. I mean, I like the sperm competition one, because I do think, like, it's not something that people think about. Like people think usually that the choice is more like in the selection, and they forget that they could be selection after the choice. And so some of the sneaky ones were meant to kind of bring light to that that sometimes even if the choice is made, there is ways to control that choice afterwards. I also like some of the ones that give more play to the females. Like show you how maybe females are choosing, or why females are choosing certain things. I've always liked the one in which the male kind of looks like a female and just sneaks around, right, so it doesn't actually gets to compete, right? Like you're not competing. You basically make yourself look like a female, and then you can approach females and other males just think, like, Oh, I'm getting an extra female. So that's great. And then you actually get to mate, right? And so I think that that sneaky behavior is really good. And so those two, I think would be my favorites if I was to choose Jason Wallace  11:20   Yeah, I will say, when I played this game with Brian, Andrew, you mentioned the sort of cartoony vibe of all the drawings, and yet all the concepts are very hard science. So there are things like the nuptial banquet, where you present food in order to lure your mate in, and also, like, give them extra energy and such. And it's a very hardcore, like very tried and true scientific concept. I'm looking at the card here. It has like what looks like a mosquito, like laying out this candle lit dinner for someone, or Brian's elephant seals, who in the game are dressed up like luchadors. I like the juxtaposition of the hard science fact with the sort of goofy, cartoony way of displaying it.  Andrew  11:57   Thanks. I'm really glad you pointed it out, because we spent a lot of time, not only coming up with kind of the vibe that we wanted, and then we communicated to the artists, but also we we spent a lot of time going over each trait and saying, What is a good human analogy that would help people and like understand this without us having to sacrifice anything else. And one of the things we told the artists was we really, we really emphasize. We want you to make this fun and engaging, but we want you to make the animal as accurate as possible, while also making it fun, right? We don't want any spiders that have their legs coming off both the head and the abdomen, because it's not accurate. We don't want a Halloween spider. So the spider in the game the Peacock Spider, they used Peacock Spider references, and you can tell they even match the patterns, but then they have them juggling, which is obviously not something that a Peacock Spider can do. But we wanted to make sure that people also were clear that we were communicating, not that this is a Peacock Spider card, but this is a display trait. And so by having the luchador mask and the banquet, it was less about the organism, even though the organism was a good example of that trait, and more about the trait itself. And so I do remember spending a lot of time trying to make sure the art came across, probably, maybe too much time, honestly, for a game, but like, it was really important to us to make sure that was both engaging but also communicating the accurate science. Brian  13:09   There's another game by Brexwerx games. It's their second game called eight leg Peacock, which is specifically about the peacock spiders. And it's a card matching game, or something like that. It's, it's fun, but yes, from looking at that in peacock spiders, that's the one spider I would not be surprised to find one juggling out in the wild. Jason  13:28   Yes, very, very tiny bowling pins. Yes, spiders are like the size of a pin head, Brian  13:35   but they're so cute. How many jumping spiders can you fit on the head of a pin head? Andrew  13:39   That would be the find of a century if you found a Peacock Spider juggling in the Australian outback. Brian  13:45   So I guess, with that in mind, it sounds like you had this was one of the questions I wanted to ask anyway, how did you decide what you wanted to include and what you wanted to exclude from the game? Obviously, you couldn't include everything. What got simplified in the process, what got simplified and what kind of like, what hit the cutting room floor for Andrew  14:01   for us, we started with a very clear idea of what we wanted the game to do. We weren't just making a game, we were making a teaching tool. Our audience was teaching people both in the classroom, because we did a little bit of play testing with other games beforehand, and we recognized that a lot of tabletop games aren't really conducive to being played in a classroom setting like a high school, because they don't they take too long, one to learn and usually to play, and we really wanted the game to be accessible to teachers, because that's where a lot of education happens. And we also wanted to be accessible to people who weren't necessarily wanting to learn and sit down and play a game. And we wanted so that means it had to be engaging, right? And we also wanted to make it accessible to people who weren't big strategy gamers. So those kind of three things were the starting point, and from that kind of flowed what we decided to do, and then Andrea had a very specific idea of the things that she wanted to teach. We actually have learning outcomes in the rule book, and that came from very early iterations where we're like, this is what we want to teach, and that's what we don't Andrea  14:53   want to teach. Yeah, the learning outcomes were actually very useful for us, because a lot of things that when we figured like this, may be a misconception, if it did not interfere with our learning outcomes, it wasn't something that we were going to stop. And so that's why, also, like, in the rule book, there is also, like a misconception area, because we were like, there are certain things that you're going to get wrong or you're going to misconcept. And then I would say, like, the biggest thing is, like, we didn't shy around humanizing traits, which, in theory, that's not like a lot of classrooms trying not to do that, but we were like, This is the best way in terms to make it fun. We kind of wanted to make sure, like core elements of science did not get twisted or misunderstood. But other than that, if we were had to sacrifice something so that it will be more fun or more easy to play, we kind of did. at the end of everything. It is a game, and the whole point is for people to have fun. And part of the visuals also helped us with that. Because if we were like, if we can make visuals accurate, if people remember, like, cute spiders, or at least the diversity of traits, that's also giving people other stuff to think about. And so at least we get that part in. And so sometimes we went for other things in order to not completely mess around. So like, for the nest, it was like a big thing for us to just not have just a single image of what a nest is that was just like a bird nest, so that we could get away from this idea of, like there are several different ways of nest, and we wanted to do that. So sometimes images help us not get rid totally of something just by using a diversity of image or having a diversity of stuff. Yeah, I Brian  16:19   think you're right. I think it's actually kind of I think it's known, but maybe it's a little underappreciated how fun the role play of a board game is. It's like, oh, I am now playing my giant elephant seal versus your, I don't know, tiny hippo with an itty bitty bite or something like that. That doesn't really make sense. And you have done something that I always like to see. You're very clear about how you're representing the science. What's accurate, what's not accurate. It's one of my favorite things to see in one of these games, when somebody takes that seriously and doesn't just leave it to chance, is explicit about that. So kudos for you for taking that little bit of extra effort and spacing your rule book to making it clear and also just designing for the classroom. It's awesome. Nobody wants to do that, so thank you for doing that too. Jason  17:01   Yeah, our listeners at this point are probably tired of hearing about how educational games is a dirty word in the gaming industry. It's nice seeing you with that explicit goal and also the considerations of because we have noticed several of the games we have played on this podcast have great lessons in them, and there's no way you could deploy them in the K through 12 classroom because they take too long. They're too complicated, anything like that. I wouldn't say you've gotten all the way to a party game on this, but you're definitely very, very close to one in terms of complexity and ease of use and everything, Andrew  17:29   yeah, and that's a little bit my fault. The version we had when we both graduated grad school was actually less complex and it didn't even have a board. But I was concerned, especially after play testing, that a lot of the females weren't represented well enough, and we didn't want to give this impression that the females didn't matter in sexual selection at all. And so I actually introduced the board so that one we could get around that conception, because you can show the females on the board, and then also because there, we felt like there was too much. There was a potential for misunderstanding the difference between competition and combat, like people kept saying, Oh, it's a blue card. It doesn't compete. It's like, well, no, they don't combat, but they absolutely compete. But the board allowed us to have two different colored females, which isn't technically accurate, and showing that they actually do compete, and that when you have the female scarcity taking, you know, female tokens away, that's one of the reasons that there's a difference between the intra and intersexual so it's true, we didn't, we didn't quite get there, but we were almost there, and that was just because of a last minute change, honestly. Brian  18:25   So in the combat strategy, it's an all or nothing, right? The winner takes the all of the females. That's the idea. in the competition version, from  Andrea  18:33   The flashy Brian  18:34   the flashy strategy, it's relative to how flashy you are, right? Right? So there's a different balance between they both can be successful strategies, but you're balancing the probability of being success based on that, which I think is very cool at a very, sort of a very subtle way of, sort of getting at this and and, of course, the females are important. They're literally the whole thing. It's the whole reason you have these nonsensical, ridiculous strategies is because of the power of sexual selection. Andrea  19:02   Yeah, we thought it was very interesting that when we were play testing, a lot of people comments were like, the females were not present. And I was like, but the females are the ones that are choosing. They're the drivers of the whole competition. And so that's kind of what brought us, like, the amount of people that really were like, this is like, such a chauvinistic male kind of perspective. And we were like, wait, what? Like, we were not expecting, right? And so that was one of the things that we were like, well, we don't want that. That's not what we want people to take from the game. And if we can, if we have to compromise into, like, putting maybe a little bit more complication into it so that people don't get that idea, it's totally worth it. And I would also say, like, part of what we like is that it's not only bringing that complication of like an all or nothing, depending on if you're using flashy or combat, but also depending on the environment, right? Because if you're our combat one, you're less likely to survive to certain things, right? And so that also plays into that, into sometimes, if your environment gets really complicated. And we actually, because we were thinking about teaching right, like, if you play the normal game, we just have one set of like environment cards, which are more like diverse but for the teaching setting, we actually do have cards that make like an extreme environment in which you maybe get no resources, or one in which you get like so much predation that you're basically going to be killed at every moment. And that is really good from the teaching perspective, because it shows you how you would normally adjust and be like, Oh, I'm not playing that, because I'm going to get eaten every single time, so I'm just not going to play that right. And it really drives the point across when you're teaching about how those two things are interplaying and how they actually feed and so how you can get such weird traits, even if they're not great for survival, Brian  20:45   because you could be like the very sexiest male ever with a peacock with a tail that's six times the size of its body, and if you get eaten, it doesn't matter. You lost, you lost, you don't leave any offspring. Having a massive body also takes a lot of energy, Andrew  21:00   and often there are trade offs. Yeah, that there puts a limit on how large you can get, and that limit is definitely defined by the environment. What Andrea was saying you guys, maybe, I don't know if you played around with it, but the cards themselves, you can make different decks using the environment cards. So at the bottom of the card, you had an S or a V, you're supposed to take the V's out. I don't know if you did. I think we did. Okay. So if the V's represented, if you have those in it represent a variable environment, you can actually lose energy. So it encourages you to invest immediately that turn, because you don't know if you'll lose anything you saved up, whereas a stable environment allows you to save up. One of my favorite examples of this when we were teaching, because we did teach in the evolution class that we had, was that I would ask students, after we swapped out the stable versus variable environment to give me examples of stable versus variable environments. And they would often, you know, cite something like a jungle versus a desert. And I was like, okay, yeah, but what? So they're thinking physical environment. What about in the same environment? Are there examples of stable and variable environments? And I would, I would say, like, what about a mouse versus an elephant? They both can live in the exact same physical location, but an elephant can expect to save up over many years and invest heavily in a single offspring, whereas a mouse doesn't expect to live very long, and so that's why they reproduce a lot as much as they possibly can. I always like that, because it just shows a new perspective on that concept. Brian  22:09   Very cool. Is there anything that you tried to get into the game and you just couldn't figure out how to make it work? Andrew  22:15    I don't think so. I think that the most we struggled with, I remember struggling with is that we had a lot of really great suggestions from play testers of great game mechanics that would either confuse the science or that just didn't fit with the science. And even though it would have made the game more fun, we had to cut it. And that was challenging because, of course, we were trying to make the game as fun as possible. So I think there are, there are things that aren't in the current version of the game, but we could add more into, like more strategies. In fact, we have strategies that we're planning to put into the game, if we raise enough funds for it. But in terms of like element of the science, I think we accomplished what we set out to do. There's certainly aspects of sexual selection that we didn't... I would eventually, if this works out, I'd eventually like to do a sexual section game from the female perspective. I think that would be really fun, but we never set out to do that with this game. Brian  23:00   So you need the counterpoint game. The counterpoint, yeah, I'm just realizing you have a great analogy for balancing selective pressures. You have to make a game that is very fun and also teaches good science. You can't do all of one. You can't do all of the other. If it teaches great science that's not fun, no one's gonna play it. If it's all fun and teaches no science, well, then you've also missed one of your key goals. So you you have a wonderful analogy for sexual selection right there in front of you.  Andrew  23:27   That's awesome. That's so meta. Brian  23:31   Another thing that I noticed is that you've got the meta game up on tabletopia. Could you tell us about that? What was that experience like? And why did you choose tabletopia? Andrew  23:39   I chose tabletopia because I had used tabletopia A little bit, and it was free, and I knew what to do, and I didn't really spend a ton of time looking for other ones. I know there are other ones out there, but, you know, I had limited time, and I guess I was ignorant and didn't know if there was better options. As far as, what was that like? You guys don't like work for tabletopia at all do you? No I really appreciate having tabletopia. That was awesome, being able to put my cards up there. And I used it to play test with people, with the artists who were different states, and friends who are different states, and because I was living in a place by myself and didn't have it, I mean, Andrea and I moved on, moved up different places, and it was really awesome to be able to do that. Yeah, I'm not really sure what's behind that question. Like loading the cards onto tabletopia was a painful experience, and I've done it many times, and I've learned you just have to have all the sizes. Have to be exactly the same across all the cards, which wasn't so big a deal when the artists were making the final versions of the cards, because they know what they're doing, but when I was just tinkering around in Illustrator and PowerPoint, like I had to post cards up many, many times, and that's very frustrating. So I'm grateful for tabletopia, but it was, there was a little bit of learning curve. Brian  24:45   Well, I know people. I've seen, I've heard other people, for instance, having games on Board Game Arena. Often it's part of like the social media pitch. It's like, Oh, if you want to try out the game, this is a great place to do it, stuff like that. So I was just curious about that choice. So it was both a it was primarily for playtesting, yes, okay. But also it's like, it's now out there in a digital format. Andrew  25:04   I mean, now that I have it up there, yeah, I mean, I absolutely use it as a we'll use it as a way to market the game. Brian  25:10   Also, another thing, when you're thinking about getting into a classroom that, I mean, all of these kids have Chromebooks now, right? That's a great way to, you know, in addition to the physical copy, but that can be limiting in certain environments. So now you've got tabletopia, so they can still play the game, even if they can't, you know, buy 12 copies of the mating game, which I'm sure you would like them to. Andrew  25:30   But I actually do have an idea for that to reduce the costs for educators, because I do recognize that educators don't always have the funds for that. The idea is that I just take because you can play with six if you have a classroom of 30 people, you should be able to do with five copies of the game. And I was thinking a lot of the cost for the game actually comes from the weight of the box itself, right? True. Was a shipping cost because a lot of boxes aren't packed. Super efficient. So I was thinking you could probably reduce it. And I've done, I've run the numbers, I think you could reduce from the cost if you can get five versions of the game into one bigger box for three fifths of the cost. Ooh, clever. Yeah. So that's what I'm exploring. I can't guarantee that it will work, because I have to raise enough fund like I have, because you have to scale both, right? Then I have two copies of the game, two versions of the game, and I have to get enough funders that want the teacher version in order to make that reliable. But I think it's a clever idea, and I think it will be appealing to at least some educators out there, Brian  26:21   yeah, I think so too. I'm thinking about, like, what you know when you go to the grocery store and the discount cereal is in a bag instead of a box, because a bag is cheaper than a box, right? Andrew  26:30   Because the shipping costs is part of it, yeah, and the bag itself is cheaper than the box. Yeah, that's cool. But tabletopia is a great I had never thought about using the digital tabletopia version in the classroom. Think about that, Brian  26:42   so I can see, because we actually have a camera feed, that Andrew has some games behind him. So I wanted to ask, what are some of your favorite games? Jason  26:52   Andrea, I'm gonna say you go first, because Andrew's been talking a lot. It's your turn. Agreed. Andrea  26:58   Okay, I'm a simple type of games. I would say, in terms of like tables games. I say I still play a lot of Scrabble, so that's one of my favorite games. But I also used to like a lot of UNO. That's what I used to play. So I would say, like, most of the games I play are very simple. And we always say that Andy is the strategy one, and I'm the give me the simple game in which I match colors, or I match little things, and that's what I play and I enjoy the most. So I'm a simple kind of games, which works well for this relationship, because if we get the mating game to actually be successful and continue on this I like, I have a lot like, I want to build a, you know, have you ever played like Hungry Hippo? Yeah, I want to build like, an accurate Hungry Hippo for like, elementary children, because I'm like, that would be easy to do, and most of my PhD research was competition, and that's what I was looking I was looking at character displacement, and so I will be super happy to make one for elementary kids to play, like, Hungry Hippo kind of thing. So those are the kind of like, the simple minded games are the ones I love. Brian  28:01   My brain is buzzing right now with ideas. We played this game when we were kids where we had a big bin, a big plastic bin, and it had beans and it had worms and it had staples and all those different things, and they gave all the kids different little beaks to try to pick stuff up with. A Hungry, Hungry Hippos where you're changing what the mouth looks like would be really, really cool.  Andrea  28:22   Well, that's exactly yeah, because, like, I was saying, like, when I built that game for the class that I was talking before, you know, that was what I did. I basically did different tools and different resources. And so people could choose which tool. And so some were generalists, and some was specialist. And so if you're a specialist, you could only get some, but then also the resources had different points, and so some costs, like, give you more energy than other ones, and so that's what they play. And people are really excited. So I really want to do Brian  28:48   that is a game that you should try out on Tabletop Simulator, because it's got a physics engine in it. Jason  28:54   I'm just picturing Hungry, Hungry Darwin's finches.  Brian  29:02   That would be TM, TM, TM. No, I'm just kidding, you guys take that, you should Okay, well, I think that actually we're kind of coming to about the end of. Oh, wait, Andrew, you didn't do yours. I'm sorry, Andrew, what are your favorite games? I'm looking at what behind you right now that I don't know, so I want you to go and then I'm going to ask you about one of the games that's behind you. Andrew  29:21   Okay, well, I'll keep it real brief. I mean, I Yeah, it's funny, because I was always trying to make the mating game more complex. I do like complex games. My two favorite games, I'll just keep it to two, is first, not a science game. Betrayal at house on the hill  Jason  29:34   I love that game Andrew  29:35   I love the narrative storytelling. I love how the game changes halfway through and almost becomes a totally different game. My biggest complaint about the game is there's not enough diversity of tiles, because I want the mansion to be bigger and and more interesting. But I love that game. The other game that I really love, that is a science game, is photosynthesis. And I love that one primarily because when you play it, at least personally, you feel like a tree. You You have to be playing you have to be investing upfront. You have to be making choices upfront. That affect the very end of the game. It's difficult to shift strategy as you go. I love how they make it feel. I love the mechanic of the Sun circling around and like the competition, like the game wasn't intended, I think, to be educational, necessarily, but they did a great job of simulating the life of a tree. And I think that I really, really, really enjoy that my wife, however, thinks it's the most boring game ever. And so, you know, whatever it is, what it is, Jason  30:22   I think we're more on your side. That was our number one game. The very first episode we ever did. Our first Brian  30:27   episode was photosynthesis, yeah, okay, that's awesome. And I think we decided it was actually a game about forestry. Yeah, the lumber industry more than about a natural ecosystem, yes, for sure. But yeah, it was fun. It was definitely unique. And, you know, lot of games use science as I don't know, never mind. I don't want to get distracted with this. They weren't trying to teach science. They just did it by accident. Andrew  30:50    It was a theme. They're replicating a theme, although Brian  30:53   I really can't imagine that mechanic making sense for anything else. How would you re skin that? It you just couldn't. Andrew  31:00   Yeah, no, it's great. It's why it works as an educational game. It needs some tweaks. I've definitely thought about tweaking it. Brian  31:06   Okay, now you have a game on the shelf behind you that I don't I know most of the games that are up there, I do not know what CO2 is. Tell me about CO2. Andrew  31:13   I actually haven't played CO2. I've had it for a long time. It's, it's very pretty, like all good games should be, right? So it's, uh, it's basically, you play as an economy trying to reduce your carbon dioxide output. Brian  31:27   Okay, so we just played, uh, very recently, we played daybreak, which was a cooperative game by Matt Leacock and Mateo Menapace, which is, which is this, it's, it's a game about climate change and combating climate change. It's a lot of fun, very hard, because climate change is a very hard problem. Andrew  31:43   Yes, well, that's cool. Daybreak, I'll have to put down my list.  Brian  31:46   Yeah, you should. It's really It's very pretty, too. Speaking of all games, should be pretty. It definitely is. So what about news? Tell us about when is the mating game? You know, we want to try to help get the word out. So tell us about the mating game. When? When can people find it on Kickstarter? And why should they buy the meta game?  Andrew  32:01   I don't have a Kickstarter date, but it'll be March of 2026, probably the beginning of the month, and there's a pre launch page you can sign up for. And I would say that it's super helpful if people who think they might want to buy it, or think they will probably buy it, or at least look into it, if they click on the Save Link on that pre launch page, that's super helpful. Gives me an idea of how many people I have that are interested in, and lets me know when I should be launching or whether I should be launching. And then we're also on Instagram, primarily pangolin science games. All of our socials have pangolin science games because pangolin games is already taken, which is fine, because it works. We're on Instagram mostly. We're on Facebook a little bit, and also blue sky. So be looking for updates there. Brian  32:37   Okay, fantastic.  Andrea  32:38   Why support the game? So I would say several things. One, I think, is because it's fun and you'll have fun. Second one is because it can teach you something. But like, I tell people, like, it doesn't teach you if you don't want to, like, if you just play the game and don't think about it, you don't necessarily will get that much from it. Then if you actually go through, actually reflecting on what you're doing. And then the other one, I think, is because science matters. and science education matters. And we want people to be more aware of scientific facts and just critical thinking, so that when you see stuff in the news, you kind of have a better idea of what's happening around or why that matters. And I think we've done kind of a crappy job at letting people understand all that goes behind the things you're getting. And so I'm hoping that also it's, it's supporting science, especially right now, where it's kind of a hard sell at the moment for many, many ways. And so I think that that is part of it. And then my hope is also that it will bring the idea of how amazing and diverse the world is, right? Like, I always say, like, sometimes we focus too much like we did, keep traits that are iconic, like the peacock tail, but there are so many more traits that animals have that people may not know about it. And just being able to see all of that diversity and fall in love with all of that diversity, and kind of experience it in a game form is really, really valuable, and I would say that at least should get you excited.  Andrew  33:59   I would like to add that support the mating game, because you want to support us in our vision. And we do have a vision. We're not just out here making games like Andrea said, we really want to support science education, and more than just science education in a formal sense, we really want to make science as an understanding, like understanding of the processes that our world is governed by, intuitive for people, right? So if you had people playing games in classrooms about all sorts of topics. Then as they grew up, not only did they remember those topics more intuitively, better because of the way it was presented in game form, but they have a greater appreciation, right? Because you've associated games and science and fun all in one thing that's not threatening. The other thing I want to point out is that it's not just about science as like an abstract out there, fun concept to learn about, but this game is a great example of this. But science teaches us a lot about ourselves, especially biology. I know some people don't want to admit it, but we are animals, right? So we have the evolutionary and ecological context. I mean, the mating game doesn't explicitly say anything about human mating behavior, but a lot of the same rules apply, and we're not going to get into that, because that's a whole different field. But by learning the concepts through games About, you know, abstract things, you can actually learn a lot about why people behave the way you do, why we behave the way we do, and what to do about it. And I think that that is more of a abstract goal of ours, but I think that there has a lot of personal value. Brian  35:13   What's next for pangolin? Are we? Are we going to see the female selective pressure? Andrew  35:17   There's all sorts of games. I have a list of at least five or six that I've been toying with, Andrea has her list. One thing I'd like to do in the future is bring in not just biologists, but also physicists and geologists, and try to do the same thing with that. We have a whole vision for where this could go. And so back us, because you support in that vision, and because without you, without consumers telling us what they want, we'll never get there. Brian  35:38   Yeah, you got to respond to that selective pressure, right? Jason  35:40   Yes, exactly. All right. Well, that seems like a good place to wrap it up. So thank you. Andrea, thank you Andrew, for being on here. Good luck on your Kickstarter. We'll try to time the dropping of this episode to be at or shortly before when you go live. So best of luck then and Meantime, listeners, thank you for listening and have a great month and happy games Brian  36:01   and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya, this has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2026 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

#Diatoms #DONA #Ludoliminal #Microbiology #BoardGames #Science In this episode we're going microscopic to talk about everything Diatoms! Starting from the game by Ludoliminal and going through the classic (and obscure) Victorian art form of arranging these beautiful glass-shelled organisms on microscope slides, our special guest Laura Aycock--collections manager at the world's *largest* diatom herbarium--helps us understand all the beauty and wonder of these tiny, shimmingering marvels. From tepid ponds to hot springs to arctic ice, diatoms are everywhere, and they do a lot for us while looking absolutely fabulous. So grab a microscope and prepare to never look at pond scum the same way again! Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:09 Fun facts: diatom oxygen and ice habitats 03:53 Overview of Diatoms the game 11:41 What is a diatom? 15:06 What is a diatom herbarium? 20:55 Diatom reproduction (and shrinkage!) 25:43 Diatom artwork 32:20 Diatomacious earth 35:06 DNA complicating things 38:15 Weird diatom facts 42:05 Nitpick corner & grades 47:27 Wrap-up Links Diatoms official website (Ludoliminal Games) Diatoms living in arctic ice (Stanford University) Diatom art (Google image search) Diatoms of North America (and recorded lectures) Jeffrey Stone's diatom electron micrographs (Instagram) The Diatomist documentary (Vimeo) Henry Dalton's micro-mosaics (Microscopist.net) Amazon rain forest fertilization (Wiley.com) Diatom slide preparation part 1 & part 2 (YouTube) Specific diatoms:  Ancient diatoms (ScienceDirect) Campylodiscus - Pringles chip shaped diatom (ResearchGate) Entomoneis - twisted figure 8 (Diatoms.org) Ethnomodiscus - 2m diatom (Wikipedia) Aulacodiscus - Diatom with antennae (MIcroscopy UK) The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Brian  0:00   Jason, hello and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about science behind some of your favorite games. Jason Wallace  0:10   Today, we will be talking about diatoms by ludoliminal Games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason. This is Brian, and today, for our special guest, we have Laura Aycock. Laura, can you please introduce yourself? Laura  0:25   Sure. I'm Laura Aycock. I am the Collection Manager of the diatom herbarium at the Academy natural sciences in Philadelphia that's affiliated with Drexel University. And I've been working with diatoms for about 15 years, and I find them fun and enjoyable. Brian  0:38   That's really cool. Thank you for coming on, Jason. How did you manage to get the exact right person to come talk to us? Good job  Jason Wallace  0:44   being very persistent with emails.  Laura  0:46   Theres also not very many of us  Jason Wallace  0:49   there is that when there's actually a website called diatoms.org, that has all the nation's top diatoms scientists linked to it, somehow, it's not that hard to find someone. So before we get into this lovely game about absolutely beautiful, microscopic creatures. Let's start with our fun science facts. So Laura, as our guest, we usually pass the privilege to you to start. Do you have something you'd like to share with our audience? Laura  1:09   Sure. My favorite fact about diatoms is they produce about a fourth of the oxygen we breathe. So they're very important to life on Earth, and we wouldn't survive without them. Brian  1:16   So trees get all the credit, but they're stealing that  Jason Wallace  1:19   we talkabout plant blindness, where people just don't look at plants. There's definitely what macroscopic bias, where we just don't think about all the things that aren't within, you know, human size scale. So yeah, trees get all the credit, but all these little microbes are actually doing a whole bunch of the work there.  Laura  1:33   Yeah, diatoms, along with other groups of algae, actually produce about half of the oxygen we breathe, so they are as important, if not more important, than land plant, but no one thinks about them, sees them, or really acknowledges them.  Brian  1:44   So let me think. Then I'm thinking about this track of carbon dioxide that we've been seeing sort of dip and rise and dip and rise and dip and rise. Now that dip and rise that's from the like Alpine forests in the northern continents, right? But the stable activity that's presumably all the algae in the ocean, right? Or do they also fluctuate on an annual cycle?  Jason Wallace  2:04   I'd assume they'd also fluctuate annually, just because of temperature, if nothing else. Laura  2:07   It depends on the environment. So diatoms in the ocean are relatively consistent, but I think it does fluctuate with temperature. I actually don't know too much about marine diatoms, because my expertise lies in benthic freshwater diatoms. Brian  2:19   Benthic freshwater. So that means, like, the things that live in the muck at the bottom of fresh water environments,  Laura  2:24   yeah, the brown slime you see when you go to creeks. That's what I love to look at.  Brian  2:28   Oh, you're a slimologist. That's awesome.  Jason Wallace  2:30   All right, Brian, your turn. What fun fact do you have for us today?  Brian  2:33   Well, funny enough, I also brought a diatoms one I was looking for something recently about diatoms in the news. It's a press release out of Stanford, about diatoms remaining active down to negative 15 degrees centigrade, so cold, basically, in solid ice isn't as solid as you'd think. Actually, it can have these little micro fluidic chambers within it, sort of threads of liquid water. And the diatoms were actually not only colonizing these but moving through these chambers. I didn't even know diatoms could move. I guess they have like little actin filaments that they use to move on slime. I want to know more about this, and I'm hoping that Laura can explain it.  Laura  3:08   Diatoms are very capable of active movement. Not all of them, though, they have to have a slit in the center of the cell, which is called the raphe and they can secrete mucilage. And they glide along like slugs.  Brian  3:18   So you can tell just by looking at them if they're going to be able to be mobile?  Laura  3:21   yep,  Brian  3:22   Do all the ones with Raphe have mobility? Or do some of them have the Raphe and are not mobile? Laura  3:26   No, all of them have mobility. The raphe can vary in its placement on the cell, whether it's in the center of the cell, along the sides, if it's on one half of the valve. Because diatoms are made in two parts, they're kind of like a box where you have a top half and a bottom half. So when they're dead, they split apart. So you'll see the raphe on one valve and not the other. But they do have their Raphe. Brian  3:43   That's really cool, man. So diatoms are kind of like mimics in D & D. They live in a box.  Jason Wallace  3:48   They are a box, a glass box. They make themselves. Brian  3:51   That's okay. These are very cool organisms.  Jason Wallace  3:53   They are. So let's go on to this game, then, because this game is a beautiful game about these beautiful creatures. So diatoms is a game by Ludoliminal Games and published by 25th century games. It actually won a 2025 Mensa select award, and I like the tagline on the publisher's website. It is a stunningly beautiful game about making art from algae, which is not something you would think about, but the whole metaphor of this game is about Victorian diatom art, which is this obscure art form, where, back when microscopes, well, microscopes for the masses, were a new fangled thing, and people were trying to sell them. They wanted to sell things that you could look at right away. And so they would sell these little slides you could put under and they had diatom art on them, which is what you're making in this game. We'll talk more about what diatom art is in a little bit for the game itself, its basic stats. It's for one to four players, obligatory single player mode, although I'll say this is one of the few games we've played where I actually have played the single player mode, and I can attest it's actually quite fun.  Brian  4:51   Yeah, I was gonna say you actually said you liked it like you enjoyed it. Jason Wallace  4:54   It's very calming. And ages eight plus about 30-45, minutes to play. Suggested retail price is $55 a lot of that is probably going to the very high quality components. So there's very high quality chipboard, most of which has foil embossing on it in some degree, oftentimes, lots. The game is played in two sections. You have your tile placing one where you've got these hexagonal tiles that have colors coming off of them. So every hexagon consists of six triangles joined at the tip. And so those six triangles can be any one of a number of colors. They've got five different ones, red, yellow, green, blue and purple. Some of them are white as wild spots. And it's a typical like color matching game. You have the hexes down on the board, and then you try to place new hexes so that the colors match. That part is fairly straightforward. The thing is based on the colors you make at that intersection. So when you place a hex down next to two other tiles, it forms a point where all three of those tiles touch, and where, therefore there are six triangles around that central point. And the size and distribution of the color patches determines which diatoms you then collect. Metaphorically, this is you like looking at a patch of water under the microscope, and like sucking it up and being able to grab some diatoms out of it. The second half of the game, every player has their own little player board, so everyone's working individually. Here you've got the shared water tiles, but an individual board, and you're placing those diatoms on the board in order to make arrangements. And the board has all these cutouts where I haven't counted the number of spaces. There's probably like 40 or 50 of them, each one of them can only hold one of two shapes, and they've got it drawn out. So you can say, Oh, this spot can either hold a triangle or a star, but it cannot hold a circle, or this one can hold an oval or a circle, but it can't hold a square, that sort of thing, because the diatoms, in addition to coming in five colors, also come in five shapes, and those shapes are based on the size of the color patch you made when placing those tiles together. The idea is you're trying to place these down artfully. And of course, because it's a game, it's not just aesthetically pleasing. They have rules for how you gain points. And when I have taught this game to other people, which we did at a few conventions last year, keeping track of the scoring rules is the hardest part of this game. People get the tile laying pretty easily. People get getting the shapes and collecting the diatoms. Remembering the many, many different ways you can score points is actually the hardest part, because you can score points based off of how many of different colors you have. More diatoms of a single color gets you more points. You can get them based off of where they are. So the board is circular. It has kind of three rings. You have your inner ring, your middle ring and your outer ring. And then, based on the diversity of shapes you have in those, determines points there. And then there's all these lines of symmetry, so horizontal and vertical and diagonals. And if you have matching pairs of diatoms on those on the same ring, the score sheet for this is, thankfully very well put together. There are literally, like, 20 or 30 spots for you to write down. Oh, here's how many points I got for this particular arrangement here, and then this one here, it walks you through. If you just go through the score sheet, you will have everything. And it makes tallying it up at the end easy. It does not make keeping all those rules in your head during play any easier. That is still quite hard. And I think a lot of people, at least a lot of people I've played with, reach the point where they focus on a few things and they just kind of don't worry about the rest, even after several plays, when I'm looking at this, like, okay, I can keep a few things in head, but I can't keep all possible ones in head. So sometimes it's just like, Well, I'm just going to play this here, get a few things, and then I'll figure out where I can place them well.  Brian  8:21   I think that's everything in the game. When you're talking about components, one of the things they have are these little petri dishes that you get to keep all your pieces in. Except I can tell you, if you've ever worked with actual petri dishes, these are much nicer than regular petri dishes. These are actually like your normal petri dish. If you handle it wrong, it immediately cracks. These are actually meant to hold up over time. Jason Wallace  8:32   Yes, these are not meant to be disposed of after a few days.  Brian  8:35   No, for sure,  Jason Wallace  8:36   and they have a few other things. So they have, like every player has their own little like score guidebook so that you can look through and you can see how the scoring works. They've got this cute little magnifying glass so you can, like, isolate the little six point section that you created so you can more easily track because some people have trouble mentally sectioning that off from the larger tiles in order to get it. And several the people that I taught they actually really liked using that tool. Brian  8:59   Oh, really,  Jason Wallace  8:59   they liked using it because it because it made it much easier for them to figure out how many of each diatom and each color they needed to get.  Brian  9:06   I could see using it for just the role play purpose of looking like you're holding up your little magnifying glass to the water to show the section you're working on. But interesting, I figured that was just for fun.  Jason Wallace  9:16   No, it's actually quite useful for many people, and that's most of the rules. It's actually a very simple game. It's a very elegant game. You can bring in additional judging rules to make it even more complicated, if you want. And one thing is that once you set a diatom down on your board, which you have until it comes back to you. So this game could take forever, if you had to wait for someone to place their diatoms before the next person went but you don't, you have until it's your turn again. But once they're down, you can't move them, which, while being a nice standard game mechanic of like, you have to commit, I also really like it because of the metaphor. Because the metaphor is you are gluing these to a microscope slide. Once they're glued down, you can't move them. And so I think it actually works really well doing double duty there.  Brian  9:51   So we got this game, I think I picked it up at some point, because it was, it seemed like it was thematic. It. Is extremely pretty. But we actually had discussions, is this a game we can talk about? Because this game, the metaphor, is really about an obscure Victorian art form, more than it is about diatoms. But we also thought, when else are we going to get the opportunity to have somebody on to tell us about diatoms? So we should just take this opportunity and talk about it anyway.  Jason Wallace  10:18   I'm much more liberal about what can go on as long as it has science in it, somewhere that we can talk about, I'm fine. And definitely this is a science light game. It is inspired by science. In fact, reading the designer diary, the tile laying component is a very early part of the game. That was sort of what the core was, but the diatom veneer, so the theming of the game was actually a very late addition. The designer actually says how she was playing with the game. She had the tile laying down. It was fine. It was actually like collecting fractions, because it originally was something to do about, like math fluency due to some fellowship she'd gotten, but it really wasn't quite jelling. And then she took her child to the aquarium, and they had some poster about diatoms. And unfortunately, the link to her picture was broken, so I couldn't see what the poster actually said, but apparently it talked about, like these microscopic silicon-based algae that made these beautiful structures. And she just fixated on that. She started doing deep dives and researching, and she found this beautiful art form. And then apparently the rest of the game just fell together after that, like it made perfect sense. She redid where you placed your little fraction things. Originally, it was some sort of like bingo board into the actual diatom one. And that's fascinating to me, because the metaphor feels like it goes so deep into this game in terms of how you actually play things. It's just fascinating to me that was actually the last addition to it interesting. But anyway, that's enough about the game, per se. Now we're going to go to the actual science here. So Laura, this is where you're gonna need to help us. Because even though we both study microscopic things, we're both kind of bacteria people, well, plants and bacteria, and my understanding is that a diatom is neither of those. So what is a diatom? Laura  11:54   That is a question I get asked more than probably any other question in my career. And a diatom is neither a plant nor an animal. It is a protist, however, is algae, which, if you've ever looked at a phylogenetic tree of life, you'll notice there's the three main kingdoms. Algae actually spans all three. So it's not monophyletic, which is the term we use. But diatoms are a particular group of algae, and they're all share the trait that they have a cell wall made of glass or silica. Jason Wallace  12:17   Okay, so protist protists are single celled eukaryotes, so they're not bacteria. They actually have complicated cells like we do, that has a nucleus and all the organelles. Brian  12:26   but that's okay. We're not going to hold that against them. Jason Wallace  12:28   My understanding is that most eukaryotes are protists. This is another case where we are very biased by animals and plants and fungi, because we can see them. But the vast majority of the Tree of Life of eukaryotes, of anything like us, is actually microscopic, and we kind of ignore it. So you mentioned that they make a cell wall out of glass, out of silica. Why silica? It's like cellulose all over the place, chitin for fungi, peptidoglycan for bacteria, silica, glass. Why silica?  Brian  12:57   And it's there. Actually it is their cell wall in the same way that, like a plant cell wall has cellulose and pectin, they make their cell wall out of silicates? Laura  13:05   Yeah, they do. So they don't make the silica itself, which, if you think about it, that causes them to not have to use as much energy as it would to make an organic component. They pull it from the environment and then build the silica cell walls. So it's really readily available in the environment, which is a easy resource for them to grab. It's hard. It protects them from predators. It's opaline, and it has the ability for them to have pores, which allows for greater sunlight penetration, for photosynthesis. So there's a lot of reasons why they have these silica cell walls. Jason Wallace  13:33   So opaline? transparent? Laura  13:34   Yep, they're opaline. They're not fully transparent. Of course, we don't really know, because it's really hard to see a diatom and what it actually looks like. But the common belief is that if you were to look and you know what an opal looks like, they're probably similar to that, where they kind of have this milky exterior that is radiant, and then it has these beautiful colors to it. But we don't really know they're so tiny we can only see what we can see through the microscope. And they are see through. So when you look at them alive, you see the chloroplast, you see all the organelles, you see this beautiful golden brown color when you look at them, because you're not seeing the actual cell wall, because it's mostly see through and transparent.  Brian  14:07   So I have two questions. One question is, what does the name mean? What's the origin of the name diatom? Laura  14:13   The name diatom comes from it being two parts. So it has two halves, because diatoms are shaped like a box where they have the top half and a bottom half. Jason Wallace  14:19   Okay, so probably Greek diatomos or something like that.  Laura  14:22   That sounds right. Brian  14:23   The other question was, so they're photosynthetic, but they're not related to green plants, is that right? Laura  14:28   Correct? The algal group that is most closely related to plants would be green algae, but diatoms are not green algae. They are in their different kingdom. Brian  14:35   okay, different kingdom. So they're, they're brown algae, right? Laura  14:38   No brown algae would be seaweeds. Oh, they're called golden brown algae. Is their common name.  Brian  14:43   Okay? There's too many flavors and colors of algae. I guess there's a reason they span, you know, so many different branches. Golden brown algae. Laura  14:50   Algae literally fits in every kingdom of the tree of life. Brian  14:54   So algae is a little bit like when you say tree, lots of different things make trees, right? An algae is just a way. Of being a living thing. Laura  15:01   Yep, traditionally, they're photosynthetic. I think that's the only characteristic that really pulls them all together. Jason Wallace  15:06   And then you said that you're the collections manager at a diatom herbarium. Now I'm familiar with plant herbariums, where people take plant samples and they'll press them in paper, and then they record like where they were recorded and when and such. And people use that to study the distributions of plants and such. I assume a diatom herbarium is similar. But can you explain to us, like, what exactly is a diatom herbarium and what's it used for?  Laura  15:30   The diatom herbarium operates very similar to the botany herbarium. We actually do have a botany herbarium in our institution as well, but we're not a part of it just because we are diatoms and just diatoms. That being said, we actually do have radiolarians and other things, but that's another topic for another day of just collections in general, but we have the largest collection of microscope slides in the entire world. So we have about 300,000 accessioned microscope slides. And we have accessioned means that it's officially cataloged into collection. We have a ton of other microscope slides that have not been formally added to our database, given a catalog number, and don't even know, probably another 100, 200,000 of those. And then we have the materials used to make the slides. So when we say materials, it's usually organic or digested material. And what we mean by that is when you go collect an algae sample. So algae is found everywhere, fresh water, salt water, there's even terrestrial diatoms. And you collect the sample, and then to actually see them, and to see the intricate structures of the cell wall, we have to soak them in acid to remove all the organic materials you find inside the cells, because they're see through, we can't see any of the structures about doing that. So then we preserve the materials, which is the digestive material, our sample. And so we have that as well in the collection, and we probably have about 100 to 200,000 samples, and all of our slides and samples are from all over the world, and how they're used is that researchers will contact us if they're trying to study diatoms in a specific region to look at what was there 150 years ago, to see how that compares to what's there. Though, also we have a lot of type slides. So if you get into taxonomy, in order to describe a species, you have to select a single specimen, which is a whole debate in the diatom world that I don't think we have time for today, to use as the type specimen. So we have about five to 6000 type slides. So if you're trying to describe a new species, you want to look back at the original type specimen to ensure that what you're describing is not already been described, and then also to look at comparisons of morphological features. Jason Wallace  17:20   You have the diatom holotypes. Laura  17:22   We have a lot of them. Jason Wallace  17:23   We talked about the game holotype and dinosaur holotypes About a year ago. So, so what's your job as collections manager entail? Are you entering all these into the database, the ones that haven't been cataloged? Are you fulfilling order or is like, what do you do as your day job?  Brian  17:37   Is your collection digitized at all? Or is it all  Laura  17:40   Oh, boy. So that that word digitized.  So yes, we are digitiz ed. We do have an online database, which is a bit of a it's been chaotic. So we had one database in a format that wasn't functional for many years, and then we moved to a different format in which we're having to rebuild it and get it back to where it's fully functional. A lot of our data is digitized in the sense of, we have the metadata. We have a lot of other stuff too, such as, like pictures of the specimens on the slides, which counts as digitized data. We actually have 3d microscope slides available online, so we have scans of our slides that you can operate, similar to looking at a microscope, where you can focus in and out at different, well, not different magnifications, but you can zoom in and out of that scan, which is at 400 times magnification. We also have a ton of other just stuff. We have a library, which we have digitized as well. We have records of that, and I have to manage all of that, organize it, maintain it. I have to care for the slides to make sure they're being properly stored and not getting damaged over time. Repair slide that they're broken. If I can repair them, I have to send loans out if other scientists request that they want to see slides or take images of type materials to send to them. It's a lot. The better question is, what don't I do as the Collection Manager? Because on top of all of that, I also am a researcher myself, and try to publish papers and work on research projects various different topics. With diatoms, I primarily focus on phylogenetics with them right now and taxonomy, but I also do ecological research as well. It's a lot. Jason Wallace  19:06   And so if you remember from our talk about Holotype, I think we talked about phylogenetics and taxonomy there. Phylogenetics is the process of figuring out what is related to what, and then taxonomy is the process of like assigning names and species. And it sounds like trying to tell two species of diatoms apart is about as problematic as trying to tell two species of bacteria apart, which is to say that the natural world laughs at these artificial divisions that we humans have made upon them.  Brian  19:32   But they've got all the cool structures. So I unlike bacteria, you've got a lot of morphology to look at, right? Laura  19:38   Yes, they have numerous structures that are so immense that you wouldn't even be able to comprehend how many there are, and we're discovering new ones each day. When we look at them in a scanning electron microscope, we can actually see the very detailed structures of the cell wall at a level that we wouldn't be able to see under a light microscope, we can see the internal features because they have features on the external part the internal part on. The sides, they're held together by silica bands. And even those can have features that can distinguish two species. Diatom taxonomy is really complicated. It's really hard to distinguish them. There's debates about what is a new species, what isn't and then when you start adding molecular data, which is the DNA, we finally have started doing DNA work on diatoms. We're very behind on that compared to other organisms, but we work on that too. You would think that would add more clarity, but sometimes it creates more confusion. There's a ton of cryptic species, which are species that you can't tell apart morphologically by how they look, but they have different DNA sequences, which would indicate they're different species. And there's the ecological species concept of maybe these two diatoms have identical morphological features and identical DNA, but however, they only exist in completely different ecological environments. So are they two different species, or are they the same? Diatoms just are the epitome of all of the issues with taxonomy and what is a species and what isn't. Jason Wallace  20:55   So are they sexual, or are they just asexual? Laura  20:58   They do both. So they reproduce by binary fission, which I think is the primary mode of reproduction. So how that works is they have a top half and a bottom half, those will split apart, and the top half becomes the bottom half for the daughter cell. However, if you think of a box or a petri dish, one half is slightly smaller than the other. So as they produce they go through this size shrinkage. So you'll have a great size variation, which also creates some difficulties when trying to identify them within the same species, and can actually affect the morphological structures as well and how they look. And in order to get back to the original size, they have to undergo sexual reproduction, where they produce an egg and a sperm, mate and then create an Auxospore that can pull silica from the environment to get back to the original size. Brian  21:38   That's crazy. It actually vaguely reminds me of telomere degradation. Jason, explain what that is. Jason Wallace  21:45   So telomeres are the tips of your chromosomes, which is what your DNA is bundled in. And because you can't copy all the way to the end of them, they tend to shrink over your lifespan. And there are complicated mechanisms to help take care of that when children are conceived and such. And that is not my area, so they don't know what those are, but this sounds amazing, that basically every time they divide, they technically get a little smaller, until they finally need to do sexual reproduction. So they could they start over, so they can so they can get back up to normal size. That's just fascinating.  Brian  22:14   That's so cool.  Jason Wallace  22:15   How long have diatoms been around? I mean, something this diverse and this widespread, I'm thinking hundreds of millions of years silica shells, those have got to be very well preserved in the fossil record. How long have they been around?  Brian  22:25   And I imagine from a species depiction, if you're using the silica shell, then you can be doing using the same species characteristics for our fossilized silica shells from a long time ago versus the ones that are out right now.  Laura  22:38   Yeah. So the current belief for how old diatoms are is from the Cretaceous Period. They're  actually relatively new on the evolutionary scale. So dinosaurs came here first, and then diatoms showed up sometime afterwards, towards the Early Cretaceous period. And the reason we know this is because the silica cell wall preserve so well. They are heavy. So when diatoms die and they lose their buoyancy, they drop to the bottom of the water body that they are existing in. So whether that be a river, a stream, a bay, an ocean, and they they lay on top of each other and create a structure similar to like a sediment core. So when you take cores that which is like a giant cylinder that you can put into the core, pull it up, and then you have different layers, you can actually see how the diatom community has changed over time, especially in water bodies that are more stagnant, such as lakes or bays, we've been able to date the sediment, and that's how we can figure out how old diatoms are. And the current findings is that at the Early Cretaceous period, but diatoms have changed rapidly since then. So what we see from the older diatoms, they look remarkably different than what we see in today's modern times.  Jason Wallace  23:38   So quick aside, Early Cretaceous would be probably 100 to 100 and 50 million years ago. I had no idea we'd be referencing holotype so many times on this episode. But change drastically how? like so listeners, if you're not driving, find a place to do a quick pause. Do a search for diatom art or diatom diversity, and just spend a few minutes going down the Google rabbit hole of just how varied and beautiful these little things are. When they're mounted, they're glass shells. You hit them with a light, they turn all these beautiful rainbow colors. I look at those like we have long, skinny ones, we've got round ones. We've got ovals, stars, these weird triangle things, if you're saying they were very different than what they were, what were they? Laura  24:15   I'm trying to think of how to describe it without showing a picture. And they have strange structures. They almost look alien. They have. Some of them have what looks like antenna, weird spines, the areolae or the pores in the cells, can look really strange compared to what we see today. And in my mind, when I think of a normal, diatom in modern time, I have the background to know what that is, but it's hard for me to describe that without using pictures of what the shapes and everything look like. But even the shapes of them back then are different than what we see to now, let me start by saying there's two main classes of diatom shapes, which is centric, and pinnate centric are more circular, and pinnate are more boxy. So centric diatoms are believed to have happened before pinnate. So that's why we'll see more centric diatoms when you look back in the cores, Jason Wallace  24:56    I'm just thinking how every time life hits on something new, it tends to do it weird at first, which obviously is our own personal bias, but I'm thinking of, if any of you have ever seen pictures of animals recovered from the Cambrian explosion, which was when animal life first really diversified in the oceans, about 500 million years ago. I think there's some weird critters in that that we look at those days like that. That was evolution experimenting, because it hadn't figured things out yet,  Brian  25:21   so we had the diatom explosion of the Early Cretaceous, where they were experimenting with form and shape. We'll definitely try to find some pictures that we can put up with these, or point people to things on our show notes. So we can say like, this is a current diatom. This is an early diatom, so they can see for themselves how they have changed over 100 million years.  Laura  25:41   I definitely recommend doing that if you ever looking for a good rabbit hole to get stuck in diatoms. Is a great one for that.  Brian  25:43   Do you have any diatom channels you can recommend on social media? Laura  25:47   I don't know if there's diatom channels, per se, there is the DoNA, which is the diatoms of North America, we have a webinar every other Tuesday at 12 Eastern Time, and they save all of those online and publish them on YouTube so you can watch all of the previous webinars, some of them a little bit more friendly to the novice, and some of them were geared and tailored towards researchers. There's a large variety of the different webinars, and those are fun to look over. There's also Jeffrey stone, I think he has an Instagram or some sort of social media account where he does SEM work, which is the scanning electron microscope. And I'll often show diatoms and talk about them. I think they actually have their own podcast. I'll have to do more research into that and give you the name of what they do. Brian  26:25   Oh, that would be great. So I manage the social media for as it is for the podcast, and I know that there would be a hunger for diatoms on Instagram. There's a whole subdivision of Instagram people just taking pretty pictures of things in nature, and micrographs and close ups of plants and everything, and I think diatoms would hit big.  Jason Wallace  26:43   Unfortunately, I think our biggest contender for that, we lost a few years ago. So if you do any search for diatom art, you will eventually run across Klaus Kemp, who, until a few years ago, was, as I understand it, the at least the most famous living diatom artist, possibly the only professional living diatom artist, but he passed away in 2022 but he actually spent years perfecting a glue recipe that would take days to dry so that he could position his diatoms properly. Because there's hundreds of these things, and it takes a very long time. He built custom microscope rigs. People like, pick them up and move them around. There's a video you can look up called the diatomist. I'll link it in the show notes. It's actually well worth a watch. It's only about 10 or 15 minutes long, beautiful, highly recommended.  Brian  26:43   So if you want to manipulate a diatom on a slide are you using, like a super pulling, like a fine glass rod into like a little micro point, or like a fine needle, how do you move one diatom? Laura  27:36   So there's a lot of people who've tried various ways to do that. I know actually decent amount about the original diatom arrangers from the Victorian time period. We have a lot of slides by Möller, who was the original or most well known diatom arranger from that time period. And so I've done a lot of research, because there's some of the more precious items in our collection, and they're fun to show to the public, or if we have any events, I've done a little bit of research into his life. And one of the things I've noted most is that the original arrangers all kept their secrets with them and how they did it. So unfortunately, we don't know what they did to create these beautiful arrangements, especially Henry Dalton, who used butterfly scales, parts of bugs and created true artwork. He has chickens, flowers there's insanely gorgeous. I also recommend searching Henry Dalton arranged slides. They're gorgeous. And there are also some diatoms on there that he died to add color to them, but Klaus Kemp was the most modern one, and he has records of how he did it, but how you move diatoms, we have to still do that if we want to do SEM work and look at a certain position of a diatom, because they look a lot different when they're sitting on their side versus when you see them from what we call valve view, which is the forward view. We used glass pipettes that we stretch under a flame so they're super tiny. We tried using that to suck them up and move them around. It's really complicated, really hard, very tedious, exhausting, stressful work Jason Wallace  28:52    that sounds like the voice of experience  Laura  28:55   trying to make monocultures for diatoms is one of the most frustrating things I've ever done in my life, because you have to isolate one cell and move it, because they do reproduce by binary fission, and there's not enough DNA in most cells to get quality DNA sequences, so you have to isolate one cell, move it into a Petri dish with medium, and then you just pray that it grows. It often doesn't and just dies. But that isolating one from a live slide culture is just frustrating. But we actually have a student. Her name is Sylvia Lepic, and she really found these arranged slides beautiful and lovely, so she started doing that herself. And she uses a eyelash glued to a wooden rod that she will look at the microscope under 100X magnification and manipulate diatoms that way. I forgot to ask her what kind of glue she uses. I know she used glycerin, plus some lab grade gelatin. Has she tried that as well? But she's actually been really good and has made some gorgeous arrangement just out of fun. Brian  29:48   That's really cool. I'm thinking about these other times where you see the science and art kind of coming together, like I'm thinking about the glass flowers that are on display. I think it's at Harvard, because they're so important for identification. But they don't flower all the time. So if you really want to be able to teach people how to do the identifications, you have to have the flowers, and in this case, the sort of art made with the diatoms. I don't know. I mean, like, if you could make a diatom arrangement, that would be a combination of art and science. Would you try to arrange, like a phylogenetic tree? Like, what would you make as your arrangement of diatoms? Laura  30:18   There's actually example of what I really enjoy about the arranged diatom. So as I mentioned earlier, that we have to see certain features with the different views that you see them in, versus girdle versus valve view is there was Schultz, who was a original member of the Academy of Natural sciences, who made arranged slides, and he would take valves and put them in these different orientations, so that way they could be used to research and to really learn the morphology of the diatom. So I would enjoy doing something like that. There's also Möller was quite famous for using microphotography, where they would take a picture with the names written of the diatoms and somehow shrink it down where they can glue it onto a microscope slide, and they would place individual valves into the circles above these names. So when you go to look at this microscope slide from the 1800s you see a diatom, and under it is the name written down. And I think that is amazing, because back then, he paired up with Rabenhorst , and they actually did do art compared with science. That was amazing learning tool. They were able to help young taxonomists start to learn the name, so they have access to the diatom right next to the name.  Jason Wallace  31:18   It's lovely collaboration between science and art. We don't get enough of those, but they're wonderful when they happen in all of this. Laura, do you have a favorite diatom? I mean, you have access to the world's largest collection. Surely, you must be able to pick a favorite out of all that.  Brian  31:31   And I actually wanted to ask a slightly different question that's on the same theme. I see that you have named many you've contributed several species. So is one of those your favorite?  Laura  31:39   So right now my favorite diatom. It does change fairly often depending on what I'm working on, is I recently published a paper where I described a few new species of Penularia, and one of them was able to name after my former research advisor, Dr Kalina Manoylov. So that's very special to me, because I was able to do something special for her and give her back a little bit of how much she's poured into my life and my professional career. Brian  32:01   That's very sweet. What is the name of that species?  Laura  32:02   It's actually not on diatoms of North America, because I need to make a page for it still, because the paper was just published recently, so I couldn't have made a page without the name being officially published. But it's Penularia manoylovy (sp?). Brian  32:15   Okay, well, let us know. We'll point people to it when it's out. Okay, we can at least put it on our Discord. Jason Wallace  32:20   Going back a little bit, you talked about how diatoms stick around. And when I was researching, I came across something that I've run into previously, which is diatomaceous earth, which is apparently dirt made from diatoms. Can you explain to me what this stuff is?  Laura  32:35   Yes, so it deposits the diatoms that there was a body of water that had an abundance of diatoms. As it dried up over time, all of the silica would sink to the bottom, and then you just have this massive deposit of pure silica dust, and it appears white and chalky, and it's just crushed up frustules, which is what we call diatom cells. And it has a lot of applications. It's used a lot for commercial use. It's a very valuable resource, and it's also beautiful to look at because it's just a whole bunch of diatoms. And I know of a few things they use it for. Is like a dynamite stabilizer. It's used for filtration to make beer and wine and fish tanks. They use it as an abrasive, so for fine sanding, because it is slightly abrasive, it found in some toothpaste, because it is a gentle abrasive,  Brian  33:15   we use it for pest control in organic farming. It's the insects don't want to walk over it or something. I don't know.  Laura  33:22   What it does is it gets into the skeleton of the bugs and breaks it apart. So it kind of is like a whole bunch of tiny glasses attacking the bug. Jason Wallace  33:30   Tiny glass knives being shoved into the bugs exoskeleton got it, Laura  33:33   but it's organic and won't harm us as humans. Brian  33:36   Like eating glass. Is it bad for humans, or it's just it's too small to hurt us?  Laura  33:40   You can buy food grade diatomaceous earth, and there is a difference between food grade and non food grade, where it's fine to ingest in small quantities, it's not fine to breathe in, and actually can cause lung damage if you do breathe in too much of it, because it is just tiny shards of glass. Jason Wallace  33:55   Okay, so okay to eat, not okay to breathe. Got it also, part of me just chafed at the idea of a silicon based substance being called Organic.  Brian  34:03   That's a different episode  Laura  34:05   that depends on the definition of organic. Brian  34:08    Yes, it does. Jason Wallace  34:09   Yes, I know. So one of the facts I ran across when researching for this episode is that, apparently the Amazon rainforest gets fertilized by diatom dust from Africa that gets blown across from the Sahara, from where there used to be a bunch of lakes, and they've all dried up. Now, can you confirm that?  Laura  34:26   I do know about that. I don't know a ton about it. I know very little bit. But if you do go and you collect some of the sediment off of the top of the Sahara Desert, you'll find diatoms in it. And diatoms are remarkable organisms and can withstand years of desiccation. So there are believed, confirmed instances where they've been able to rehydrate diatoms from the Sahara Desert, which would have allowed for that repopulation if it gets blown in the wind or gets carried up in the clouds and then dropped on the Amazon rainforest. The whole idea of diatom dispersal and how it travels around is a very complicated topic. Jason Wallace  34:57   Okay, Brian, diatoms have just surpassed tardigrades in terms of my favorite cute, microscopic organism, Brian  35:02   okay,  Laura  35:03   they don't look like bears. The Tardigrades are adorable. Brian  35:06   Yeah? So, like, what are the Okay, so I was gonna ask about the DNA thing, but then I figured it might be like a touchy subject. I'm also thinking about how everybody's taxonomy got rewritten by DNA. For bacteria, it's mostly settled down the fungi people are going through it now, but for the diatoms, it seems like it's even worse, because the problem now is that you've got a morphological species concept that you've been able to apply back through time, but you can't do that with the extinct ones. So what you're going to have is two parallel species definitions for the same groups of organisms. That's going to make things complicated. Laura  35:37   I would say that is a touchy topic, and there is two different sides or parties that believe certain things. So diatoms are used as bio-indicators, which is the biggest applications for them in environmental research. So a bio-indicator is an organism that you can based on its presence or absence in the environment. Can give you ideas about how healthy or clean or unhealthy the environment is. So diatoms are used as bio indicators, and that's all been based on morphology for the past, however long we've been working with them, but now there's this meta barcoding and e-DNA that's coming up, and you can use that to make water quality research using diatoms. However, you lose that very important connection between how they look and the DNA sequence, because eDNA doesn't allow that connection to morphology, unless you have a reference library that was done through monocultures to be able to compare the sequences, Jason Wallace  36:27   all right? And so eDNA just means environmental DNA. It's DNA you get from, like taking a water sample or a soil sample, instead of taking it from a specific organism. Laura  36:36   So there is this debate on, do we need to connect the data? Do we not need to connect the data? And it can get a bit dicey between people on this debate. And generally, the diatom community is very friendly and cohesive. However, debates do happen in any scientific community, so this is definitely one of them that happens fairly frequently, and there are people who just do diatom DNA and don't really know anything about morphology. So it's a strange and complicated topic. Brian  37:03    I feel like if the diatomologist and the artist can get together, then the molecular and the morphologist should be able to find common ground as well, right? Laura  37:10   I would hope so. And I definitely am on the party of we need to figure out how to connect the morphology with the molecular data. And there are a lot of people that are working towards that and stand in that middle ground. So there is progress moving forward. Brian  37:23   Diatoms united.  Jason Wallace  37:24   So you mentioned that they're indicator species, and you mentioned previously that they fix a lot of oxygen for the world. So what else do they do in ecosystems? What other roles are they playing? Laura  37:35   So diatoms are the primary producers. In almost all aquatic ecosystems, if you think back to fifth grade science, when you learned about primary producer, and then the grazers, and then you have the predators. So everything eats everything, and the energy flow through an ecosystem all starts with plants, well diatoms and other photosynthetic organisms play that role in aquatic ecosystems. So they're very important, because without them, you wouldn't have the energy flow through the ecosystem. Jason Wallace  37:59   So they're the basis. They capture the sunlight and it flows through. And because they're largely microscopic and just kind of like the brownish slime that we see on rocks and tree stumps and stuff, we just ignore them, but it's actually a really important component for how energy flows through the environment. Laura  38:15   Yes, and diatoms in particular are interesting because they have lipid droplets, which is oil in them. There's this whole idea to use them to milk for oil. But again, that's another topic that requires a lot of conversation. Brian  38:26   Did you say milk? Are we milking diatoms? Laura  38:28   I did say milk. So when they get stressed, they produce lipid droplets and oil. And so the idea was to get a whole bunch of diatoms in a pool, stress them out, and then milk the oil out of it.  Brian  38:37   Oh, wow. Is there society for like, protection of diatoms. This sounds cruel.  Laura  38:42   No, the problem is, is, it takes so much energy to get to that point where you actually get a usable amount of oil. Is, it's not really any benefit. It's actually worse than the regular oil that we use now. But they've been referred to as the hamburger of the ocean because they have those oil droplets. Is, they're very nutrient dense, though they're beneficial for organisms to eat them, especially the macro invertebrates or the small fish they eat them.  Brian  39:04   Do the lipids contribute to buoyancy and keep them up in the photic zone? Or is that just just, am I just making a connection to something that isn't actually there?  Laura  39:14   I have to go back to my plant cell anatomy, but I think it's primarily to use for storage, because they do it when they're stressed, when the environment. So I think it the storage or way to keep them alive under stress.  Jason Wallace  39:24   Okay, so what is the weirdest environment that you have a sample from? Laura  39:30   So I don't personally have any, I mean the collection. I think we have some from some hot springs in Japan. My boss here, the curator, Dr. Marina Potapova, has a lot of Arctic diatoms in her collection in some highly harsh environments, that they also look a lot different than what you see, such as like temperate areas I Philadelphia region, but I would say the hot springs probably is one of the most interesting samples we have, because you would think it's quite strange that diatoms can survive really intense temperatures, but they can. Brian  39:57   There's something really lovely about the thin, Brown. Lime layer. And then when you look at it under a microscope, it's this incredibly gorgeous complex. Jason Wallace  40:05   Yeah, I wanted to try to do our own diatom isolations in preparation for this episode, but it's a very busy time with grant proposals and such, and so we were not able to do that, although we have plenty of ponds around campus where we could go get some and I'm sure Brian has some hydrochloric acid or something that we could boil them in to clear them out. There are videos on YouTube that will show you how to do this. Just be very careful doing it at home, because you do have to, like, boil hydrochloric acid or stuff like that in order to clear them out. Laura  40:30   Hydrogen Peroxide also works really well. Oh, that actually you don't have a ton of organic material in it. It's a softer treatment. So any diatom that's widely silicified, we have to use that for but it works pretty well, like 70% hydrogen peroxide, even like 40% hydrogen peroxide, I don't think it's the kind you can just buy from a drug store. I haven't tried that before, but it works, and you do really need a fume hood to do this. I do recommend not doing this without a fume hood.  Brian  40:53   Well, then Jason, actually, yes, I have both of those things, so bring me some pond slime, and we can do it later.Okay?  Jason Wallace  40:59   okay, so we've talked a lot about the morphology, and these things are beautiful. Now there's a bunch of shapes in the game. It's conveniently they tie the shape to the number of color patches you've gotten. So if you get one patch, it's a circle. Two it's a little oval. It has two sides. Three is a triangle. Four is a square, five is a star. Looking online, I saw a bunch of much weirder ones, where they're like, bulbous, or they're  what is the weirdest diatom shape out there that you've seen? Like, are any of these things like weird fractal shapes or anything like that? Laura  41:29   The weirdest one I always think of is campylodiscus, which looks just like a Pringles chip. Jason Wallace  41:34   Okay, microscopic glass potato chip. Got it. Brian  41:38   It's probably very crunchy too.  Jason Wallace  41:40   I'm sure it's very crunchy. I'm sure teeth would not like it. Laura  41:43   There's also some too, like Entomoneis, which look like a figure eight, but they're also kind of twisted,  Laura  41:45   Like a mobius strip?  Brian  41:47   I don't know what a mobius strip is. It's like you could take a piece of paper and twist it on itself, so it technically only has one edge. Laura  41:56   I think it's similar. So they look twisted, and they have pictures of them on DoNA which is the diatoms of North America.  Jason Wallace  42:01   There will be many, many photos linked in our show notes people, so you should check them out. Okay, so we should start wrapping this up, which comes to our nitpick corner. Brian's favorite part of the show. Brian  42:10   Oh, I don't know, man, I don't know what to talk about. I mean, they Yes, you get diatoms out of water. Like, that's the thing. Yes, people used to arrange them on slides to make pretty murals. That's a thing. Brian  42:16    I don't think there's much we can science nitpick in this. Like, there's not enough science in it. It's a very science-lite game. I think we can nitpick The one issue, the game pieces are beautiful and they're all foiled. But the problem is the foil actually makes it hard to see the color, sometimes a little bit. So when it comes scoring time, I was lifting up my my scoreboard, I was kind of tilting it to try to get the light right. Like, is that red? Is that purple? Brian  42:42   The patterns of the pores, you said those are the areola.  Laura  42:44   Areolae? Yeah,  Brian  42:45   Areolae. Those are different on each shape. So you can use they're colorblind friendly in that regard. So they always have a pattern there too. It's not just the color, but you're right. Like the yellow and the green really hard to tell apart if you're in the wrong kind of light,  Jason Wallace  42:58   but that's about it. Like I said, it's a very elegant game, very well put together, very high quality, and I find it very fun. I don't know, I've toyed with the idea of going through the single player mode. So single player mode involves a bunch of cards where there's challenges and there's rules so that you can't just, like, play it forever until you get it. You only have so many spare diatoms you can pick up that don't fit the patterns you're trying to do. And they're actually really quite fun. And you start actually on the front of the board, which has all the set little pieces I mentioned, where you can only put a circle or a star or whatever. But the second half, you flip the board over where it doesn't have that, and it's free form arrangement. And so they have some of these where you're making arrangements that look like a tiny Solar System, or ones that look like a face or a tree or other things like that. Where you're putting these together  Brian  43:17   Jason is holding up cards of the different shapes. So for those of you who Jason's forgotten that this is an audio podcast, Jason Wallace  43:51   no, no, I'm trying to get your reactions. Like I know our audience can't see, but you can at least react. Brian  43:58   Audience, I apologize for Jason. Jason Wallace  44:01   All right. I mean, that's really it. There's again, elegant game, very well done. So on to grades, and I'm gonna say this is, I think Turing machine was the one where I gave an undefined science grade.  Brian  44:10   I think what we need is an art historian to really grade this. I think that this is the wrong class. Jason Wallace  44:15   Okay, I will say the science grade is undefined, but I'm definitely want to give it points for bringing attention to these beautiful creatures. And okay, it does actually do some things right. It gets the shininess of them, right. Well, it gets the shapes right. It gets the variability there. I don't want to give it a grade, because that implies a wrong standard, but I want to say that they managed to make the game and the science mesh beautifully. And I really appreciate that  Brian  44:38   we wouldn't have had a chance to talk about diatoms otherwise. So like I said, I'm not going to grade it either, but I'm glad it's out there. I'm glad it exists, not for science. We can give it a fun grade. Well, actually, Laura, what do you what do you think you haven't had a chance to play? But it sounds like you'd be more informed on this than we would be. What do you think Laura  44:55   I'm just happy there is a board game out there about diatoms? Because I'm just happy that diatoms are getting promoted in any way possible. So I'm very thankful for that, and I have seen it before. It does look like a beautiful board game, and honestly, I think it kind of gets the heart of whole diatom arranging, and the really complicated nature is the rules, almost is a perfect analogy for how complicated and complex diatoms are. So I really like the game. I'm going to buy a copy eventually,  Brian  45:18   Awesome. Let's see, Jason, I want to hear your fun grade first because you really like this game. In fact, I bought the coffee. But you have the game because you like it so much more than I do.  Jason Wallace  45:26   I'm going to give it an A I keep using the word elegant. I love things that are elegant, that have relatively simple rules and yet have a lot of strategic depth to it, which I think this game satisfies. And like I said, it's one of the few games that we've played that has a solo mode where I've actually played the solo mode and enjoyed it, and I'm considering doing more. There may be, there may be, like, 30 days of diatoms on our Instagram feed at some point.  Brian  45:48   Jason may not want this shared, but one of his hobbies is stained glass. So I think this is merging his love of highly analytical, optimizing games with his desire to create beautifully arranged mosaics.  Jason Wallace  45:58   Oh yes, yes, the fact that these are actually made of glass. Is part of that, taking something from silica, making beautiful arrangements. And so, yes, there is a little bit synergy. Is like, Oh, this is that same thing, but on a microscopic scale, I don't think we've mentioned it. So we talk about all these diatom arrangements on microscope slides. So like a full beautiful mosaic of like 100 or 200 little diatoms in these beautiful patterns is about the size of a period. So they really can only be appreciated under the microscope, or as prints.  Laura  46:24   I Think it's even smaller than that, depending on the size of the diatom, because the largest diatom is only two millimeters wide. And then they get much smaller than that.  Brian  46:32   Wait they get up to two millimeters.?That's like naked eye visible. Where is this diatom? Brian  46:38   It's over there. Jason, look behind you,  Laura  46:40   trying to remember what it's called, starts with an E. Think it ethmodiscus  but I don't know. Jason Wallace  46:41   exactly where it's found, Entomodiscus. Insect circle?  Brian  46:45   Is that an insect associated? Is that a thing?  Laura  46:49   I know it's a thick, circular diatom. Says it's found in the temperate zones of the world's ocean.  Brian  46:54   Oh, okay, for my fun grade, I guess I have never gotten out diatoms to play, except for you. And then you took the game so and then Jason Wallace  47:02   I you gave me the game.  Brian  47:02   I did. I have actually officially given you the game. I have been like, Jason, you should keep this game. You really like this game. I don't know we could play it a couple more times. I don't really want to ding it. I'll just say B, it's fun. I enjoyed it. You know, it's a little complicated. It's kind of two games in one, there's the selection, and then arranging the mosaics is very complicated. And you know how I feel about over optimizing I enjoyed Jason Wallace  47:20   it, and I actually got to play it with my nine year old, and she was also enjoying helping me make the arrangement and stuff. So I consider that a win.  Brian  47:27   Absolutely. Laura, I just wanted to ask, Do you have a favorite game?  Laura  47:30   I actually love classic monopoly, just because I get to wreak havoc or chaos when I play it. Brian  47:35   Oh, really, do you play with house rules? Or do you play by rules, rules?  Laura  47:38   Well, when I do play with my brother, primarily it's rules, rules, and we get very competitive with each other. And we actually have a long history of using my cousins as pawns to beat each other. Brian  47:49   Monopoly, bringing families together for however long Monopoly has been around. Jason Wallace  47:53   Does that mean you're using your cousins as like shell corporations in the game? Laura  47:57   Yep, I have no shame over it either. Brian  48:01   That's fantastic. Jason Wallace  48:02   All right, we'll wrap up there. Thank you, Laura, very much for coming on and telling us about these beautiful microscopic organisms. Is there any place you want people to check you out? Do you have, like, a social media or something else to follow? Laura  48:12   There you can check out Diatoms of North America, which is a wonderful resource for them to use for diatoms. I am a part of that. And then if they want to ever come see diatoms. We do have a very small exhibit at the Academy natural sciences in Philadelphia, which is the oldest natural history museum in the entire country.  Brian  48:32   Well, next time I'm in Philadelphia, I'll put it on the to do list for sure. Jason Wallace  48:34   Well, now you have something for your travel plans listeners. So with that, we will sign off. Thank you very much. Have a great month and good games,  Brian  48:37   and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. Jason Wallace  48:39   This has been the gaming with science podcast copyright 2026 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to game with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.  Transcribed by https://otter.ai

#Cellulose #GeniusGames #InDefenseOfPlants #Plants #Botany #CellBiology #MolecularBiology #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Summary This mont we talk Cellulose and all things plants with special guest Matt Candeias, of the In Defense of Plants podcast. In this sequel to Cytosis, we dive inside of a plant cell in a worker-placement game that while similar to its predecessor also adds a lot of new mechanics and strategy. As usual, Genius Games's science is top-notch, and we get to talk about photosynthesis, Rubisco, how plants nearly wrecked the environment (twice!), why C4 photosynthesis is the best photosynthesis, and the weirdest ways plant use their energy. So grab a houseplant and settle back for all things Cellulose. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 02:40 Pollen and pointy sticks 07:59 Intro to Cellulose 13:47 Rubisco & chloroplasts 20:47 The cell wall 25:15 Plant movement 29:12 Elements of photosynthesis 32:09 CAM & C4 photosynthesis 38:03 Water and light shaping plant distributions 42:14 Weirdest use for cellulose 44:52 Nitpick corner 51:12 Grades 56:27 Wrap-up Links Official Game Website (Genius Games) In Defense of Plants (Podcast & Book) 430,000 year old wooden tool (Science.org) The evolution of C4 photosynthesis (New Phytologist) Skunk cabbage and philodendron making heat (In Defense of Plants)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:00   Hello, and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:10   Today, we're going to talk about cellulose by genius games. Hey, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian. This is Jason, and we have a very special guest with us today, Dr Matt Candeias, who is holding up the wall against plant blindness. He is the host of In Defense of Plant, and I'm already breaking my thing. I should be letting him introduce himself, Matt, tell us about yourself. Matt  0:36   Well, first off, thank you guys so much for having me. It's an honor to be here. My name is Matt Candeias, yeah, I'm an ecologist by training. I have always had an interest in sort of the way the natural world interacts with itself, us including and for about the last probably 20 years of my life, that has largely been focused on how plants set the foundation for everything in this world. So yeah, my PhD is in plant ecology. I spent a lot of time looking at how plants kind of form communities and structure themselves over different gradients in the environment. It's been a lot of fun. And as you mentioned, I run in defense of plants, so for many, many years of my life, surprisingly, that number goes up every year and just hits me with a whole new sense of, Oh, I'm getting older. Yeah. It's been a, basically my Ode to My love to plants, and trying to share that passion with the world and try to get people to see plants the way I do. You know, it was one of those things where I just kind of always thought that plants got the short shrift when it came to science communication and the way we looked at the natural world. You know, cheetahs are exciting, elephants are brilliant. Why aren't we talking about plants like that, other than as food or medicine, which is cool, but plants are their own organisms, so I created in defense of plants to celebrate that. And it's been a love affair of communicating that in many different forums, but mostly through podcasting, ever since, Brian  1:51   you are the host, but you have talked to everyone. You have had so many episodes, and you have on special guests pretty much almost every episode. I can't imagine what it's like to schedule all of that. Matt  2:03   Calendars give me anxiety. So it's always anxious. I have tons of anxiety around it, but it's kind of streamlined at this point, and it's just fun. And it turns out that people really want to share their passion too. And when you come in and say, Hey, I'd like to promote the science you're doing, I think it's really cool. People are really receptive to that. So, you know, they my guests make it very easy on me as best as they can. You know, it's the herding cats. The phrase always comes to mind though. You know, we just do our best. Brian  2:29   All right, so I'm glad that you were able to join us for a very plant centric game. I know it's much more cellular biology than ecology, but again, couldn't pass up the opportunity to try to get you to come on and talk to us. But before we get into talking about cellulose, let's do a little bit of science banter. So what's something cool you learned recently or heard about a story or anything like that? We usually let the guest host go first. Did you? Did you have anything that you want to share with the class? Matt  2:57   Yeah? Yeah. So luckily, shout out to my friend Allison, who puts me on on point every week goes give me a plant fact. I was thinking about this the other day, and it's one thing that I've heard, you know, throughout my education, throughout my career, and just for some reason, tucked away and never gave it much thought. But lately it's really been hitting me is that pollen is a male gametophyte. It's technically a separate organism. And I think, you know, people make a lot of jokes about what pollen is, and they're getting allergic to, you know, certain types of essentially, plant sperm. And, yeah, that's not wrong. There's sperm involved. But pollen itself is a fascinating structure that is really it's its own haploid organism. And I think that, to me, is really cool, because if you're in the plant world, you know, mosses and ferns get a lot of credit for having this alternation of generations flowering plants have carried that on. It's just a highly reduced form, and we don't think of it in the classic model that you do when you're teaching about the non vasculars or the ferns, that kind of thing. Brian  3:50   I still remember in college learning about the alternation of generations just being so confused. Matt  3:57   It's so cool, though. It's one of those things that when you think about the way we approach teaching about plants or getting people excited about plants, we're still so stuck in decades old ways of kind of getting that their head wrapped around, like, what is the parts of a flower, which eventually you can learn. I think if we started with these, like, how alien plants can be in terms of what we take for granted as everyday life as a vertebrate, mammal, animal, whatever you want to call it. It's just these things that like they can be very confusing, but plants are very weird, and that's a good jumping off point to get people excited about it. Jason  4:29    Yeah, my primary experience with pollen is walking through a cornfield where corn is taller than I am. It's dropping tons of pollen because it's wind pollinated. It falls on my sweaty arms, germinates and tries to burrow into my skin. Corn pollen allergies are actually a serious occupational hazard in my field, Matt  4:29    I believe it. Yeah, I feel bad for all of my botanist colleagues that like have pine pollen allergies and work on the coastal plain like it's a nightmare, but they endure. But that's a good sci fi book, right there. I mean, you've got the foundation for a good pitch. You just kind of got to flesh it out a little bit more  Jason  5:04   The Last of Us, but it's corn. Okay. Brian  5:07   What about you? Jason, what'd you bring? Did you bring anything to share? Jason  5:10   So a few weeks ago, I read this article summarizing a paper in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences about finding the oldest confirmed wooden tools used by humans. It's from 430,000 years ago in Greece, around an elephant carcass that was apparently killed and butchered by some of our human ancestors. And the thing is, apparently, at least, if you're an archeologist, being able to tell a rock from a stone tool is apparently fairly easy. At least the article made it implies such, but telling a stick that has been sharpened to be used as a tool from just a kind of pointy stick is hard, apparently they but around this elephant, there were apparently several dozen wooden bits, and so they cataloged them all. They looked at them, and two of them under the microscope showed clear signs of having been shaped by humans in terms of like scraping and being used as a tool for various things. Exactly what? Don't know, because, as one of the authors said, there's a lot you can do with a pointy stick. But given that there were a lot of predators around, there was a lot of prey around, they were probably doing something. And they even pointed out that it's a relatively primitive pointy stick, because they basically just grabbed, they used a piece of wood from something local, and they basically just sharpened it, and that was it. Whereas you go forward a few 10s of 1000s years, apparently we found Spears where they're sourced from hardwoods, they're further away and that they have been not only sharpened, but then they've been hardened in fire to make them better points and so this is like a very early example of woodworking for human tool use. Brian  6:49   Okay, so we learned how to slowly refine the pointy stick technology, yes, to Jason  6:55   make them pointier and harder and better at doing whatever you want to do with a pointy stick, which is largely stabbing it in something else. Brian  7:04   This reminds me of a story that you told at a panel that we were on at Dragon Con about when early humans moved into places where bamboo was common and you stop having a history of stone tools. Jason  7:18   Yes, that was a I learned that way back in undergrad, I think. But the idea was that bamboo is much easier to shape than stone, but also can be just about as sharp. And so humans did what humans did. They took the easy way out. And so we lost the stone tool record there because they were using a much more biodegradable substance. And that is part of why it's so hard to find wooden tools in the in the in the archeological record is because wood decays. Rocks don't, Brian  7:45   yes, rocks have to erode. Yeah. Jason  7:47   But I figured, given that wood is made of cellulose, it was appropriate for this episode, and it'd be a great way of showing that some of that cellulose, even though a lot of it gets eaten or burned or whatever, some of it sticks around for a very long time. Brian  7:59   Yeah, I was just about to thank you for giving me a perfect transition, for talking about the talking about the game. Because, you know, bamboo wood, we're talking about cellulose, basically as this very durable material that sort of defines plants for what they are. It's one of the defining things that makes something a plant is the presence of cellulose. Cellulose is a game that is published by genius games. Again, we've already we've had many of their games in the past. They are specialists in this area of creating hard science games, games that are representing the science accurately, although always simplified to a certain degree, because it still has to be a fun game to play. So it is typically marketed as the sequel to the game Cytosis, which is an engine building game that's played inside of an animal cell. I think it's more specifically supposed to be a human cell. Cellulose is played mostly inside of a plant cell, kind of it's actually a little bit more organismal than just that. Going back to elementary school, every one of us probably had a STEM or a science class where we had to make a little model of a cell, and you could either do an animal cell or a plant cell. This is the game that is played inside of a plant cell. So we have some things that are conserved, that are found in both both an animal cell and a plant cell has a nucleus, they both have an endoplasmic reticulum, they both use ribosomes. They both have a cell membrane. But as you can imagine, in cellulose, we're focusing on more of the mechanic around those things that make a plant cell unique. In particular, the presence of a rigid cell wall made of cellulose, hence the name of the game, the presence of chloroplasts, where photosynthesis will occur. And one thing that often kind of gets skipped or looked over a little bit is the presence of a large central vacuole. Yes, animal cells have vacuoles, but in plant cells, it can be like 90% of the volume of the cell is just this large central receptacle of the vacuole. Jason  9:53   Yeah, and if you don't remember your cell biology, the vacuole is basically just a it's a storage bag. It's just a bag of. Stuff that the cell sticks things in to store them, and in Brian  10:04   particular for plants, a lot of that is water, and that's really what's giving cells all their shape and their rigidity and kind of letting plant cells be plant cells.  Next to your cell you also have sort of a picture of a very generic plant with a very generic shoot and very generic root that you'll be sort of moving a little marker up to sort of determine how many resources you get at the beginning of your of different phases of the game. The central mechanic of the game is you are trying to sort of grow your shoot and your root to get more resources. You are bringing in carbon dioxide. You're bringing in water to make sugar that you can either burn for energy or you can deposit into the cell wall, which as that as each of those glucose molecules is created and added to the cell wall. Eventually, that leads to the end of the game, right? Once the cell wall has been completely manufactured, that's kind of, you know, where you tally up all your points and you're done. Jason Wallace  10:58   It's the turn tracker. And what's nice is that the game automatically adds to it every turn, so that there is a finite state. But it's also because you have some control, the players can sort of manipulate that to be to their advantage, to either end the game sooner or just by not doing it end the game later. Brian  11:15   So it's still sort of, again, if we think about the original Cytosis game, what we're doing is going through the process of from the nucleus, making mRNA, making protein, secreting things out of the cell. What did we decide that? Oh, this must be an endocrine cell, because you're making so many hormones or something. But in cytosis, you're playing a generic plant cell, trying to finish your cell wall, right? And the engine is really the engine of photosynthesis, yep. Jason Wallace  11:40   And you also have remember the various cards you can get that can be things like starch storage or various proteins and enzymes. And there's a bit more of an engine building component to cellulose than to psychosis, where as you get these enzymes, they can trigger each other again, if you've got the protein to spend. And so one way of getting a victory is actually building up a protein engine to just generate a lot of resources or points, or what have you, which is not something you can do in Cytosis. Brian  12:07   And also some of those cards have huge changes and very enormous swing on the game, like the starch card, very expensive, but worth a massive amount of victory points. I think, Well, you got like, two starch cards, and you got so far ahead of me when we played that I just never even came close to catching up at that point. Which I mean, not that that's atypical for when Jason and I play games, but this was, this was pronounced, Jason  12:32   well, it's because the starch, so maybe we're jumping ahead to the science. But starch is made from a bunch of glucose strung together in real life, so it costs several pieces of your glucose, and that is an expensive piece. It takes a lot of game moves to synthesize every bit of glucose, and so you're spending a lot of them on starch. They want to reward you for that. Brian  12:51   Like Matt, did you get a chance to play cellulose before we sat down to talk? Yeah? Matt  12:55   Yeah. It was actually kind of a rough, quick sort of play through sort of thing. So in terms of strategy and stuff. I it's gonna be a few more plays before I get down that road. But, yeah, it was, it was interesting, because I do, like these engine building games. I really do, unless I'm playing with someone I'm guessing, like Jason in your life, that's really good at kind of seeing where the strengths and weaknesses are, and just build these unbeatable engines. So it's a blessing and a curse. Yeah. Brian  13:22   Jason's really good at, sort of like, you know, seeing the matrix and just kind of like, you know, zeroing in on what the optimal strategy is with what appears to me as at a glance. Let's talk about some of the science here. Jason  13:35   Well, we should probably start very basic as, like, chloroplasts and the synthesis, synthesis of cellulose. Let's do the molecular stuff, get it out of the way, and then we can step back and do the broader stuff, where Matt's expertise will shine. Brian  13:47   The best way, I think, to connect the mechanics of the game. And it's very clear from the design of the game is it's focused on the things that make plant cells sort of unique and different from animal cells. And those are, we've already talked about them, sort of the vacuole, the cell wall, and in particular, the chloroplast, right? The chloroplast is the, I don't know, what do we always say for the mitochondria, it's the powerhouse of the cell. The chloroplast is the powerhouse for everything, solar panels of life, for sure. So the chloroplast is where all the magic happens, right? It's where a plant is going to combine carbon dioxide and water, using the energy of light to create to create sugar, to create glucose, right? That everything else uses producing water and oxygen as a byproduct. Jason  14:40   This is what makes almost all life on planet Earth go round. There are a few exceptions that live way deep in the ocean or way deep underground, but anything that most of us would recognize is eventually powered by the sun through these chloroplasts, Brian  14:54   the chemical reaction, more or less is represented in the game. It takes six carbon dioxide. Add six water to make all of the carbons in one sugar. Jason  15:04   Yeah, and this is done by a an enzyme called Rubisco. Full Name is ribulose one five bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase,  Brian  15:12   which is why we call it Rubisco instead.  Jason Wallace  15:15   Yes, exactly. But by some accounts, this is the most abundant protein on Earth, as plants make gobs and gobs and gobs of it in order to actually perform photosynthesis. And so it is everywhere on this planet. And it is old. I think the estimate I saw was somewhere around, like 4 billion years. It's estimated to have been around like way before there was much oxygen. Well, any measurable amount of oxygen in our atmosphere, Brian  15:39   which surprisingly, actually, you can kind of still see the effects of in how that enzyme functions, right? Jason  15:45   Jason, yeah, we're not going to get into suffice it to say that Rubisco actually doesn't deal well with the presence of oxygen, and we may talk a bit about this later, but it's it shows its hallmarks of having evolved when it didn't have to worry about this highly caustic oxygen molecule floating around and potentially causing problems with it. Speaker 2  16:05   That is my favorite part about Rubisco, though, I have to say it's the part I always glom on to with my limited molecular experience. I just love that fact about it  Brian  16:14   is that it basically gets poisoned by oxygen.  Matt  16:16   Yeah, the fact that you know, evolution is often kind of perceived in the larger public is this being this highly optimized, we're getting the best solution. And Rubisco is like, Nah, we figured this out, like 400 some odd million years ago, and it works. It works good enough, but it's still the byproduct of what it did to the planet that is poison to it. So it's this funny sort of balancing act of like, let's just get past enough so that these things can reproduce, and we're good, Jason  16:41   yeah, and I guess this may be a bit of an aside into evolutionary theory, but it's basically trapped in what's called an evolutionary optimum, where it there's probably a better version of Rubisco out there, like there could be a better version out there that doesn't have that problem, but anything but getting from our current version to that would have to go through something that doesn't work very well, and so is strongly selected again, so we can't get there. We're stuck with where it's at. Except that there are some groups out there trying to engineer better versions of Rubisco. And I don't know what state there are in. I haven't heard of any Nobel prizes being given out for that, so I don't think they've managed it yet, but I know there are people working on it. Brian  17:20   So chloroplasts are thought to have evolved very, very solid evidence that they evolved through a process called endosymbiosis, which basically the chloroplast as we see it in eukaryotes. Actually, its ancestor was a free living blue green algae, basically a bacteria that became engulfed and adapted into eukaryotic eukaryotic cells. And some of the evidence for this is the fact that chloroplasts have their own little, circular genome that still even makes its own little ribosomes for protein synthesis that are the same size and shape as bacterial ribosomes. So it's highly reduced, but they still basically, you can tell what they used to be based on these remnant features. Jason  18:05   Yes, and mitochondria are the same way, actually. So mitochondria are also thought to be a result of one of these ancient endosymbiosis events. They're called. And you can also see this because I believe it's this way for both chloroplasts and mitochondria a cell. I don't think cells can assemble them from scratch. I think they have to divide from existing ones. So you have your cell which divides, but inside your cell you have your chloroplast and your mitochondria, which are also dividing in order to make new ones for the daughter cell. Brian  18:34   But I know that there are several diseases in animals and humans that are associated with the mitochondria being defective. I'm aware of some things like that in the chloroplast as well you can end up with so like variegation that you get in plants, for instance, where you'll have sections of the leaf where you have a change in color, a loss of that green, or segments that would be white or or a lighter yellow, or something like that are caused by mutations, not in the genes in the nucleus, but in the genes in the chloroplast itself. Matt  19:05   Have you heard of the albino redwoods? No. So there are sports of redwoods in the wild, and they're super highly guarded secrets, because I think people try to poach them, but they they're sports that develop with no chlorophyll, or at least such reduced chlorophyll levels that they're just a ghostly white version of it, and it's one of the few instances where I don't think they function at all Photosynthetically, and they don't die right away, or in many cases, they don't die right away, because redwoods are really good at grafting, so they're almost living as like this parasitic offshoot, albino offshoot of the parent tree, because it's still able to channel nutrients to sort of that Little rhizomatous sprout it has, it's a weird thing. You should look into it. Jason  19:43   I was wondering, because we get albino corn plants every now and then, just because we work with genetics corn, which is really crappy, and so it has mutations in it every now and that show up, and they they only last, like a week, and then they've exhausted their their food supply, and they're dead. Brian  19:59   So. The the sort of creepy, okay, like plants have modular bodies, right? But the idea of having a parasitic limb is very troubling, Matt  20:08   right, right? It does nothing for me, but it's attached and I feed it. Brian  20:16   Okay? So chloroplasts, super important, super essential. Basically, you all of the carbon in your body came from chloroplast and came from carbon dioxide. Right now, it definitely is true, some of the nitrogen probably came from an artificial fertilizer, but the carbon came from photosynthesis. Jason  20:34   I mean, unless someone's eating, like, tube worms and such, Matt  20:40   Oh, you haven't like, Jason Wallace  20:41   like, bulk, like, deep sea vent crab, like, delicious. Brian  20:47   Now let's talk about the other big thing that makes plants super different from animal cells, actually. Okay. Again, we want to talk about how the weird vertebrate perspective skews our perspective of things. How about just the weird animal perspective? Animal cells don't have cell walls, and we like to talk about that as normal. That's not normal. Every other living thing has a rigid cell wall, okay? And plants would be like the the that's fungi, that's bacteria, that's almost everything has a rigid cell wall, except, for some reason, animal cells. But plant cell walls are made up of the structural polysaccharide. I'm sorry, I'm going to use too much jargon. Jason's going to catch me on these and backfill with what this stuff actually means. Cellulose is a rigid polymer basically made of glucose, which is like, that's just pure sugar. It's this simple as six carbon sugar. What's the best way to explain glucose? Jason Wallace  21:39   Jason, it's the most common sugar. So if you have your table sugar, that's that's actually a little two sugars put together. It's one thing of glucose and one thing of fructose joined together. So it's like half of table sugar.  Brian  21:51   So it's like glucose is the very easiest sugar for any cell to use and break down. It makes up table sugar. It's the sort of carbon and sugar currency of biology and cellulose is made of glucose that, weirdly, is almost completely resistant to being broken down and used as anything.  Jason Wallace  22:13   So cellulose and starch are both just chains of glucose put together, but they differ in where the connection is in for starch, it's on one carbon, and for cellulose, it's on another. And starch is like, everything's food. Everything eats starch. It's how you store it. You break it down. It's fine. It's very easy. Cellulose is like a rock, like hardly anything digests cellulose. This is why cows have their massive, like, four chambered stomachs, and they're basically just like fermenting bathtubs on legs is because they can't break down cellulose, and so they have this big bioreactor they walk around with to feed all the bacteria that are digesting cellulose for them, because they can't and because hardly Anything can. Brian  22:59   Plants have made one of the most durable polymers, except for, like, modern plastics and stuff like that, out of food, right out of the easiest sugar to digest. They've turned it into something that basically could barely be broken down. And, like, technically, why we have coal is because cellulose is so hard to break down. Jason  23:20   Yeah, it's all that's left. Like, that's coal is stored sunlight from hundreds of millions of years ago, with most of the other stuff just like, kind of broken down. It's what's left, right? Matt  23:30   And those ecosystems were massive forests, I mean, covered the earth in many carry cases, not everywhere on Earth, but they were expansive. And it all happened during a time before there were fungi and certain types of bacteria that got good at it, it hadn't evolved yet. And so that's these deposits were put down long before anything could come by and even remotely hope of utilizing it, which is why it's such a vast store on this planet. Jason Wallace  23:53   Yeah, I've heard some debates on that, but regardless, I think a lot of them were also in very wet areas, so they were anoxic. There was no oxygen around. So even if there were bacteria and fungi break it down, they didn't have any oxygen to do so. And so just like modern peat bogs and such, they just stuck around. Brian  24:10   I do like thinking about how much plants have changed the fundamental chemistry of the planet again and again and again. I mean, they were some of the biggest polluters in evolutionary history, right? Literally poisoning all of the life on Earth by accumulating huge amounts of oxygen, which is actually still quite toxic, even to themselves, then creating huge amounts of cellulose and lignin, which is the other major structural component of trees that also couldn't break down. It's like before humans came along and invented plastic, plants were pretty much doing the same thing. Before we move ahead, I want to talk about how weird plant cells are compared to animal cells, because that rigid cell, well, it's not just that. It's rigid. They're all glued together, right? They're they're afixed to one another, they cannot move. So like, unlike you in your body, you have blood cells. You have cells that move in your body, that flex and will move throughout. Plants don't do that. A plant cell is fixed in place to all of its neighbors, and that really changes how they function, right? Matt  25:15   Big time. I mean, when you think about what makes studying plants so wonderful is they don't get up and move away, and when you think about the challenges they face, and put it into the context of all their adaptations, it comes down to that rigid structure of them, kind of having to display a surface as best as possible to the sun and do everything else around the physical constraints of that. Now there are plants with really fast movements, and it's fascinating to dive into, like how a Venus Fly Trap, closes its trap and then reopens it. Or, like the bladderworts. It's one of the fastest movements in the biological world, the way the little bladder can inflate itself and then engulf its prey that way. But, you know, I think of like Darwin's experiments, this is stuff that's fascinated scientists forever is like, how do tendrils wrap around and they've all had to kind of evolve these creative ways of stretching that structural component of elongating or shortening that cell wall. And it's a really fun kind of journey to take when you realize just they're anchored in a place. Because, again, I think we take elasticity, you know, as someone who's completely not flexible in this world, we take it for granted, though, you know. And then you think about all the other things about plants that revolve around just the fact that they're, like you said, These multi iterations of these repeated structures. But at the core of it are those plant cells with the cell wall kind of keeping everything in place. It also gives them a lot of strength, too, and rigidity and staying power, as we kind of just talked about for the last few minutes. Brian  26:39   The The interesting thing is that, like we do get really kind of obsessed with things like Venus fly traps or rapid plant movements, because it seems so unusual, but plants do, they have behavior. They do move. They seek nutrients, they they will climb and do all of these interesting things. It's happening at a slightly different timescale, and it's all mediated by growth. It's so different from what we think like for a plant to go find a new nutritional source underground. It has to grow and elongate its roots to do so it's like whereas an animal just walks over there and gets it right. So it's they're still doing the same thing. They're just doing it in a fundamentally different way. Jason Wallace  27:19   Yeah, and a lot of the above ground movement is with that vacuole you mentioned, where pumping it full of water or letting it empty out so things get stiff or so they get a little relaxed. Is how, like sunflowers track the sun. I believe that could, because they're expanding on one side and then contracting on another. Or leaves that go up and down, which you only ever really notice if you're watching, like a high speed video of what a plant does throughout the day or with different temperatures and such. Brian  27:44   It's really fun. If you've ever watched, like, a sped up video of like, let's say, sea stars or something, or sea urchins. They look like they're sessile they're not. They're moving quite a bit. It's kind of the same scale for plants. There's a lot of movement. Like plant leaves flutter up and down constantly. You just don't notice it. Matt  28:01   Yeah, I think of like, people that grow, you know, the house plant movement being as big as it is, calathea, for instance. I mean, during the day, the leaves are out catching the rays. They're vertical, or at least horizontal, or they're, like, perpendicular to the sun's rays to the best extent possible. And then at night they they go up, and it's something you can track. Throughout the day, you go away to work in the morning, they're in one way. You come back at night, or, you know, you're out with friends, you come back and you notice they they've moved. It's just you would need to set up a slow mo camera to capture it in real time. But it's just a different pace of life, which I do kind of appreciate, because it all feeds back into trying to have this sort of sci fi esque adventure on planet Earth. It's out there. You just, you know, got to pay attention a little bit more to see it. Brian  28:41   So let's see. So we talked about how the Okay, I would love to talk about the vacuole more, but I'm really not sure what to talk about. Again, it's like the cell wall creates a rigid shape, and the cell gets inflated by the vacuole, sort of expanding like a water balloon, to kind of keep that rigid. And that's kind of the secret sauce for plants. That's where that strength comes from. Is basically by sequestering water in this central it's like they have a they have a skeleton of water balloons, Matt  29:09   classic turgor. Brian  29:12   And that might let us transition to into another thing. So remember, we talked about how photosynthesis you need. What do you need? You need light, right? So what is a leaf but a big biological solar panel, right? Just to collect all that sunlight, and they can move, and they can even shift the chloroplasts. To make that process more efficient, you need to get water, and that's going to come from, you know, our roots, and move up through who wants to explain transpiration. Matt  29:39   So on the leaf, you've heard about stomata. They're these pores. It's two cells that kind of surround an open area that can swell and contract, all based on turgor pressure, like we said, in and of itself. But they are essentially the ends of one end of the straw, the other end of the straw. If you can imagine these bundles of straws that are plants goes down into the roots and so. As through variety of processes, heat whatever water availability they can, open and close those and what that does is essentially open and close the tip of that straw. And so any water that's in the soil, around the roots or in the tissues of the plant, if it's starting to evaporate out, it moves in, others below it, molecule wise, move in to replace it. And I think it's mostly through that, like, weak, attractive force of of water, right? It's dead tissue, so capillary action, right? And so through capillary action, as water evaporates out of the stomata, which is usually in the leaf, but it can be in the stems, it can be in the flowers, it's pulling water up behind it. And so that's why, you know, when you stop watering your house plants, you cut off that supply at the base, they start running out of that water, and you'll start to see that wilting, because the vacuole is no longer staying supplied, and it's losing water through those pores. But that's the way water defies gravity through plants without any muscular contractions. Brian  30:54   Just the miraculous thing, the tallest plants in the world are still basically getting the water all the way up from the roots through just capillary action, Jason  31:02   tiny, tiny, microscopic straws that are going up redwoods. Brian  31:06   Yeah, and those stomata, you need the evaporation to pull the water up, but that's also how the carbon dioxide is getting in right at the same time. So it's controlling turgor to open and close the little stomata. And a leaf is several things. It's a solar panel, but it's also a lung, right? It's where all the gas exchange occurs, right? And that could mean water vapor going out, but it can also mean oxygen and carbon dioxide coming in. And that Jason  31:32   was one of the little bits I liked from the game cellulose. Is that when you collect carbon dioxide, you actually drop the amount of water you're able to collect, which is a real thing, because you only get plants, only get carbon dioxide when they're stomata open, but that lets water go out. And for people who work on, say, drought tolerant crops, this is a big issue is you've got to try to balance those two things, because you can't get both of them at the same time. Brian  31:54   So one of the things we didn't had a chance to play with this, but I did look at it. You've got two scenario cards where they sort of change the rules ever so slightly. One is a mangrove, so a plant growing in a completely water saturated thing, and they sort of change the root architecture. The more interesting one is the cacti. I don't we can get into talking about this later, but for the cacti, you start with less water. You also don't drop the water level when you get carbon dioxide. And they call those CAM stomata, which is kind of right, but kind of also not right. I think who wants to talk about cam photosynthesis?  Matt  32:32   It's one of my favorites. It's one of the few places, Yeah, Jason Wallace  32:36   you're good. They hear from us all the time. They don't Brian  32:39   need to hear from us anymore. Matt  32:40   No, I love CAM, because I think so many people again, you learn c3 maybe you get into c4 in high school, and that's where a lot of people stop with plants. But CAM is all around us, especially if you collect succulents. There's so many plants that are doing this, and it's so fascinating, because it does kind of help in these dry environments, which is why it's the cactus card in this game. I think they chose wisely, in that case, is essentially, and there's probably variations on this theme. You have this trade off in most plants, of like you said, having to be able to take in CO2, but also you want to reduce water loss. Well, in a really hot, dry environment, you can imagine that's a knife edge balance. And so some plants that have evolved crassulacean acid metabolism, Cam crassula, being the genus It's named after, which is kind of also cool, is you take in carbon dioxide at night, when it's much cooler, when the vapor pressure is a little bit easier on you, and you're not going to transpire as much, and then you store it in your vacuoles, going back to another aspect of the game, or the plants that are really neat as crassulacean acid, if you Were to chew on a cam plant, I don't recommend doing this, because some are very toxic. It would taste sort of acidic because it's stored as that and so during the day, when light is coming in and you're starting to do those light dependent reactions, they can take that Crassulacean acid out of solution and use that carbon instead of having to open their stomata and take in CO2, so they're able to keep their stomata closed, use stored carbon, and still photosynthesize without losing so much water in the process. Brian  33:03   So it's another way that plants have to solve this problem of you're going to lose water when you bring in CO2. So they separate it in time, right? They bring in the CO2, they stash it. I actually think I wouldn't be, you know, I'm surprised that we haven't seen the Could you help me with the pronunciation Crassulacean acid? Is that? Yeah, yeah. I'm surprised that there's not a whole wellness fad associated with just that showing up in energy drinks. But they stash that, then they close the stomata, and then they do the sort of light dependent parts at a different time, right? So you mentioned c3 c4 I'm gonna let Jason handle that one, because that's his specialty. Jason Wallace  34:49   But before we get on that, I do want to say you may not see the crasilic acid in health food, but let us remember that Agave is a cam plant, which means that every time that someone is taking a shot of Tequila, they are benefiting from Crassulacean acid metabolism. Brian  35:04   Okay, so the next time that I do a shot at tequila, I'll be sure to thank cam photosynthesis, Jason  35:09   yes, which I'm going to say is the second coolest form of photosynthesis on the planet. The coolest, of course, Brian  35:15   you are such You are such a corn fan I am. Jason Wallace  35:21   Look, if you actually crunch the numbers, like there is more corn on this planet than probably any other single species of plant. So it's like, I Yes, I am a fanboy. But so c3 c4 is a different way of photosynthesis. C3 is sort of the default named because the carbon it that it gets used as the central part of the process has three carbons in it, so it's a three carbon molecule. C4 uses a four carbon molecule instead. And whereas cam plants separate it in time, day versus night, c4 plants, which include corn, sorghum, a bunch of other tropical grasses, they separate it in space, they actually have a two layer photosynthesis system. There's the outer layer, which captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, sticks it onto this c4 compound, and then shuttles it into an interior place where it then gets released. And the whole point of this is that that makes the local concentration of carbon dioxide around this Rubisco enzyme we talked about much, much higher than it would be if you were just relying on the atmosphere in general. And this seems to be a much more efficient version of photosynthesis, especially in places where it's like hot and dry, which is why you find a lot of these in tropical areas. And it's why c4 plants like sugar cane, sorghum, maize, corn, they are extremely prolific in terms of making biomass. They can fix a lot of carbon. And there are people working on trying to transfer that photosynthetic mechanism to others of our crops that are not like that. Like rice is a big one I hear about to try to capture that improved photosynthetic efficiency, because the idea is being if you could do this, then without adding any other fertilizer, any more water, anything like that, maybe even less water, you could dramatically increase the yields of these plants and make it easier to feed the planet. What? That's a hard thing to do. Evolution has done it, but evolution has had 10s of millions of years to do that, whether we'll manage it in the next 20 or 30, I don't know. Brian  37:23   It's only in some grasses, right? Are there other things besides grasses that do it? Jason  37:27   Well, it's mostly grasses monocots, but it has been evolved multiple times. Oh, right. So I just looked up a paper, and according to this paper, which we can cite, it says that c4 photosynthesis evolved 32 times in dicot, not even grasses, and then another 16 times in the monocots, which are grasses and some other relatives. So it hurt a lot Brian  37:51   of times. I had no idea so bad I've been so, wow. Okay, well, I mean, I'm a microbiologist, that's my excuse. Jason Wallace  38:03   Well, I have a question, and this, I think would go really well for Matt about ecology, because in the game, you've got two of the three things you need for photosynthesis, well represented. You've got water and you've got CO2, and then light is just kind of assumed to be there. But I don't know about CO2. I assume it's relatively evenly distributed over the world, but I know water and light are not how does that affect the kind of plants that we see out in the world? Speaker 2  38:28   Yeah, great question. I've always assumed it's more or less an even distribution. You know, you get into aquatic systems and things change, but you know, you think about the major limitations of that light and that water especially, and you start looking at the kinds of plants that occur in a desert versus a tropical rainforest, and there's exceptions to all of these rules, right? Biology is messy, and plants make it even messier, but having to be able to access those in a readily available way, or to be able to store them really changes that structural component of a plant, like you had said, when they go foraging for the the essential aspects of what makes plants possible, they have to grow. And so in a lot of cases, especially in dry environments, you'll see highly specialized root systems, either deep tap roots or some of my favorite are these specialized rooting structures like you see in the Proteas, for instance, in Australia and South Africa, are these roots that create habitat for specific types of fungi. And whereas a plant has kind of big cells, by comparison, bigger organs, fungi are these just super, super small hyphae that can cover so much more area of the soil. And so by partnering with these symbiotic fungi, they can gain access to so much more in trade for these carbohydrates. Now you see that other where other places in the globe, but then you think of like a very water rich environment where it's readily available, and you get trees that grow 100, 200 300 feet. And you know, the limitations of it are more about competition for light. And that's another thing I really like to talk about, too. Is light is such an important resource. If there wasn't competition among plants, it'd be a pretty uniform sized forest or grassland out there. And then, you know, you see in this sort of interim the rain shadows, where these grasslands, I love thinking about North America in this context, because right off of the rain shadow of the Rockies, you have the plains, the high like that short grass sort of element, where even the grasses kind of have to be a little bit more sensible about how much they're putting out, because above ground tissues need a lot of water, need a lot of nutrients. The closer you get to like the Mississippi the east, where that rain shadow kind of relaxes, you get the tall grass prairies where, you know, it's a sea of grass, you can get lost in these ecosystems. And then, you know, you get farther away on the East Coast, you get forests again. So it's really you think about that. It's that physical component of the plant can tell you a lot about the environment that it's growing in. And it all really comes back down to access to light, to water, to nutrients. Brian  40:52   That's Oh, the astute listener, those fungi. Those would be the mycorrhiza fungi, I assume, yes, yes. So those are from when we discuss undergrove so it all ties together, folks. And I've got a question Jason Wallace  41:04   for you, Matt, because this is something I remember hearing, and I think you may be able to confirm it. So I've heard that as far as like, light scarcity, so some plants that live in the understory of forests where they have to deal with a lot of taller things intersepting the light that they'll actually have layers of like pigments and colors on the bottom of their leaves to bounce the light back up so they get a second chance to absorb Is that true? Matt  41:25   I've heard a lot of debate, you know, especially like purple undersides, as to what role that's playing. There's a lot of debate around like bouncing the light back up, or protecting from those rare instances where, like, a sun fleck hits your leaf, right? If you're so used to shade, and then all of a sudden, this intense, direct sunlight hits you. One thing I will say is, if you pick up Dr David Lee's book about plant pigments, he does talk about different aspects of it, like variegation and different structures, different kinds of and intensities of chlorophyll and other pigments can really help with that. So I think there's a lot of elements of that that are very true, because you can really look at like the functional traits, these, these aspects, the pigmentation, the size, the shape of the leaf, and tell a lot about where a plant's growing. And you can kind of start picking out the shade lovers over the high sun plants in that context. So I think there's a lot of nuance to it, but you're definitely on the right track in many instances, Jason  42:14   with all this cellulose is being fixed. And I looked up the number, it's 157 billion tons of carbon get fixed every year by plants worldwide. Is the current best estimate, with all this carbon being fixed. What is the weirdest thing that you know of that plants do with that carbon they're making that they're fixing into cellulose or something else? Matt  42:34   Great One, and it's hard in the sense of like, oh yeah. Now I got to think about that a little bit more. And the one I came up with, and I think if you gave me another week, it would be a big competition in my brain for what comes out of my mouth first. But produce heat. I think that's one of the strangest things plants do, is produce heat, because you talk about weird world sort of stuff that we don't apply to plants, and heat production is generally not one of them. And there's many different pathways that plants do this. But by using some of those starches, some of those sugars, like things like certain aroids, skunk cabbage being a really common one, especially if you're in like Northeastern North America, it uses a lot of those stored starches to go through a metabolic pathway where the mitochondria kind of kicks in, into high gear for a certain period of time, and they produce heat in and around their flowers, which helps kind of melt through the snow. They're very early bloomer, like pretty much before most snow melts in a good snow year, and they produce these volatile organic compounds that kind of smell skunky and mushroomy. And they they there's a lot of you know, thought that they the heat helps kind of diffuse that out into the environment so that they can attract their pollinators, which are fungus gnats. In other cases, like there is a species of philodendron that was studied that it uses fats, which is kind of a weird thing. You don't think about fats in the plant kingdom very much, but this one uses some sort of alternative pathway through the mitochondria to burn these fat tissues, which, again, is coming from the carbon that these are producing through photosynthesis. And it hits such an intensity and produces so much heat that for the short window of time that it's doing this, its metabolic rate is comparable to that of a hummingbird, which what here's a plant doing something on par with one of the highest metabolic rates, I think maybe even the highest in the animal kingdom, which, that's insane. Yeah, it's wacky, mind blowing. It's a it's a shot in the pan, right? Like it is a short period of time when they're doing this. But this is a tropical plant growing in the canopy of a highly competitive environment, with a lot of other plants doing things to attract pollinators. There's a lot of competition. Let's be the weirdest we can right? Evolution has selected a plant that can kind of do what it needs to do for a short window of time. And you know that reproductive benefit outweighs the cost of producing, storing and burning fats at the rate of a hummingbird. Brian  44:52   That's fascinating. That's really cool. Love it. Let's do our nitpick corner. Nitpick corner, again, is a chance. Chance for us to just look at the game, look at the representation, and just be like, yes, but, or, well actually, to, you know, the game show on dropout or, and again, you don't have to nitpick if you don't want to. I think Jason and I played this recently, and I think we both may have picked out one thing in particular that sort of caught our attention. This is more of a gameplay nitpick. In the game, you have this side board that which is indicating your you know your plant. It's where you're growing your root and your shoot. When you're playing, you invest early in that growth, in growing your root, growing your shoot, to get your resources. You need plant hormones to do that, and you need to spend some resources after you've grown your root and your shoot. You never do that ever again. Jason  45:40   Yeah, there's like, two spaces on the board that just become useless as soon as you have gone all the way down those tracks, which is just kind of weird. Brian  45:47   It's like your plant evidently has one leaf and one root, which I know that there is that one plant that only makes the one giant leaf, but I don't think that's this plan. Jason  45:55   That's a metaphorical simplification. It's probably lots of different ones. It's like choosing different architectures or whatever. But it is odd that from a gameplay perspective, that there's an entire section of the board that once you hit it, you stop interacting with it. I had Brian  46:10   extra plant growth hormones that I just didn't need, didn't use, couldn't get rid of, and didn't get me any points. Speaker 2  46:17   Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out. It is a weird, sort of anticlimactic element of the game, where you can kind of go in and then if, once you've played it, I'm sure you kind of get wise to that. But right out of the gate, like, I'm gonna grow and wait, that's it. I'm done. So in a way, it kind of peters it out. And I don't know there are determinant plants, there is a limit. But, you know, I go to games to have fun first, and education can be a happy second component of that, but that, I think it was a little weird. Jason  46:45   I think an easy partial fix would be for some of the cards that you can buy to have hormone costs, because then you have something to do. Now, that said genius games tries to stay honest to the science, like, if the only thing plant hormones do is grow a plant, well then you're kind of limited in what you can do. And I'm actually not a plant physiologist, so I don't know what else plant hormones are used for. Brian  47:07   Oh, well, they're there. They do everything but, but we don't need to get into that, but I can tell you another way they could have fixed it is, look, there are plenty of games where you could open up a new worker at a certain point. I want to open up a new shoots. I want to open up a new roots. That would add a lot of interesting complexity to the game if I because I went through, for instance, I went for shallow roots, so I got a great early reward, but it didn't pay off in the end. But once I go down that route, very realistically, plants don't grow backwards, but I could never grow a second root. Matt  47:36   I don't know why. Yeah, I think for all of the effort to make this game look good. It could have, you could have shrunk that board and then added like components that you could add to it, sort of like, you know, its own little separate board. But if you made more space for it, you could have done that. And I think it would have been more true to the strategy of being a plant, and had a lot more, like jumping off points, if education was more the goal there. Brian  47:59   Ooh, yeah, imagine if, instead of buying the cell component cards, you're actually buying new organs that you get to kind of like lay out to make your plants. That would be fun. Jason Wallace  48:09   It would be, I think I actually do prefer this to cytosis, because it is more mechanically complex than more ways to go out and when this is just the one thing was like that just feels a little strange, but the rest of it, I think, is quite well done. And notice none of us are bringing up science nitpicks, because genius games includes an entire booklet telling us about all the science in this game and where they made compromises in order for the sake of gameplay. Brian  48:31   So I they even mentioned plant pathogens twice, which is way more than you would usually hear about them. Matt  48:38   Yeah, I do. I think I do, and it's more of like a philosophical science nitpick, and it's just the element of, like, what is the main competition of this game? And yes, it was just, it's odd to me, because building a cell wall now I again, I'm a huge fan of competition as a component of all aspects of life. I think it gets kind of poo pooed, because we want to all get along as humans. So we're like, no plants get along. No, they don't. They're competing with each other. But I think the competition within the self, the organism, we could kind of calm that one down a little bit. And I don't think cell walls is the most competitive process of a plant's life cycle. And so again, I think we'd be changing the game a lot to kind of accommodate that. And I just thought it was weird to focus on the cell wall. I'm not a game designer too, so I want to give these people the credit that they're due for, like, creating something out of knowing they were making it a sequel. But, yeah, building a cell wall doesn't seem very competitive, or at least from a scientific perspective, to me Brian  49:34   in Cytosis Jason and I, because I agree, both of these games kind of have the biggest problem of, who am I as the player? What am I? What is my role? Jason Wallace  49:43   It's the central metaphor, like, Okay, what exactly am I playing in this like, which is not necessary, but it's one of the things that does help you kind of grok it a little Brian  49:51   bit better. So in Cytosis, we decided, Oh, I'm a transcription factor, and my little workers are kinesins. In fact, we designed little kinesin the little motor Proteins that look like Mickey's brooms from Fantasia, that kind of go around and walk around and do all the work inside the cell. It's like, okay, we are competing transcriptional programs trying to do different things inside the cell. That completely breaks for cellulose. There's no way to make that work, because you're trying to do the same thing, right? You're literally, you're, competing with each other to do one thing. It's, it's very strange. Jason  50:24   I know maybe you're some sort of master regulator, or we're probably stretching it too far. It's like, if we're trying, we're trying to force a unifying metaphor on this game, when the reality is that in order for it to be a game, it just had to be kind of like this, right? Yeah. Matt  50:38   And I, at its core, I do want to kind of celebrate the idea that it's teaching you, at least in some aspects, trade offs, right? Like, not everything is this infinite generator, not everything can be optimized in every way, shape or form. Jason Wallace  50:50   Cytosis was definitely the first game, and I think it was, it was successful. And then the thought was, well, how can we do this for plant cells, which I am going to applaud them for, because, again, most people don't even think about plants. So I am very happy that they decided to take on that challenge. And I'm actually very happy with the level it came out, which maybe this is the point where we transition to grades. Brian, Brian  51:12   Let's do grades. Let's talk about so we are we are professors. We give our games grades. We give it a grade on science accuracy, and we give it a grade on fun. We'll just kind of do those back to back. And Jason, why don't you go ahead and lead us out on this conversation? Jason Wallace  51:27   Okay, for science accuracy, I'm going to give it a solid A so again, my metric for this is basically, does it try? Does it show accurate science? Is it, especially if it's honest about where it makes compromises, and does it succeed at showing what it's trying to do? And I think this succeeds. I mean, most genius games come out at A's on science, because they really do their work. There's a lot of stuff in here. It's, again, the sort of thing where, if someone plays this game, and then they go through, like, a plant biology course, and they go through cells like, oh yeah. I recognize that. I understand how the things go together, and even the little things, like you don't have to have the water drop when you take carbon dioxide. It's a kind of interesting mechanic in there, but the fact that it represents a real important trade off for plants is, I think, actually quite nice. And so I think the science is, as usual, top notch for gameplay. I would give it probably an A minus. Like I said, I actually prefer it to cytosis, because I think it's more complex with the fact that you can get protein engines going, the fact that you have control over the length of the game by building the cellulose chain, the fact that the vacuole, we didn't talk about this, but there's actually a little bit of a mini competition there for control of the vacuole, because it gives you an extra action that turn if you manage to get it, it gives several different places to strategize around the one off part, like we mentioned, is that the plant growth just stops mattering partway through the game. But everything else, I think, is more mechanically complex and more mechanically rich. And so I'm probably going to give an A minus, and that minus is only because the plant, the plant growth, stops mattering. Brian  53:04   I think I'm right with you, Jason, I gotta be honest. Probably the same science grade and fun grade. When does anybody talk about the vacuole, let alone make it central to how you think about a plant cell? I use a slightly different metric for the science. It's how much science are you going to learn by accident, just by having fun playing this game? You're going to learn six, water, six. Carbon dioxide makes a sugar. You're going to learn about the vacuole. More than I've ever seen anybody even talk about a vacuole in a lecture, in addition to all the normal sort of stuff about photosynthesis, I love that the growth hormone, they actually made little wooden meeples that look like cytokinin, for no particular reason. They could have picked any hormone. And they did simplify it down to just one that's cytokinin. We looked it up, which Jason  53:53   is a card in the game, actually, which is another incidental learning. All the cards are real plant enzymes, real plant hormones. They have Rubisco in there. I think it's the one that gives you an extra photosynthesis action. It's like that, you're right. There's gonna be a lot of incidental learning happening as you play this game. Yep. Brian  54:10   Sort of like a genius game Specialty is all that sort of learning that happens by along the way. And I agree with you on fun too. I think this is, this is an A minus. This is, I'm trying to decide if this is gonna make it into a regular rotation. I guess the next time we're feeling the inspiration to play cytosis, maybe we're playing cellulose instead. Jason  54:29   Yep, nice. What about you, Matt? What do you think? And you can abstain if you want, because some people aren't comfortable gradings. But oh no, I don't it is fun, kind of judging things. No. Matt  54:39   I mean, this is like, you're you're opting to play this game. You're either subjecting people to it as a tool or at a game night trying to have fun, right? And so I think, yeah, I'm with you guys, a A on science. It's cool to see at least these things associated with each other, getting kind of the basic numbers and and doing that association of trade offs. To me, that's really neat. And that vacuole element, I think, was probably the. Favorite part of this was just how different that kind of it added a layer of strategy. Yeah, it could have been fleshed out a little bit more in terms of that plant growth element. But, you know, you can only put so much into a game that you can play in an evening, right? There's definitely longer versions of this that, over time could be developed. Fun wise, though I'm going to be a little bit more brutal. I would put this at like a B, B minus for me, just in terms of, it's fun, it's different. I again, anything that puts plants first is kind of, in my mind, this felt a little like it could have cooked a little longer. And like I said, it did feel a little sequely to me. Is like, Hey, we gotta, let's make a plant one and a little bit more time maybe thinking about different elements of it. Overall gameplay, average worker placement to me, and I'm personally, if I'm going into a board game night, I'm going there to have fun, if it's educational, that's a bonus. But, you know, at some point it just becomes a lot of words, and I could just see a lot of friends taking strategies just based on that, and to hell with the science behind it. So 100% Yeah, to me, it's fine. It's a solid game. I think it would be really worth having in a classroom, having around, but I don't know if it would become part of my regular rotation as a result. It's fair and Brian  56:11   actually, you helped us with our next transition. You can tell you're a podcaster, because the conversation just moves from point to point to point like this is something that we've started doing this season in particular, what is one of your favorite games? And it doesn't have to be a science game, great question. It doesn't even have to be a board game, but it would be Matt  56:27   cool if it was okay. Well, in that case, one of my favorites, and it's one that I keep coming back to, is it's another plant game. Oddly enough, it's photosynthesis. It was our very first episode. Yeah, I noticed you all had talked about it, so I don't want to step on too many toes, but to me, in terms of, like, the in terms of, like, the pacing, the thought process, the sort of ecosystem construction, I love how every game plays out and how it looks. I think it's kind of like a complete package. For me. In terms of, you can play a couple rounds with your friends, it looks really cool. Never Is it the same time and time again, there's enough strategy that no one kind of fixates and and just becomes that guy at the table right? To me, that's, that's like, I think that's a perfect sort of balance in terms of, you know, different strategies and stuff. Of course, there's plenty of different ways you can flesh that out in other ways, but that's, you know, what expansion packs are for. So that's, that's one of my favorite board Brian  57:17   games, you know, Jason, we haven't even played photosynthesis since that first episode, maybe we need to bring that out. The next time we get together, what do you say? Jason  57:24   Yeah, the problem is that since starting this podcast, we always have this queue of games we need to play. The games we've already played actually take a lower shift in the in the queue. Matt  57:35   Yeah, content creation, that's the devil of it, right? Careful what you do with your hobbies. Jason Wallace  57:41   Yeah, and like, our audience is there, like, all doing, like, the world's tiniest violin gesture. Oh, no, you're doing you get to have fun for as part of your job, poor you. It's like, no, no. It's like, we get it that we are lucky and blessed to be able to have this opportunity. It just helps some unanticipated side effects. Sure,  Brian  57:59   we get to have Matt come on and talk to us about a board game. How fun is that? Matt  58:04   Thanks. I appreciate that. Jason  58:06   So So Matt, as we wrap up, where can people find you? Yeah, I Speaker 2  58:10   am all over the the internet, as in defense of plans. It is mainly a podcast every week, new guest or rehashing some conversations I've had in the past when I need to, but it's, you know, I go to the experts. I'm not an influencer trying to influence you in any way. I'm not just reciting Wikipedia or papers that I've read. I am trying to get the experts on to talk about their science and to humanize it a little bit. It's a very fun kind of conversation. I've learned so much in the process, and I, you know, I hope you enjoy it. If you're into plants, ecology, conservation, that's really where we're at there, that that intersection between those three things, I'm on Instagram quite a bit with just photography and videos quirky. I like to throw in a little bit of the music tastes I have, because, like, that one person that chimes in, they're like, Heck, yeah, that band is awesome. You just made my day, friend. Brian  59:00   You have a very active Instagram, which is all just beautiful pictures of either plants or pieces of plants. Matt  59:06   Yes, yes, I do a lot of I love macro again, plants are these weird at all scales. So yeah, there, and that's pretty much it. I'm not too active on social media for mental health reasons. And you know, it's just wise, yeah, I try, but yeah, that's pretty much it. I have a book. You can get it wherever you get your books. It's in defense of plants and, yeah, just come enjoy the show, and let's celebrate everything plant related. Brian  59:30   Yay, from two plant scientists to another. Matt  59:33   Thank you. No, I appreciate it. This is a really fun idea and concept, and you kind of hit it right where it needs to hit in terms of that fun science combination. I was really stoked to learn about this show, and I can't wait to keep learning about these different games. You're going to introduce me to a bunch of new things I can corner my friends with on the weekends. Jason  59:52   Thank you. All right. Well, thank you. Brian  59:52   Okay, so thanks so much, Matt. We're going to go ahead and cut it there. Have a great month and great games Jason Wallace  59:59   and have fun playing. Dice with the universe and go see some plants. See you. This has been the Brian  1:00:05   gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2026 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.  Transcribed by https://otter.ai

#Oceans #Finspan #OceansNorth #MarineBiology #Interview #BoardGames #Science Summary In this special bonus episode, we talk with Dr. Brynn Devine, one of the science consultants on Finspan. We get to hear what it was like helping the game's development, why monitoring fish and oceans is so crucial, how cold-calling can open surprising doors, and details on many lovely, lovely fish. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 04:16 How Brynn met Finspan 07:37 Being a science consultant 16:37 Balancing accuracy and gameplay 21:20 Favorite fish 25:30 Brynn's great secret 27:36 Wrap-up Links Finspan Designer Diary (where Brynn is specifically thanked) Ocean's North  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Brynn's photo courtesy of Ocean's North Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Brian  0:00   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason Wallace  0:10   In today's bonus episode, we will be interviewing Dr Brynn divine about her role as science consultant for finspan. All right, everyone, welcome back. This is Brian  0:21   Jason. This is Brian, and Jason Wallace  0:23   today we are joined by a very special guest, Dr Bryn Devine, who was one of the science consultants, maybe the science consultant for finspan. I guess we'll find that out. Dr Devine, Brynn, can you please introduce yourself? Brynn  0:34   Yeah, hi, Jason. Hi Brian. Thanks for having me. I'm Brynn Devine. I'm a fish biologist, fish scientist, and was one of three actually marine biologists who were consulting on the finspan game. Brian  0:44   Very cool.  Jason Wallace  0:45   Good to meet you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. When I was reading over the designer diary for finspan, they actually mentioned your name. In fact, it says specifically thanking you for all the endless insights about fish, from their abilities to their fun facts the accuracy of their art. So you apparently made an impression on at least one of the designers of the game. As soon as I read that, I was like, I want to talk to this person. We've had several game creators on this podcast, but we've never had one of the science consultants, one of the people in charge of getting the science right. And so I want to talk about that, but before we get that, let's talk about your credentials. So the internet says that your title is Arctic Fisheries Scientist at Oceans North. Can you tell us a bit about what is Oceans North? And then, what does an Arctic fishery scientist do? Brynn  1:29   Absolutely good questions. Yeah. So I'm currently working for Oceans north. So ocean North is a charitable nonprofit organization that's based here in Canada, and we do a variety of different marine conservation work in partnership with both coastal and indigenous communities across the Canadian Arctic and also the Atlantic region. So my role is Arctic fisheries scientist. Some of my job is providing stakeholder advice on some northern fisheries stocks, but a lot of my job is research based, and I have a long academic science research background, so I really love that aspect of my job. And I get to work with communities to help design science projects and research projects to help answer questions that they may have related to fish and fisheries in their local waters. So for example, I'm currently working on a project tagging sharks up in Nunavut, which is a region in northern Labrador and we're expanding that to look at other species, like cod and salmon, so looking at fish movement. So some of my job is more indoor cat vibes, going to meetings and in the office. And a lot of it, though, is, you know, get to go in the field, get to go to some amazing places, and get to work with really cool fish and really cool people. So  Brian  2:30   it's half indoor cat, half catfish.  Brynn  2:32   Yes, exactly. It's a good mix.  Brian  2:34   How do you tag a shark?  Brynn  2:37   Oh, good question. Well you catch one first. And then we're using satellite tags. So it's a little tag that you put either on their fin or in their muscle, and it stays on the shark for you can program it forever, long you want, but usually up to a year, about Max. And then it collects all the data on where they go, their depth, the temperature they use, and then it pops off the shark and relays all the data.  Brian  2:56   Really, it actually releases from the shark, and you collect it, or it transmits, or how do you Brynn  3:00   It transmit it all through the you like, pre program, the date you want it to release, and then as soon as it gets surface, it dumps it all through the satellite. So I can just sit at my desk here in Canada and I can just download all the information about the shark. It's really cool. Brian  3:12   So the sharks are showing off their cool, new piercing to their friends, and then just randomly, it just pops off  Brynn  3:17   exactly. I like to think it's a little accessory that they get to show off to their friends, and they enjoy having it, but Brian  3:22   that's super cool.  Jason Wallace  3:23   What's the purpose of a lot of this research? Is it all fisheries management, so figuring out appropriate catch, or some of it just basic science. We don't know how this fish, how it works, like, where it lives, what it behaviors, like, I realized in this area that the boundary between basic research and applied research is probably pretty fuzzy, but like, Where does a lot of this fit Brynn  3:41   absolutely so I mean, many regions of the Arctic are notoriously under-sampled. They're just remote. They're seasonally ice covered, so there's just not a lot of information. And for some of these species, like the sharks that we're tagging, they're sharks that are really taking advantage of the warming temperatures up there, and so they're pushing further and further north. And so then people in these communities that maybe they don't often see that that many sharks, but now they're seeing a lot of sharks. And so people in the communities have a lot of questions, how long are they staying? Where are they going? Where are they coming from? Why are we seeing these things? So it's really supporting communities to collect data that then they can have and they can use that data to help monitor their own marine resources and manage their own resources up there. Jason Wallace  4:16   Okay, and then getting more towards the game side of this. How did you get involved with finspin? In the emails beforehand. You said that was not part of your official job. That was something you're doing on the side. But how did you get connected with them? Brynn  4:26   I think it was kind of a weird way to get involved, maybe. But yeah, I guess it was 2021 back during the pandemic. Like many people, we were all playing probably more board games than we've ever played before, just not a lot to do when everything's closed down. I found myself with a group of friends that were really into board games, and one of our favorite games to play was wingspan. We're all biologists, so a bunch of nerds, and it was a really nerdy game to play. I had never seen that game before. Had never come across it, and I was blown away immediately, not only by the scientific detail in the game, like it's so cool how they've integrated that into so many components of the gameplay. And just aesthetically it's stunning, the artwork and everything. I was blown away. Love the game, but maybe after the second or third time playing it, I was like, "guys, you know, what would make this game so much better?", "if all these birds were actually fish? so much better." And I just kept thinking more and more about it, and I feel like I could just see so many similarities and how the game could be played, but also the demographics of the audience. I mean, for birders, you have the classic ornithologists. You have people who like backyard birds and bird feeders, and then you have this huge force of recreational birders that are really into it. And the same for fish, you know, you have ichthyologists like myself, aquarium hobbyists. You have all of these recreational anglers. I get to see the demographics kind of playing well for both groups, and then maybe after one too many glasses of wine, I was like, You know what? I'm going to email the game makers. And so I went on their website, and I just found, I think they had, like, a web portal to contact Stonemaier games. And so I was just like, hear me out. This is why I think this game would work so well for fish. Sent it off like no expectations to ever hear back from anyone. Lo and behold, I had a reply from Jamie Stonemaier, Stonemaier games, I think, like in 12 hours after I sent it. So lovely. And he was like, it's so great to hear from you. Like, I'm gonna let you on in a little secret. Don't tell anyone. It's weird you mentioned that because we're working on an aquatic version of wingspan right now. So I was like, No way. Well, I was like, if you need any like fish people. Let me know. Brian  6:22   I love that you describe yourself as a fish person. She is, in fact, a human I promise.  Brynn  6:27   I am a human. Yeah, they can see me on video.I'm a human.  Jason Wallace  6:29   We keep calling ourselves plant people. Brian,  Brian  6:31   that's true. Okay, okay, legitimate, legitimate. I do not actually photosynthesize  Brynn  6:36   We are people of our nerd realms, but, but yeah. So then and he contacted me back, and he was like, That would be great. I'll put you in touch with our game maker. So, yeah, that was years ago now.  Brian  6:46   What a wicked story. That's so cool that a cold call actually led to this is so. Also not the first time we've heard about how the renaissance of science and science accurate games sort of really comes out of a combination of wingspan of the pandemic.  Brynn  7:01   Yeah. honestly, it's such impressive games, yeah. So I think I really found or contacted them at the exact perfect moment. I think they were early enough in the development of the game, they hadn't really, maybe even thought of, like, what scientists they would bring on to look at the fish facts. And I just kind of inserted myself into that perfect moment. But I'm glad I did. It was really, really fun. Brian  7:20   I guess there's a lesson there. Don't be afraid to just send somebody an email after you've had several glasses of wine, right? Brynn  7:20    Shoot your shot, whatever, like, just put it out there.  Brian  7:20   Jason may disagree. Brian  7:20   I'd say, if there's a lesson to the listener and it's like, Hey, if you have an idea to try, the worst they can do is either say no or just ghost you. Brynn  7:36   That's just it. Yeah, Jason Wallace  7:37   so working on the game, then, what was your role, like, what did you do as a science consultant here?  Brynn  7:43   I was very focused on the science aspect. And as you know, like, if you've played wingspan or finspan that a lot of the science is in the cards. So most of my science support was a little bit helping with some species selection where needed. But once we had sort of the fish, it was mostly helping to make sure that all the details on the cards was correct, fact checking all of the core deck of cards for the fish in the game.  Jason Wallace  8:03   And you've mentioned that there were two other science consultants on them. Did you have some sort of division of labor amongst yourselves, or was it that you were all doing basically the same thing, and they would essentially tally their scientist votes and go with whatever the majority said, like, How'd that work? Brian  8:18   Did they also cold call after several glasses of wine? Brynn  8:21   I don't know how they got involved. Honestly, I didn't have an opportunity to talk to either of them. Brian  8:25   Oh, really? you don't know your counterparts? Brynn  8:27   No, no, I don't. So I'm not sure how they divvied it up. I think they gave us all the opportunity. I think I was probably, I don't say the most annoying, Brian  8:34    enthusiastic,  Brynn  8:38   yes, very like a stickler. And Michael would say the same thing too. I probably was his worst nightmare for most of the game. Brian  8:44   You were being reviewer 2. We need that. Brynn  8:47   I was absolutely Reviewer 2, yeah, but so I'm not sure what the other biologists did or how they got involved, but  Brian  8:53   yeah, well, they were Reviewer 1 and Reviewer 3.  Brynn  8:56   They're like, looks great. Jason Wallace  8:57   Okay, so fact checking, art, coloration, I assume fish sizes, where they live. I know this is one thing. When we were talking about the game on a normal episode, we were surprised, like, the whale sharks were all the way down to the deep, deep benthic zones, until I actually did a Google search, like, oh yeah, they can actually dive down several 1000 meters, apparently,  Brynn  9:17   yeah. And I love to hear that. That's what I want the game to be. I want people to learn cool, new things about fish they didn't know.  Jason Wallace  9:22   So during this process, how much of what you contributed were you able to draw from what you already knew, and how much of it did you have to do a lot of additional research in order to be able to find out about this fish you'd never heard about, or, I guess, given that you're an Arctic fishery scientist, all the tropical fish that showed up like, how much extra work did you have to do for this?  Brynn  9:40   I'm a big fish nerd. I've studied fish for quite some time. I It helps that I did my master's degree in Australia. So I did work for some coral reef fish. Then my PhD was more general deep sea fish focus. I'm working a lot in the Arctic now, but I've had the opportunity to kind of dabble in a lot of different types of fish. But I think, as you both know, the longer you're in academia, it doesn't make you more knowledgeable, it just makes you hyper-knowledgeable about one very specific thing or species. So I absolutely had to do some research. Sure. There were some cards that I could like, no research required. But, I mean, there's something like 15,000 species of marine fish, so I absolutely had to do some research, even things that I felt pretty confident about. I just really wanted to make sure all the information was correct. The last thing I wanted was for someone to find their favorite fish card in the game, and then there'd be some horribly wrong piece of information on the card. The game designers did a lot of work populating a lot of the cards, like, sometimes I would get them and, like, everything's there. So then it was really just going and making sure that everything was correct. And I mean, some of the information, you know, is like, coming from web pages like Wikipedia or other web pages where there wasn't, maybe references to it. So you know, you can't believe everything on the internet. I tried really hard to make sure that everything on the cards, from the depth, the name, the fact everything was corroborated, not just with web page material, but also scientific references. So I was digging pretty deep in the peer-reviewed literature. I've luckily amassed quite a few fish textbooks over the years. So I had a lot of materials to look but I was making sure that what's on the cards was present in multiple sources, but in like, citable, peer reviewed sources. Brian  11:10   So then there's a secret references cited section for Finspan. we don't know about. Brynn  11:15   It's all in my head.  Jason Wallace  11:16   I was gonna ask if you still have those notes around, because, yeah, that would be fascinating. We actually gushed over a game earlier this season called primates, where they actually have the references cited section at the end of the rule book. Every single card has a reference for it. Brian  11:30   Really, really cool. So it's, it's fun to know that. That's true for Finspan, too. And I love the respect of just thinking it's like, oh, wait a second. Every one of these cards, there's someone out there in the world who this is their favorite fish. They love this fish. Brynn  11:43   Yeah, I hope that's the case, but yeah. And some, like some of the fish in the game. I mean, there's some very obscure deep sea fish in it, which is great, but I mean, some of the species, they may only be known from a handful of specimens. So sometimes it took a really deep dive in the literature to find certain information or confirm certain information, but also to find a good visual for the artist to do their rendition for the card, some of these fish, you could search of specific species of like, say, Barbeled Dragonfish. And maybe the first whole page of google images will be a dragon fish, but not the species you're looking for at all, because there may not even be good photos of a lot of these fish. So sometimes it took a bit of a deep dive to find, like, a good quality illustration or photo for the artist use and make sure everything was accurate. Brian  12:22   Pun intended or pun not intended? Brynn  12:24    of course, intended. Jason Wallace  12:26   Okay, so in this process, do you have some examples of where you had some sort of influence on the game, on the art, or on a factoid or something that you're particularly proud of?  Brynn  12:39   Yeah. I mean, I'm so pleased with how the whole game turned out and how well it's being received. I feel like everyone seems to be really enjoying it, and I'm happy I got to be involved, I guess, in terms of what I'm proud of, I mean, poor Michael O'Connell, again, he was the game designer that I worked most with, and I, again, was probably his worst nightmare when it came to  Brian  12:57   We're going to have talk to him and see if that's true Brynn  13:00   Yeah, talk to him. He will, He will corroborate all of this. Yeah, I was merciless in my resolve when it came to correcting the fish information. And he was so patient and understanding with, like, my fish neurosis. But it really helped that he was really supportive in making the game as scientifically accurate as possible as well. And that really helped. I think, you know, they appreciated how wingspan really achieved that. You know, even early on, they were kind of thinking of ways to make it different than wingspan. There, there were some suggestions of like, oh, well, do we even need the scientific names on the cards? We even need the fish facts on the cards? And I was like, Absolutely, you need to have, that's the best part of all of these games. You know, like to learn about the things that you're playing is really cool. And it was good. Like, Michael also was really supportive. So I think fighting to keep things like that in the game, and I'm happy, like, obviously they're all still in there, but yeah, I'm proud of that all the fish cards turned out the way they did. I haven't gotten any angry emails about incorrect information forwarded to me by Stonemaier games, so I'm hoping that is a good sign. I'm also really proud of the diversity of fish that's in the game. I think a lot of, like, I don't know, things you see with the ocean, it's often the beautiful coral reef fish, you know, that everyone loves looking at. But there's some really cool fish in this game that most people probably haven't encountered. And I appreciated that Michael, like, there was no fish too weird or bizarre for me to recommend. Like, Michael loved that. So I got to kind of insert some of these weird fish into the game that I'm really happy about. I mean, because it just, it makes me so sad. There could be people walking around out there that I've never heard of a grideye fish Brynn  13:00   That there are a fish full of knives. Brynn  13:03   Yeah exactly like or a little deep sea lizard fish. It just makes me sad. People could go their whole lives without knowing about them, yeah,  Brian  13:26   althoughI wouldn't want to encounter one, because,  Brynn  14:09   oh no, they're They're tiny.  Brian  14:09   I know, I know I'm way bigger than them, but they're so pointy.  Brynn  14:09   Oh, they're so cute. Brian  13:00   Okay, I'm gonna ask you the same question I asked our marine biologist on the finspan episode. What is it about the deep ocean that breeds nightmares like, why are so many deep sea fish just congealed nightmare fuel. Brynn  15:01   Jason, how dare you? First of all, hey, extreme pressure breeds some weird stuff. I don't know also, I mean, there's no light down there, so no one can see these horrors. Really,  Brian  15:09   okay. This is the same answer we got before.  Jason Wallace  15:11   Two scientists have said this must be just correct Brian  15:14   It relieves the selective pressure of having to look good Brynn  15:16   Yeah, that's not something anyone thinks about cause they cant see each other. Brian  15:18   it's more important to be able to eat. Brynn  15:23   Exactly who was the marine biologist you talked to?  Jason Wallace  15:25   So that was Emily Melvin. She's a PhD candidate at Duke University. Brian  15:30   Yeah, we kind of go back and forth. We talked to scientists, we talked to game creators, we talked to other science communicators. We'll talk to anybody who will actually answer our emails Basically,  Brynn  15:39   that's great. Well, I hope Emily didn't have any fish facts that she was upset about in the game.  Brian  15:44   Did you want to know sort of what came up in our conversation? Brynn  15:47   Yeah, sorry, I'm fully derailing this interview But  Brian  15:49   So in wingspan, you know, you can have movement between the environments. The thing that is sort of like, you know, with the verticality of finspan, is just that the fish don't move. The fry move, but the fish are kind of stuck there. So like, I can stick my whale shark in the twilight zone, and that's where it will be for the rest of the game. So that was the only thing. And like, we know it's a game, we know that you're making concessions to gameplay. So we have our little nitpick corner that's  Brynn  16:14   Fair take Jason Wallace  16:15   to be fair. The biggest nitpick that our other expert had is nothing to do with any of the fish color. That's true. The meeples are divers and not submersibles going down to the bottom of the ocean.  Brian  16:16   We did talk a lot about how you could send a diver to the bottom of the ocean, but not alive. You couldn't. Brynn  16:32   They'd be dead, yeah, yeah, that's that's fair.  Jason Wallace  16:35   So actually, Brian, so you bringing that up about like the fish being stuck there actually brings up my next question is, so your major goal was to try to make the science accurate. But in this area, with games, also happens with movies television, sometimes you have to make compromises in order to make a good product. A game that is scientifically perfect and really boring is not going to go anywhere. So are there any places where you were involved in having to make that compromise and saying, like, Okay, this is something we can bend in. This is something we cannot or was that mostly on the game designer side? Brian  17:07   Well, it sounds like you fought for keeping the scientific names. So thank you. Brynn  17:11   Yeah, thanks. Yeah. I fought for some things and, but, but yeah, like, a lot of the game design that was not my realm. So I wasn't really, I think early on, Michael reached out to me with questions about different aspects of the gameplay, of like, how science could be integrated, but it was very little and very like, on some very specific things in terms of compromise. I mean, yeah, like, again, I didn't have much control over gameplay aspects, but I will say, I think that there was a strong desire to make the game a little less complex than maybe some of the other span games to make it a little more approachable to a wider audience. And so I think they were really trying to find a balance of making it different from wingspan, but not too different from wingspan for all the people who really love wingspan. But ultimately, I think then through that, some of the science became a little more abstract. You know, I think, for example, the fish eggs is a good I think early on, I had lots of questions from the game designers of what are the different types of fish eggs, and does this fish egg makes sense for this species? And I think it just became way too hard to be descriptive, just because there's so many different reproductive strategies for fish that it was impossible. So ultimately, like simplifying it to just the fish egg that's in the game now, I think makes a lot of sense for like, gameplay.  Brian  18:18   So did you get to talk to them about how some sharks give live birth? Brynn  18:22   Oh, endlessly. Yeah. I'm like, you can't make that fish have this egg because they don't have that egg. Yeah again, that's all part of being a stickler and a nightmare. I think a big thing too, like just the overall concept in the game of, like, a bigger fish eat smaller fish. I maybe had to personally compromise, because I'm like, whale sharks, cant eat, blue Marlins Michael!  Brian  18:42   literally, almost the exact same thing that we talked about as well is just, again, look, we love these games. We love what they're trying to do. The nitpick corner is literally just that. It's just nitpicks. We're not bashing games based on these little things that we know are compromises. Brynn  18:54   Exactly yeah. So I think my like science heart, I wanted it to be like everything is exactly that's not realistic in gameplay. So yeah, I think it's great what they did with it. And so then I just kind of focus more on what was less abstract, science wise, which was the information on the fish cards.  Brian  19:12   One of the things that I love about finspan. Have you ever played the game photosynthesis? You said you're a biology nerd, so maybe you have? Brynn  19:18   no but it's on my list. I'm dying to play it. I've heard really good things about that. Brian  19:22   You should get it, again. It's more of a forestry game, but whatever, that's okay.  Jason Wallace  19:25   You should also listen to our episode on it was our very first one. That's true. Brian  19:29   Listen to all of our episodes first of all. Brynn  19:31   I listened to some.  Brian  19:32    But photosynthesis, you're you get this wonderful feeling, this tactile feeling of this grove filling with and growing with trees. And in finspan, I really do feel like you're just populating this ocean, you know, all the little fry swimming around,the eggs. And it's just so satisfying at the end, when you get to look at your tableau, and it seems so full of life. So for vibes alone,  Brynn  19:53   for fish vibes alone,  Brian  19:54   that's right, it's very fishy. Jason Wallace  19:57   I want to go back a bit to the fish eating fish. So. So I guess fun science fact for our audience, reason a whale shark can't eat a Marlin is because the whale shark's throat is only like, what the size of a quarter, because it eats krill and such,  Brynn  20:09   exactly.  Brian  20:09   Is that true? Oh my god, it's a huge funnel. What kind of pressure has to go through the throat? Jason Wallace  20:15   So my next question is, are there examples of the opposite? Are there smaller fish that eat bigger fish. The only ones we could come up with on the episode are all mammals that gang up and eat larger fish. Are there actual fish, fish that do this? Brynn  20:28   Well, Jason, I'm so glad you asked. Let me tell you about some of the nightmares in the deep ocean, because this is absolutely what goes on there in the dark that you can't see. What comes to mind is this fish called the Black Swallower. It is notorious for having this, like, stomach that can extend. It's insane when they when they fed, it looks like they have this giant, little pot belly. They can eat fish up to, like, 20 times their body length. Brian  20:52   Oh, my goodness.  Brynn  20:52   I mean, I think, I mean in the deep sea, like, when you find something swimming by, you got to take advantage of it, whether it's bigger than you or not. So, yeah, I think in the deep sea especially, there's a lot of examples of fish that can eat, like any frog fish, angler fish too, like they can really distend their stomach to expand and accommodate prey much bigger than themselves. Brian  21:10   So they're kind of doing the snake thing a little bit.  Brynn  21:11   They're just Yeah, exactly, yeah. Brian  21:13   That's really neat. Jason Wallace  21:15   So I'm about to do something very cruel. Brynn  21:16   Oh no, oh no.  Brian  21:16   You know what this question is going to be, right? Jason Wallace  21:20   Brynn, what is your favorite fish? No, either in the game or in real life.  Brian  21:27   Okay, I'm just gonna say we always ask people this. But I do want to caveat. It's okay if you feel like you can't choose one, you can just choose a favorite fish, and that's actually fine. And also they don't know, so we won't tell them. They don't listen to the podcasts. Brynn  21:43   Yeah, this is like the hardest question. I get it a lot. I mean, I just adore so many fish. It's impossible to have a favorite. I will say there were favorites in general of mine that I was like, Oh, this needs to be in the game, so I'll maybe stick with those Greenland shark.  Brian  21:56   Very cool Brynn  21:58    beloved species of mine. I've worked on them for many years now. So that was of like number one needed to be in the game for me, Jason Wallace  22:03   is that the longest lived vertebrate? Am I remembering that right?  Brynn  22:04   Yeah, we think it's the longest lived vertebrate. Used to be the bowhead whale for a long time, but there was an aging study that came out in 2016 that thinks that they could live 300 years or more. There's so little uncertainty with radiocarbon the deep sea and aging methods, but super long lived, really cool deep sea fish. That's one of the sharks that we were tagging up in Nunavut as well. So that one absolutely had to be in Oar fish was another favorite of mine. Brian  22:29   Also very cool. You're picking all of the top ones. Brynn  22:32   Thank you. Excellent fish, longest bony fish. Also inspiration, possibly for some of the sea monster tales of a long time ago, the sea serpents, Brian  22:40   and also the sea monsters in Subnautica, the video game Subnautica, supposedly Brynn  22:45   love a good Oar fish, and then literally any deep sea angler fish, love deep sea Angler Fishes. I did notice there were several of those. Yeah, several of them. And not just like the cute little round ones are great, but the really funky ones, like the Wolftrap angler or like the really toothy sea devils, so cool. And they're ones that I think a lot of people don't realize the diversity of deep sea anglerfish. You often just see the kind of little round ones, but they're all just absolutely perfect. So yeah, I'm glad that there's a lot of really out there anglerfish in the game. Brian  23:12   Well, I was gonna kind of try to help constrain this question. Be like, okay, one in the deep sea, one open ocean, one coral reef. But you kind of did that already a little bit. But evidently, not the coral reefs. Not into those? Brynn  23:23   I do. I love a good coral maybe the mandarin fish and coral reefs. Oh, I don't think I know that one. What's it look like? They're tiny and they're beautiful, like every color of the rainbow, gorgeous little fish. Brian  23:33   So are you friends or enemies with the invertebrate folks? Brynn  23:39   Enemies for life. No, I admire any invert specialist because, I mean, if I think the diversity of fish is insane, like the inverts are just It's wild. This is a feud I'm not aware of. I know of like Team fish team bird feuds in the past, but I haven't heard of the fish vs. invert, verts vs. inverts? Brian  23:59   It's just different specialties. I mean, we were speculating on what some expansions for finspan would be. And I think having the mollusk or the crustacean expansions would make a lot of sense.  Brynn  24:09   Yeah, those would be cool. Like, pick your poison, right? There's all kinds of things going on down there. Jason Wallace  24:13   Well, I think we're gonna start wrapping this up. Okay, so before we wrap up, like, is there anything else that you really want our listeners to know about fish, about the Arctic, about fisheries management, anything like this. I mean, you've got a platform, you might as well take advantage of it.  Brynn  24:27   Oh my gosh, that's a tough question. I guess, in terms of the game, I hope people see the game and see the insane diversity of fish that are in the ocean, you know, and really respect that. I mean, this is, you could think this is only a fraction of what species are actually out there. And that's like, just the species that we know. I guess in terms of biodiversity, there's still so much of the ocean that is unexplored that goes for the deep sea, many regions in the Arctic as well. And I guess just to drill home, what all of us know now climate change. I mean, I work in a place in the Arctic where people there see changes that are happening so fast. And we don't really have the baseline data that we need to really detect those changes, but also know how that will impact communities, people's livelihoods, access to food, and just how ecosystems will shift over time. So I guess just just a call for more conserving biodiversity and studying what we need to study to know how climate change will really impact things moving forward. I don't know if it was a good answer to that?  Brian  25:21   Yeah, I think so. I did want to ask though, Brynn, because we got your favorite fish, and I can assume, is Finspan your favorite game, or is there another game you wanted to sort of call out? Brynn  25:30   Okay, I hesitate to even say this, because it's going to be so embarrassing, but I I haven't actually had a chance to play Finspan all through I know, I know, and Michael would like kill me if you heard me say that. But I want to be clear, it's not for lack of trying. They sent me a copy. So nice. I bring it to my nerd friends house with like, the intent to play. Brian  25:49   What kind of nerd friends are these? Brynn  25:50   fish nerds, conservation nerds, but we go to play it, but then I open the game, and everyone's just like, oh my god, the cards are beautiful, and, like, the game is beautiful, and then we just sit around. Brian  26:00   You can't get people to play because they're too busy looking at te cared  Brynn  26:02   We're just like, looking at all the cards. Like, oh, this fish is so cute. This was so cool. Like, read this fact, read this fact, and we literally sit there for an hour doing that, and then it's like, momentum dies. Brian  26:13   And if you really don't want us to put that on, we won't. But if you would let us put that on, that is so amazing. Brynn  26:21   But it is like, I mean, the game is, I've heard such great things, and I will continue to bring the game to parties unsolicited, to try to force people to play it. But so far, people are just so taken by the beauty of the cards and the games and just the fish in general, which is which I love. And I could sit in a circle just looking at Fish cards, talking about fish for all of time. So yeah, Jason Wallace  26:39   well, if your job ever takes you near Atlanta, Georgia Then you know two people here that where we'd be happy to play finspan with you. Brian  26:46   Yeah, come to Dragon Con. Dragon Con is great. Brynn  26:49   What is Dragon Con? Brian  26:50   Dragon Con is a huge pop culture convention. It's held every year in Atlanta. It's really all nerd culture, but it also has all these tracks. So for instance, Jason and I volunteer in the science track, and we have panels about all different scientific topics. Jason Wallace  27:03   We've done slimes, we've done reproduction, we did Brian  27:07   a whole panel about grass, and there were like 70 people sitting there listening to us talk about grass. Brynn  27:12   Oh, my God, this sounds so cool. Yeah. I mean, I'm based in Halifax, and we have halicon here, which is like our little mini Comic Con. Yeah, they have like, a whole board game room, and I was really excited. This year, they had Finspan in there, and there's some people playing it, so that's cool. Jason Wallace  27:29   So your lack of playing is not for lack of trying. You have tried very hard, Brynn  27:30   yes, tried so hard, and I'll continue to keep trying, and hopefully we'll finally play it.  Brian  27:35   This has been really fun. It's such an interesting process to actually talk to a science advisor on this because they don't usually do that. Brynn  27:42   Yeah I mean, a lot of games don't have enough science in them to probably need one,  Brian  27:45   Even the ones that do. I remember we did the game Atiwa, which is about fruit bats in Uganda, based on an actual study. We talked to the scientists who's study inspired the game. They didn't talk to her until they already had the game done. It's just not part of the culture. It's just not part of the culture.  Brynn  28:00   Yeah, I guess you just got to start cold emailing game makers and just insert yourself into their games. Brian  28:05   Well, I mean, hey, what do you think Jason and I are trying to do at this point? Jason Wallace  28:09   We cold email scientists half the time, so actually most of the time. So Brynn, are there places where you'd like people to look you up? Do you have any social media handles or anything like that? Brynn  28:19   Yeah, you can oceans north. We have a has a great website, and we post stories to keep people updated on some of the works we do and a lot of the different places we do work. So can certainly look there for our ongoing tagging work up in the north. Jason Wallace  28:33   Yeah, and I saw even that Stonemaier made a donation to oceans north as part of their production to that, and like one or two other charities. Oh, did they it was listed in their designer diary or possibly the rule book. I don't remember which that they'd made a donation to oceans north and like one or two other charities as part of the creation of the game.  Brian  28:50   That's so nice. Brynn  28:51   I remember they had asked for some advice on, like, what ocean charities would be good to donate to. I didn't want to self promote, so I didn't recommend oceans north, but I glad that they did. Jason Wallace  29:00   That's very nice. Well, I think we're gonna call it there. Brynn, thank you so much for coming on. This has been a delightful conversation.  Brynn  29:07   Thank you. for having me Jason Wallace  29:08   Thank you for doing the good work up there, learning more about Greenland sharks and all the other stuff going on underneath the Arctic ice. And listeners, thank you for listening. Have a great month and great games. Jason Wallace  29:18   And as always, have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya!, Jason Wallace  29:19    this has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2026, listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to game with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.  Transcribed by https://otter.ai  

#Finspan #StonemaierGames #ElizabethHargrave #Wingspan #ScienceCommunication #Oceans #Fish #BoardGames #Science Summary In this episode we discuss the game "Finspan" by Stonemaier Games, and are joined by Emily Melvin, a PhD candidate in marine science at Duke University. In a game that's basically "Wingspan but with fish", we talk about the game differs from its predecessor, all whole bunch of different fish, what IS a fish, deep-sea nightmares, lovely bioluminescence, ecosystems, invasive species, and just how much we still don't know about our oceans. So take a dive with us into the undersea world of fish and Finspan, and let's have fun playing dice with the Universe. Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 01:41 - Fish bones and flatfish 04:17 - Overview of Finspan 10:02 - What is a fish? 13:41 - Fish eating fish 17:31 - Ocean dimensionality 23:31 - Young and schools 29:14 - Deep-ocean nightmares 32:46 - Bioluminescence and venom 36:35 - Threats to the ocean 43:46 - Nitpicks and constructive criticism 50:14 - Final grades 55:05 - Sign-offs Links Finspan (Stonemaier Games)  and on Tabletopia Single origin of flat fish (Nature Genetics) Seas the Day (Marine podcast from Duke University) Emily Melvin's professional website and Bluesky profile Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Brian  0:06   hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about science behind some of your favorite games. Jason Wallace  0:11   Today we'll be talking about finspan by Stonemaier games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason. This is Brian, and today we are joined by a special guest, Emily Melvin from Duke University. Emily, will you please introduce yourself for our audience? Emily  0:27   Yeah, hi. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Emily Melvin, and I am a PhD candidate in the marine science and conservation program at Duke's Marine Lab, which is in Beaufort, North Carolina. And I study issues of policy and governance. So broadly speaking, my work focuses on the relationships between humans and the marine environment. And I also am an avid scuba diver. I'm a licensed open water scuba instructor, so a lot of my knowledge relating to this game comes from my experience as a diver as well. Brian  0:57   Oh, that's extra cool.  Jason Wallace  0:59   Yes, you got hands on experience. Brian  1:01   That's right. You can talk to us about how when we use the divers to represent the actions.  Emily  1:05   Oh, I have thoughts about that.  Brian  1:06   I'll bet you do  Jason Wallace  1:10   all right. And one thing we've started asking guests recently, do you have a favorite game you like to play? Speaker 1  1:15   It is really hard to pick a favorite game, because I There are so many different categories, but lately, I've been really into playing Ark Nova on Board Game Arena. So I don't have the physical game because I don't know that I have anyone who will play a game that long with me, but I like to play that one online Brian  1:32   Ark Nova is on our list for this season, so we've never played it. I'm looking forward to it. We don't have a copy of it yet, do we?  Jason Wallace  1:37   No, so we'll probably be doing Board Game Arena too.  Brian  1:40   Oh, okay, okay,  Jason Wallace  1:41   all right. So we like to start off with a fun science fact. And Emily, we always give our guests first choice. Do you have some fun science fact that you know or that you picked up recently you'd like to share with our audience? Speaker 1  1:52   Sure, one thing that I came across as I was preparing for this podcast was thinking about the fact that actually fish, bony fish, like a salmon, for example, are more closely related to humans than they are to a shark. So we can talk a lot about that a little bit more later, if you'd like,  Brian  2:06   Isn't it like, technically, phylogenetically, we are fish. If you there's no way to draw a grouping around fish that doesn't include us? Jason Wallace  2:13   The word fish is a pretty tough word to define, because of that phylogeny, they're not necessarily grouped together in a way that scientifically makes a lot of sense So  Jason Wallace  2:22   yes, this is one of my questions for later. So we will get into that.  Brian  2:25   Fantastic. So I found out a thing about flounders or flat fish. So these are in the order, you'll have to tell me how I said this wrong. It's Carangiformes. Unknown Speaker  2:35   I am not great with pronunciation, so it sounds right.  Brian  2:37   Well, whatever, you can look at it on Wikipedia if I said it wrong. So this is a diverse group of fish that actually has some members that you might not expect. So it also includes Remora. It has barracuda. It has Archer fish, which are very cool in that they actually like spit, little jets of water to catch, prey all of that's in the same family. So you can get the diversity here. But it also has the flatfish, the flounders. So if you've ever seen a flounder, if I can describe them, they have a very flat body, and both of their eyes are on one side of their head, so their eyes point straight up, both the left and the right. So they undergo a pronounced metamorphosis. During development, they start as symmetrical, very fish looking fish, and at a certain point, the eye slowly moves over to one side of the head. There's no other way to describe that, except for metamorphosis. Interestingly, there was a long considered that that had actually independently arose multiple times in that group of fish. So that very unusual body plan had popped up several times independently. But what I saw was a study in 2024 where, based on genetic evidence, actually it does look like sanity prevails, and there was a single origin of that very unusual body plan. So all the flatfish have sort of a common origin of having one of their eyeballs move to the other side of the head, Jason Wallace  3:45   yeah, and they're all basically swimming sideways along the bottom, aren't they?  Brian  3:48   Yeah, they got a lot of weird adaptations, and some of them do active camouflage, like an octopus or a chameleon. And if you have one with a damaged eye, it actually doesn't do a good job of camouflaging anymore. Emily  4:00   When you're scuba diving, you will not see them until they move. It's crazy. They they're very camouflaged, Brian  4:06   and it's just burying themselves. They literally change their appearance, right? They're really good at it. Jason Wallace  4:10   So they've got, like, chromatophores, so little color changing cells in their skin,  Brian  4:14   yep. And they actually do have to look around at their environment to do that. Jason Wallace  4:17   Very cool. All right. Well, talking about fish. Let's make a transition now to the game finspan. So finspan, as you've probably guessed from the name, is a sort of not only sequel, but spiritual successor to wingspan, both of them by Stonemaier games. It came out in 2025 and its basic stats, so one to five players. So it comes with a single player mode, ages 10 plus due to complexity, runtime of about 45 to 60 minutes, which seems right, once people know what they're doing. I've taught this game several times at conventions and such, and it's definitely closer to an hour and a half to two hours when you have like, five brand new people to it, but once people figure it out, it can go a lot faster. Pedigree of this it was developed by Elizabeth Hargrave, although reading through the designer diary, it seems like she had more. An executive producer role. So the frontline developers were David Gordon and Michael O'Connell. They brought in some artists who had also worked on wingspan in order to do all the beautiful watercolors that it has. And Hargrave was sort of consulted at multiple times, and was doing play testing and such. So she had more of a higher oversight part bit of the layout of this game. It has these actually very large player boards that you play on. These things are pretty massive, at least two sheets of printer paper stuck like fat wise together, maybe larger. So this game, if you have all five players, takes up a lot of space. It has a bunch of fish cards that you draw and that you play out and that have various abilities you're trying to put together. You've got fish eggs, fish young, and then schools of fish, which in the base game are just little cardboard tiles, but with Kickstarter upgrades or some fancier options, which my copy has because I bought it secondhand, and I guess whoever had it firsthand bought those, but they have actually, like slightly squishy plastic eggs and little wooden meeples for the fish and the schools, which are nice. Brian  5:59   Yeah, Jason, you managed to find the ultimate copy at the lugcon swap meet, right? You got the Kickstarter thing with all the pretty extra things, and you didn't have to do the kickstarter backer  Jason Wallace  6:08   Yes, it was Southern Fried, actually, Southern Fried Gaming Expo in Atlanta. And then you have these little cute diver meeples that represent your actions each turn, and then are also showing you like going down through the ocean depths as you play. So what does this game look like, or what does it play like? It's just like wingspan. It's an engine building game. So you are trying to play fish into your ocean in order to set up combinations that get you the most points at the end. And you get points from the points that are printed on the fish. You get points for eggs and for young. You get extra points for schools. So if you get enough young in one spot, they become a school, and they're suddenly worth twice as many points. So that's part of the in game strategy. Interestingly, there is no food in this system. If you've played wingspan, you know, there's the bird feeder, you get the different foods. Apparently, an early version had that, but the final version does not. Instead, your fish are the food, so all these eggs and youngs and stuff that are worth points are also what you use to fuel your cards. So discarding cards, discarding young and eggs, is an important part, and having the resources to fuel, putting things down is an important part of it. And then there's mechanics to get cards back and such. So it's very much a resource management and engine building game. And I think location is more important than this than it is in wingspan, because in wingspan, you have your three habitats that you can place birds in, and they go from left to right, and that's kind of it. Here you're working in the ocean, you have three different depths that you can get, most of which have multiple rows within them. You have three different columns, and some fish can only be placed in some columns and not in others. And those locations matter, because that's what gets you your little bonus abilities as your diver goes down, is if you have a fish in that location, then you're able to score some sort of bonus. You get to draw a cart, or you get to put an egg on a fish somewhere, or you get to hatch an egg into a young if there are no fish in that location, you don't get that bonus. And so you're encouraged to fill out your tableau so there are fish not everywhere, but in lots of places. And then, of course, some of them have abilities that give you bonuses so you can string things together in order to get the most points possible. That's kind of it in a nutshell. There's no way we can not compare this to wingspan. They are definitely sister games. It plays, I would say, a bit more streamlined than wingspan, and that was a conscious design choice. They reduced the number of things people would have to keep track of. Brian  8:19   Well, it also reduces aquatic drag.  Jason Wallace  8:21   Yes, that as well. Jason Wallace  8:24   I would say it's more fiddly in terms of the engine, just because there's more places you can put stuff. But overall, you can see that it is, it is a similar game, but it's also different enough, at least to a very different play experience. This is not just a re-skin of wingspan, but underwater. This is actually a different game engine that has similar roots, but is different enough you can tell it's a distinct theme and gives a distinct play experience. Brian  8:48   I mean, again, if wingspan is played horizontally, Finspan is played vertically, right?  Jason Wallace  8:52   Yes, that's definitely it.  Brian  8:54   It's vertical wingspan with no food.  Jason Wallace  8:57   That is a gross oversimplification, but we'll go with it. Jason Wallace  9:00   One thing I also want to throw out here, this has nothing to do with the gameplay. And in fact, it's possible to play this game and never even notice it. So there are five player boards, and like I said, they're huge, and they have this beautiful artwork on the front of like this island with mangroves at the top and like a coral reef, and then going down into the deeper ocean. If you flip them over and you actually put them next to each other, they're this gorgeous watercolor of the of the globe. It's the entire globe from left to right. It's, it's gorgeous watercolor map that they never point out and that you can play an entire game and never even notice is there. So that's one of those little details that I really liked in there, because it shows that they care about the quality of the game overall, even though it has no mechanical effect. When I first discovered that, I was like, Oh, this is awesome. Okay, so that is the game finspan in a nutshell, or oyster shell, as the case may be. Now let's go on to the science behind this being Elizabeth Hargrave game, I would say the bar is set pretty high. She has shown herself repeatedly. To be involved in some very good, hard science games. So Emily, this is where we need you, someone who actually has experience with fish, to talk to us, to plant people and let us know how it worked out. And the first one I want to mention is what Brian already talked about, what is a fish? Emily  10:16   What is a fish that I saw that question and I thought, Oh, wow, that's actually really hard to answer, because there is no single evolutionary group that defines a fish. So one of the most challenging things about defining a fish is that for just about every definition, you could say, Well, what about and give an exception, because there are fish that violate any of the general definitions we use for what is a fish. But generally speaking, we think about fish as an aquatic organism that is generally a vertebrate. Most of them are cold blooded, and they're breathing through their gills, as opposed to something like a marine mammal, which is still breathing air through a blowhole. They need to come to their surface. Fish are breathing through their gills. So not everything that lives in the ocean is a fish. There are exceptions to any of those things, but generally speaking, those are the kind of categories, Brian  11:01   okay, but let me ask so you you gave a couple things, an aquatic organism that breathes through gills and is cold blooded and is a vertebrate. So is there anything that breaks the vertebrate rule? Emily  11:12    I think yes,  Brian  11:14   because, like, hagfish don't have a skeleton anymore Brian  11:16   I think hagfish is one of the main exceptions that breaks the vertebrae. There's definitely fish that break the cold blooded rule. Tuna and sharks are warm blooded. so not all fish are cold blooded. So there are definitely exceptions to all of those so yes. Brian  11:33   there's quite a few different things that like, gave up on gills and used lungs at this point, right? Or maybe have both. Emily  11:40   Yeah, one of the things that's most confusing is there are things with the name fish in them that are not fish,  Brian  11:45   like starfish, jellyfish  Emily  11:47   starfish are not fish at all. So starfish are any echinoderm. They are not closely related to fish, really. So that's one of the reasons that typically now we're referring to them as sea stars, as opposed to starfish. But it is a little bit confusing to think about. What is a fish, because it's not something like a mammal, where we have an evolutionary group defined by really specific things. It's more of a characterization, a grouping of convenience. Jason Wallace  12:10   And this game is very definitely about the fish. Like we know that there are coral and sea stars and jellyfish and stuff all there in the environment, but all the cards are fish.  Brian  12:19   They're all vertebrates,  Jason Wallace  12:21   Yep. And they even said in the designer diary, they made the choice whereas wingspan, the birds are sort of geographically grouped. You have your North America base game, you have your European expansion, your Oceania expansion. For finspan, they intentionally chose some well known and some really weird fish. Is what their selection criteria was. So they're not some geographically limited swath, I think they went for, I guess, more photogenic ones, like ones people would know about, and then ones also that are just kind of weird and out there.  Emily  12:48   Yeah, and another thing about the geographic piece of it is that the ocean is a very fluid place. And, of course, fish fly as well, but it's a lot of these are highly migratory species, right? So whale sharks, for example, are present all over the globes, and we also have things like a lionfish, for example, is in the game and lionfish, of course, are endemic to the South Pacific. They're also present in the Caribbean, where they're an invasive species. So it's very easy for fish to move around in the ocean, not only through their own movements, but for example, lionfish may have been introduced through the ballast water of ships coming throughout the ocean. So it's very easy for fish to move around the ocean in a way that's not necessarily as easy for terrestrial animals. That's not to say it doesn't happen, but fish do move around a lot. Brian  13:33   Well, I can already imagine what expansions for finspan would be, not that if any are planned, but the mollusk expansion and the crustaceans expansion, Jason Wallace  13:41   which actually brings us into the next one I wanted to ask about, which is about food. So I mentioned how there is no food in finspan, not in the final version of the game. Instead, your eggs and your young and even your other fish cards all serve as food for the cards you're playing out. And they're all the costs you have to play to get them there. And one thing they say in the rule book is that there's hardly any fish that are really pure herbivores, like almost all of them will eat other animals if given the chance. And my question for you, Emily is, is that the case? Is it really that much of a fish eat fish world out there? Or are there things that, okay, these are generally herbivores, and then they'll, like, snap up some little fry if it happens to get in the wrong place at the wrong time. Emily  14:22   There are definitely fish that are primarily herbivores. Something like a parrot fish comes to mind that you see them all the time chomping on the algae on the reef down there when you're scuba diving. So there are definitely fish that are primarily herbivorous. Algae is a hugely important food source for a lot of fish. And then there are, you know, if we think about in the game, as you mentioned, it's all fish. There are a lot of fish that eat things like crustaceans, echinoderms, things like that, that are not technically fish, but there are other species in the ocean. So it is a fishy fish world, but not quite to the extent that it is in the game, I would say. Brian  14:58   So that's a simplification for the game. Brian  15:00   It's definitely, I think a lot of the mechanisms in the game are for simplifications, especially regarding the eating mechanic. For example, in the game, I think for simplification, a bigger fish can always eat a smaller fish. And that's certainly not true in nature. There are fish that prey on fish that are larger than them, as well as large fish that don't eat. For example, a whale shark would not eat a tuna. In reality, that just wouldn't happen. But in the game, you could do that again. I think, as you mentioned, there's a lot that I think they've simplified for purposes of a more streamlined mechanic. Brian  15:29   Which fish eat fish that are bigger than they are?  Emily  15:31   That's a good question, because now that I realize it, I'm realizing the example I'm thinking of is not a fish. Because what is it? Killer Whales are known to prey on larger whales, such as Blue Whales, not fish. Of course, they're marine mammals. So that's not a great example, because it's not fish. Brian  15:46   I'm thinking about, like, I'm thinking like, deep sea things, like the Pelican eel or something, or a swallower. Emily  15:51   say some of those weird deep sea and I don't know as much about those deep sea critters, other than, you know, some basic facts, but yeah, I imagine that they're out there. Because, as I said that I realized, Oh, the example I'm thinking of isn't fish at all.  Brian  16:02   That's okay, Jason Wallace  16:03   quick definition. So this is cycling back of it. You mentioned echinoderms. And can you define for audience, what you mean by that? What are these things that fish are eating and they're elsewhere in the ocean? Emily  16:14   Oh, I'm gonna get in trouble now, because Brian  16:19   not from us,  Emily  16:20   I know not from you, but my colleagues in the invertebrate department, which I am not in, are going to be disappointed in me that I don't have a definition.  Jason Wallace  16:27   can you give us some examples of that echinoderms then?  Brian  16:30   The name means spiny skinned, right?  Emily  16:32   Yeah. so something like a sea star is a great example of an echinoderm. And then we also have a of course things like crustaceans. It's a little bit easier an example to think of things like shrimp, lobsters, crabs, things like that. Brian  16:44   The things that everything is trying to evolve into, except not really. but a echinoderms, so radial symmetric, spiny skin, so sea stars, sea urchins and I think sea cucumbers too, if I remember, they're not spiny. But maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. They're super weird. So whatever we can figure that out later. Emily  17:02   Yeah, hopefully my friends in it who teach inverts won't listen to this Brian  17:08   Invertebrate people don't listen to podcasts, It's fine. Jason Wallace  17:11   Hey everyone, this is editor, Jason from the future. Just to clarify, we looked it up. And yes, sea cucumbers are echinoderms. And also, going back a bit, hagfish are vertebrates. Even though they don't actually have any vertebra, they do have a notochord, which is sort of like a elastic neural rod, but no actual spinal column. So with those clarifications out of the way, let's get back to the show.  Jason Wallace  17:31   So one other thing in the game, so the board is laid out with this. We call it three dimensionality in the game, it's just two dimensionality. So you have your depth in the ocean, and then you have your distance from shore. And so technically, there's actually like 15 different zones in the game, if you count every way you can. So you have your sunlight zone at the top, then you have your twilight zone in the middle, which I think only has one row of cards. The sunlight zone has three, and then your midnight zone in the bottom, that has two rows for cards. But then also the very, very top row is the estuary row, and the very, very bottom row is, I don't remember what the name before it is like the deep,  Brian  17:58   the deep, deep, dark,  Jason Wallace  18:07   yes. And there are some things that can only be played in, like that very top or very bottom, even though there are subsets of the other zones. And then on top of the up and down layer, we've got the far from shore layer, so our island is on the left, and we have the things close to shore, and then kind of middle away, and then very far away. And the game structures these mechanically. So like the close column is drawing cards, the middle one is eggs, and the far one is hatching things and movement. But my question is, how much does this structure the actual ocean? I imagine depth is very important. How about distance from land? Does that also structure things a lot? Emily  18:39   It definitely structures things, and it's not only distance from land, but it's the nature of the land itself, the vegetation, the habitat. Like you mentioned, there are the beautiful illustrations on the player boards. There's mangroves, there's coral reefs. They're all kind of together for purposes of the illustration, but you may have one area that is a mangrove area, and there's a mangroves are extremely important areas for nursery habitat for a lot of fish species, you may have rocky intertidal areas. Those are very common. For example, on the west coast, there's a lot of that kind of rockier shoreline. And there are certain species that really thrive in those environments and are adapted to those environments. There are Sandy habitats that different species are adapted to. So you definitely have different species in different areas of the ocean, and you have a lot, as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of movement. So you can have fish that migrate to one area for spawning. You'll have spawning zones, and then they may live out the rest of their lives in other areas of the ocean. So that geography is definitely a hugely important part, as well as depth. As we mentioned, another thing that's really important is salinity. So for the game, they list the top row. They call it the estuary. But estuary isn't really about depth. An estuary is an inland area, kind of an isolated area where you're having a mixing of fresh water and salt water zones. So those are typically a lower salinity area. So you'll have certain species that are more acclimated to a lower salinity than others. You know, that was one of the things, I think, for simplification of the game, they've called that top row in estuary. But estuary isn't really about depth. It's more about that salinity aspect.  Brian  20:17   Interesting. I have heard that there is less mixing in different parts of the ocean, so you can have large differences in salinity or exchange of temperature, more than you'd think. In a body as large as like an ocean or sea, Emily  20:31   you can have really large differences. And one example I'll give is I do my work in the Bahamas, and there are these amazing ocean blue holes, and you can actually be out in the middle of the ocean, and these blue holes are connected through limestone to inland areas. And you actually will have these pockets of fresh water that come out. And you can actually see it. There's a halocline, you can see the mixing of the fresh water and the salt water, and where they come together, and they come together, and they produce this slimy stuff we call whale snot or mermaid hair, depending on how how you know what your personal aesthetic is. Whale snot or mermaid hair. But that actually is all because of that fresh water and salt water mixing. Brian  21:14   I prefer mermaid snot.  Emily  21:16   There you go.  Brian  21:17   Is that like a biofilm? Is it like a microbial thing, or is it a chemical thing?  Emily  21:22   I'm actually not exactly sure what it is. it smells like sulfur, so  Brian  21:26   probably bacteria then. Emily  21:27   So it's probably bacterial. Brian  21:29   I don't know how to Google that safely. Emily  21:31   Yeah, that's a good question. Jason Wallace  21:33   We will leave that as an exercise to our listeners Emily  21:39   googling whale snot. Jason Wallace  21:42   Yeah, the one I'm familiar with is the Baltic Sea up around like the Nordic countries, Sweden and Finland and such, because it's basically this very long, very bottlenecked Bay up into inner Europe. And so it's all fed by rivers and rainfall at the upper end. So it's very low salinity there. And then there's this huge gradient as it gets closer and closer and closer to the actual Atlantic Ocean that the salt is mixing more. And so you have a large geographic variation in terms of how salty the water is. And I know this because of genetic studies where they found that fish that live in certain parts of that have genes adapted for specific amounts of salinity. And so you can actually sample fish from all over here and do an association study and find what are the genes important for salt tolerance based on where you pulled the fish from.  Brian  22:29   Interesting. So in Halocline, "Halo" meaning salt, and I guess "cline" meaning variatio?. What's a good? cline is between two things? Emily  22:38   Yeah, gradient, gradient. Okay, so you think about a thermocline being the temperature gradient that's often warmer water at the top and colder water at the bottom, saltier water and fresh water have different densities. So you'll have the salt water will be on the bottom and the fresh water will be at the top, because salt is heavier. Brian  22:55   The other weird thing I've seen are these, like undersea lakes, the brine lakes or something, and what causes those to have I'm sorry, we're talking too much about ocean chemistry. It probably should be talking more about fish. We maybe we could skip this part. But there are, like, you could find lakes of hyper saline brine under the ocean. They look extremely strange, like they literally have like ripples on the surface. So it looks very SpongeBob. You've got underwater lakes. Emily  23:19   Yeah, it's very cool. The ocean is a fascinating place. And, yeah, probably don't want to talk too much about oceanography, because, again, I'll get in trouble with my colleagues in oceanography. Jason Wallace  23:31   All right. So moving back to the fish part of it, an important part of the game, is the production of young and then turning them into schools. The game actually has, at the last page of its rule book, it has a little half page listing of basically the simplifications they took, and they mentioned this specifically, and that, okay, the eggs and the young you're hatching are not necessarily related to the fish that they are put on. That's just a thing of convenience, a mechanic that they're doing. But they talk about these young coming together, forming schools. My question here is twofold. Is like, Why do fish school? And the second one is, do they only school with their own species, or do you get, like, multi species schools happening at some point, Brian  24:10   like mixed herding on the Savannah? Do you get mixed schools in the ocean? Emily  24:13   Yeah, I think you'll see some mixed schools. I think traditionally, when we think of schooling fish, though, I think the most prevalent examples are going to be single school fish. And you think about things like sardines and bait fish, for example, where you see these just incredible balls of fish that almost seem like an organism, like a giant organism in and of themselves. We don't really know entirely how they communicate, but they move together. They move as one. Those are typically single species schools, but we do see fish schooling together. Often. Schooling is just as it is on land. It's a defense mechanism. So if you're part of a big school of fish, the likelihood that any predator is going to come by and snap you is less than if you're swimming along by yourself. So it can be a defense mechanism, but you also do have. Have examples of fish that will school for predatory reasons. You know, a school of fish that may come together to hunt other fish that are smaller. Do sharks do that? Some sharks school, I'm trying to think of if they school to hunt. I know, like I've seen, schools of tuna that are going after smaller fish. I know Hammerhead school. I don't know if they school to hunt or if they're schooling for social reasons. I mean, some schooling is social. One of the things is, you know, we can't ask fish why they do what they do. So not all of the behaviors that they do are fully explained. So we don't necessarily know why all of these things occur. But primarily, I would say it's a defense mechanism is the most common reason for schooling. And so in those cases, you can have, you know, you'll see mixed groupings of fish in schools, but it's not really, you know, in the game, it's very much the young are off schooling. You have adult fish that school as well, right? There are fish that spend their entire lifetime in a school of fish. So it's not necessarily as simplified as is in the game. I would say Brian  25:58   Hammerheads are just the gossips of the shark world, that's all,  Emily  26:00   yeah, and they don't always school, but they come together in schools at certain points first,  Brian  26:06   yeah, when there's some hot gossip to share,  Emily  26:07   yeah, exactly Jason Wallace  26:10   with the school. So an important part of the game is moving them around, because there's some movement restrictions on them, so you want to get them out of the way, so you can put things together and make new ones, and they can just go as high or as deep as they want. Is that typical for fish? I mean, we've already talked about these are sort of abstract representations, but like, is it typical that young fish, or certain fish will be able to go to any depth? Or do they mostly have a pretty set location, depth wise, at least where they stick? Emily  26:36   It's kind of depend on the fish. There is kind of an amazing not so much with fish, but with invertebrates, there's this amazing vertical migration that happens out in the open ocean where things will come up from the deep, and some of those species that live most of their lives, perhaps near shore. As adults, the juveniles are really going up and down with the light in the open ocean at night. But that's not really so much true with fish. So there may be some vertical movement, but I think for the most part, you're not going to see like you do in the game, where you have fish hatch and get together and then they can go kind of wherever they want. I don't think it quite works that way. Brian  27:11   So it's so interesting to think about fish speciation, because we're kind of like spoiled on land. We think about things physically separating, but these separations in the ocean are very different. They're not real boundaries, but they are boundaries. They're boundaries based on amount of light, on depth, on salinity, on all these things that are like, not super obvious at a glance, but they're definitely there. Emily  27:33   I mean, and habitat. There are fish species that spend their entire life on a single coral head, talking about speciation, maybe subspecies, but they will adapt their coloration to the specific coral that they're living on, because they need that for camouflage. So there are fish that really are restricted in how far they can move, because they're really adapted to this specific habitat. You know, we've talked about things like salinity, things like debt, but really, habitat is one of the most important things, and it's why, when we think about conservation, we think a lot about protecting Fish's habitat as well. Brian  28:08   That's like crazy co evolution, but really just driven by one partner.  Emily  28:09   I don't know that's a good question. Is it driven by one partner? Because there's so much symbiosis in the ocean that happens as well. Coral, for example, compete with algae. So they do benefit from fish who eat that algae living on or near them, because they kind of keep some of that competitiveness in check.  Brian  28:31   Yeah. I guess if you're a coral and you get covered with some kind of algae, you you can't photosynthesize anymore, your symbionts can't photosynthesize anymore. So that's bad. Emily  28:39   yes, So as we see coral degrading throughout the world, we do see often them becoming covered by algae. And that can be caused by a lot of things. It can be caused by ocean acidification. It can be caused by temperature rise, and it can be caused by reduction in fish population and reduction of those herbivorous fish on the reefs. Brian  28:59   We learned about ocean acidification and temperature rise in the game Daybreak that we did last season. It's all connected. Jason Wallace  29:05   I want to get back to the the ocean conservation. That's kind of what I want to end on. So I want to circle back to this fish habitats and places where they live. And I've got a very directed question, why are so many fish from the deep ocean? Like out of the worst nightmares of HP Lovecraft. Like I was looking through these cards, you've got the Pelican eel, whose mouth looks like it's like a third of the size of its body just to gulp things down. Anglerfish are sort of the poster child for this. We see one in Finding Nemo as this is horrific monster trying to eat our protagonists.  Brian  29:35   Viper fish are just as bad.  Jason Wallace  29:37   Spiny sea devils was one of the cards I saw where it's just a mouthful of knives. And then, of course, there's the hagfish, which is just like the world's best slime producer. So like, why? What is it about the deep ocean that manufactures nightmares? Emily  29:54   It really is nightmare fuel, that's for sure. But I think they're cool. I don't know. I think they're cool. Maybe I'm strange. But, I mean, the main reason is, if we think about everything occurs for an evolutionary purpose, right? And so in the deep sea, you don't have light. So a lot of what we see in a coral reef, for example, all these brightly colored, beautiful fish, that's for reasons like camouflage, like attracting mates. Just like birds, fish are often brightly colored to attract mates that is just not necessary in the deep sea because there's no light and they can't see each other, so they're relying on other forms of communication. And then there's also a functional piece of these fish have to withstand huge, huge amounts of pressure and an extremely hostile environment, so every 10 meters adds an atmosphere of pressure in the ocean. So basically, you go down 10 meters in the ocean, you've doubled the pressure on yourself. So you think about these extremely deep habitats, the amount of pressure is insane. So that's why, first of all, you wouldn't have a scuba diver going down to that depth like they do in the game. But second of all... Brian  31:01   I mean, you could just not alive,  Emily  31:03   not alive, they would be very dead, all dead. But you have a lot of kind of these blobby cartilaginous fish, because that's more able to withstand pressure than something like a bony fish. Brian  31:16   You'd think like, oh, you need a really tough body to live down there. But actually they're very delicate, right? Emily  31:21   Yeah, I think they're goopy for lack of a better, They just look, that's not a scientific term, but, you know, they just kind of look like blobs. And there's a few reasons for that. One is, again, the ability to just kind of withstand, you know, you think about the kind of, yes, you think about strength, but it's easier to break a bone and more harmful to break a bone than it is. You know, if you're made of cartilage, it's a lot easier to heal. That's kind of a bad example, but Brian  31:49   okay, I know this wasn't the intention. I know this isn't what you mean, but it almost sounds like the reason they're so hideous is because they can't see each other Emily  31:56    pretty much. Yeah, like, if we didn't have video cameras, we'd all be a lot, you know, would we get ourselves? I mean, not that I look nice now, but if this was a video Jason Wallace  32:10   that's okay. It's an audio podcast,  Emily  32:11   exactly if This was a video recording, it would have looked much different. So, yeah, I think it's the same for fish, yeah, no, it is. They can't see each other. So, you know, and it's not just the attracting a mate piece, but it's also it is the camouflage piece, although some fish do use light for camouflage. So that bioluminescence, there are some fish, because if you think about the light filtering down from above, if you have a predator below you, they can actually see your shadow. So there are actually some fish that use bioluminescence on their underside as a form of camouflage. So that's one of the purposes of that kind of bioluminescence that we see in the game as well. Jason Wallace  32:46   That is actually a great transition to my next question, which is about a bunch of these fish abilities we see on the cards. Most of them come into play in terms of the weekly bonus goals, but we've got, like, bioluminescence, electrolocation, also electric discharge, predation, camouflage, that sort of thing. So you just mentioned bioluminescence, and I love bioluminescence like I love anything that glows. I owned a glowing Petunia for a while, until it got infested with spider mites. You already told us why things glow. Well, part of it camouflage. Why else do things glow in the ocean? And how do they do that? Emily  33:21   Yeah, so there is actually a chemical reaction that occurs. And I'm forgetting the names of the chemicals involved.  Emily  33:28   It's luciferin and luciferase.  Emily  33:30   Thank you. Yes. So it's a chemical reaction that occurs. So some of the fish actually produce that chemical reaction themselves. Others have bacteria that, again, it's a symbiotic relationship. So an example is the angler fish that you mentioned already in Finding Nemo. So they're kind of famous because they have this lure dangling out in front of them that glows to actually lure their prey. So that's a different reason for that bioluminescence. But those angler fish don't actually produce that bioluminescence themselves. They use a bioluminescent bacteria, whereas some fish actually will have a chemical reaction in their own bodies,  Brian  34:04   huh, I didn't know that the angler fish use symbionts to do that,  Emily  34:07   yeah? So it's symbionts. Brian  34:08    So like, inside that little bulb, there's just a little bacterial, well, not a little a very large bacterial colony, Emily  34:14   yeah, I'm not sure exactly of the like, where it is, if it's in the how exactly that works, but I do know they don't produce it themselves, Brian  34:21   but some of them do, yeah, some fish do, so some of them use symbionts. Some of them do it themselves.  Jason Wallace  34:26   All right, so what about Venom then? Emily  34:27   So, I mean, venom is a classic, you know, it's the same reason as creatures on land use venom. It can either be for protection or for predation. If we think about something like a lionfish, you know, they have these amazing spines that come out of them, and those are primarily a defense mechanism. That's one of the reasons they're such a problem as an invasive species. Is, in the Caribbean, they don't have any natural predators, because they have these spiny venomous spikes. But you can also have, I'm trying to think of an example, but you do have fish that will use venom to stuff. One and immobilize their prey as well, but you'll have both of those. Brian  35:03   Yeah, I'm thinking about mollusks. I was just reading about cone snails. And I mean, they're impressive with it, but they're not fish, so they don't count. Emily  35:09   So a lot of mollusks, like octopus, use venom, so the blue ring octopus is actually one of the most venomous creatures on earth. So that's a great example. Thank you for giving me one, because the blue ring octopus does use venom to immobilize its prey. They're tiny, tiny, tiny, little octopus, and they're one reason that if you're ever scuba diving, of course, they're only in certain places of the world, but you don't ever stick your hand down into the sand, because you never know what is under there. And a bite from a blue ring octopus could be deadly. Pretty quickly. Jason Wallace  35:41   They're in like, Australia, right,  Emily  35:43   yeah, yeah. Australia, Indonesia, yeah. Australia has all the dangerous critters are in Australia, but yeah, primarily that area, the Philippines. They're found, I've seen them in the Philippines, Indonesia, that kind of South Pacific area. Yeah. They're not in the Caribbean, the Atlantic, unfortunately for us, well, fortunately, if you you know, like sticking your hand in the sand, but unfortunately, because they're really cool to see Brian  36:07   Australia, where the venom has been taken to the ultimate biological art form, Emily  36:12   indeed, and other forms of killing also, like kangaroos, aren't venomous, but They sure are scary, Jason Wallace  36:20   but they're so cute, yeah, but they are also not fish. So let's go back to fish.  Brian  36:25   Well, I don't know are they, because I thought we No, it's fine. Jason Wallace  36:29   There's an entire podcast called no such thing as a fish like, I think they have the monopoly on that particular discussion. Brian  36:35    Fair Jason Wallace  36:35    So we talked earlier about ocean conservation and ocean habitat, and it's like, okay, yes, we get like our human population is doing a lot of stuff all over the world, including to the ocean, and we hear about some things, acidification, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. What are the major threats to fish in the ocean right now? Emily  36:53   There are a lot. Unfortunately, one of the biggest ones, of course, is climate change. Climate change in terms of both rising temperatures as well as ocean acidification, as we've talked about, a lot of this is about the ecosystem, right? It's not just about the fish themselves. Climate change can have both direct and indirect impacts. So climate change affects coral reefs. It's causing degradation, massive loss of coral reefs worldwide, which are one of the most important habitats, as well as food sources for fishes around the world. But then you also do have direct impacts on fish as a result of climate change. So we are seeing some species of fish move more and more northward as a result of rising temperatures, because they are so adapted to these environments. So if you think about something like, you know, a two degree Celsius warming of the ocean, it may not sound like that much, but think about if you walked around with a fever of 103 104 degrees all the time, that would not be a way to live. And so we're having some really rapid changes that are affecting fish. So that's one of them. Another, of course, is habitat loss, habitat degradation, both from climate change, but also from physical impacts as well things like developments, things like eutrophication, runoff from things like farm and agriculture can be really problematic. Jason Wallace  38:14   So eutrophication, can you define that for us? Emily  38:17   So eutrophication is essentially excessive nutrients in the water, so a lot of nitrogen, a lot of phosphorus, and that's often run off from things like agriculture. It can also be from wastewater, things like that. And it can be really problematic, both to the fish themselves, as well as, again, to habitat. Brian  38:35   That's when we get, like, the algae go crazy and, like, consume all the oxygen, right?  Jason Wallace  38:40   This sort of, like that big dead zone that shows up in the Gulf of Mexico every year, right?  Emily  38:44   Yeah, yeah, something like a red tide that we hear about, yeah. Jason Wallace  38:48   And so these are really big problems, obviously. And it's one of those things that are, they're so big, it's hard to get a grapple on, like, I can't stop climate change, like we talked about this with Daybreak, like it's a big problem. Are there things that individual people can do that have some sort of measurable impact to make things better, even if it's just like, picking up a bits of trash or something Emily  39:06   absolutely I mean, one of the best things I always say you can do is, especially if you live in a coastal environment like I do, is shop local try to support local small scale fishers. For one thing, those small scale fishers tend to I mean, of course, fisheries management is extremely complicated, and so I can't simplify it in a quick these fisheries are good and these are bad. However, small scale fisheries tend to be more sustainable than some of the larger imported commercial fisheries. But there also is just the carbon impact. You know, if you're able to eat local, the more we're reducing our carbon impact. Of course, I realize that that's easier said than done. You know, we all are in a system where it's very difficult to access affordable local foods, and certainly in some places more than others. But to the extent we can choose local producers and kind of reduce our carbon footprint, that's helpful as well as just generally. You know, we always hear Reduce Reuse, Recycle, and I would put reduce and reuse as far, far far above recycle. So the more we can reduce our consumption in general, reduce the amount of stuff we purchase, reduce the amount of stuff we use, and try to reuse and make do with what we already have, the better it is for our environment. Brian  40:17   Is there an equivalent to farm to table for fisheries? Emily  40:20   So there are some locally supported fisheries. So I would encourage you to look and see if there's one in your community. There used to be one here in coastal North Carolina, unfortunately, it was a victim of the pandemic, so it no longer exists. But there are some community supported fisheries around the world and around the country, similar to like how you would have a CSA, a community supported agriculture. There are some local community organizations that will have ways that you can support your local fishers, as well as check in with local fish markets. You know, check a local fish market. Ask where places are getting their fish. Where did this come from? One of my favorite things to do when I eat fish, because I do eat fish, is I just go into the local seafood market, and I ask, what's fresh? You know, what's freshest and what's best, and you know, what's sustainable? You know, I come across some of my new favorite fish. I love Trigger Fish. Trigger Fish is not something I'd ever eaten until I moved here, because it's not something that's really marketed at a mass scale. So you might find something that you really love just by going into your local fish market. You know, the people who work in this industry, both the fishers as well as the people who sell the fish, care a great deal about maintaining their livelihoods and maintaining their industry. So they tend to be really well connected. So if you just go in and strike up a conversation at your local fish market and ask them, like, what should I be eating? I'm sure they'd be happy to talk to you about that Jason Wallace  41:39   related to that. Can you say anything about, like aquaculture? So farmed fish? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it, as with all the other things complicated, Emily  41:47   as with all other things, it's complicated. One of the things I focus on for my work is that it's so important to think not just about what we are doing as individual consumers, but as a policy standpoint, because a lot of the challenges that we face as individual consumers is that it's simply impossible for us to know whether a given aquaculture product is from a sustainable practice or not. So the more we can kind of talk to our representatives about Fisheries Policy and aquaculture policy, the more impact we can have, because aquaculture can be really great. There are plenty of sustainable aquaculture practices, but there is also a lot of really problematic aquaculture that happens in some places in the world. Sometimes they're using tremendous amount of fish feed that can actually have an even more detrimental impact than wild fisheries, because the fish feed comes from some really unsustainable sources themselves. You know, it's not a cure all to say we can just farm fish, because those fish still have to eat something. But there are aquaculture facilities that are increasingly trying to use things like algae. We have some folks at our marine lab who work on that, trying to use algae as feed to kind of increase the sustainability of those aquaculture systems. So the answer is, it's complicated, and it certainly can be a really important supplement to the seafood industry. But as with anything, sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad,  Jason Wallace  43:06   all right, last and final question, arguably most important one, what is your favorite fish not necessarily to eat. Emily  43:15   Well, I'm gonna go with a hammerhead shark today. That's today.  I love a hammerhead not to eat. That is one thing. Do not eat shark, please. It is not illegal to eat shark in the United States. It's not necessarily illegal to fish for shark in the United States. That is one those apex predators take so long to kind of reestablish themselves. So that is one thing. I will say, Please don't eat shark. So not to eat. But I love a hammerhead shark. They're just so cool Brian  43:39   and they're the gossips, right?  Emily  43:40   And they are. They love to spill the tea. Jason Wallace  43:46   We're gonna wrap that discussion up then and move on to our constructive criticism corner. So the game has a lot, I think, of science in there. Typically, they've got some really good illustrations. They apparently, when thinking of the different abilities the fish would have, they tried to look at every individual fish and figure out what of the abilities we have makes sense for this fish. And I don't necessarily understand the connection between them, but is there anything we think they could do better? With the caveat that they mentioned the most obvious ones in the rule book already about like food and other things like that, I Emily  44:17   think that point that you just made is actually one of the nitpicks that I had about the game is I actually don't think that the fish's abilities necessarily relate to the biology of the fish. So to give an example that red lion fish, I noted that the fish's ability is to allow you to play another fish, and that doesn't really relate to anything about the biology of a red lionfish. You know, they're actually predate on other fishes young. That would have made more sense for something like a bait fish or a sardine, because you're going to be recruiting some of those larger fish that would come into the ecosystem. So I didn't necessarily think that there was a connection. For example, the venomous fish have no particularly venomous ability, which I recognize that's partly a choice of the game mechanic. You know, there's no negative player interaction in this game, which I think it's nice and it makes it a fun gaming experience. But you don't have that kind of connection. I didn't think between the actual biology of the fish and the fish's ability, because in wingspan, I think it's a lot more closely related, you know, not to focus on wingspan, but I think they've tied in wingspan, the birds abilities more closely to what the birds actually do in nature. And I don't think that finspan necessarily did that. And I think that might be a choice of the simplification of it. You know, like you mentioned, they've chosen a more simplified mechanic. And so, you know, I don't necessarily fault them for that, but it would have been cool to see, you know, like some of the venomous fish actually using their venom in some way in the game, or something like that.  Brian  45:41   Are we allowed to make our nitpicks in comparison to wingspan? It feels mean it's, it's in the game. You can't, not, right?  Jason Wallace  45:47   Yeah, there's sibling games. You're allowed to compare them and pick favorites. Brian  45:51   I think there were ones maybe a little bit of a science nitpick, and one's a little bit of a gameplay nitpick. The Science nitpick was, I'm thinking that, like, sometimes it seems like you've got fish that can go across a wider variety of depths than maybe would necessarily be realistic. The one that caught my attention in particular, and maybe I'm wrong on this, was the whale shark. They're not going to go down into the Twilight Zone or deeper, because there's nothing for them to eat there, right? Emily  46:12   I wouldn't think so. Primarily, when we see whale sharks, we see them near the surface, because they primarily feed on some of those kind of surface schoolers. So yeah, I do think that there's been a little leniency with that. The other one is that I didn't see necessarily any biological or ecological relationship in the horizontal habitats either. You know, it was more tied to the mechanic, yeah, which I think they could have done something really cool with having, like, a mangrove habitat, a coral habitat, an open sea habitat, and having it more. But I think they, again, they made that choice for the gameplay. And I don't know that you could really do both of the things I just said, you know, you tie it to the fish's ability and to that kind of habitat piece. Brian  46:53   One of the things that you do get in wingspan, that you don't get in finspan is movement. There were birds that could move between habitats. And again, once you put your fish down, it's just there forever. There's no upwards or downwards movement. There's no movement between zones, and that's unfortunate. It's a simplification, but it seems like something was kind of a lot of the fish have a end game mechanic, or when played, much more so than wingspan, where I feel like a lot more of the abilities they would be activated through each round,  Jason Wallace  47:19   yeah. And I think that's a conscious design choice, because they mentioned that they wanted to, again, streamline the game and try to make it so that you could play it easily in like 45 to 60 minutes, and I think, be a little bit more beginner friendly. When I was reading the designer diary, they actually specifically said that, okay, they got wingspan and then wyrmspan, the fantasy version that will never actually appear on this podcast is considered their crunchier, heavier game. And finspan is actually like the lighter game out of the three.  Brian  47:46   interesting Emily  47:47   I agree with you, Brian, I think that simplification did lose a little bit if we're comparing, but I will say my parents were here for the holiday, and we can't play wingspan. It's they find it too complicated, and they did enjoy finspan. so, you know, so there's, there is a choice. And I also wondered if part of the reason they made this choice is, frankly, so many of the species in this game we know almost nothing about. So it would be really hard to tie or maybe not almost nothing. But you know, our knowledge about specific species is still very limited. We study mostly commercially relevant species, socially relevant species, so there's a lot of information we don't know, so it's much harder, and it seems like what we know is constantly changing. So if you tie a game mechanic to a fish's ability, when you don't know much about that fish, that makes it a lot more difficult. So I wonder if that's part of the reasoning as well. Brian  48:37   Okay, so maybe their choice was, was actually one of academic caution. Emily  48:41   Who knows? I'll be charitable and assume that. Jason Wallace  48:45   And Brian, I just looked it up. Apparently, while whale sharks spend most of their time, like in the top, you know, 500 meters of the ocean, apparently they can go down to 2000 meters.  Brian  48:54   Oh, wow. Okay, Jason Wallace  48:55    apparently it's not common, but they can. So I think that depth thing seems to be one of the things where they if they want to get their science right, they're probably going to get it right there  Brian  49:06   makes sense.  Jason Wallace  49:06   So I'm going to guess if it doesn't make sense to us, that's because we don't know enough about fish.  Brian  49:08   All right, nitpick withdrawn. Emily  49:11   But I also think it ties to your point about the lack of movement, because even though a whale shark can dive to that deep of a depth, it could never spend its whole life at that depth. So it's one thing to make a dive from time to time, but it's another to live in that habitat. So I still think it's a valid nitpick, even though a whale shark might appear at that habitat, you know, to place it there and have it live there, I don't think is necessarily scientifically accurate,  Brian  49:33   all right,  Jason Wallace  49:33   for me, I just think that they streamlined it to try to make it a lighter game. There are times where it definitely feels more complicated, just because there are so many places I can put my fish. It's not like, oh, I have three choices. It is whatever is the most open one in my current row. It's like, no, no. This fish can go literally anywhere in my ocean. Where do I want to put it? Those sorts of choices give a lot more options. Sometimes I get a little bit of decision paralysis. I was just trying to figure out where the best one is, and then I just give up, like, Okay, I'm gonna put it here and hope for the best.  Brian  50:04   This is the optimizer's demise. This is the well, what is the best choice? Jason Wallace  50:08   Yes, yes. And that may just be my personal play style.  Brian  50:11   It's not just you, but it definitely is you.  Jason Wallace  50:14   All right. Well, let's go on to letter grades then. So Brian, let's start with you. So we've got science and fun. How would you score this game?  Brian  50:23   I think I'm actually gonna give it a little bit lower score on science, because it does seem a little bit less integrated into the mechanics of the game. I think that there's just as much in the card, but it feels like a lot of the way that it's sort of blended in is maybe a little bit more of an afterthought. I think for science, I'm gonna go with probably a B, but I'm gonna keep it with the A. I do like playing fin span, so you gave a B for science and an A for fun, yes, B for science and an A for fun,  Jason Wallace  50:49   and Emily, how about you? Emily  50:51   Yeah, I overall agree, but I will say there's one thing I didn't mention explicitly. I alluded to it earlier, but the fact that the meeples are scuba divers going to the deep sea, I have to take off. I'm sorry. Those should have been submersible vehicles. They should not have been scuba divers. So I think I'm going to give it a B- for science, but I will give it an A for fun. I enjoyed playing the game. Like you said, it's hard not to compare it to wingspan, where I think the science was so integrated. So yeah, I'm going to do a B- for science.  Brian  51:22   I really think it's fine to compare it to wingspan. It's literally named after the same mechanic with the same designer. I agree Jason Wallace  51:28   it's legit to compare it. I'm gonna go on the record saying I think you two are being too harsh. Because, well, think about it, if this were not a relative of wingspan, if this were just some random other science game we'd gotten, we would score this at least an A- on science, because it has real world fish, it has real world habitat stuff. It has their sizes, it has details about them that are true. There is a lot of science in this game, okay, and it is, as far as we can tell, accurate. There are strategic simplifications, but I think if this were just some other random game off the shelf, I would give it no lower than an A-. Brian  52:01   Okay, I think that's a valid argument. I think that I've been grading on a curve, and I've been grading it relative to wingspan, and that's probably not fair, so I will change my grade to an A-. Emily  52:11    I'm not going to go into the A range, but I'll bump up to a B+. I think you're right. I think you're right, but I'm sorry, I can't give an a range where you have scuba divers going to the bottom of the ocean. I just can't. Brian  52:23   One of these days, I got to have you talk about the video game Subnautica. I'd love to hear what you have to say about that.  Jason Wallace  52:27   All right, I will say science. I will do A to A-.  Brian  52:32   Well, you just made a huge case for A-.  Jason Wallace  52:35   I said, at least an A- possibly up to an A. It's just a question. I can't quite tell how much I'm also grading on a curve, because there are some things that are present in its sister game that were dropped for this. There's no little distribution map showing. This is where this fish shows up. Maybe that's because we don't know where it shows up. Actually, I think they mentioned that in the designer diary, where they don't actually know where a lot of these fish appear. They know where they have been seen, but they don't actually know where their range of habitat is, because so much of them go unseen. I think at the end of the day, I'm probably going to go with an A on it, because, again, I think there's a lot of science here. They made strategic choices about what they would choose and what they would not and I think I'm going to go a bit with what you said, Brian, are people going to learn wrong things here? Probably not. Most of what they are going to get is probably going to be right. So I'm going to go ahead and give it an A for science. Brian  53:19   Okay. Oh yeah, Emily, what was your fun grade? Did you give a fun grade? Emily  53:22   Oh yeah, I said an A I really enjoy the game. I think it's a great game. And I think I also grade it harder because of my knowledge of these, if I didn't know anything about it, it's it's really hard. It's like, you know, when you watch a TV show that's about something that you know is your job, you're way harder on it. You're a harsher critic. I will say, the amount of work it must have taken to have the facts on all of these hundreds of fish, cars and the beautiful illustrations is really incredible. I mean, they've really done a lot of work. And I'll buy the expansions, because I want to see, like you said, I would love a crustaceans expansion. I want all give me all the octopus. I think that would be really cool. And I think there's a lot of ways to expand the game, and who knows, maybe in those future expansions, they might add some complexity, you know, kind of like wingspan did with some of their expansions as well, and add some complexity that's more tied to the biology we'll see. Brian  54:17   Yeah, and probably fewer banned cards, because there's fewer combinations. But Jason, what? What was your fun grade? Because I cut you off. I apologize. Jason Wallace  54:24   I'm gonna give it an A- for fun. Okay, it's one where I still haven't quite grokked it. Like, as I go at it, I still feel like I don't have a good strategy as the game progresses, like, oh, okay, this is how I make good strategic decisions to try to advance my board state. I haven't quite gotten that yet. It took me many times of playing wingspan to figure that out, too. So that may just be the nature of this sort of game.  Brian  54:46   So which would you rather play?  Jason Wallace  54:47   I would probably go for wingspan.  Brian  54:49   OK I don't know at this point. I think they're about even. For me, I'd like to play both, either.  Emily  54:53   I think it depends who I'm playing with, a more casual person. I think finspan is a little easier to teach and explain at least. But if you've played it a lot, I'm probably going to repeat wingspan more. Jason Wallace  55:05   All right, so we need to wrap up. Thank you very much, Emily. For anyone who wants to follow you or look at your work, where can they find you? Emily  55:11   So I have a website. It's emilymelvin.com and I also use Blue Sky to share my academic work. Which my handle there is EC Melvin. Jason Wallace  55:19   And you mentioned a podcast through your university, right? Emily  55:22   Yes. So our university, the Duke Marine Lab, we have a podcast called seas the day, S, E, A, S, the day. So you can check that out. We have a number of different series on there talking about things like PhD student life, different scientific work, as well as the one I've been involved with, which is our conservation and development podcast series. That podcast is run by my advisor, Lisa Campbell, so it's a great place to learn a little bit more about what we do at the Duke Marine Lab.  Jason Wallace  55:49   So we are going to call it there. So thank you again, dear listeners for being here with us. We hope you have a great month and great games. Brian  55:56   And as always, have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. Jason Wallace  55:59   This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2026 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to game with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

#Primates #Evolution #GreenButteryflyGames #Conservation #BoardGames #Science Summary Happy 2026, everyone! To celebrate Darwin Day (February 12th), we have a special 90-minute episode with Will and David from the Common Descent Podcast to talk all about Primates! We'll cover the new game by Green Butterfly Games, all six clades of primates it showcases, and tons of other fun facts about us an our arboreal cousins, like how monkeys rafted from Africa to South America and why Aye-ayes are the best nose-pickers. So grab a banana, build a nest, and settle in for a lively discussion of Primates. Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intros 00:02:07 - Dung Beetles and Human Endurance 00:11:42 - Game Overview 00:21:23 - Primate History 00:33:00 - Different Primate Groups 00:51:17 - Humans in the Game 00:57:17 - Representation through Game Mechanics 01:07:36 - Picking Nits 01:13:09 - Final Grades 01:21:55 - Wrap-up Links Primates (Green Butterfly Games) The Common Descent Podcast Dung beetles evolving to eat meat (Science.org) Limits of human endurance (Nature.com) An aye-aye picking its nose (YouTube)  When the Earth was Green, by Riley Black (Macmillan Publishers) Pitchstorm and Fate of the Nostromo (Board Game Geek)    Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason Wallace  0:00   Brian, hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:12   Today, we're going to discuss primates by green butterfly games. Hey, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian. This is Jason. And wait, we've got some other people here. Brian  0:26   Will and David, you're back!  Will  0:27   We're back.  David  0:28   Can't get rid of us,  Brian  0:30   no. Well, not that we would want to actually, this whole reason that this entire episode happened is actually your fault, so please explain yourself.  David  0:38   Oh, that's true. We this game was sent to us. We were sent it as a gift from one of our listeners, yeah, oh, we should have, we should have looked up who it was that sent it to us. That would have been really good to get the name. Jason Wallace  0:48   Thank you, anonymous. Listener of another podcast, Brian  0:54   common descent. Listener, whoever you are, thank you and make yourself known. You guys got a game, and you said, Well, we know some people who want to play, who like to play science games, and you approached us, which is totally different, because that's not how this works around here. We usually have to chase people down. David  1:08   We got the gift. I think it, I think we received it shortly after the last time we recorded with you guys.  Brian  1:15   Oh, wow.  David  1:16   And it was a really cool because it's the it's a perfect game for your podcast? Brian  1:22    Absolutely.  David  1:24   We thought it would be super fun, and so, yeah, it was one of the first things we did is we said, hey, do you guys want to play this you want to come back and play this game with us?  Brian  1:31   Yep, and we did, and it was fun. And we even did it the weekend of the museum meetup at Fernbank, which, again, is going to date this episode, but whatever, that's fine. We're releasing this episode that will also be our episode that's closest to Darwin Day. So it's also a good game for Darwin Day. So I'm excited to talk about this game. It has a huge amount of science content, and I'm excited about the conversation we're going to get to have about primates and how they're weird. But before we get into that, why don't we do a little bit of science banter? Anything you guys would like to talk about? Will  1:58   One that's on my mind because I literally just finished taking notes on it for one of our news sections, which will come out before this. So it won't be, I won't be spoiling our news. There was a study on dung beetles that have evolved to be necrophageous. So eating dead bodies, Brian  2:16   Did they roll them up into little balls?  Will  2:18   Yeah. And this is a thing that I was aware of. We talked about this in the decomposing episode, there are beetles that basically roll up a bit of a meatball and roll it away, bury it and let their young feet off of it,  Brian  2:30   okay, Will  2:30    instead of dung, yeah, meatballs. Brian  2:33   That's a different meaning of meatball. Yep. Will  2:37   And there was, there's a group of dung beetles that have evolved to do this, and they studied it by finding those underground  Brian  2:48   meat? Will  2:48    open like like like burrows that they used to there are Ichnofossils, trace fossils of these burrows that have preserved. And you can tell which kind of beetle does it, because they build the burrow differently. And so they were able to figure out the timing of the evolution. Because originally the idea was that, well, when the big herbivores that the dung beetles were eating the dung of died, they had to switch to something else. And so during the megafaunal extinction not too long ago in our earth's history. That must have been when the beetles switched over. But when they looked at the dating, it found out no they were eating meat well before the big herbivores started dying out. So what it seemed is more likely, is there were so many herbivores and so much dung and so many dung beetles that competition for some dung beetles to have to start doing something differently, because there was too much competition and too much to go around. So the herbivores now were just feeding dung beetles while alive and then flesh eating dung beetles while dead. Brian  3:59   What an unusual form of niche partitioning, and also meatball trace fossils! David  4:04   Yes, yeah. Cool. Jason Wallace  4:06   So which, which megafauna mass extinction. Was this? Is this like dinosaur mass extinction, or is this like 10,000 years ago mass extinction? Will  4:14   Yeah, yeah. The 10,000 the 10,000 years ago with the mammal, megafauna, mass extinction. This was a study focused on South America. So this would have been a lot of the American big animals that would have been these dung beetles, would have been living alongside of, of, like big marsupials and things like that. Brian  4:35   Were there coprophagous organisms that are known from, like the Jurassic I know we like to talk about how sauropods must have been crazy ecosystem engineers, but they must have been producing huge amounts of waste. David  4:49   There are dung beetle fossils in coprolites in the fossil record. I think they go back to the Mesozoic, although I'm off the top of my head, I'm not sure. But there are specific there are dung ball fossils, like coprolites that are specifically rolled up into balls and have often dung beetle larval burrows inside  Brian  5:14   interesting. So I would be it would be absolutely insane if basically, the origin of dung beetles corresponds with sauropods. Because, of course, Will  5:25   when it's like someone was definitely doing the job, I just don't know which group of insects it was, because how could you not take advantage of that? Brian  5:33   All right, what about you, Jason, you said you found the thing too.  Jason Wallace  5:37   Yes. So I was looking at things about primates, and I found one about humans recently, which were primates. So that counts. This was a recent one on our peak energy expenditure. So basically, there's the question of, what is the capacity for human like endurance, like, how much, many calories can you actually burn sustainably? And so they took a bunch of like, high endurance performance athletes, like people that are doing all sorts of crazy endurance feats, and they gave them a bunch of labeled heavy labeled isotopes, okay, heavy hydrogen, heavy oxygen. So they could trace it, you Brian  6:15   got to have that nice, sweet heavy water.  Jason Wallace  6:15   Yes. So and again, I don't know all the details, suffice to say, let them determine how much they were metabolizing, how much they were how many calories they were burning. And they found that for these extreme athletes, the limit was about two and a half times their basal rate. So your basal metabolic rate is how much your body burns when you're just lying there. It's how much it takes to pump your heart and to breathe and to maintain your organs and such, and they've known that. So in short bursts, you can go up to like, 10 times that amount if you're doing like a super, like a super endurance run, like, I know someone who did a 24 hour run. I think he's a little crazy, but he did it. Brian  6:57    I'm sorry. What? Jason Wallace  6:59    you run for 24 hours. That's that's the goal.  Jason Wallace  7:02   No You don't David  7:03   thank you. I don't want to run. I don't want to run for 24 seconds. Yeah. Jason Wallace  7:08   The thing is, when you do that, you're actually burning calories faster than you can metabolize them in you cannot digest food fast enough to replace those calories. So that's not sustainable. So they found that over the course of like six months, as these people were doing their hyper endurance stuff, it averaged out to about two and a half times, and that when they were performing their really high endurance stuff, they subconsciously cut down on other things like fidgeting or walking around or other stuff. So they cut back on their other caloric expenditure in order to keep it to about that amount. And the hypothesis is that that's about as fast as you can actually metabolize calories, because it takes calories to digest your food. And the thought is that about two and a half times your basal rate is probably as much as you can physically ingest and absorb at your peak. And so that's the hypothesis anyway. Obviously, there's other stuff to be proven, but they they seem to have done some good work. So, okay, this is the limit of how far over the long term you can actually burn David  8:07   Interesting, interesting. Bad news for speedsters. Jason Wallace  8:10   Yeah, then you just tap into the speed force. And that's a force, a source of infinitre energy right? David  8:15   This is why the Flash has the Speed Force is to overcome force is actually physiological limitations? Yes, David  8:28   I'd be fascinated to know, and I don't know how we would do this, but to see what that kind of study would find in other species, is their version of this? Different? Are they able to maintain a higher activity level. Brian  8:44   So I think the best surrogate for this study is probably cats. David  8:49   Yeah, well, and dogs are interesting. I was gonna say dogs, because cats, even modern, even wild cats, are not very active animals like lions are famous for they sleep like 18 hours a day or something, right? They really are "rest most of the day and then do some bursts of activity". Dogs, I think, would be an excellent comparison, because dogs actually have a lot of the same physical adaptations as humans, for mobility and for traveling and for covering long distances. They're cursorial animals, as we are. And dogs would also be nice, because you can train a dog to do whatever you need it to do for this. Brian  9:36    Cursorial means running? David  9:39   Cursorial means adapted for running. So horses are cursorial dogs and wolves, all canines are cursorial and common adaptations you see across those three groups include large lung capacity certain types of thermoregulatory. Very you know, we sweat, dogs pant, these very particular adaptations for maintaining body temperature and the shape of our legs. Dogs, horses and humans, all have very long legs that tend to also be very thin. One of my favorite things to compare if you if you have a cat and a dog handy, and you look at the shape of the limbs and a cat and a dog, dog legs almost all the muscles up on the top, and then it becomes this stick toward the end. And the fingers on the paws are long and in and narrow. The foot is sort of long and narrow. If you look at a cat, their arms tend to be muscular all the way down. Their arms are much more flexible and their paws are a little bit wider and shorter, because cats are grapplers. Yeah, cats are using their arms to wrestle and grab and pull dog arms are really built to do one thing, and that is to walk. That is to move. And they're really efficient at it. Jason Wallace  11:08   And so humans would be the only cursorial primate. Yes, like I've seen other primates try to run, it doesn't work out so well. David  11:18   No, we are actually. There's a bunch of hypotheses that we are specifically adapted for running, not just for walking on two feet, but that some of the anatomy of our especially our lower bodies, is specific, not good for walking, but specifically good for running. We are running adapted primates. Brian  11:42   Well, I don't think we could ask for a better transition into the discussion to this game, so I think we should take advantage of that and and start talking about primates the board game. I'm going to start by introducing the game. We're going to, you know, deal with that particular challenge and how the game works. And then we're going to jump into a conversation about what is a primate, where did they come from, and how do we relate to the rest of them? As you know, weird, very weird, bipedal primates. Okay, so primates is a game that was designed by Derek Coons. I looked this person up a little bit. So he is a graduate of Miami University in Ohio, another computer scientist person who made his way into board games, but actually was one of the founding members of Mercy for Animals, so very interested in sort of animal rights and that aspect, which actually you can see some of that reflected in the game. So I'm not sure what inspired the creation of primates, but I'm very glad that it did, because this is an incredibly detailed game about primates and primate evolution. So what does the game look like? You have a it's a very space hungry game. Let's start with that, like when we all sat down to play, it took the majority of the table to sort of just lay this out. And there's a reason for that. You have a large, beautifully illustrated, simplified phylogenetic tree of the history of primates. It's split down into six major branches. The reason that the board is so big is you've got six different groupings of primates, and these are regular playing playing, regular size playing cards. So you can kind of imagine, if you're going to stack up six of these side by side, it's just going to take up some space. You have slightly oversized cards as well that are going to represent extinct primates. So the tree is split into six groups. We're going to come back and we're going to talk about all those groups later. In more detail, you've got oversized, chunky, wooden meeples representing, I'm trying to remember what all of them were. There's an orangutan, for sure. I think there's a bush baby. There's definitely a lemur in there at some point. Or maybe it was a tarsier, I don't know. I'm sure they were trying to pull from across the primate family tree. Jason Wallace  13:50   I will say the meeples are the best part of this game. They are the most adorable meeples I've ever seen.  Brian  13:57   They are very good. So the board is a phylogenetic tree of primates and how they relate to one another, but it's also representing a real, physical tree at the same time. So the goal of the game is to take your little meeples, and you're moving them up the branches to the top of each of these six different extant primate families. When you get to the top, you get to take one of the cards that is there, and that card will represent a member of that family, and usually will tie it to a specific ability. So for instance, orangutans, if you get the orangutan card under the great apes, it has an ability called tree swaying, which lets you jump from branch to branch on the phylogenetic tree, which we think is a wonderful representation of that ability. There may be things that are affecting their ability to collect food, or stuff like that. Positioned on the tree, you'll have little primate skull icons that are representing extinct primates along those different lineages. And you're also going to populate with different sort of food tokens. And there are, I think it's animal protein,  there's plants, fruits, and then there's like a wild card that's supposed to be, like, saps or exudates or something like that. I think it's a wild card because sometimes you're licking honeydew, which is just what comes out of the back of an insect. So it's kind of vegetable, it's kind of animal, it's both. It's a wild card,  Jason Wallace  15:18   post processed vegetable. Brian  15:20   Yeah so let's see the movement of your primates up the tree is actually something where you it is a roll to move, kind of it's still very strategically choice. It's not Candy Land. So you're going to roll three dice. They have either one, two or three on them. You can either move all three of your little primate meeples on different branches, or you can move, use two dice and move one of your your meeples, an extra far distance. When you get to the top of the tree, you get to collect a card. The only other mechanic is, if you rest, you can get these bonus cards. And a lot of those have this sort of if you think about Mercy for Animals, a lot of those are about legislation to protect animals or to protect primates. Or that's where you'll also get your set mechanics where you're trying to collect. You'll get extra points for collecting all of the primates from China, or something like that, or other sort of interesting groupings. When you collect those, there's this secondary track called the heart track. You can also get points from that. Most of your points are going to come from collecting your primates at the top, collecting your little bonus primate sets and your heart track that runs across the bottom. And I think that's all the ways you get points in this game. Jason, what am I forgetting? Jason Wallace  16:32   No, I think that mostly covers it. You've got your your primary points you get from picking up the various extant or extinct primates. You've got your bonuses, you've got the heart track, and I think you may have some bonuses for food at the end. You haven't eaten, but you use the food to buy various other things. So it's a resource, but it's also worth points at the end. Brian  16:51   Yeah, usually that's true. Whenever there's some resource, they usually throw a couple extra points. If you got a bunch of those sitting around, usually it's only going to be there to help break ties. You're never gonna win a game from hoarding a bunch of like, food cubes. Will  17:03   I don't can attest that's where most of my points came from. When we played, that was where most of my points were from. Was my leftover food. Oh, okay. Brian  17:11   But actually, this is the different from when we played holotype. Because I think you spanked everybody in holotype. Yes, that one, I did well. But I think in this version, I think David spanked everybody if I'm, if I'm remembering correctly, David  17:22   I think me, Jason and I, I feel if I remember correctly, we were sort of neck and neck, Jason Wallace  17:27   yeah, and I honestly don't remember which one of us was ahead. I also don't. I think the difference was like, Yeah, David and I were up ahead, and then the rest, you other two were way behind. Brian  17:36   Sorry, I was just enjoying the game. That's my That's the excuse I always get for why I lose pretty much every time we play. David  17:47   We sat down before we played. Brian was like, I haven't played in a while. So the classic video gaming excuse, Brian  17:59   yeah, this controller is clearly broken. Will  18:03   I'm not used to this kind of controller. Brian  18:05   So we were playing where if you were putting your meeple along the traffic, you were running up a thing, you'd pick up all the food along that track. That's how we were playing the game. That is wrong, by the way. It's the only reason I know it's wrong. And unfortunately, this is just rule books are hard to write. There's a card that I found, and it's actually for the cheek pouch, which is in an Old World monkey trait, which gives you the ability to pick up all of the food as you go by, which is the only way that I found out that we were doing that wrong. Jason Wallace  18:35   Yeah, we looked at the rule book for like, two minutes trying to figure that out and compare wording at one place and another. So I'm going to put that down to poor wording in the wording in the rule book. Brian  18:44   I mean, like I said, rule books are hard to write. They just are. It was very clear that you had to stop on the location of where an extinct creature was located to pick it up. It was a little less clear about if you had to do that for food. But evidently, you were have to, you have to actually choose to stop to collect the food. You don't just get it for walking by it. David  19:02   That's interesting, because that would have changed it quite all. You would have ended up with a lot less food. Another thing that I maybe you mentioned this, the game has a set number of turns.  Brian  19:13   It's only 10 rounds in a 4-player game. David  19:15    It's only  10 rounds. And that was one of that was part of the logic. Why we figured, oh, it must be you pick up the food as you go, because otherwise you're really food is a really limited resource. Brian  19:27   You'd have to be much more strategic and purposeful about your movement. But even then, it seems like you would really struggle to get some of those more expensive cards. Like you'd have to actively go for them. Like, I think the Gigantopithecus card, I think you're using your food to buy these extincts that are out there.  David  19:43   right, I wouldn't have been able to steal it from will.  Will  19:46   No, no, that's right. A better game. Brian  19:51   I do say that honestly, with the board game, as long as everybody's playing by the same rules, it's fine, right? And we were definitely all playing by the same rules, it just would have been a little different. Will  20:00   Yeah, yeah. Just been a lower point point total at the end, but the gameplay would have been the same, Jason Wallace  20:06   yeah, for sure. And I will say, like, the gameplay on this is pretty straightforward. It's like, once you set up everything, like you, you roll your dice, you move your primates, you kind of, you can aim for some things and try to get them certain ways and such. But it's, there's it's not a super complex game. It's like, we've had some games on the podcast that are very complicated. I'm thinking like Earth or genotype is fairly complex, even in terms of just how the game plays out. This is a fairly simple game, roll the dice, move your primates, pick up cards. Doesn't take long to kind of figure it out. Brian  20:41   And like all the best games, the game is fun, and the learning happens by accident, because when you flip through entire deck of like, Oh, these are all Old World monkeys. These are how they're related to one another, and this is how they're related to Gibbons, and this is how they're related to this. And these are the extinct things that came on their line. And here are the things that they eat. You're just gonna learn that by playing primates. I mean, I'm getting ahead of myself, because I'm gonna come back to I'm already making my argument for why i What kind of grade you might be predicting this game is gonna get when we get to that part of the conversation. But we have two paleontologists on this podcast, and we have a game that is about evolution, Earth history and extinct primates. So Will, David, I would like to if it's okay, we can start talking about the science here. Can you tell me about the history of primates, and in particular, the primate niche and its history? David  21:35   Sure, primates, so in the grand sort of picture of evolution, mammals get their start around 200 million years ago, right at the beginning of the age of dinosaurs. And primates get their start after the age of dinosaurs. So primates, from our evidence from the fossil record and also evidence from the genetic comparisons with other species, it looks like primates really sort of came into their own around 60, 65 million years ago, in the aftermath of the mass extinction that ended the Age of Dinosaurs, the earliest primates were closely related and very similar to some early rodents, and this sort of group of mammals that were relatively small, probably some tree climbing ability, right? There are a lot of rodents today. There are a lot of carnivorans, things like raccoons, that are not fully tree dwellers, but they're able very comfortably to go up and down, in and out of trees. Early primates, including groups like the plesiodapiforms, which are considered to be maybe the earliest primates, maybe cousins of the earliest primates were beginning to develop these arboreal adaptations, right, anatomical specializations for spending almost all your time in the trees Will  23:11   compared to squirrels a lot?  Brian  23:13   Yeah, I was just about to say, like, I've always heard that, like our oldest primate ancestors were more like squirrels than anything else. David  23:21   Yeah, and squirrels are a great comparison, because they are extremely arboreal A and B. You know, being a tree dweller full time has the benefits of being able to navigate an environment that not many other animals can navigate, being able to get up off the ground and away from the many dangers that can be present on the ground. Squirrels are a really interesting comparison, because squirrels are uniquely adapted for going up and down trees. Squirrels are famously able to run, just run straight up and down a tree. Their I think their wrists turn outward in a way that most animals don't. Okay, so squirrel, it's you think of like a raccoon will climb sort of up and they're grabbing and they're stepping kind of the way we would. Squirrels can fully just run vertically. Brian  24:18   That's true. They kind of sprint up a tree you don't see Will  24:22   they can also sprint down the tree. Yeah, they can just move. And their feet also can kind of rotate, so that they have hands and feet going in all four directions, so they just have a four direction grip on the tree, and can just Velcro to it. David  24:41   Okay, I won't even run down the stairs. Squirrels are really impressive. Brian  24:48   So those early primates, did they have sort of what we would consider like the primate hand setup, or the early version of that, with the fingers and opposable thumb? David  24:57   Yes, I believe off the top. Top of my head, I believe in early primates, we see evidence for the at least the beginnings of grasping hands like we have, which, again, not unique to primates, right? Raccoons have that a lot of rodents have, that the beginnings of specialization for plant eating. Early primates were going after plant foods. I want to say long and probably prehensile tails are something that shows up very early on. There is also genetic evidence to suggest that enhanced color vision is something that is evolved deep in the primate family tree. Most mammals have relatively limited color vision, not black and white, but basically, most mammals are effectively color  Jason Wallace  25:50   red, green, color blind,  David  25:52   color blind, red, green, color blind. Primates are unusual. Primates are not we have three we're trichromatic, right? We can very clearly see reds, greens, blues, etc. That seems to be something most most of us, yes, present company excluded. That's another thing that evolved early on, possibly to help identify fruits and other food stuffs that would be up in the trees. Brian  26:19   So our nocturnal mammal ancestors presumably lost one of the three color cones, and actually, mammals had to re evolve like basically, through gene duplication and adaptation, have re evolved the ability to see in three colors, if you look at like birds, for instance, never lost that original trichromy. David  26:43   Most vertebrate animals have better color vision than really that we do right. Reptiles tend to be three or four right, trichromat or tetrachromat. A lot of insects have better color vision. A lot of fish have better color mammals really did downgrade in that regard. Brian  27:03   We had to get it back. We had to Panda our thumb back.Pandas thumb our way to trichromy.  Will  27:10   And some people have hypothesized that that may be why, compared to like reptiles and birds and insects, why mammals are so dull, colored. Brian  27:18   Oh, why we're so boring  Will  27:19   that you don't get a lot of brightly red and blue and yellow mammals, because it's not as useful for us compared to those other animals that can see the vibrance of those colors much better than the average mammal. So you get a lot of brown mammals. Brian  27:36   and that's why mammals are so stinky. David  27:41   And also, if you think about what are some of the exceptions mammals that are using Reds and Blues for display, it's primates, right? It's baboons, it's mandrills, it's things like that, yeah, Jason Wallace  27:55   okay, so you say that the primates really got their start right after the after the dinosaur extinction, which immediately brings to mind, like, Okay, that sounds like they are occupying a niche that got vacated as part of that extinction. Is that correct? Brian  28:12   I mean, what was there before? Like, there were large herbivores and large carnivores and burrowing things and all kinds of things. Like, was there a primate niche before primates, or did they invent the niche alongside with the development of angiosperm trees? David  28:27   Well, that is you've hit on. The key point here is that part of what probably allowed them to evolve was the loss of large herbivores and the loss of large carnivores, which meant that there was food to be eaten and safety to be found. But also, there is evidence to suggest that before the dinosaur extinction, forests tended to be more open environments because you had all these big herbivores clearing space and stomping through the forest. Okay, we see evidence for denser, closed canopy forests becoming more common after that extinction, and that was probably a huge boon for animals like primates who live in the trees and are specifically adapted for moving between trees.  Brian  29:20   I guess that makes sense when your average herbivore is the size of an elephant or larger David  29:26   Yeah, yeah, you don't get a lot of closed canopy those animals stomping around. Will  29:32   And you need that. You need that closing of the canopy to be able to just be a canopy dweller. Otherwise, you're going to have to go up and down trees. David  29:41   And there are several lineages of gliding, Mesozoic mammals. Brian  29:46   Interesting, interesting. So another thing, I was looking through the book, and I didn't realize this, every one of the little spaces on the phylogenetic tree has a letter and a number, and we were trying to figure it out. And so, like we decoded what the letters mean. They're. Coded to the name of that lineage, of that particular branch, including, you know, before the splits that occurred, there's also, they're numbered one through seven. And I found out in the book that has a meaning too, in fact, the it's tied to the to the era in which that extinct creature would have been found, like, if it has the number six or seven. It's from the Quaternary within the last which is the most recent 5 million years. The most recent anything in five was the Neogene, and anything prior to that would have been the Paleogene, 66 million to 23 million. So it's actually also synchronized to time, which is, I suppose, great when you're getting your extinct it shows you exactly on what branch and exactly what time period it has to be in right as you're going up through it. We've got a bunch of different families of primates to talk about, and I really don't know how we want to, how we want to narrow it down. I did think one thing I wanted to point out is one of the families is tarsiers. And I looked through the tarsier cards, because the cards have different abilities based on what the different creatures, the different primates in that group are. There was only one ability for tarsiers. It was leaping. There was the only thing that they mentioned was leaping. Our tars So, so what is a tarsier? Will  31:14   Tarsiers are really like they're one of my favorite groups of primates. Jason Wallace  31:18   Are they? The oldest branch I'm looking here at the board, but I don't have a good image of it. Brian  31:24   I think the oldest was actually and they did the wet nosed primates, which is combining lemurs as well as lorises and Bush babies, into a larger group, Will  31:34   yes, and I don't know which member of them like has, but it does look like tarsiers, probably is, is one of the oldest, if not the oldest David  31:48   lemurs in in true primates. So the closest cousins, living cousins of primates, are colugos, which are just outside the group, which are gliders. Then lemurs are the out group. So they are the earliest branch of living primates, lemurs, lorises and so on. Then it's tarsiers, sort of the next branch in. And then everything with everything beyond tarsiers is monkeys. Then you're your New World monkeys, your Old World monkeys. So tarsiers are the closest primates to monkeys without being monkeys, and then lemurs are one more step out from there, Brian  32:27   and all the lemurs are in Madagascar. There are no are all the lemurs in Madagascar?  David  32:33   Yes, I believe that's true. Brian  32:36   Okay, so unlike marsupials, where we do have the occasional possum who's running around there somewhere, like all of the lemurs are found in one place, and their closest relative, the lorises and the bush babies, are a little bit more distributed than that, right? David  32:50   Yes, yeah. They're in broader Africa, I believe, yeah. Will  32:54   And there are, there are some in Asia that I don't know, which specifically. Brian  33:00   The Loris is the only, okay, it's the only venomous primate is the slow Lori. So that's just, it's weird claim to fame, and lemurs do all kinds of insane things. And I mean, I wish we probably can't really spend, like, a ton of time on it, but the front of the box is the aye aye, which is one of my favorite primates, which is absolutely freaky little lemur that is basal even to the rest of the lemurs, and is is a primate that is doing the same ecological job as a woodpecker. Jason Wallace  33:34   Tell me about this. You guys kept talking about its freaky fingers and stuff, and I have no idea what you're talking about. So explain this, please.  Will  33:41   I will happily take this one, because this is one of my I love primates. They're so cool. The Aye Aye is a lemur, but it is extremely specialized. They hunt for grubs underneath the bark of trees, and they do this using very sensitive ears and a very sensitive finger that they tap on the bark. Their middle finger has elongated into this very thin, very still dexterous, and it's actually almost like ball jointed at the base. It is extremely dexterous. And they tap on the bark and listen for hollow spaces. And when they find one, they have these rodent like front teeth that they then gnaw a hole into the burrow or cavity where the grub is. And then they use that long finger, which has a hooked nail on the end, to reach in and fish out the grub, and then in eat it and move on to the next one. And that's very much what woodpeckers do. Woodpeckers find spots where grubs are going to be in the wood. Bore into it with their beak, you know, Peck into it. They're woodpecking, and then they have their tongue is long and barbed. To fish out the prey. So it's very similar system. Brian  35:05   So they're both highly derived, and they hit on very different solutions to the same problem based on their starting materials. David  35:12   Yeah, the third finger. So it is the third it's the middle finger that they're using to do it. And my favorite thing to it's, it's very, very long. It is this unusually creepy looking finger. There was a paper that came out recently that got a video footage of Aye Ayes picking their nose, putting that finger all the way to the base, the full finger, all the way up in there, to get as much reach as they can, yep, into the into the throat. Brian  35:54   I'm gonna shout out another podcast here weird and dead, because they did a whole, the whole episode on the freaky fingers and the nose picking.  David  36:01   Oh, just, Oh, that's great.  Brian  36:03   Oh, absolutely, of course they did. That's their whole jam, right? Gross, the gross things in biology and evolution that nobody wants to talk about. There was even some discussion of, why do they do this? It's like, I don't know, humans do it too. Why do humans do it? Will  36:18   one of those of, like, super weird for us to think about doing it. I bet it feels amazing, David  36:24   like a Q tip in the ear. Yeah, just Will  36:28   No, itch, you can't get to Yeah. Brian  36:35   All right, so we said New World and Old World monkeys. Okay, so we got to talk about this. We got monkeys in South America and we got monkeys in Eurasia. Those are different groups of monkeys, right? David  36:49   Yes. Generally speaking, New World monkeys are in the new world the Americas Old World monkeys are on the other half of the world, Brian  36:57   okay, but they're not okay. They but you said, because of that, phylogenetically, that means that everything between them is also, if we're going to call monkeys a group, that means everything in between them is also a monkey, right? So they share a common answer with each other. But like, where did they come from? And where did the new to the new world? Are we? Are we doing some insane rafting to get monkeys to the new world?  Will  37:20   Yeah, that does seem like what happened Jason Wallace  37:22   That's exactly what we're doing. Oh, so this is, this is not like breakup of Gondwana land or whatever.  Brian  37:26   No, it wouldn't, because the continents were already split before primates existed. David  37:30   Yep, yeah, yeah. The earliest monkeys in the Americas, I think, are Oligocene, so like 30 something million years ago, I think, is where, where they are, which is way after the Atlantic Ocean was nice and wide by that point, okay, and all the evidence suggests that the ancestors of New World monkeys rafted across the ocean at some point.  Will  37:55   Yeah, from Africa. Brian  37:56   There's a ridiculous story to be told there about the monkeys that rafted across the Atlantic and didn't die. David  38:02   There's a chapter in Riley Black's latest book when the earth was green that depicts a scene of this exact thing happening. Brian  38:11   Okay, crazy.  Jason Wallace  38:12   You got to figure out if there was some group of monkeys that managed to raft all the way across. There are many, many more that didn't.  Will  38:20   Oh, yeah, David  38:23   it probably happened multiple times. This is also rodents did the same thing. So there are the group, I think it's caviamorphs. The group that is includes like capybaras and porcupines. New World porcupines, also appear to have rafted across around the same time. So for any listeners who are baffled by what we're talking about, a thing that we see happening pretty regularly in the modern world is you will get, like a storm, will tear a chunk of forest off or something, and then you end up with, like a log and a mat of vegetation, just a big, just a big chunk of floating Trees and leaves and vegetative matter that often has animals in it. And those rafts can go anywhere. And if they make landfall somewhere, those creatures can then crawl off and, you know, go find food and shelter somewhere where they are this there is good evidence to suggest that many times throughout Earth history, this process has been responsible for taking a group of animals to a part of the world that was new to them,  Brian  39:35   interesting, So then the the ocean currents must have a huge I wonder if you can infer certain things about ocean currents. So, for instance, placentals in in Australia didn't happen. So nothing rafted and survived. But then do New World monkeys? Did they go through some kind of crazy bottleneck where basically all New World monkeys are descended from, like 50 monkeys who got there at a certain time or. You said there have been multiple instances of rafting? David  40:02   Yes, yeah, I think, I think that's from genetic evidence. Now, we're a little bit outside of my familiarity, but it seems like there are multiple origins of New World monkeys, which probably means that at least a couple of different populations rafted over. Brian  40:24   Let's see. Okay, so that's our New World monkeys, and this is our spider monkeys, our howler monkeys, our capuchins, like all what there's owl monkeys, which I saw, were the only nocturnal monkeys in the new world. We got lots of nocturnal primates everywhere else, but at least in the New World monkeys, it's just those ones. But then we got our Old World monkeys, and I didn't realize baboons are actually in the Old World monkeys. So of course, it makes sense, because that's where they're from. Do baboons? Okay? Monkeys have tails. This is kind of what we would consider the trait of something being a monkey, is that has a tail, right? And I think we were talking about the color stuff, was it you guys who were telling me about the bright blue and red in a mandrill is not pigments. David  41:07   Yes, yes, structural, yeah, animals generally can't do blue pigments. So pigments are molecules in the cells that express different colors. Uh, mammals can't do red, and animals, I'm pretty sure animals in general, can't do blue. And so blue is structural. The actual structure of the skin or scales or feathers refracts light to make it appear blue. And red in mammals is blood. It's just the tissue becomes flushed with blood very close to the surface. Brian  41:47   So other examples of structural colors, you'd say animals, and that even extends to insects, a butterfly's blue wings are the shape of the scales, sort of refracting the light to make it blue, the same way that the sky is blue because it's reflect, refracting the light in such a way to bounce it around and create blue. Will  42:05   Your blue birds and stuff like that are also like, if you put them in the wrong light, they would stop looking blue, because it's just a trick of the light. Brian  42:17   Okay, so at this point, there are two groups that we have not talked about, that are represented in the primate family tree, in the game primates. Obviously, it's more complicated and more diverse than this, and that is the Gibbons and the great apes, or the gibbons I've also heard called as the lesser apes, which seems really mean to make a whole group just to put one thing into as well everybody, but not you. You can be your own side. David  42:41   I think historically, they were considered great apes. And then at some point, as more evidence accumulated, we realized that they were an out group. And so that's when they got their own name, the lesser apes, which is a disservice, because Gibbons are awesome. Will  42:56   I feel like someone who came up with that name was one who would who was extremely jealous of their ball joint wrists and went, let's call them the lesser apes that'll put them in their place. David  43:09   Sounds like they were named by a great ape. Brian  43:11   There's a lot of that going around. We really have to do something about that. Gibbons are also they're specialist in their form of movement, right? The brachiation? Like, that's there they are. Like, I guess there are. There are other primates that do it, but nobody does it as well. Or is it really just a Gibbon thing? First of all, what is it? What is brachiation? Will  43:34   Brachiation is a primate specialty in many ways. We can brachiate So that is being able to hang from your arms and swing and use your arm as the lever you're swinging by. David  43:48   When you do the monkey bars on the playground you go from hand to hand that's brachiation. Brian  43:53   gotcha monkey bars or rings, so basically, like half of gymnastics, exactly. Will  44:01   Like that's that's all brachiation. Uh, other great apes are also very good at orangutans are brachiators, and they are also primarily tree dwellers. They spend very little time on the ground. Gibbons, though, are not only tree specialists and extremely good brachiators. They're like fast like Gibbons can chase a bird down in the trees, and they are moving with such speed and precision that it just is not comparable to any other group that's doing it, except for, like, you know, spider monkeys, that move but they're not moving in the way Gibbons are moving, Brian  44:41   because theyre cheating, they've got an extra limb.  Will  44:44   Yeah, exactly Gibbons  are insanely acrobatic, and it's, it's and because they're primates, half the time it looks like it's just for fun, because they are just doing more than they definitely needed to do to get. From A to B, and watching a given with the zoomies is fantastic. David  45:06   They have zoomies in three dimensions. Will  45:08   Yes, absolutely. They put the Z and zoomies. They use that Z axis. David  45:16   Well, it's an interesting point to make, because we've been talking about how primates are these tree dwelling specialists, but there are several different methods among primates about how they do this, right? Great apes do not have tails, right? Gibbons have an actual ball and socket, wrist joint. They have these incredibly flexible arms, so they're great at swinging and brachiating. Orangutans are good brachiators, but they also do, like, what I think is called, like scramble climbing where they are going. They're reaching across branches. They're sort of crawling through the trees with all four limbs at once? Yes, a lot of monkeys have prehensile tails, so they're effectively climbing with five limbs. Lemurs are unusual in that they tend to be they're often vertical climbers, so their body is sort of upright while they're climbing. And they're also leapers. They jump from tree to tree and branch to branch. Okay, so even among primates, you have different styles of climbing and getting across and through trees. Brian  46:34   Gotcha, which was that tarsier thing, that sort of like state that leaps, that leap, that way of leaping through trees? David  46:40   Yes, which is part of why, when lemurs are on the ground, they hop, Brian  46:46   which is very fun. If you've ever seen zaboomafoo, it's the Yes. It's a fun like sideways crab bouncing, yes, with their hands held up in the air.  Will  46:58   Yeah. They're no longer good at walking around on flat ground. They are made for trunks.  Brian  47:04   Okay? Gibbons also lack a tail, right? Like, if we were to say, like, the thing that we sort of ties all the apes together is that the tail has been, I guess, do we just say it's lost, or just extremely reduced, David  47:15   it's effectively lost? Yes, I don't think any apes have a functional tail at all, even when, like humans, occasionally, a person will be born with a tail. But tail is in quotes because it's really just like an act, like a little nub, okay, at the base of the spine. Brian  47:37   So tail loss is that actually, okay? Wait, is it tail just an extension of the is a tail made up of vertebra, or is it a different set of bones? David  47:45   It is, it is vertebrae. It's often differently shaped vertebrae. So you can tell in a lot of animals, if you're looking at a tail vertebra versus, you know, trunk or neck. Brian  47:55   Is that a snake? Is that a snake thing, too? David, yes, snake. David  47:59   You can see, you can identify a tail vertebra by itself. Yeah, a tail is actually defined by being an extension of the trunk, okay, past the butt that is made of bones and muscle, but there's no organs with it. Okay, interesting. So all of our organs are in the body wall, like within the core of the body. A tail is an extension of the body, muscles, vertebrae, but no more organs, and it is beyond the butt. Will  48:30   This is why a lot of your arthropods that have tails aren't actually like a scorpions tail is just its abdomen. A scorpion poops out of the tip of its tail right before the stinger? Oh, no, yep, the stinger tail is full of organs that. So that is not actually a tail. That is just a long body that has been made into a tail like structure. Brian  48:53   I am. There's that horrible pun that I'm building in my head, and I haven't finished it. So anybody feel free to pick this up. But it's like bed butt and beyond Brian  49:06   but anyway, so, so it's David  49:07   Bod butt and beyond, yes.  Brian  49:09   There we go, body butt and beyond. Brian  49:13   So we actually then prime we, because we are also apes and graded specifically, have literally lost vertebra, like it's just, it's just gone, like we don't make them anymore. David  49:26   we've also lost teeth, Brian  49:28   yeah, I guess that's true.  Will  49:29   Yeah, shortened our snouts down. David  49:31   Okay? Dental count, Brian  49:33   so we have fewer teeth than other other great apes, or just other primates, David  49:37   other mammals, okay, other mammals. Brian  49:41   So great apes that you know, I bonobos and chimps are considered separate now, right? I know that they weren't when I was young, but now we consider them two different species, correct? David  49:51   Yes, yes, they're both in the same genus. They're Pan Okay, so chimps and bonobos are our closest cousins. So the great ape tree. Is orangutans on the outside, right the early branch, then gorillas, then chimps and bonobos, and then side by side with chimps and bonobos is humans, the hominins. Will  50:13   And we can see there that the great apes arrive from best to worst. David  50:22   Yeah, no, that's you pretty much got it. Primates prime, like a, like a pop, a successful film franchise. They really nailed it on the first one, and then they just been trying and failing ever since Will  50:36   I like the sequel. Gorillas, real cool. The sequel is good. I lost interest after that. Brian  50:43   Hey, man, I love orangutans, right? I think we might have a little bit of redhead bias over here, Will  50:51   but long arms and red hair makes me biased. I don't know, Brian  50:56   but the one thing I like, Okay, so let's actually look at how it's represented in the game. So remember, every one of these creatures that's in the game has a card that's associated with it. They have basically a portraiture of a representative of that species. So there is several different subspecies of chimpanzee, gorillas, orangutans, and each of those have a different abilities. Now, in great apes, there is a card for human. It is not one portrait. It's actually a collection of portraits. There is no ability that's specifically associated with humans. There is no benefit to collecting the human card. David  51:32   You can be human and you're you just get an extra feet and that's it. You don't have any special abilities. Jason Wallace  51:37   I mean, given how many specialized adaptations we have. I think that's an oversight. Brian  51:42   I think it was clearly not it was it. It was an active, conscious choice. It's like we are not going to pick a person to represent all of humanity, and we are not going to pick an ability that represents all of humanity. We're just, we're basically kicking it down the curb. We're not dealing with it. Here's your human you're in the great apes. You can collect it if you want. I don't think there's any bonus points that lets you get you get for collecting humans. It's like, we can't leave them out, because that's wrong, but we're also not gonna let them be the same as everything else.  Jason Wallace  52:12   You make it sound like they were so grudgingly included.  Brian  52:15   It's like, I think they were, I kind of, I'm not kidding, yeah, I think we're like, well, we can't leave them out, but we're not going to put them in the game in the same way. David  52:25   I think the choice to have a collage instead of a single portrait image is an excellent choice. Yeah, I think that's that's always that's such a difficult because once you start talking about humans, you're in culture territory, and you're in modern culture, and how do you pick a single living culture to represent the entire species that you make it a collage, you skip that issue like doing an ancient human might have been the only way to get around that of like and even then, if you're depicting them as they once lived, yes, are you in? Are they based on particular demographics, living human? How are you but Brian  53:07   you're forgetting. The obvious solution is, you make them yellow. You just go Simpsons,  David  53:14   that's true. Or Lego, yes, you just make it a lego person. Jason Wallace  53:16   I think we could have had some special abilities, tool use, endurance running. That's true. Brian  53:22   Actually, you're right. Bipedalism actually would have been a very easy thing to go with, which is worth talking about, because I know we've all done this. Look at your feet. They are hands, I'm sorry, and it's weird, like primates have four hands, and we tried to turn those hands into feet, and we walk weird. So weird compared to everything. I don't, yes, what else can you say this? Humans walk weird. We just do, Will  53:49   yeah, no, I absolutely think that should have been the ability, and it could, it could have had some mobility thing of like, you get to you get to re roll a low dice when you want to move, and you get to move farther, because you're a long distance traveler, like that's what humans are good at. David  54:05   If I didn't know you mentioned the cheek pouch thing, you could also have done the same thing with that, because your hands are free, Brian  54:15   yeah, for sure, yeah.  Will  54:18   I definitely think that's a little bit of an oversight. I can, I'd like the DND mentality. I get potentially where they were coming from, but that definitely feels like it's missing. Brian  54:29   Yeah, I think, you know, bipedal and tool using specialists. I mean, that's just, I mean, that's, that's what we are. You gotta explain well. And there's a couple other things, like highly vocal humans are incredibly vocal. But you know, not everybody I understand why they didn't do it. So I guess, okay, I'm already into my nitpick territory. You could have given humans something, right? Yes, okay, that is pretty much in terms of the science we have now crossed the family tree of primates more or less. We have talked about each of the different groups and a little bit of a weirdness on each of them. Is there something that you guys saw in the game that you'd like to talk about, that we haven't talked about? Will  55:10   I like that the cards focused in on the diverse array of things that primates eat and would give like, here's a food, here's some of the primates that eat this food and focus in on that because we, I think very often it's primates are often very good generalists in that they're not, you know, they're not known as picky eaters, but they do have a wide range of specialties. And you get things like gorillas, which are herbivores, like, mostly, they are specialized for, you know, grazing effectively, like, not like a cow does, but they are eating bamboo and tough foliage, which is a very specialized herbivore of a primate. So we just, I like that they emphasize the diet more to be like they're they're not all just eating the typical stuff that you think of a monkey eating or us eating. They're eating a wide variety of stuff. Brian  56:09   They're not eating bananas. I don't think bananas in the game, actually. Yeah, they didn't. David  56:13   I think on the Kickstarter page they say there are no bananas in this game. Brian  56:19   There were plenty of insects though, David  56:22   yes, and and I it was really cool because it meant that you'd pick a food card, and the food card would be like a real plant with a scientific name and a portrait. And it means that this game about primates isn't just about primates. No, there's also some plants in there, there's some insects, and I think that that is both fun because right you're learning even more stuff. You're learning things beyond primates, but it also really drives home a really important part about studying ecology and evolution, which is that you can't just study primates, because primates live alongside other species, and they eat other species, and they in order to fully understand any group of animals, you also have to know about other species, because that's their predators or their prey or whatnot. Jason Wallace  57:17   For me, I want to talk a bit about the bonus cards, because we didn't actually get to see that many due to the nature of the game. I don't think you see that many of the bonus cards in any given game. It's a thick stack of cards, but this is where you have a lot of the the other side about primates. So I'm looking on the Kickstarter here. It has things like fission fusion, which is a certain thing that groups of chimps, I think, will do in terms of restructuring their social networks and such, but it's also where you get a lot of how we interact with primates. You mentioned there's like protective legislation, there's a wildlife veterinarian card. There's other things there that are showing how humans are interacting with primates. And since they're all bonus cards. They're probably the good ways we are interacting with primates. I doubt that there is a habitat destruction card or a bushmeat card. Brian  58:07   Probably not on the probably not on the heart track. No, I think that that would be a weird, weird way to get points for David  58:15   well, and Brian mentioned the sort of passive learning. And there are cards that are like China, right? Primates that live in China. And it's just a list of primates that live in China. And I had a moment, I don't remember, I might have been the China it was one of those cards. I had a moment sitting there, and I looked at one of those cards and I went, Oh, I didn't know that species lived in in that part of the world. Oh, that's cool. And that's, you know, that was a thing that I learned along the way, Jason Wallace  58:42   I think the other thing to throw out is that this is probably the best, the best cited game that we have. Not the others are citing it. But if you look at the back of the rule book, we talk about showing your work and showing your sources. You said, every single card has a citation link to it.?  Brian  58:59   As near as I could tell. This game, this board game, has an extensive references cited section that is longer than many review papers, every card, every dietary card, every behavior, every everything seems to be linked to a an appropriate citation. I actually, I'm curious what citation format they used. I didn't check that the Chicago style, Jason Wallace  59:24   but it does mean that they did a lot of work to make sure it's accurate. We talk about hard science versus soft science games. This is definitely a hard science game. They wanted to be true to the actual science out there, to the actual reality, while also making a game that was fun to play. David  59:41   I was reflecting on this while we were talking, you know, going over the rules and such. The last time we were on your podcast, we had played holotype. And holotype is really a game where the mechanics of the game are capturing the scientific process. Yes, right. It's gamified. But it is very much you know you're doing the things that actual scientists do. Brian  1:00:05   Holotype is about being a paleontologist. David  1:00:08   Yeah, this game is an interesting approach, because the mechanics aren't trying to be one to one with primate ecology or evolution. So instead, the primate evolutionary tree is the setting for a game that is built to take place in that setting we talked during playing that the tree that is the game board is both a evolutionary tree of primates and a physical, actual tree, right? Like you can climb between the branches and stuff, and in terms of scientific representation, that doesn't make any sense, right? That is not an accurate way to depict either of those things, but it makes a game out of this real scientific depiction of primate evolution. And I thought, I think they did a really excellent job balancing. You made a game where all of the pieces are scientific things, yeah, as opposed to a game where you're like, true, the game is you're traveling through primate evolution. That's not really what they've done here. They just made a game out of the pieces of primate evolution. Brian  1:01:26   The goal of the game is to learn about primates. The goal is to learn about primates. Jason Wallace  1:01:31   Yeah, it reminds me a lot about periodic which we did a few episodes back where It's a game where your board is the periodic table. The game is not about the periodic table. That's just the the tableau on which you are playing. Here we have the primate evolutionary tree. Is the game board, even though it's the game itself, the playing of the game is not about that. That is the setting in which you're doing everything. David  1:01:54   And I really like that. I thought that that was really fun. Will  1:02:00   Another thing I really liked that they I liked that they included extinct primates in it, not only because Are they part of primate evolution, but from a paleo perspective, extinct primates get talked about very rarely. That's true among Brian  1:02:17   outside of Homo outside of humans, Will  1:02:18   yeah, exactly outside of us and outside of, like, some big names like Gigantopithecus and stuff like that, which Brian  1:02:25   is everybody's poster child for Bigfoot, right? Will  1:02:27   Yeah exactly. Yeah. Most  of your fossil primates just look like another primate to most people, like, unless you know what you're looking at. It's just a different kind of monkey, a different kind of, you know, lemur and you don't get the wooly, you know, baboons and the saber toothed gorillas, like, you don't get these oddball fossil primates that stand out so much that they get attention from the general public. So I like that they were included, because I was even having moments of like, Oh, hey, neat. I have never heard of this guy because I'm not a primate specialist, so I don't know any names outside of the couple of famous ones, like gorilla lemurs and stuff like that. So it was fun getting to see some of that and have a little more appreciation for a fossil assemblage that doesn't usually get much public attention. Brian  1:03:23   It is. It is really nice, yeah, because, I mean, what is the point of a phylogenetic tree? If you're not going to talk about how you got from here to there, it's not just extants, right? David  1:03:32   well, and that's also how you build, you know, you were talking about how the different stops along the way on the tree are representative of evolutionary divergence points and point times throughout the evolutionary history of the group. The way we know those times and those points is by looking at fossils, yes, Jason Wallace  1:03:54   and this is another case where there's way more of those cards in the deck than you will ever get through in a single game, just based on how much food you have to spend, how you have to land exactly on the right spot for them. It's like, we maybe only went through like, what, five to eight extinct primate cards the entire game. David  1:04:13   Yeah, I was gonna say, I wanna, I wanna say we only ended up purchasing like, three or four between the four of us. Brian  1:04:19   They're expensive, and we weren't even doing it correctly, right? Jason Wallace  1:04:24   There's a decent number of them there, and they're include like extinct homo species. I remember seeing Australopithecus was on there. David  1:04:30   So also we mentioned it here and there, but I just want to give one additional shout out to the ability cards, because all of the ability cards are a real life adaptation of primates turned into a fun game mechanic, right? It's leaping and it's climbing through the trees and food sharing and cheek pouches. And I think that that's such a fun again, it's gamifying real world scientific information. And I think that that's really cool. Jason Wallace  1:04:59   Yeah. It's in a way that makes sense, because sometimes we've seen cards in other games where, like, they have the name and the ability doesn't really have any logical connection to the thing it's representing. But in this case, they did a pretty good job of matching that. Oh, I can understand how this mechanic represents leaping. So like, leaping lets you, like, jump over other spaces or something like that. And this branch swinging lets you swing from one side to another. And there's other things about being able, like, if you're a certain food specialist, then you can steal the food, or take extra food or something, Brian  1:05:32   get some food. The social abilities that you'd see a lot of those in the great apes would translate to that social track, that heart track, right? It's like, oh, it's a social bond. So we're going to let you move up that track in a different way. It's like, it's the it's a great way of finding your real thing. What is a fun way of representing the metaphor in what we're doing? And does it make perfect scientific sense? No, but it makes sort of a it's good for the vibes, right? Will  1:05:58   Well, it's also satisfying. Because, like, not only does it convert to gameplay that is like, Aha, now I get to do a cool thing, but it feels like that also emphasizes, yeah, that's what this group's good at. Brian  1:06:12   It's the role play. The role play is fun. You get to pretend that you are one of the primates, right?  Will  1:06:17   you get to really appreciate the specializations of, like, yeah, like, you, you got to be a tarsier, or for a moment, so you got to jump like crazy. Because those things are like, like, watching a tarsier move around is like watching a frog. It just goes, and it's gone, and then it just lands somewhere else and clings to the and it's just, they're so cool at it. I like that. The abilities were emphasizing the cool stuff that the primates can do. David  1:06:44   And I, I think that this style of game you because this is a game where there isn't a goal of the game, right? You can collect points in a variety of different ways. There's different abilities. Everyone's game is a little bit different. Like everyone is collecting different abilities, collecting different cards, there's multiple ways to accumulate points, which I think is a perfect style of game for, a game about evolution, Brian  1:07:12   about you got different solutions, different niches that you can occupy  David  1:07:17   exactly there's different there's different paths to success. And I think that that's a perfect if this had been a game where there was one goal and everyone was striving for this one specific thing to do, I think it would have been less cohesive with the content.  Brian  1:07:34   It wouldn't have felt like primates. Okay, well, let's move on. Let's do our nitpick corner. So I already talked about mine, and my nitpick is that they didn't give humans any kind of special ability, even though there are some very obvious options, like even just bipedalism, would have been a clear biological thing that you could put on humans. So that's my nitpick. Did anybody else have anything else you don't have to nitpick. Nitpicking is fun nitpicking. You know, we've already mentioned, from my perspective, I take a lot from gaming with science, from Silver Screen science. So this is your little opportunity to have a rant about something about the game that maybe you thought could have been different. Jason Wallace  1:08:15   And got to say, like, if we talking a game about primates, nitpicking is totally on brand. David  1:08:19   Absolutely we are picking nits. The only thing that comes to mind because I didn't think about this ahead of time because I forgot, but the first thing that comes to mind is, I think it would be cool if there was more variety of meeples available. So there are four meeples, as we mentioned, each one is a different type of primate on the tree. And this came up the last time we were on the show. I love the role play aspect. Like I my meeple was the bush baby when we were playing, and I happened to be because of where we I was sitting relation to the board. I was near the bush baby side of the tree, and I couldn't really see very well the opposite side of the board, so I said, All right, I'm just going to focus on this side, because this is my tree, and I'm the bush baby, and that's cool. And I think if there were also meeples, because there's only four different types of meeples, and there's six nodes on the tree,  Brian  1:09:16   yeah, there's six. bracnhes like, there's six tips on the tree.  David  1:09:19   So, and at the very least, it'd be cool to have one for each of the branches. But also, if there was a gorilla option, and if there was a variety, I think that would be cool. I think that'd be fun. This is a light nitpick, because I don't, it didn't actually take away from the game, but I think that'd be a fun thing Brian  1:09:35   to have. This is a this is, honestly, this isn't a nitpick. This is a marketing idea. Selling expansion packs with the new meeples and the new player boards.  David  1:09:38   I wouldn't be surprised if there is that, or if it was like a stretch goal or something on the Kickstarter, because that would be cool.  Will  1:09:53   The only thing that comes to mind for me was that, and we it, we would have to play again with the actual rules. But if you're are only going to pick up food when you land on it, that seems like it's going to be even more difficult to get extinct cards. Yeah, and the fact that you have to land on the space that the extinct primate is on to even get the chance to buy it like and this is purely just, I'm a paleontologist, I want to get the extinct cards. And it feels like there's a lot of barriers in the way to getting the extinct cards I want. I that's so it's it's more just now. But the cards I'm excited to get are the ones that I have to go through multiple hoops to even get a chance to maybe get them if I have the food that I need when I'm able to land on that space Jason Wallace  1:10:48   and David doesn't beat you by a turn  Will  1:10:49   Exactly. There's lots of hoops. David is one of the hoops.  David  1:10:54   This is how both games. So far, it seems that my preferred way to play a game like this is to roleplay as a character and troll Will, Brian  1:11:04   hey, I'm feeling very seen right now, you know, but it obviously didn't hurt you. I think you did really well, David, David  1:11:14   but actually it was a winning strategy this time. Yeah, for sure. Brian  1:11:17   Trolling Will is always willing. Was always a winning strategy. Will  1:11:21   You win if you win and you win if you don't. Brian  1:11:24   Why are you buying the extinct primates with? Why are we collecting food to buy extinct primates? The extinct primates don't need any food. They're already dead.  David  1:11:34   Yeah? Need to. You need to use food to pay your excavators. Brian  1:11:39   Oh, okay with all that insect protein, David  1:11:42   yes, that's exactly there's no money in the game honeydew. Brian  1:11:47   What about you, Jason? You got anything to pick out? Jason Wallace  1:11:53   My only nitpick is also that humans aren't special. It's like, Oh, come on. So  Will  1:11:59   Well, it's definitely got a little bit of this is one of my common complaints that comes up with like, people recognize the superpowers that cats have all the time, that you know, they can see in the dark, and they're agile, and they have claws, and then dogs are just dogs so much of the time that people don't recognize that. It's like they have one of the most powerful sense of smells on our planet. They also have night vision, and they are incredibly, incredible stamina runners. So, like, I think humans are getting a little bit of treatment. It's like, well, it's a human what can they do? So many things Brian  1:12:32   I'm winggling the fingers on my hands in front of the camera right now. Like, here, that's a thing. That's a very important thing. Will  1:12:37   We created a piano, which is all about us. It's just going to the 10 the 11 on how dexterous we are, just showing off. Yeah, like we are incredibly cool animals. It's just very easy to get bored with it because we're around us all the time. Yeah, and I feels like one of those cases, Brian  1:12:59   I guess Gibbons got the that crazy brachiation ability. It's like, we're doing that with our fingers, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, okay. Well, let's move on to grades. We are going to combine fun grade and science grade, so you can just do them back to back. I think I've already made it really obvious that I think this is a pure A on science for me and for fun, I I'm just gonna knock it down just a little bit as an A-, because I don't, maybe that's not even fair. No, I'm gonna stick with the A-. I just want to play this game more, which maybe that means I should actually be giving it an A I don't know. Because if, for me, if my grading is, how often do I want to pull it out and play it like I actually from this conversation alone, I want to play this a couple more times. Jason, can we play this a couple more times? Jason Wallace  1:13:45   Yes, we can.  Brian  1:13:46   Okay, thank you. Brian  1:13:48   All right. What about you? Jason? What do you think? Jason Wallace  1:13:51   So I will also give it an A for science. I mean that citation list alone is should merit an A, but also just the quality of the depictions and being accurate in the little things that don't have to be accurate, like the letters and numbers for the points, the spaces on the board which they don't like come out right and tell you this, they're just there. But you can dig, and you can find the information if you want it. I think definitely a for science. I would put it at a B to a B+ for play. I also want to play it again, but I want to play it again to see all the components I didn't get to see the first time. I actually felt that the depth of strategy was shallower than I like that the decision points were relatively simple, and so I prefer more strategic depth in my games than I felt I got out of this. I think it's a beautiful game. I think it was fun to play. I just think I would probably get bored of it after a few go arounds. Brian  1:14:51   Was it a little bit too random for you? Basically, no, not, but Jason Wallace  1:14:55   not that. Actually, it's just that the decision points, I think, are relatively. Because you have this one board that's actually fairly small, and there's only, there's literally only six paths you can go up. It's there's not that many things I have to balance to figure out what is the optimal play this time, it rarely felt like I had to make a decision between here are three different things I want, and I can only pick one of them. It was usually like, oh, that's the best choice. That's the best choice. That's the best choice. Brian  1:15:22   Now I'm curious, because, like I said, the tarsiers only have one ability. So if you definitely want a leaping ability card, all you need to do is go up that tarsier route. You have one for sure. I don't know that's a winning strategy, but it is a reliable one. Will  1:15:38   I think my, my grade I think would be close to Jason's of A, A+  for science. I'm so blown away by how well they did and the attention. And it's a love letter to primatology, like it's, it's just there's so many cool details and neat examples that they put in there, and then fun wise, it's, yeah, I think somewhere in the Bs, I had fun. I enjoyed it, but I did not feel like, oh, what's the word I'm looking for? Like, like, pumped for my turn. Like it was, it was very much like, I'll just roll and I guess I'll see what happens. Yeah, cuz, like, I if I move with all of them, then that very much decides what I can do. There's not a lot, there's not, like, a huge number of paths, and so much can happen between my turns that there's no point in, like, planning what I'm gonna do, because The food I was gonna get got grabbed, the extinct one I was gonna get got grabbed. So I'm just gonna roll in, and then I will just apply numbers, and then turns over so, like, it there was, I wasn't invested in my turn of, like, Oh, let's see. I've been, I've been planning this, or I've been, you know, getting ready the same way that, like, like, holotype, where I felt like I was, like, all right, I'm aiming for something. I've got a goal in mind, and I'm working toward that over multiple turns. This one was just where the dice roll is and land is what happens. Jason Wallace  1:17:19   Yeah, the fact that there's no private hand probably makes, probably contributes to that, just because you can't have, like, Oh, this is my thing I'm working towards. And no one else can take this from me. Like, everything's out on the board. It's like, if you don't grab it this turn, someone can grab it before your next turn. What about you David?  David  1:17:41   I am gonna, I'm at this point, saying the same things that everybody else has said, I think A for science Absolutely, extremely well  Brian  1:17:44   consensus,  David  1:17:45   put together and then play, yeah, I'd say a B, maybe a B+. I think it was fun. I think that it's an enjoyable game to play the same way that, like a beautiful looking video game is fun to play because I get to look at it and it's great. I think that there, I agree with some of what Jason was saying, that it feels like my decision making opportunities are a bit limited in this game, that there are things that it would be fun to do, like the extinct primates would be fun to go for, but there's not really much of a way to plan for that. Also, like Jason said, I wish there were ways to see more options in the game with the primates, the extinct primates, with the bonus cards, you for the most part, there's a handful of them available. There's not a lot of ways to dig through them. You don't get them very often. So the game feels and then there's all very limited. There's only 10 rounds, yeah, yeah. And I found myself, as the game was getting close, I was kind of bummed that we were almost done, because I wanted to be able to explore more and do more and build up more resources and stuff. Brian  1:19:01   That you'd have to play this game many times to really get to see everything the game has to offer. Yeah, I feel Will  1:19:07   like I'd want to play it for way more than 10 rounds. But if I played it again, I'd just just break the round cap and do it multiple times. Brian  1:19:17   Just keep, take the rounds out. Just keep shuffling the diet cards. Will  1:19:20   Just keep, yeah, and then just when we we've hit hit a time, we feel like we're done. David  1:19:26   All that said, I think that it is a really nice game. I think that I sometimes I find myself I get overwhelmed with a board game, if there's too many options to be made, or if it's too strategy based or too competitive, then it can start to feel a little bit less accessible or a little bit more stressful. So I do like a game where there this is an easy game to play casually, true, right? I don't. I'm not. I don't feel like I'm having to put in a whole lot of thought to it. I don't feel like. I'm having to worry about getting scooped or somebody you know, running away with it. It does feel a bit more friendly and accessible in that way. Will  1:20:11   Yeah, well, because you can't really play like a wrong strategy if you are moving your primates up the tree, you will eventually get to the end of the tree and get a primate right, even if you're just moving them and rolling dice and like, you will get primates. You're not You're not going to be just shooting yourself in the foot, because it's like, well, you you didn't do this, so you just don't get that thing that you were aiming for. You will get primates. You will get cards. So even just playing it as as un-strategically as possible, by the end of the game, you're gonna have four or five primate cards that you will be your little collection. And that's still fun. David  1:20:53   I would be interested to play this game with kids. Sure. I think that because, like Jason said, it's not there's there's, there's a bunch of different parts to this game, but the actual gameplay is pretty straightforward and simple to understand. There's not a lot of detailed strategy, but it is. There's a lot of fun in it. There's a lot of really cool pictures, and there's a lot of really evocative abilities, and you have your meeples, which are big and very visually exciting. I think that it feels like it's a fun family game.  Jason Wallace  1:21:26   Yeah, I could see, I almost feel like middle school would be a good area for this, because it's they'd have enough strategic complexity, and they'd be able to really get it. Whereas, if you play this with like, an eight year old, like, okay, there's just a bunch of monkeys and such, but an eight year old, like an eighth grade or something, then it's like gateway primatology. And so Brian  1:21:48   primatology, not even once. All right, um, you know what? We may not have time to do this, but I did want to ask, and I'm sorry, I know we're already running long. Do you guys have a favorite game or just a game that you really like? Because we've been asking people that I know we're already over, do you have a board game or it doesn't have to be a board game, and it doesn't have to be a favorite, but what's a game that you like? Will  1:22:15   I don't have a sciencey one that comes right doesn't have to be Brian  1:22:18   a science game. We literally had, like Monopoly or something like Will  1:22:22   the one that I've played, like, like board game I've played recently that I haven't gotten to play it as much as I want to, but I've gotten to play the number of times with a number of people, and I really like it is a the alien board game, the escape the Nostromo, something the Nostromo, which is the first movie, Alien movie as a board game. Each person takes control of one of the crew members who has their own ability, and then the alien is an auto unit that moves toward the nearest player. Brian  1:22:53   It's a true monster. It's just responding to stimuli Will  1:22:56   exactly so you are just trying to get tasks done. And it's great because it's very this. You're fighting the ticking clock because, like, one of the end things is the self destruct sequence gets activated. So you now have this many rounds before everything goes off. And it's got this very fun. We all are working like it's your turn next you should go do this, because then I can do this. And if you get if you get this to them, they can get it to me, and I can build the thing. And it's, we're planning five turns ahead, because we've got seven turns left. And it feels like the movie. It feels like it captures the movie really well. And I love it. Brian  1:23:39   It sounds really fun. Actually, David  1:23:41   it's called fate David  1:23:42   of the Nostromo.  Will  1:23:42   Fate of the Nostromo. There we go. Jason Wallace  1:23:45   Yeah, I've played nemesis, which is basically alien with the serial numbers filed off. And it's also fun. It sounds like it plays similarly. Actually. Brian  1:23:55   I might need to go to the board game cafe and see if they have that. That sounds like a lot of fun. Will  1:23:59   It's great.  Jason Wallace  1:24:00   How about you? David, David  1:24:03   um, I the first thing that comes to mind is a game that I played once, many years ago, that I've been thinking about ever since, which was called Pitchstorm, which is a game where the whole premise is it has sort of the that apples to apples thing where one person is the judge and the all the other players are,  Brian  1:24:25   oh, it's like a party game. David  1:24:26    It's a party game, absolutely. But the premise is that you're pitching movie ideas to, you know, a studio or whoever, and you just have to, like, improvise studio ideas, and then, or improvise movie ideas. And as you're pitching it, they can throw out cards to like, modify your prompt, and you have to adjust it on the fly Brian  1:24:50    so you get like, studio notes,  David  1:24:52   basically, yeah, it was so much fun. It was just like a fun, goofy improv party game. And I played it one time. Time at a friend's wedding, and that was the only time I played it, and I had a great time. I think I did really well at it, which helps, that helped me to enjoy it, and that, yeah, that game was, it was super fun, and I've been thinking about it for the last or 10 years, or however long that's been okay. Brian  1:25:18   So now all those common descent listeners that have come to the podcast, you know what to send to their PO Box, right? Jason Wallace  1:25:24   Theyre gonna get 47 copies of pitchstorm, David  1:25:29   and then I'll sell them.  Brian  1:25:33   It's all a con, guys,  David  1:25:35   exactly. This is just a pyramid scheme. Brian  1:25:40   All right. Well, now that we've revealed that we should probably go ahead and wrap up the podcast. Thanks guys, thank you for coming on. David  1:25:49   Oh, come find us. We are hosts of a podcast called common descent, which is a podcast about paleontology, evolution and the history of life on earth. Every episode, we tackle the main topic suggested by our audience, and we also talk about science news. And occasionally we do little side discussions where we talk about science and movies, and we speculatively evolve monsters during October, we actually, if this is coming out around Darwin Day, we will be timing perfect. Actually, the timing is pretty great because we will be in the midst of releasing a special series in February where we'll be speculatively evolving Pokemon. Brian  1:26:30   This is pok-E. The series. Is it going to be four Pokemon? David  1:26:34   We will be doing five episodes where we will be specifically evolved into speculatively evolving legendary Pokemon. Brian  1:26:42   Oh, fantastic. Okay, all right. Well, everybody look forward to that. Go listen to Common Descent. Go listen to Pok-E. I'm gonna wrap it up there. Listeners, I hope you have a great month and great games. Jason Wallace  1:26:55   And as always, have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. Brian  1:26:57   This has been the gaming of a Science Podcast copyright 2026 listeners are free to reuse this recording for a non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming of science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. Transcribed by https://otter.ai  

#GeniusGames #STEMEducation #SciComm #JohnCoveyou #BoardGames #Science We've done several episodes on games from Genius Games (Cytosis, Periodic, Genotype), and now we get to speak to the man behind it all: John Coveyou, founder and CEO of Genius Games. John graciously sat down with us to talk about the beginning of Genius Games, the stigma of "educational" games, the challenges and joys of STEM game design, and some of his favorite non-Genius games to play. So sit back and enjoy this conversation with the man who makes our job easy, John Coveyou. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:55 History of John and Genius Games 07:50 Designing Educational Games 13:19 Balancing Fun and Realism 20:54 Most Challenging Games to Design 29:55 Upcoming Offerings 36:36 Favorite (Non-Genius) Games 38:23 Wrap-Up Links Genius Games website  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Splash images courtesy of Genius Games. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:00   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.  Jason  0:07   Today we're talking with John Coveyou, CEO and founder of genius games. Brian  0:16   Hey everybody. Welcome to a creator interview. I'm Brian.  Jason  0:19   This is Jason,  Brian  0:20   and joining us is John Coveyou from genius games, John, can you introduce yourself? John  0:26   Sure, yeah, I'm the owner of genius games. I've owned it since about 2011 and we make science accurate board games and jigsaw puzzles for the hobby market. Brian  0:38   Those are very cool and very popular. I think I like the the frog. One in particular is very good. John  0:44   You dissect a frog in a lot of public school science classes, so we want to make sure we threw that one in there.  Brian  0:49   I don't think I did a frog. Did you ever do a frog?  John  0:52   I did. I think it was 10th grade biology. Jason  0:55   I don't remember if I ever dissected a frog. I did do a fetal pig. Brian  0:59   I remember we did a heart one time and that actually, like, screwed me up for a long time. John  1:03   Yeah, I don't want to know what this stuff looks like inside of my body. Let me just move on. Brian  1:10   Fair enough. We're really excited to be able to get you on to talk to us today. Our whole reason for existence is to talk about board games and science and genius games. As you can imagine, we have done many of your games before. We've done cytosis and periodic. We did genotype. We have more games planned in the future. We're going to be doing cellulose and probably whatever else comes down the pipe. Eventually. I'm sure we'll, we'll touch on most, if not all, of the games in the genius library. John  1:37   Well, that's great, because those are two of my favorite things, science and board gaming and both have, I mean, honestly, had a dramatic impact on my life in many ways. I mean, I run a company that combines those two, but the impact goes much deeper than that. So I'm very excited to talk about both of those things and how they came together. Could you Jason  1:55   give us a bit of your background there? Because this is not necessarily a logical place to end up. At the intersection of science and board game. Your company basically lives in the space of making what I call hard science games, games where they're not just inspired by science, but they try to portray it accurately and faithfully. What brought you to that place? John  2:13   Yeah, and you know, it's a long, windy story, but I will try and summarize it as quick as possible. I think when you see a lot of games out there in the marketplace and you see, you know, a science-based game or a STEM-based game, what you're looking at is a product someone wanted to create, to just generate money. I did not arrive at the place of creating a product. I arrived. I mean, I fell in love with the sciences, and also loved board gaming, and those two things kind of randomly came together. So a little bit about my background in the sciences. After high school, I joined the military. I was in the military for eight years total, but only three of it was on active duty. I spent about a year and a half in Iraq in Mosul and Samara. And while I was there, I was enrolled in some university classes, and one was a chemistry class. And reading through I had, I got a lot of time to read through that chemistry textbook, and some other textbooks I had chemistry and some in physics, I think I was taking at the same time, because of the the stressful environment that I was in studying sciences actually became very therapeutic for me, like allowed me to take my mind off of the stress, the anxiety, the difficulty that we were facing as soldiers in that area, and I got to think about like, how atoms were built and how the universe was made, and how atoms combined to form compounds and molecules And and it actually, it was really nice to, like, take my mind off of everything. And so I really fell in love with the sciences in a way, while I was there. And at the same time, we were playing lots and lots of games, a lot of poker, a lot of risk, not, not stuff you would think of when you think about traditional, you know, hobby games. When you think about traditional hobby games, you know, a lot of times you're thinking about like Carcassonne and dominion and Settlers of Catan, which was probably the three most popular, or a ticket to ride. You're thinking about these really popular hobby games you can like buying target. For me, like poker, Texas Hold'em was a big introduction to getting my mind wrapped around the human experience, around games, and then we play a lot of risk, and boy, you know, playing risk in a combat zone with a bunch of angry soldiers, so many risk tables flipped. Brian  4:29   I feel like risk kind of sits at that, at that space where I know it's not, it's not quite part of what we would consider a modern hobby game, except I'm thinking about risk legacy and how it's kind of been inducted and almost like transitions between the games that most people would have at home and sort of the hobby game space. John  4:46   Yeah, it was that, yeah, I think Rob Daviau was the guy who did that, and he's an excellent legacy designer. And yeah, that did bring risk into a different place in the board gaming space. But anyway, so I came home. From the military, and I was studying engineering, so I got my degree, and have a master's degree in engineering. Went on to work as an engineer for a while. At the same time, really started to play a lot of other hobby games with some of my family and friends. Got into Dominion pretty heavy. Started playing some of the older stuff, like through the ages and mage night, some of these bigger like, whoa, you can, I mean, you can play these things for hours and hours and hours and real and really, like, never hit the bottom. You know, there's still, like, more game to be played. And I was teaching chemistry. I was teaching chemistry at the community college, and it just kind of struck me, like, Why? Why are we so intimidated by all these science concepts. You know, if I was to tell you that you have three oranges and three apples and each of them weigh one pound, you could do the math. It's real simple. But as soon as you remove these objects that we're really familiar with and you replace them with neutrons and protons, all of a sudden we lose our minds, and we're just like, I can't do it. It's too hard. It's not that hard. These are we're just intimidated, I think, by a lot of these concepts. So So I was thinking through that, and at the same time playing games with some of my friends, and they're like, memorizing just useless information that they'll never use in real life science fiction games. And I'm thinking, like, why is this the case? And it struck me that I just, I wish there was more real science based, like real science based board games, card games something so that when you're playing it, you're playing something that accurately mimics a real science concept, real process. And I think cyt-, you know, jumping forward, I think cytosis, in a lot of ways, is one that I'm the most proud of, in that sense, because it, because it's just such an interesting concept, the human cell, that game was really designed around the infrastructure that governs the activity within a human cell. So that's how it happened. That's that's the backstory.  Brian  6:56   What is the mission statement of genius games?  John  6:59   Yeah, that's a great question. We have toyed around with a few different mission statements. We say our core purpose is to create science based products that engage just allow people to have fun with the science concept. The wording isn't too tight on it. You know, I think sometimes you see mission statements, and you're like, what does that even mean? Brian  7:23   You got to create synergy.  John  7:25   Yeah, Team synergy. And, like, Listen, if I'm in a team and it's not synergetic, I'm leaving. So I don't know what this means, Brian  7:32   something that we've been dealing with, because, again, we're in this space, and we have, you know, read designer diaries and interviews and what people have said when they're trying to design games that are like this, where they're trying to use science concepts or have sort of an educational undertone to what they're doing. We did an episode on daybreak, which is all about climate change, designed by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, and they were very explicit in the designer diary, they didn't want an "educational game", quote, unquote, very specifically, and that bothered me that this idea that educational is a dirty word in the games industry, or they said chocolate dipped broccoli. I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on that, and how do you kind of deal with that sort of intrinsic bias that a educational game can't be a fun game? John  8:20   Yeah, that that is such a tough place for us. It is true. The word education in the gaming space is kind of a dirty word. And I think the reason why there, there were so many companies or people trying to create products that were really just to generate revenue to make money, and so you saw a lot of these larger companies do that, and you have things like flashcards that are referred to as games, and they're not game, they're not they're not games, they're just activities. And then a lot of people tried to make something they could sell that maybe accurately depicted some science concept, but it really wasn't fun. Wasn't fun at all. So the passion that went into, or maybe the motivation, I would say, that went into creating that product was just based upon making money, not on making something for the hobby. I love making things for the hobby. I love making games. I love thinking about games and why people have fun or are frustrated in the middle of a decision, what makes a decision in the game really interesting? That's a question that is really hard to answer and really easy to answer at the same time, it's really easy to answer that, but you could talk about it for hours and hours, days, weeks, years, right? What makes it what makes a decision in a game really interesting to make, and if you're not able to sit and think about that and really go deep into what makes it a decision in a game interesting, then you're probably not going to have a game that offers interesting decisions or is not very fun, or is not very enjoyable. And then, like they mentioned, chocolate covered broccoli, you just have. Broccoli, and you basically got to make people eat it. Somehow, you slap the word game on it, even though it's not a fun game or a good game, right? What? And you know, when we market our games. So I would not consider our company an educational game design company. We're not like an educational game publisher, although, if someone was to say, well, you make games that are like educational, right? I would say you can use them for educational purposes. We have a lot of teachers, tons and tons of teachers that take our games and they use them in the classroom. And that's fantastic, and that really brings me joy. But we don't actually design games so that a teacher can pick it up and play it and use it in their classroom. What we design a game for, we take a science concept that you would find, and let's say a biology or a chemistry or a physics 101, class, so a standard concept you'd find in an entry-level science class, and we want to take that concept and we want to make a game about that concept, that even if you remove the science and put zombies or dragons or ninjas or you name it, the game itself would would stand all on its own. People would find the game fun. They'd find the game worth their time. They'd pay to play that game. They'd  choose to play that game over any other game. It just so happens that when a scientist looks at that game, they go, "Wow, this science is really accurate". Now, if you want to call that an educational game, you know, be my guest. Call it whatever you'd like. It's really hard to use terms. You know, we use terms like educational or we use the English vocabulary is used to make sense of things that we don't understand. So the word educational is a very fast word to understand something. I have a hard time calling our games educational around hobby game players, because they have, they have an idea about what an education educational game is, and that is a game that is meant to force you to eat your broccoli by covering it in chocolate. Yeah? And that's not what we do. We want you to eat it because you're like, This is good. This is fun. Brian  12:06   It's really good. Broccoli.  John  12:07   It's really, yeah, it was prepared by a chef. Brian  12:14   language for this is difficult, we say, I say, a hard science game, yeah? Which I think, or, like you said, a realistic science game is that kind of how you think about this? John  12:23   I'm not too married to any specific language. We do normally say our games are real science themed games, or hard science themed games, games designed around a science concept. It's tough, because there's not really any clear language to use when someone's like, oh. Because anything I say, they say, Oh. So you make educational games. I mean, we design our games for hobby gamers, right? You'll, you'll see any of our games that you play, you'll see the exact same mechanisms out there in the hobby and other games. Oh, yeah. Like Cytosis, worker placement game, yeah. I mean, there's, there's probably 100 different worker placement games out there, the ecosystem line, all card drafting. Um, Ion a compound building game that's endorsed by the National Science Teachers Association. There's nothing different about the basic mechanisms in that game, as there is from Sushi Go or seven wonders. Brian  13:14   It's card draft. Oh, so it's card drafting, set man, set creation game.  John  13:18   That's right. Jason  13:19   So I've got a question for you on this design is that, as you're making a hard science game, you've kind of got the two goals there. You want to be a fun game, and that is definitely a top priority, obviously, from what you said, but you also want to be beholden to the real science. And so my question is, what do you do? How do you manage when those come into conflict when, when do you decide to make a simplification for the sake of fun gameplay, when do you decide to to make the mechanics morph to match the match the reality? How do you make those decisions? Brian  13:52   And we have a specific example as well, and like and again, we we play games in the hobby. So we know that the mutations in genotype are a game thing, because if you had it realistic, it would never happen, and it wouldn't come up, and it would actually break the game if it happened the way that it needed to. John  14:09   Okay, so let me I'll address this in two ways. The first is, I'll tell you what traditionally happens, and then I'll tell you how we design games. We get pitches all the time from designers, and they say, Hey, I got a really great game, you know, you have this mechanism and that mechanism, and it's themed around whatever biology, cell biology or plant biology. One of the first questions I ask is it "could, could you just completely take this theme off and replace it with anything else?" Right? Now, was this really a game designed around something else and you just slapped this biology design on top of it. Usually the answer is yes, the game is just themed around. You could just slap any old theme on it. You can kind of tell when you play a game like that that this theme is not really embedded in the in the design. When we make a game, we start with a concept, a science concept, and the first thing that I do personally. Me as I map that whole science concept out, I map out the primary resources involved in that game. So let's talk about psychosis as an example. Because I think that that's cell biology is probably the most like ubiquitous concept you you don't get to you don't get through high school biology without learning up the human cell at least once, right? Oh, mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. Every time I talk about this, someone says that, so we'll just get that out of the way. So cell biology, okay, What? What? What are the basic resources of a human cell? Well, you have nucleic acids, carbohydrates, you have proteins, and you have lipids, fats, and I might be missing something else in there, because I feel like it's, oh, yeah, energy ATP. These, if you take a biology class, you're going to hear about these four or five resources over and over and over again. I mean, you read them on the package food food labels, right? How many, how many carbohydrates does this have? How much protein does it have, how much fat does it have? The reason why those three things show up, it doesn't tell you how many nucleic acids it has, but the reason why those three resources show up is because they're literally the building blocks of the human body. They're the building blocks of a human cell. And when we built, when I first designed that game, I stopped and I said, you know, what are the basic building blocks inside the human body? Well, it's the main macromolecules, and here they are. Okay. Now, how does a human cell now? How is a human cell built? Well, a human cell has a Golgi apparatus. It has endoplasmic reticulum, it has a nucleus, it has a plasma membrane. So like so, how do all these things work? And we basically mapped all that out. Here's how DNA replicates. Here's how DNA turns into RNA. Here's how RNA turns into proteins. Here's how the proteins interact with other lipids to decorate them, to turn them into useful molecules and hormones and other things. And here's each organelle involved in that process. We just mapped it all out. There's no game there's no game here. There's zero game here. It's basically a model that shows how resources move through the different factories within a human cell, and then we say, Okay, what is the motivation of the human cell? What is it trying to achieve? Well, the human cell is trying to thrive on its own. Produce resources to communicate throughout the body. Produce resources for the body to use. Okay, how could a player take on the same motivation as a cell and then be awarded points for those things. And how could we create or put some mechanisms in place to limit the amount of resources in certain ways so that a player has to make an interesting decision to gain their path towards whatever they're motivated towards scoring points, whatever it is, and then that's where basic game mechanisms come into play. Worker placement was perfect. You place a worker that takes the spot up. You place a you place a worker inside of the nucleus, and you get RNA. You place a worker the mitochondria. Well, there you can take some ATP, or you can convert your carbohydrates into ATP.  Brian  14:09   It's the powerhouse of the cell,  John  14:55   powerhouse of the cell. So you just keep doing that, right? You turn this model you have into actual resources. You limit them with game mechanisms, traditional game mechanisms, and then you just play test it, play test it, play test it, and play test it until you have something that's not just enjoyable, but really mimics the science. Now you asked, What at some point you do run into this where you've got to take you have to simplify things, or you have to take liberties for the gameplay. And I think you know that that's a it's really hard to articulate how you do that. That's an art more than a science, but you just do it in a way that still has integrity to the science concept. And then you make it very clear when you took liberties. And that's why we have in all of our games, we put a science behind document, and in that document, we explain how the science is accurately represented in the game, and then we also explain, here's the areas we took liberties. John  15:41   And this is something that you that genius games does, that nobody else in the space really makes as much of a point of doing. And one of the things that really make me appreciate the way that you design your games. And I call this showing your work.  John  19:24   Yeah,  Brian  19:24   there's so few people that show their work, John  19:26   yeah, yeah, just show it. And also just show when you're wrong. Hey, I know I'm wrong here. I know this is not the way it works. I had to do that to make a game. At some point, we got to make a game here. But just tell me that. And then I'm like, oh, yeah, I trust you even more, instead of it feeling sneaky, you know. Brian  19:42   That's kind of how science is supposed to work. If you're wrong, you just say you're wrong, right? John  19:47   Yeah, yeah. If I'm wrong, here's the areas that will show where I where I could be wrong. Please, someone go investigate that, because if I'm wrong, I'd like to know that y'all gain from that and the other, the other thing I'll mention about the science behind documents. We don't create those internally. Those were crowd sourced. So we have a huge group of scientists who get together all over the world, a lot of PhDs, a lot of doctors, a lot of grad students and and they will each take a section, they'll play the game, they understand the science. They'll take a section, we have one lead editor, and they'll write sections to explain each of the main science principles in the game, and then where we took liberties. And so it's like we tried to do that. We don't want to be biased. Well, like this is a third party saying where the game is working, where the game is not working.  Brian  20:36   It's peer reviewed. Jason  20:37   Yeah, right. Well, okay, so now I know a listserv that we need to get on, Brian.  Brian  20:41   yeah, I was gonna say, like, well, I'd like to volunteer as tribute, but I'm sure you've got all of the expertise that you need. John  20:48   We're always open for volunteers, alway.  never, never too many Jason  20:54   Are there any games you've went through where that process of building the scientific model, translating that into a game where that was either particularly fun or particularly difficult. John  21:05   Oh, always both. Yeah, it's, it's, it is never easy. If it's easy, something's wrong, like, what, how did, how did we, if it's easy, it was like an accident that it was easy, right? And I've been working on a game about the human immune response, working on this game for probably eight years.  Brian  21:23   Okay,  John  21:24   it's, it's basically, it's a tower defense game where  Brian  21:27   Fantastic John  21:28   it's like a cut on the human skin. Bacteria is coming in, Staph, strep, pseudococus, I think, is the proper name of the other kind of bacteria that i is coming in. And then, right now, it's based mainly on, like a bacterial infection, so bacteria, and fairly common bacteria, they have on your skin, and then, and then the game is basically a tower, tower defense game, where this cut is like the pathway that the bacteria is coming in, and then your body builds up this immune response and sends in neutrophils and macrophages, and then some other things, B cells, T cells, and things like that that might come from from an adaptive immune response later on. And the game is supposed to mimic how the body builds up this response and fights off these bacteria and closes the wound. And then we want to expand this, this little model and mechanism, into other types of wounds, or other types of infections, you know, so you have, you have skin puncturing, and then you've got bacteria coming in. Well, what about like a nasal infection or an ear infection? Because you don't have punctured skin, necessarily, you've got native bacteria that got into your nose. Or what about a different kind of infection? What about an infection in your in one of your organs? Or what about a viral? What about what happens with a virus? Well, that's totally different.  Jason  22:51   The covid expansion. John  22:53   Oh, yeah, yeah, we'll get, we'll get real controversial. We could get into all kinds of stuff, right? I mean, how they but the crazy thing is, the crazy thing is, it's not, it's not cut and dry, even on something as simple as a just a cut on your skin. People's people's immune systems are quite unique, depending upon how their immune system the immune system is a reactive thing. It's not a proactive. You know, you're not born with a perfect immune system. You build your immune system up over time. It's very reactive. You introduce things to the human body, and it builds up antibodies and builds up a response to those things, because it's aware of what the greatest threats are. So so each body might respond slightly differently. And so building this game has been challenging in many ways, it also challenging because it's really the human immune response is unbelievably complicated, and any simplification you want to make is erroneous, right? Because it's so complicated. So we are right now facing we have been facing that for many years, and I've put the game away and then gotten it back out, and then put the game away and then gotten it back out over eight years, just over and over and over again. So yes, a lot of fun, but also it's never not a challenge. And if it is, I would say, why was that? Something's wrong. We must have something wrong here. We must have the science wrong. If it was that easy,  Brian  24:18   well, that's really cool. And that actually addresses another question is, what is that, That theme you've been trying to do, but just haven't been able to crack yet? So I guess we've got an answer to that as well, the human immune system. John  24:29   Yeah, the human immune system. That's definitely one. You know. The other one, though, I would say, is even harder, is cosmology, space. Oh, because in here's why, where are the resources that you're limiting? Where is the human decision? Where is the, you know, like, like, it's okay, here's the solar system. They're not changing paths. They're not changing trajectory. They're not like, how do you how do you enter in player agency, into the system? You've got to come up with something else. Like, oh. Oh, there's people jumping between the planets. Okay, well, now we're not talking about science anymore. We're talking about science fiction. Maybe we're talking about futuristic science, sure, but, but we really have to. We're really grasping for something here when we try and make a game around that, and I say that because we have tried to make a game about, you know, planets, solar system, galaxy, something, right the and it has always been very challenging. We all we face the same thing with most physics concepts. Because physics concepts, you know, we actually, I have been designing the game for a long, long time called, I've called it a lot of different things, motion, a Newtonian physics game. The other name we had for it was physics Park. And one of my staff and I got into a argument about F = ma, force equals mass times acceleration. And we and we argued about this for weeks. And we're like, first of all, it's like, the nerdiest thing in the world to argue about, you know, F = ma weeks. But second, it was like, we couldn't with the argument was about the argue. The argument was about, like, consequences and agency, you know, and I don't even remember the details, but it was like, you know, no force is the force is the consequence of something accelerating, a mass accelerating. And you're like, No, you have to push. You have to, like, push, and the acceleration is due to the force. And we're going back and going, like, how do we use this in a game? And we kept arguing about what the like, the beginning motivation was. And so it finally the game just fell apart because we couldn't stop arguing about F = ma. Anyway. So these concepts, about, like, you know, physics, macro scale physics, like Planetary Physics, all the way down to, you know, F = MA with a cart, we couldn't get around this idea that that's not the way it works. You know, you can't just run out there in the middle of the track and push the cart along, like, it's not how it works. Brian  26:54   So anyway, so, yeah, I guess so it's, it's the, it's the cause versus effects. Problem of like, well, what, what is the player controlling? It's kind of like you can imagine a cosmology game where you're tweaking the starting conditions of the universe. We're changing the Planck constant that but what does that mean? What does that actually turn into? Jason  27:12   That means you're playing nature gods. Yeah. And we have several games where that's basically what you're doing. You are the nature God, creating this world and populating it with things, and that's really the metaphor of what's going on. I do wonder, like you mentioned, you've struggled with physics games, and we've noticed that in this space, there's way, way, way more games inspired by biology than any other field in the sciences. And I wonder if it's just because biology is where things get really, really complicated, and where you have agency being able to come in with actual decision making of creatures or of humans, or if it's just complex enough that you can't just plug in some equations and you know the exact result. There's always noise, there's always randomness. And so I wonder if that's why it just has a more handle for people to go in and turn it into a game because of just all the complexity that's there. John  28:02   Yeah, I thought about that a lot. I think it does. I think there are just more like pathways in biology to mimic with a game. You know, when you take a pathway, you have clear like inputs and outputs, and so you can, you can, you can produce a game around those inputs and outputs, because you can model it and because you can like, like, you know, the reason why something like human disease exists is because there's something is off about the inputs and outputs, whereas with physics, you can't really change inputs and outputs. It's like Newtonian physics. When you change one thing, there's a very for the most part, with some very, very minuscule exceptions. There's a when you change one thing in Newtonian physics, there's a very defined outcome that we're aware of exists, and that's how we know, that's how we know Newtonian physics is true outside of the very small and the very big. Then we've got to put some fudge factors in there to make it work. But with biology, it's like you've got a pathway, and the the interesting things happen when the pathway is manipulated, or resources come in, half put together, or half put out. And so it's just easier to, like, play with that process, to play with that pathway. If that makes sense. Brian  29:14    I think it does. I think a lot of biology is like a game, right? I mean, you look at how living things interact, and it is fundamentally, it is risk management. It is a game it is input versus output.  John  29:25   Yes, yes, yeah. Jason  29:27   There's probably a few theses out there of applying game theory to natural selection and how you look at the way certain organisms have solved certain problems, and they follow a game theory tactic. And I'm sure that's out there somewhere. Brian  29:40   I mean, you can see the same sorts of ecosystems pop up again and again and again, with things occupying the same roles. You see, you know, hydrodynamic shapes in aquatic reptiles and in sharks and whales, just over and over and over again, solving the same problems. What's on the what's on the horizon for genius games?  John  29:58   Yeah. So. We got pretty heavy into jigsaw puzzles, which I'm excited about. So we have a whole series of kids floor puzzles that are illustrated by a certified medical illustrator from Johns Hopkins University. The two that have not hit retail yet are the cat and the dog, which we didn't want to make a cat and dog anatomy puzzle, because I just thought, you know, it's just no kid wants to see, you know, their pet puppy's anatomy. That's not but at the same time, it's like, well, that's the animal they're actually probably most familiar with.  Brian  30:35   Those kids who want to become veterinarians, they come from somewhere. John  30:39    absolutely, yes, absolutely. And so that's something that we have invested pretty heavily into. And the next release in that line is the cat and the dog. Outside of that, the games that I am working on currently are the game about the human immune response, which the name that the name we're currently working with is just immunology. That's the name of the game, all right, immunology, a human immune system game, and that game, I don't know how long it's gonna take me. We'll see it's, it's one of those things where, like, once the core, the core concept, is working really well, but all these additional scenarios, it's the sky's the limit. I mean, really, any game, the challenge we have with every game is, when do we say it's done? Because it's never like, perfect. It's never actually, actually done. It's just weird. We don't want to work on it anymore. We just want to publish. Yeah, you Brian  31:33   just got to decide when you're done, right? Yeah. Jason  31:35   Week is at the same point with scientific manuscripts, yeah, John  31:38   yeah, yeah. It's like, Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect. Is it done? Yeah. I'm sick of writing it. I'm sick of doing it. It needs to see the light of day. It's got to get off of my plate. And then the motion, the motion game, or physics park, or whatever we decide to name that. That's another one. We actually are working on a game as well that we're, we've, we've gone back and forth on whether this fits in the genius games brand or not, and we've concluded that it fits well enough to move forward. But it's a game about running a Veterinary Clinic, and we was designed by two veterinarians, and they brought us the game, and it was, was a bit simpler than what we would like to see as far as mechanisms. But what really struck me was the methodology they use to heal the animals in the game is what the veterinarians use in the clinic. And I really like that, because I would love to design a game about how a vet diagnosis issues within a animal, and then how they solve and cure that animal and how they run their clinic. And so it's, it's, it's just sciencey enough that we feel comfortable publishing it, but it's even more, a little bit more about like running a veterinarian clinic. So that's one I'm excited about as well. And then we have a whole series. We're producing a whole bunch more of games in the ecosystem line. Brian  33:05   We've, we have not played this yet, and we clearly need to, where do we get started with ecosystem John  33:11   so I would, I would suggest the first ecosystem game is probably the place to start. And it's just, it's just a generic ecosystem, if you really, if you want to be really critical, you could probably say, you know, some of these animals don't interact the way you show in this game. And that's that'd be a fair criticism of the game. What we're when we originally licensed the game, it was a designer who pitched the game to us when we originally licensed it. I thought, I don't know, you know, it's not, it's not heavy enough in the sciences, but it's not like, like, it's not, it doesn't accurately, you know, show how a model, an ecosystem, functions. But it was, it was, it was a really fun game. And what I, what I thought, was, this will help us expand our line and as some more mass market types of channels where people will sort of bridge. I'm not a hard science person. I'm not a hard game a hard gamer. I like some light science, and I like some animals and some light game play. Great. This is a perfect like intro game, really easy play, card drafting. You're building an ecosystem. Who doesn't love doing that, and so we've we are now expanding that into a line of games that that just hone in on specific ecosystems. So we did the Savannah, and now we're looking at the Amazon rainforest, as well as the Australian Outback,  Brian  34:36   Oh fun,  John  34:37   as well as what's the other one? A tundra, oh, and then the Alpine mountains, like like animals that you'd see, you know, in the Rockies. And so trying to really hone in on specific ecosystems and show the animals and interactions in that ecosystem with, you know, plants, whatever water basis they have, whatever fauna basis they have. What predators they have, and just show how some of them interact. But again, if you that's the lightest of all the science games we have, but it is maybe the most approachable. If you're like, Hey, I know about the Rockies, or I know about savannas, or I know about, you know, what Australian, Australian Outback and I like koalas. You know, John  34:37   who doesn't like koalas, except for people who actually have actually have to work with them? No, it sounds like really fun. It seems like it's, it's a great way to expand out. You could even have, like, prehistoric ecosystems or, or, you know, coral reefs. John  35:34   Yeah, you've you so you, yeah, you went there. we are designing a series we haven't told we haven't mentioned this anywhere, designing a series that goes from now this is like, this is, you know, does it fit squarely under what genius games does? Nor, you know, traditionally, not really. But we're designing a whole series that is starting with the dinosaurs and then moving into prehistoric humans, and then civilization, and then colonizing Mars. So we went out like, Oh, wow. You know, four game set where you just kind of see this trajectory of, you know, humanity. And, yes, we're taking a lot more liberties in that than, you know, we are with other things, but, but it's fun, but it's fun.  Brian  36:20   Fun is key. John  36:21   Yes.  Jason  36:21   All right, so I know we're getting near the end of our window. I've got one more question for you. We won't make you pick among your favorite children by asking your favorite news games put out, but I'm curious, what are some of your favorite games, not by genius games. What are the favorite ones you've seen elsewhere in this ecosystem? John  36:39   I have a lot of favorite games that my answer would actually depend upon who I'm playing games with, because that's going to really dictate what what I'm going to play  Brian  36:48   That's a very good answer John  36:49    if I'm playing with if I'm trying to introduce people into gaming, I would play Werewords, which is just, I'm in one of, like, the best games ever. It's so good, I'd play werewords, or I would play crew, or I would play Port Royale. Those are, like, the three little light games. You can teach it in five to 10 minutes. You can play it. And there's a whole lot of other really good games out there too, but those are the ones I'd play. You know, if I had new gamers, if I'm if I'm gonna play games with people that are like gamers, but they don't want, they don't have three hours. Or maybe not even like gamers, but just people who want a little more oomph. I'd play stone age. I love stone age. I play a lot of Stone Age. Or I would play like citadels or Santa's workshop. Recently, we're approaching the holidays. Santa's Workshop might be one of my favorite games right now. It's so good or pandemic pretty, like, good cooperative, not too heavy, pretty light fun. If I'm gonna play, and I'm gonna, like, really go deep, though, and play some heavier stuff, I would play mage knight, or I would play through the ages, Puerto Rico, or San Juan, the card game, which is a great introductory version of that. Yeah, I think that that's, that's, or, you know, Pandemic Legacy, you know, why not? Like, why not go through that whole thing again? Yeah, the, those are my favorite games right now. Brian  38:08   Jason and I solidified our friendship over Pandemic Legacy, and then, actually, we stopped playing pandemic during the pandemic.  Jason  38:16   Yeah, it was too close to home. John  38:19   What a weird game to play during the pandemic. Also, why not? Brian  38:23   Yeah, I think with that, we should probably start wrapping this up again. We appreciate you taking the time to talk to us and, you know, giving us all this great insight into genius games and science games in general. Jason  38:34   Yeah, well, I'm gonna say John. So for people who want to know more about genius games or about your products coming out, where should they look for it?  John  38:40   Yeah, the easiest place would be our website, genius games. We're on Facebook, we're on Instagram. We have a newsletter. We try and send a newsletter out maybe once every two months or so. We really try and not bog people down unless there is a new release or, you know, a big promotion going on, or something like that. So those would be the best places. Jason  39:00   Thank you so much, John, for coming on. We really appreciate it. This has been on Brian's bucket list for at least a year,  Brian  39:05   absolutely.  Jason  39:05   So we are very happy to have been able to talk with you, and we are we really enjoy genius games. We always joke that you do half our work for us.  Brian  39:13   Yep, thanks for making our job easy,  Jason  39:15   and we're really looking forward to playing more of your games over the next years. So thank you  John  39:19   awesome. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Jason. I appreciate the time. Brian  39:22   All right, we're going to cut it there. Thanks for tuning in. We hope you have a great month and great games. Jason  39:26   And as always, have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.  Brian  39:29   This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you, and have fun playing dice with the universe.  Brian  39:55   I have swag that I'd like to send you or to your team for the podcast. Podcast, including a set of our own printed workers for cytosis. Our little we made kineeples. They're kinesin meeples, so the actual workers of the cell, I've got all the colors from cytosis, so I'd love to send you a copy of those. Transcribed by https://otter.ai    

#NatureGame #NorthStarGames #Evolution #Ecology #Predators #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Summary Welcome to Nature, the next evolution of Evolution! We're joined once again by Dr. Thiago Moreira to talk about this reimagining of a popular game, including covering a lot of evolutionary territory we couldn't last time. We'll talk about why everything isn't actually turning into crabs, why anteater-ification needs to be a word, how humans shape evolution from moths to elephants, what exactly a species is and where they come from, and why there's no such thing as "more evolved" creatures, (at least among anything still alive). Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 02:14 Better DNA preservation 05:00 Bird-hunting tortoise 06:54 Basics of Nature 16:23 Evolution in a nutshell 18:30 Convergent evolution 27:42 Human-induced evolution 34:22 Species and speciation 40:52 Evolution toward simplicity 45:49 Final grades Links Nature Web Site (North Star Games)  Preserving DNA with EDTA (Phys.org)  Video of tortoise hunting a bird (YouTube)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Brian  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about science behind some of your favorite games.  Jason  0:10   Today, we will be talking about nature by North Star games. Hey everyone, welcome back. This is Jason. Brian  0:18   This is Brian.  Thiago  0:19   I'm Thiago Jason  0:20   again, Thiago, so y'all may remember Tiago Moreira from our episode on evolution back in season one. He is back with us today to talk about nature, which is the next evolution of evolution. So Thiago, can you give our listeners a quick refresh on who you are and what your background is?  Thiago  0:38   Hi, of course. My name is Thiago Moreira, I'm a assistant professor of honors and biology at George Washington University in Washington, DC. I do have a background in zoology, and my PhD was in evolutionary biology, and my object of studies are spiders.  Brian  0:54   So Tiago has the questionable honor of being our first returning guest. Jason  1:00   All right, we're going to assume that is a high honor.  Thiago  1:03   I consider an honor.  Jason  1:05   And Tiago, I don't know if we asked you this the first time, but we're making it a habit to ask our guests what their favorite game is. What's your favorite game? Thiago  1:13   Tabletop game?  Jason  1:14   Sure.  Brian  1:14   Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be.  Thiago  1:17   I get into the habit of like playing tabletop games, like board games later. So like, as a gamer, my favorite was always role playing games. And I'm from Brazil, and in Brazil at the time that I was a kid, we didn't have DND officially there, so we have others. So like, I play some very old school ones, but I guess the one that marked my teenage years and young adult years more was like Vampire the Masquerade.  Jason  1:43   Oh, okay, I never played that one, but I did play several other of white wolf's Orpheus is my personal favorite.  Thiago  1:49   Okay, Brian  1:50   so you were sort of in the sort of 90s renaissance of indie tabletop roleplay  Thiago  1:54   kind of, yeah. Jason  1:56   So did you like, have cape and fangs and all that sort of stuff? Thiago  2:01   I never do the the live action was, it's always tabletop, like, always rolling dice and like, that's it. Brian  2:07   That seems like a shame, Tiago, because I think you'd make a pretty good vampire. Thiago  2:12   I tried once. Didn't work. Brian  2:13    Okay, Jason  2:14   well, let's move on to our fun science fact. Tiago, as our guest, you get to go first. What do you have for us from the world of science.  Thiago  2:21   So I got this news the other day, like and like something that is probably going to be very influential in what I do. I'm a systematic person, so I do work with systematics, trying to uncover the tree of life. And we use a lot of molecular data. And this was this news from, apparently, people in Northwestern University, they found something that actually preserves DNA better than actually what we use currently, which is ethanol. So apparently when they use EDTA, which is a food preserver, it actually preserved the DNA samples more efficiently than actually ethanol, Brian  2:57   just like a suspension, like a solution of EDTA? Thiago  3:00   Yeah, they made a kind of solution to it. And actually, they found this by accident, apparently. So they just got a sample that fell in there, like, and apparently it works. Apparently it says here that, like, they got some samples from fish in ddta, and they obtain high quality DNA in large quantity. So they just pull up something from a food preservative. And it works really well.  Jason  3:21   That's interesting, because in my graduate work, we work with RNA, so DNA is less stable, more interesting cousin, and we always had to use EDTA, because what the chemical does is it binds metal ions, and it basically keeps them from interacting with the RNA or the DNA. That's what kind of makes it fall apart. RNA is tricky to work with, because that one difference of the one hydrogen, or, sorry, the one oxygen. So the deoxy in deoxyribonucleic acid, that makes a huge difference in chemical stability. And if there are metal ions around, the RNA will actually cleave itself. And there's all sorts of proteins around that are meant to break apart RNA, because it's meant to be temporary. You literally sweat RNAses, they're called, enzymes designed to tear apart RNA, so it's tricky to work with, and we'd use EDTA to keep them intact. I'm just surprised that it works so well on DNA. I would have expected that degradation would still happen, and I guess not  Brian  4:16   A lot of the enzymes that cut DNA as well. Nucleases generally need these metal cofactors as well. DNA stores information, but it is a chemical, right? So what we do is we keep it at a buffer that keeps it at slightly basic so that it improves stability, and then you suck up all of the metal ions, so the enzymes that would cut it up can't do that. Jason  4:35   I'm just surprised it works better than ethanol, which basically dehydrates everything, so nothing can work. Thiago  4:40   Yeah, that was surprising as well. I personally didn't during my PhD, but like some of my lab colleagues, they would, they were working with transcriptome, so they do have to work with, like, a RNA and like, the whole extraction was like painful, the whole rituals, especially when they have, like, to preserve the specimens in the field to do it. It was not fun. Jason  4:59   How about you, Brian, you also had a science fact right? Brian  5:03    I did okay. So based on the game and what we're going to talk about later, I heard about this story first, actually, from Will and David from Common Descent, while we were at Dragon Con, we had a panel called, "Are you really going to eat that?" which was about unusual dietary habits in the animal world. So for instance, alligators will pursue and eat fruit actively, it's not an accident. They will actually eat it if it's available. This is a story from Current Biology in 2021 it's a correspondence so it's not a full length paper documenting a tortoise hunting, killing, and eating a baby bird.  Brian  5:36   So herbivores eat what? Thiago  5:39   they're very opportunistic. Apparently, like those turtles,  Brian  5:42   carnivores eat meat, herbivores eat plants. But an herbivore will be happy to take meat if it is available, and lots of things will basically eat baby birds if they have the opportunity. They are very helpless, not very good at protecting themselves. And this is an instance of a tortoise on an island group that is just on the west of Africa. And it's a video of a tortoise just hunting this baby tern chick that fell out of the nest, sort of slowly backing away as the tortoise slowly walks toward it, trying to bite it, trying to bite it, until it eventually bites its head and kills it and eats it. So we can have a video of that if you're interested in watching a tortoise hunt and eat a baby chick. Thiago  6:19   that tortoise like was not known to eating meat before? Brian  6:22   No, I think that they've been scavenging. Yes, and evidently, this is not the only time that this has been observed, but this is the first time it's been documented from the process of actively hunting, killing and eating. Jason  6:35   There are also some very horrifying videos online of horses eating baby chicks around farms. So there's a lot of things that will eat meat if you give them the opportunity. It turns out, Brian  6:45   yeah, things will eat eggs, and things will definitely eat baby birds if they have the opportunity to do so. I guess birds primarily have to defend themselves by flying. Baby birds are not going to be able to do that. Jason  6:54   This actually ties very into the game, so we're now going to transition to the game itself, because the game actually has a card called opportunistic which lets your foragers, your herbivores start eating some meat. So let's jump into this game. So the game for today is nature by North Star games. It is basically the next evolution of the game, evolution which we covered back in season one, basic stats of the game. It's for one to four players, although there are very easy optional rules to extend it up to six, ages 10 plus 30 to 45 minutes for the base game, and about a suggested retail price of $35 Wow, that's good, yeah. The thing about nature is we make the joke that nowadays, whenever you release a game, you already have the first three expansions planned. Nature went beyond that. They made the game modular. So it is meant to have these other module expansions added on. They had the first five modules launched with the original Kickstarter, and the idea is that you mix and match these. Each one provides a slightly different style of play. Each of those is about another 20 to 25 bucks, and you can see from a gameplay it provides a lot of replayability because you can mix things around. You can customize it to what you want. But let's be honest, also from the business point of view. This lets them continue to make expansions for the next 10 years and release one to two every year as a constant stream of income.  Brian  7:40   So it's games as service. Thiago  8:08   Its the DLC of like tabletop games? Brian  8:13   Is there actually? Can you subscribe to just get the next module? Did they have a system like that in place? Jason  8:19   Yes, and it's called Kickstarter. Okay, no, actually, as we're recording this, they just launched the Kickstarter for the sixth module, like yesterday or the day before. Okay, so that's the climate module, which is the inheritance of Nature Climate, which is what we did, the sorry, evolution climate, which we did the first time around. Brian  8:37   You had mentioned that they had taken a poll of the community to see what modules people were prioritizing. And I was happy to hear that the ones about fantasy creatures, people were not too generally interested in that, right? Jason  8:49   Yes, they looks like they did a poll to ask which other modules should we make in the future. And they had all sorts of things I'm looking over now. It's got like microbes, plants, the Cretaceous era, the Stone Age, but they also have things like flying dragons, cryptids, fantasy animals and such. All the fantastical ones, the ones that don't actually exist, pretty much pulled dead last so it looks like the fans of nature want things to keep to the real world nature theme. Brian  9:14   Hooray. Those are my people. I appreciate that. I just okay. Look, if you want to go play your fantasy games, there are endless options, right? Thiago  9:21   Let nature geeks be nature geeks, Jason  9:23   yeah. So the first five of them are flight, which I actually got to test out. It builds itself as for players who want to avoid conflict because there's more resources your species literally fly away when they're full, so they can't be hunted. Jurassic, which makes giant things and helps with hunting. It's for people want to feel invincible. Natural disasters, which is a bunch of random stuff that happens. Arctic tundra. Didn't read the rules much on this, but it's for players who love a challenge. So I think it's basically hard mode. And Amazon rainforest, which has bluffing and surprises. I think basically there's the question of, are you poisonous if I eat you? I don't know until I try and. Yeah, climate, which they're just kickstarting right now. So each of these is meant to change a little bit. We're going to be primarily focusing on the core nature game, and maybe mention some of the modules in passing. But mostly we're talking about nature itself, which is this core engine around which the other things are meant to go and it's kind of obvious it is meant to be the core and is meant to be added on to you can play it by itself. But from the beginning, it's pretty obvious that the creators intend you to be able to add these various modules on.  Brian  10:26   Yeah. I think you said there's only, like, eight different power cards that you can add eight different traits. That's it, right in the base game. Jason  10:32    Yeah, we'll get to that. So that what the game consists of is you have a central watering hole, which is where all the plant food goes. Everyone has their species, which is represented by a little spin dial that shows your size, and then some little tokens that represent how many population that species has. And then your trait cards, which, as with evolution, these are what determine the traits your species has to attack, to defend, to get food better. And yes, in the core nature game, there are only eight unique cards, or nine, if you happen to get the Kickstarter off of it, and most modules only add five additional ones, so there's not that much variation in the core game. Adding even one module adds significantly more. If you add two, suddenly you're playing an entirely different game, almost because of how much change there is.  Thiago  10:32   I was telling Jason that I didn't have the chance of playing with another person I played the app.  Brian  11:19   Oh, cool,  Thiago  11:20   yeah. And like, I saw like, a video about, like, how the play with the tabletop game works, the video that is on North Star website. And I don't know if we want to talk about this right now, but like, I saw a lot of similarities about, like, some concepts from nature and evolution, Jason  11:38   yeah, this is definitely a refinement and reimagining of the core evolution game. It is not an entirely new game. You have a very similar thing, where at the beginning of each turn you put food out, you draw cards in this game, you get a new species automatically instead of having to pay for it. Then you go through the adaptation phase, where you play various cards out from your hand. The cards are, once again, beautifully illustrated this time. They are of real creatures, not of fantastic, but realistic ones. And actually, all of them have a little science fact at the bottom. Thiago  12:09    It has to do flavor text,  Jason  12:10   yeah, a little fact, and it's usually about the creature that is shown on there. So we were talking about the opportunistic card earlier. It shows a red panda stealing some eggs. And a bit of the bottom is talking about how red pandas are opportunistic, and it lets them be able to survive better, etc. The goal is to eat as much food as possible, which can be plant food or can be meat. Your species all start as foragers. You can play cards on them that make them opportunistic, or scavengers, so they can eat meat based off of certain events that will happen. Or you can play the hunter card, which, unlike evolution, is always available. So there's a stack of Hunter cards you can take. They're double sided, so you can't hide them face down. What you do with most traits at the start? And then you actually flip your size dial over, so it goes from a green forager to a red Hunter. So it's very obvious whenever that happens, everyone can see that as with evolution, defensive traits tend to appear before there's actually hunters to hunt them, just in case, because no one likes being hunted. And the idea is that over the course of four rounds, game only lasts four rounds, you eat as much food as possible, either from the plants in the center, or from these opportunistic things, or from hunting other species. And it's, again, a bit of an engine building game. You get the right combinations of cards together, you can easily do one feeding action and get 6,7,8, food off of it, which actually happened several times while we were playing the game. At the end of the game, whoever ate the most food wins. Basically, there are some minor bonus points for each species you still have surviving that didn't starve to death or that didn't get hunted to extinction, but that's actually relatively minor. Most of the points comes from the food itself, and that's basically the overview. So if you've played evolution, you're about 80% of the way towards playing nature and vice versa. We're not going to go into a lot of details on the individual differences. We're going to focus more on the science that cover it, basically, Brian  13:56   I think. So one thing I did want to mention is that, again, this game has been made incredibly I'm trying to all of the friction points have been removed. Everything's been sanded off. If your creature dies out for some reason, if it's driven extinct, right? There's a mechanic there where you you're never losing resources. The traits go back to your hand, even if your creature gets eaten, that population then rolls on to your next species. And if you get wiped out, you get to add the size to the next species. I think that there are, at least to some degree, this is reflected in the metaphor that we're going to get into later. But I really appreciate that it's like you never really, you're never really going to fall behind. You know, you don't for an evolution game. I think it would be very easy to get to the point where, if you're playing against like a Jason, for instance, he's built some impressive, crazy engine, and everybody gets wiped out and you have nothing to do. You will never have that in this game. You're always going to have something to do.  Jason  14:44   Yes, that is one change. They seem to focus on that it was possible in evolution to get locked into a state where you're just behind and you will never be able to catch up because of how far behind you are. And this, they seem to have consciously made it so that doesn't happen. And some players like that, and some players don't. I definitely have some friends who do not like that because they figure games should be hardcore, but I think most people probably enjoy that better.  Brian  15:06   Yeah, they can play the Ice Age version. Thiago  15:09   Then one thing like, I will actually ask you guys opinions again. I didn't play the game by itself, so it might be just an impression. But I, when I was watching this video, my my impression about, like, the game mechanics and how everything is going for seems to be more complex than like, the evolution in terms of a kind of like the mechanics are. I don't know if it's harder to learn or harder to explain or if just seemed to me, but like you guys felt was harder, or like will be something more difficult to explain to somebody who don't have a gaming background or something like that. Brian  15:40   I feel like we're losing our perspective on this. I felt like this was easier than most of the games we've played. Jason  15:45   same i i thought it was easier and easier to get into than evolution itself. Okay, all right. Last thing I want to mention that they did keep their sense of humor. So the first player marker this time around is not a dinosaur meeple. It is a snow leopard, meeple, which looks beautiful, and the rule book calls it, and I quote one of the most awesome first player markers in evolutionary history. So they are very proud of their snow leopard. And the victory condition tiebreaker is that if you end up having the same points, you check something you check something else, and if they're still tied, you order a meat lover's pizza and a veggie pizza, and then you play again. Love that. I like the small bits of humor like that anyway. So that's the game. Let's go into the science. And now, since we covered a lot of evolution in our episode on evolution, we'll refer you back to that season one, episode six, for a lot of details for now, Tiago, for listeners who it's been a while, or maybe who didn't catch that episode, can you give us, like, a five minute overview of evolution and natural selection before we get into stuff we didn't have a chance to cover last time? Brian  16:44   Yes, speed run. Speed run. Evolution, Thiago  16:46   sure. So in a very simple way, evolution is merely what to talk about, biological evolution. Biological evolution is the change of species over time, the change of populations and species over time, right? Evolution, per se, you can see that it's just change. But if you want to talk about biological evolution, you have to talk about changes that are like pass over the generations, and those modifications stay. And while you have one that is usually the most famous of all, we have different processes of evolution, namely four. Gene migration is where like things, genes move away from population to population. We have genetic drift, which is the loss of gain of a characteristics merely by chance mutations, which is a new feature arising because of modifications in your DNA. And perhaps the most famous one, that is natural selection, which is the one who actually it's a conjugation between what the environmental pressures you to do and therefore makes you more able or not to survive in those conditions. And the second part is the ones who are actually able to survive those conditions are usually are the ones who actually going to reproduce more and leave those abilities that make them more prone to survive to the next generation. That's was the idea of, like, evolution and natural selection on a very short way. Jason  18:04   Yeah. And I like how you said that migration is the movement of genes, because as far as evolution is concerned, all of us are just carriers for the genes. The gene is the actual unit of evolution that is going on. That's a very famous position by Richard Dawkins from back in the 70s or something, but it's basically held up all right? So we covered those basics last time. So now on to stuff we didn't get to talk about, because there's a very rich field of evolution. There's all sorts of stuff we can talk about. One area I want to talk about is convergent evolution. So this is where things will independently end up evolving the same in the game. This is basically you have players who are playing the same traits, claws or opportunistic or whatever, on their species independently. But in nature this, this also happens. So I guess Thiago, the question for you is, why does this happen? And is everything actually evolving into crabs? Brian  18:55   Also, do you have a favorite example of convergent evolution? Thiago  18:59   Uh, sure, yes. And I don't know about the crabs, though, but like so I'll think the easiest way of talking about convergence is getting back to natural selection. So I can mention the one of the unsung heroes of like the theory of natural selection as we know nowadays, which is Wallace. Alfred Russel, Wallace, so Wallace was actually the guy who noticed that species are very attuned to their environment, and they feel like, okay, so those guys, they are so attuned to their environment, they seem so well fit. Why is that? And in between the malaria, peak of feverish dreams and the other he wrote, his ideas are like, Well, I believe that the environment is actually pushing certain pressures, and the In response, the species actually modify themselves to actually fit in this environment. Brian  19:52   I did not know that part of the story that there was a fever dream epiphany moment. Thiago  19:56   Well, that might be an exaggeration, but the truth is, like when he was writing this, he was in the Malay archippelago, and he got malaria when he was there.  Jason  20:03   So and importantly, this was completely independent of Darwin. In fact, it was Wallace writing to Darwin and asking him about ideas that finally spurred Darwin to actually put out the stuff he'd been working on for 20 years. Brian  20:14   Yeah, get off his duff and publish already,  Thiago  20:16   right? Like when Joseph Dalton Hooker actually received a letter from like Wallace. He said, like, you better get your act together, because this kid is going to totaly scoop you. Brian  20:27   Hey, there's an example of convergent thinking, right? Thiago  20:30   So completely about the convergence, as those ideas converge, like, while Wallace was more focused on the environment and Darwin was more focused on the sexual selection part, what we realize is kind of like, well, you have an environment, and because of constraints in life, like, we don't have an unlimited amount of like solutions for the same problems, right? So if, let's say that you're a predator in the ocean, there's a few things that you can do different, but, like, there's some things that, like, you cannot escape from. You need to be fast, so you need to be able to actually bite and hunt and detect your prey and so on and so forth. So you probably need a body that is more conducive to swim where, like limbs are more prone to swim, and usually you want to have like sharp teeth. And this this kind of adaptation. So hence we got things kind of like sharks and orca whales. They both, more or less have the same solution for a similar problem, how to hunt in the deep water or the ocean, right? So, but one is a fish, the other one is a mammal. They're kind of far away in the tree of life. So what I like to say is like, because the environment pressures them to do something similar, and there's not many options. They converge to certain themes, and that's how we call those conversion evolution. They converge to a more hydrodynamic body, to have flippers, instead of like legs and sharp teeth and so on and so forth.  Brian  21:53   So the physics sort of dictate a solution to the problem.  Thiago  21:57   Kind of the laws of physics dictate. The laws of chemistry dictates, what can you do to adapt? For instance, you probably won't produce new chemical in your body out of the scratch. Evolution doesn't work from the scratch, right? It always gets things that are already there and kind of repurpose it  Jason  22:13   descent with modification, basically  Thiago  22:15   Precisely so. For instance, you have frog who most of the diversity of frogs is in warmer environments. But you do have some frogs who live in Alaska, for instance, how they can withstand the cold? Well, some of them, for instance, they have, like, extra glucose dissolve in the blood, which kind of works in an anti free is not a novel chemical. It's just more of the same, the repurpose in a way. So there are what we call historical constraint that works on that. For instance, why don't we see a Pegasus in real life? Because horses are tetrapods, and they're not going to evolve extra pair of limbs out of the blue. So we don't have any vertebrates with more than four limbs that are on the land. So that those are what we call historical constraint. Other constraints that we might have is kind of like, just trade off at some point something that I give you cannot, like, modify something infinitely without moving something in the other dial right when, like, you have different optimizations in the body. For instance, compare a marathon runner with a sprint runner, they have different muscle fibers involved in the process, while one of them has, like, more red muscle fibers who allow for storage of oxygen, and therefore they can actually run for longer periods, so more stamina. The Sprinter has more white muscle fibers who are more into the part of like explosion, like faster movement.  Brian  23:32   So one of my favorite examples of convergent evolution is the vertebrate eye versus the cephalopod eye. Thiago  23:38    Oh, that's a good one.  Brian  23:40   They are physically almost identical and did not evolve from a common ancestor, sort of independently hit on almost the same solution. In fact, there are some key differences. The cephalopod eye actually has the photoreceptors in front of the veins and nerves like you'd think it should be, because it's more efficient that way,  Thiago  24:00   exactly  Brian  24:00   the vertebrate eye does not. The photoreceptors are actually behind the veins and nerves, which involves things like why we have blind spots. Now that's just a coincidental happenstance of, like you said, a combination of ancestry and function. It was set up that way to begin with, and you really certain things are just very hard to change, Thiago  24:18   right? So there's not many different ways of actually having a camera that forms an image to send to your brain. So eventually those solutions will actually look similar and converge  Jason  24:29   yeah, and like vertebrates, they did it through one set of tissue that involves it turning inside out during development, which is why the things that actually intercept the light are behind all the veins and nerves and stuff, whereas cephalopods, it's more direct, and a few other things anyway. So for those of you who are wondering about the crab comment, the internet's darling of convergent evolution is crabs, and I didn't know why, so I had to look into this.  Brian  24:51   Like, how hermit crabs aren't crabs? Jason  24:53   Yeah, well, apparently, like, 100 years ago, there was someone who knows, like, Oh, hey, a crab, like, body shape has evolved. Solved five separate times among crustaceans. And so he coined the word carcinization for this, of the tendency of to turn something into a crab. Now the thing is, these were all like lobster like things anyway, so that wasn't that big. They just got shorter around her and such. And then somehow someone mentioned this in 2019 on like Twitter or something, and then it went viral. And so now you look all over there all sorts of memes about things turning into crabs. There's an XKCD comic about it and everything. But I gotta admit, when I was doing research for this, like I'm really disappointed that that's what we picked. I mean, I am not that impressed with carcinization. Actually, it's five times from five closely related things I was looking around. Anteaters have evolved 12 different times on all three different branches of the mammals tree. So placentals, like us, marsupials and even monotremes, which I assume is echidnas. Brian  25:49   Are we counting the Aye? Aye? Because there's even a primate Anteater. I guess it's not an anteater. Jason  25:53   Ants or termites, so, okay, they're basically the same. So those trees, so Brian and I love trees because they're plants. Everything tries to be a tree. Brian  26:02   There really should be arborization. Everything there's every branch of the plant family. Tree has plant family well, tree, you know what? I mean, everything in the plant family has a member that is a tree.  Jason  26:12   Yeah, I actually wanted to check if that's true. I mean, you look around so palm trees are a monocot, so they evolved in trees different from like the dicots, like apple trees and oak trees, you've got your pines, which are conifers. Anciently, there were giant tree ferns when the dinosaurs were around. Bamboo is basically grass doing its best job to become a tree. I don't know about orchids. Are there any orchid trees? Brian  26:39   Ooh, okay, then maybe I, maybe I spoke too soon, but, but the idea of having a big, tall stem with a canopy to get light is just a very good way of being a plant. I guess it's interesting to realize that trees are not related to each other, right? There are the closest relatives, for many trees are things that are not trees. Jason  26:55   yeah. And so that's converted because basically, again, they're trying to solve the same problem. When you're a plant, you want light, you want to get tall, and having a bunch of leaves down at the bottom isn't as useful as having a bunch of leaves at the top. And so you want some way to go high and then put all your leaves and photosynthetic stuff up there. And so you end up with something that looks like a tree. And there's many different ways this has been solved. I guess, if we were to boil it down, convergent evolution sounds like comes down to while there are an infinite number of solutions to any problem, most of them are bad, and there's only a small number of good solutions, so things tend to converge on that.  Jason  27:20   That about right?  Thiago  27:29   Yeah, I guess was. Dawkins was also says there's many ways to be alive, but there's many, many more ways of being dead. Jason  27:37   I like that. I'm gonna have to remember that one. All right, so moving on to a different topic. We talk a lot about natural selection, but I know we humans have become essentially a our own evolutionary force here on the planet. What are some examples of humans causing evolution? And I specifically want to avoid domestication, because we have a future episode focusing just on that, so not things like our domesticated plants and animals. Yes, we've warped those incredibly but more the accidental evolution that we're causing in the world.  Thiago  28:08   So whenever I mention anything related to human influence on selective pressures, I like to call this artificial selection, because is, in a way, is us taking place, or nature actually setting the condition for like, what is being selected or not? And in that sense, perhaps you can talk about, like, one of the most textbook examples of like selection, which is, like the moths of England, like the Biston betularia moths, right?  Jason  28:35   Oh yeah, the peppered moths.  Thiago  28:37   The peppered moths, yeah. So you have, like, the the melanic form, which is completely black, and more common form, which was the peppered one that was white, and we see both of those in nature. But like the whites were more common because they blend with the lichen in some countries, so they blend better, so they avoid predators better. But during the Industrial Revolution, in some areas, like the trees were covered with soot, so the trees itself become black, so out of the sudden the game change, and the pepper moths were the melanic were Blackish. They blend better, so their population levels exponentially grew. So you can call this us influencing the evolution of like animals, or setting the tone for what is selected or not, right? But I guess my favorite example is the elephants on Mozambique, the Gorongosa park. You guys heard about that?  Jason  29:28   Yes. Is this where they're selecting for smaller tusks?  Thiago  29:31   Yes. So tusks are used by both female and male elephants for like several different tasks, like digging holes, for getting water, like to take off bark off trees, for actually eating and so on. As well. Any males, they have an extra function, which is actually sexual selection. Like elephant bulls, they fight with each other using their tusks, right? But in that particular place, in Mozambique, because they they had a civil war, and like the guerilla, fighters were actually actively poaching and hunting elephants. To actually get their tusks and sell ivory in the market, in the black market, to actually fund their guerrilla efforts. So as a consequence, they actually put a pressure on that particular population of elephants. Suddenly getting tusks means that, like, you're more likely to be dead than alive. So we start to increase to see a population of tuskless females more than the  natural we expected. So tuskless females existed before, but they're a very minimal part of the population. But because of that, they jump from like what used to be between 10 and 15% to actually 50% of the population. And there's some studies being done now they're like, now they're like, the Sufi war is over, and all those elephants are in protected areas. Those numbers are falling down again to actually what's expected to be the natural existent population. Jason  30:50   Okay? So when humans are hunting, specifically elephants with big tusks, then it's bad to have tusks, but when we're not, then you need them for all the other things. And so it's shifting back to the previous one. Thiago  31:01   righ its the idea that, like, a natural selection is a balance in between actually getting the mates, but actually also to survive to get to reproductive age. So if you don't get to the reproductive age, you're not going to survive. Of course, you have a balance in that we can get into talk about, like, what they call runaway selection, or Fisherian selection, where, like, the sexual selective traits are exaggerated to a point that, like they might actually make survival harder. For instance, the peacocks tail. But the whole idea there is, like, you making a situation where the only way that you can get to reproductive age is to sacrifice being good, like, or being better, like, actually extracting bark and anything, or finding other ways to solve your problem, which is surviving. So that explains the high amount of like tuskless elephants females in that population. Jason  31:49   I know I've heard of something similar to this happening here in the US, where, because when you hear a rattlesnake rattle, that rattlesnake usually gets killed, there's now selection for rattlesnakes that have some mutation so their rattle doesn't work. Brian  32:03   Oh, oh, just busted, like, not less, not smaller, just does not rattle anymore. Jason  32:08   Yeah, just some mutation where the thing that separates the scale so it can actually rattle doesn't work. And so, like, you can shake its tail doesn't make any noise. And so we're now selecting for silent rattlesnakes, which is probably not what we want to do, but it's what's happening, Thiago  32:21   right? And that's why I mentioned, like artificial selection is when humans, they select by purposely or by accident, selecting a particular phenotype. One very simple to understand is when you over harvest, over harvest, or over fish, a population of fishes. What happens? Like, usually get the big ones because you want eat more, you want the bigger fish, but unintendedly, you ended up making the pressure for the population. So like, Oh, if I'm big, I'm going to die. So it better be small, Brian  32:48   so they stay smaller, or they'll reach reproductive age faster. Or you select for those that can, I suppose, Thiago  32:53   but sometimes those are the only one alive to actually, they're the only game in town for the females. Jason  32:58   Now I remember reading So Jared Diamond has his book collapse about like the downfall of civilizations. And one of the examples he uses in there, I believe it was Rapa Nui, so Easter Island. And they looked at midden heaps, so the piles of shells and stuff left over just over centuries from the natives. And they saw that over time, the shell size got smaller and smaller and smaller due to this selective harvesting of the biggest oysters or clams or whatever it was, because we're humans, we're lazy. We want to get the most for our buck so we get the biggest things, because then we get the most out of it. Brian  33:28   That's not just humans, that's all animals. Jason  33:31   Yes, we're just particularly good at it. Thiago  33:34   Exactly what is believed to be one of the reasons for the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna is not only the Ice Age, the climate change, but actually anthropic action, like we hunt the bigger animals that we had because we're hungry. So that's one of the reasons the models are saying now that, like, that's why we don't have, like, giant sloths anymore, or, like many of like those places seen big mammals that we get extinct at the time. Brian  34:00   This is also the theory of why the only continent that still has large megafauna is Africa, where we co evolved with that megafauna. Jason  34:08   It took us a long time to figure out how to hunt well, and so they had time to adapt, whereas everywhere else, as soon as humans move in, not immediately, but over the next few centuries to millennia, the really big animals all tend to go extinct. Again, we're very good at that. So I want to transition to the next one says, in the game, we talk a lot about species, and in the game, the species just appear. But in actual nature, we have speciation, so things turn into different species. And we've talked about how evolution is not necessarily one species changed into another or splitting. But I do want to ask when we're talking about what is a species, and then how do we get new species occurring? Thiago  34:44   Oh, that's a $1 million question, what is a species? So as a systematisist that's a question very dear to my heart, because it's part of what I do, right? So I describe new species. It's part of the job, but it might be, kind of seems like a question that is easy to. Answer. But like, you'd be surprised. Like, there is this paper from 2001 that counts more than 20 different species definition and Darwin himself, he was very vague about what species mean to him. Like he said, like, well, while no naturalist can they agree on a certain definition, everybody knows what they're talking about when I talk about a species. So in certain sense, it's kind of like species, oh, you know when you see it. But the concept of species, and you have plenty of them, are kind of like, none of them are perfect. For instance, take, like, the biological species concept, which is probably the most famous one that was championed by Mayr in the beginning of like, the new synthesis. So that concept is, though, is the famous one that is, oh, species are a group of like, interbreeding populations that leave fertile descendants. Brian  35:46   So essentially defining species by the genes, Thiago  35:49   no basically defining species as organisms that are able to breed with themselves and leave fertile descendants for the capacity of reproduction. And right there, if we think a little bit we have a problem. So what about asexual reproductive organisms? How they tell them apart? Jason  36:06   Yeah, we deal with this in bacteria all the time, right? Most people think about this in terms of, like, animals, invertebrates and stuff, but bacteria, it's like, no one actually has a good definition for a bacterial species and what separates them? Brian  36:18   No, we have conventions, basically, that seem to roughly correlate to this idea of the ones that are more genetically similar and even share genes more frequently. So it's sort of a pseudo biological species concept. Thiago  36:32   I heard like about a genetic species concept, but like, they tell different organisms apart. For like, if they have that particular gene, 98% similar is the same thing. Otherwise is another one. I don't know if that's what you guys are mentioning. Jason  36:45   It's this all sounds like, basically, nature is very complex and messy, and we humans try to draw our little boxes around it, but there's always going to be bleed through. There's always gonna be corner cases that don't quite fit  Thiago  36:56   right? When I talk about speciations in my classes, I talk like that's a very philosophical question, because, do we believe that species are natural kinds, or not so natural kind? It's will be something that like without any subjectivity, has an identity? You can think about this. For instance, chemical elements are natural kinds, right? Because hydrogen is different from helium, because they have one more proton that's quantifiable, that's measurable, and this actually makes them essentially two different things. The question for species is, are those natural kinds? Because if they are, there's probably there is a particular idea that we can find or can tell them apart. But if they're not, we're just, again, trying to box things away in the way that, like might be imperfect, I like to think species more like a hypothesis, right? So we try to explain the world, and we're trying to explain biodiversity, and by that, we hypothesize that, like certain groups of individuals, they belong to a species. So they're a cluster of life that is different from others. And if you use that, you can actually change this, like somebody can get a better hypothesis of, like this cluster of individuals, and it is possible to go there and repeat, improve, like any science. So I like to think it's in species as a hypothesis of relationship amongst individuals, Jason  38:14   sounds to me almost like it's a continuum. Like you have at one end there are things that are definitely the same species, and at the other end you have things that are definitely different species. And then in the middle, you have a bunch of stuff that is like part way between and maybe more similar or less similar. Thiago  38:29   right! Jason  38:30   I actually ran across a few examples of these while doing research for this episode. So, so when they built the London Underground, there are stable populations of mosquitoes that only live in the London Underground, and they are now genetically distinct from their above ground cousins, and even different tunnels are genetically distinct from each other and have trouble reproducing with each other. Brian  38:51   You've got sort of a cave ecosystem or an island ecosystem effect, Jason  38:55   yeah. And apparently, the same thing has happened with mice in new york city's parks, because, like, the parks of the green space, where the mice live, and then there's a bunch of cities separating them all, and they've started to separate, maybe not completely separate yet, but they are starting to diverge. Brian  39:08   It's a green island. It's like the mountaintop divergence, right? They're separated by spaces they can't cover. That's, oh man, I'm gonna forget Tiago. What is it when speciation is driven by physical barriers? Thiago  39:20   Is a epicarious event. Is like a allopatric speciation. Brian  39:23   Allopatric speciation, yeah. So populations get separated and just naturally diverge, either in behavior or genetics such that no longer, when they meet again, they're either unlikely to breed or are incapable of breeding.  Thiago  39:36   Yeah, so again, when you separate to population by physical bariers, what we call allopatric speciation. But you can have speciation in species who actually can visit the other ones. Those are sympatric speciation, or sometimes, parapatric, speciation, when you have some sort of division that is not exactly physical. Jason  39:55   So like allopatric is like a different place. sympatric, same place. parapatric, like, sort of neighboring place.  Thiago  40:02   Yes, it's kind of like, if we imagine, for instance, like you have a forest, basically the case, like we're talking about here. So we have a forest, but like this forest was, like, slowly degrading, so you only have kind of, like in the peripheries. You have, like, some leftovers forests. So the populations were in this peripheries. They cannot reach the inner big forest that they have. They call this peripatric speciation because in the periphery. But the whole idea is, like, you have isolation for some reason, right? And that's isolation might lead to speciation, or you can have like, new speciation by colonization, right? So instead of like being isolated, you can move to an isolated place. Jason  40:38   It's kind of like the mosquito tunnels. Apparently, that territory did not exist until we dug it out. Thiago  40:44   And those mosquitoes were, like, colonized there, and like, they found, like all they need to actually thrive by leave, right. Jason  40:50   Okay, all right. Last topic, before we wrap things up, is that I think in the popular consciousness, there's the idea that evolution is towards more complex things, because that has been the trend of things on Earth where we have we start with very simple life, and then it gets kind of more complicated over time. And of course, we humans are the pinnacle of evolution, because we are very egocentric like that. But evolution isn't directional like that. That has been a trend that has happened. But there can be evolution in other directions. But I don't think people really capture this like I know there are multiple Star Trek episodes that have to do with the next stage of evolution being, like, going into an energy being or something, but that's something. That's not how it works.  Brian  41:26   Star Trek really gets science wrong on so many levels. But that's okay.  Jason  41:31   That's okay.  It's fun. I love Star Trek.  Thiago  41:33   There was this series of books called, like, future zoology. You guys heard about that was like, they have kind of, like a science, a biological fantasy, Brian  41:40   oh yeah, the speculative evolution I've got "After Man" Dougal Dixon had a bunch of those. I think I've got his whole set.  Jason  41:46   I have not heard of those. Off to check them out.  Brian  41:48   Oh, I'll lend them to you. They're they're weird. Jason  41:50   So my question about this is, what are examples of the opposite? What are examples where evolution has selected for simplicity from something that was complex? Thiago  41:59   I think like it when you talk about complex and simplicity, the first thing we should ask ourselves is, what does it mean to be complex, or what it does it mean to be simple, right? Because how do we kind of, like define it? For instance, you can talk about, for instance, parasites, right? So they can you can think about like, oh, well, they're very simple organisms. Or you can think about like, no, they're actually very complex in terms of specialization. Can you live in a pH of three? They can in our stomachs, for instance, some of like those flatforms, they can live in our stomachs, like, which is a very high pH place. Other extremophiles, like their keys, they live in, like, very inhospitable place that we cannot so they have probably complex physiological adaptations to do that. They work in different ways, but I guess you're right in the sense that, like we have this vision about we expect all complex adaptations in complex organisms, which is not always true. For instance, jellyfishes, they barely have tissues, but they do not have a central nervous system. They do not have like organs and so on so forth. However, they do have like a complex organ, quote, unquote, that you might call rophalia, which has some, like, photo sensitive cells, some actually very complex. They can form, like rudimentary images. And actually they have, like, what they call a gravitational organ that, like, has, like those little rocks they call lithocysts. And they can use that to actually see senses and gravity, which kind of, like, helps them to orient themselves into the water column. Brian  43:25   Oh, that's cool. What is that sensor in your cell phone that, like, tells you when I'm trying, Jason, what's it? What's it called when you've got this sensor that can detect how it's oriented relative to gravity in electronics? Jason  43:36   Not the gyroscope? Is it?  Brian  43:36   Well, a gyroscope would be one way to do that, but that's cool. So, so basically, jellyfish have a bunch of unique organs, so I guess different solutions. They can still see, but they don't have eyes, Thiago  43:49   yeah, which is quite complex for an organism who is so downstream in the tree of life and don't even have a central nervous system.  Jason  43:58   Yeah? Actually, at Dragon Con this past year, I talked on a panel called slime time. We talked about slime molds, which have no central nervous system, but do a lot of coordination. They're able to solve mazes and other stuff through basically exploring and then pruning. Brian  44:11   No central nervous system?. They don't have a body other than the one that they put together from time to time as a convenience. Thiago  44:17   Maybe they are more they're smarter than us, because with very little, they solve similar problems. Maybe we're too complex for our own good. Brian  44:25   I'm always, you know, cheerleading for bacteria that solve amazing problems, and there's way more of them than our of us in terms of both diversity and number. So really, it's a bacterial world. We're just here.  Thiago  44:36   Yeah, they're probably going to be here after we're gone. Brian  44:39   Oh, that's not even a question they absolutely would outlive us, but you know, they won't be sending signals into space anytime soon. So Jason  44:47   yeah, so this discussion reminds me of Douglas Adams from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, saying on earth that humans had always assumed that they were the most intelligent species because they'd created the wheel and digital wrist watches and wars and stuff like. That while dolphins were just like stuck in the water running around, having a good time, and the dolphins thought that they were the most intelligent species on the planet for exactly the same reasons. So we probably have a very homocentric view of what it means to be a complex, highly advanced organism.  Brian  45:17   I think it is important to point out that, like nothing on earth that is extant is more or less evolved than anything else. Everything has been here and been evolving for the same amount of time, Thiago  45:29   which is a concept that I have, like, no problems, but like, it's hard, like, for the students actually to grasp when they come to classes like, say, hey, this makes no sense to say, like, we are more evolved than anything else. We're as evolved as, right,so. Brian  45:42   As the mites that live in your eyebrows  Thiago  45:43   exactly, or the bacteria,  Jason  45:45   we're just solving different problems  Thiago  45:47   in different ways,  Jason  45:49   all right? So we need to wrap this up. So let's transition on to grading. Thiago, you got to play the app, and Brian and I got to play the board game in person. Thiago, I'll give you first play on this. What did you think Brian  46:00   we have started doing fun grades and science grades sort of back to back. So if you want to give it science and fun grade, we can do that. Thiago  46:07   So in terms of science, I think was really good, of course, all the liberties that it takes to actually make this thing fun, right? But I'll give you a solid A- to the science one. And as for the fun part, I'll give it an A I thought was really fun. The app was really fun. Has a nice tutorial, is really well explained. I didn't have the chance to play against a different person through the app, but like, it seems fun to me. It's something I'm dieing to try the tabletopversion.  Jason  46:31   How about you? Brian,  Brian  46:32   yeah I'm totally happy with an A as well, a for science and A for fun. I think that the replayability is there, and it's kind of, I was telling Jason, this is sort of the magic the gathering of evolution-based board games, because you can add in the different modules to add new mechanics and new systems and stuff like that. You know, there's always a little bit of liberties that get taken for the sake of the game. But I think that the core is there and the core is good.  Jason  46:56   I'm probably going to give it, probably in A- to A range for science, simply because, like, what they have, it seems decent. I feel like there were probably opportunities to put a little bit more in so that they could explain a bit more, like in the Reference Guide, to put a little bit more, but they have little bits and pieces that they talk about. I thought there was an opportunity for more if they so chose. But overall, what they have seems pretty solid for gameplay. I think I'm gonna have to give a context dependent grade. If I only had the core game and was playing only that, I'd probably only give it a B to a B+ the core game is fine, but it's not one that I would go back to for years and years and years. I think the real replayability comes through adding into various modules. And so the modules boosted up into like probably into the A range, because you can mix and match and get the ones that you want the most.  Brian  47:43   The funny thing is, I would say that the base game almost is like a, what we would call a palette cleanser game, a short, quick game that you could play between things, which, for what is a relatively complicated game, still plays 30 minutes. Is it's only four rounds. It plays fast, right? And I guess we didn't do nit picks. But I would say I would like to see more games with these sort of themes, have that dedicated booklet of the science in the game, like we get at genius games. I think it would be, I guess it adds to production costs, but it's such a valuable little resource to be able to put into what you're doing, Jason  48:16   like, even if it's just like one page in the rule book, it would be good. I'm flipping through the rule book now they have, like, they reference Darwin on one page and such, but it's not I think they could have mentioned more, but again, maybe that wasn't their goal. Brian  48:30   Yeah, I just want a paragraph. That's all. We're gonna have to start doing this for people. I guess  Jason  48:35   we just need to start writing to all the game comes like, Look, you need to cater to the scientists in your audience, you need to put in the page of science stuff on anything that has something to do with science. Thiago  48:45   Come on. I was telling Jason, before you arrived, Brian, I can totally knock at their door like they're just right next door, like we live in the same place, the North Star game students in the Gettysburg where I live.  Brian  48:55   Oh, okay, yeah. Go do that. Go tell us what they say.  Thiago  48:58   I want to pester them.  Jason  48:59   Go deliver our petition in person.  Brian  49:02   Evidently,we need to do an event in DC or something. We got too many people in DC, huh? Jason  49:07   All right, well, we're going to wrap it up there. So thank you, Thiago, for being on here. Is there any place you want people to be able to look you up afterwards? Thiago  49:14   Ah, no, I'm fine. Brian  49:16   Do you want us to point people to your Google Scholar profile or anything? Thiago  49:20   No, it's too shameful. Jason  49:23   All right. Well, then thank you for being on here again. Thiago, we're glad to have you back. Thank you listeners for coming. We hope that if you have nature or have a chance to play it, you enjoy it, and we're going to wrap up there. So have a great month and happy gaming. Brian  49:35   Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.  Jason  49:35   This has been the game with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to game with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsements by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.  Transcribed by https://otter.ai  

#Periodic #GeniusGames #Chemistry #PeriodicTable #Atoms #Elements #STEM #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Summary In this episode we get elemental for the game Periodic, with the amazing Dr. Raychelle Burks as our special guest. We talk about why the table is arranged like it is, why some elements are weird, what the groupings mean, why we should love *all* subatomic particles, how isotopes help solve crimes, and how some people get viscious when playing Monopoly. So grab some dihydrogen monoxide and join us for Periodic, by Genius Games. Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 02:52 - Molybdenum poisoning & glowing plants 12:39 - Basics of Periodic 19:14 - What is the Periodic Table? 32:35 - Why are some elements weird? 39:53 - Not just electrons 55:16 - Nitpick corner 1:00:37 - Final grades Links Periodic official site (Genius Games) Cattle molybdenum poisoning (Australian Veterinary Journal) Glowing succulents (Matter)  Glowing rubidium (Youtube; Royal Society of Chemistry) NIST periodic table  Dr. Raychelle Burk on Tiktok, and her Trace Analysis column Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:00   Jason, hello Jason  0:06   and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:12   Today, we're talking about periodic by genius games. Hello. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian Jason  0:20   this is Jason Brian  0:21   and we are joined by Dr Raychelle Burks, Raychelle, could you introduce yourself please? Raychelle  0:26    Yes, I am Raychelle Burks, I am a chemist and a forensic scientist.  Brian  0:32   Well, I'm so glad you're able to join us today. We were just talking about, let's see you said that your Instagram handle is radium, yttrium, and you'rr Dr. rubidium. And this is game is all about the periodic table. You use three different elements in your sort of social or media, like internet handles. So I think we got the right person for this. Raychelle  0:51   I hope so.  Jason  0:52   And just to give a bit more information to our listeners, you said you're at American University in Washington, DC, right? Raychelle  0:57   Yes, the and actually, it's funny, because it's like, it is American University. What a wild name for a school. We have a lot of universities, but it is one that's kind of got a congressional mandate. There was, you know, back in the day, they were like, we are going to have the American University. And it's like, it didn't quite work out, Brian  1:16   but that's interesting. So you said there's a congressional mandate. So this is kind of like, we're at the University of Georgia. We're a land grant institution, so we sort of have this mission that the university is supposed to satisfy you. You are in a similar situation. Raychelle  1:29   It's, well, it's weird, you know, I went to a land grant institution, so I'm a proud corn Husker. That's where I got my PhD. So University of Nebraska at Lincoln and so land grant institutions, definitely a bit different, right? Because you're taxpayer money, there's some property involved, and you have a mandate, you have an extension office. I believe you have a fantastic extension office. I think all state residents you know, have the ability to have, like, a library card and come to a university event, like there's a real community kind of based thing. And in a way, American actually also has that many universities do, especially for the neighborhood they're in. But American University is actually chartered by Congress, like, way back in the day, I think it's 1893 is this a pop quiz now? But so it's, it's an interesting history that that kind of comes about. Brian  2:25   Well, very cool. Let's see. So, so we're here to talk about the game periodic by genius games. This is another in our genius games roster, which I figure eventually we'll be working our way through all of the genius games games at some point or another. But this is our second chemistry game. So we're excited to talk about it, but really, this game is about the periodic table specifically, which is very cool, and I definitely have questions, so I'm excited to have somebody here to to give answers. But why don't we start with our science banter topic? So what have we learned or found studies something interesting in the world of science today. So we usually let our guests go first if they've got something, if not, Jason has something queued up Raychelle  3:08   well, as a forensic scientist, I will say I spent a lot of time kind of in crime. I mean, hey, Okay, Brian  3:17   makes sense.  Raychelle  3:19   And so, you know,  Brian  3:20   so does CSI, does this show CSI drive you insane? It must, oh, Raychelle  3:24   you know, it's because I know it's fiction. And you know, there's a lot of like, I'm sure, you know, if you ask an astronomer, physicist, you know, it's like, Oh, does this show drive you like, there's some good bits, there's some bad bits. So I would say, if anything, it'd be like Breaking Bad, where you're, like, the one time we've got a full-time chemistry show, it's a meth cook? Brian  3:48   Well crime, you know, there you go. Raychelle  3:49   But crime, you know? But I would say one of the stories that I came across was, you know, we see some of the same elements as kind of like, culprits, right? People are like, sure, sure, arsenic, like we get, you know, thallium, right? People are very familiar with that, not only because of news stories, but because of kind of historical crime fiction. I mean, if you know, you've seen it, Agatha Christie, you're like, is it going to be arsenic? You know? But there are other elements that you're like, Excuse me, like you just you don't see them as often. So it just seems really wild. And it really caught my attention. I came across a story involving molybdenum, molybdenum. Jason  4:32   Oh, wait, it's not molybdenum? Have I been saying that wrong my entire life? Raychelle  4:35   No, no, it's Don't, don't, because we I will pronounce things as I like them. Brian  4:41   I think in Biology, we usually say it's a molybdenum cofactor. I've never heard this other pronunciation, but I'm going to start using it Raychelle  4:47   and that, that is my new and exciting way to say it. But, yeah, don't, don't go by me, because I will also, in a weird way. I went to a year abroad in England, in college, and I will actually say aluminium. And but to me, I It helps me actually remember how to spell it. I mean, it makes sense. Alu-mini-um, right? So when I pronounce it molybdenum, that's literally to help me remember, oh, it's Molly, a B, a D, like, because I'm like, I love how they spell these elements sometimes where it's just wacky. Well, for us English speakers, we're like, did you really put a Y, a B and a D, like, right next to each other? But to have the we just don't hear about this element. Yeah, right. And you know, even though, of course, like a lot of your metals, the kind of shared impact, you know, kind of, quote, heavy metal poisoning, where you're going to see the same types of symptoms, but you usually it's like, the same old heavy metals, you know, like, you're like, your lead Jason  5:53   lead mercury, arsenic... Raychelle  5:55   the usual suspects. And that's why this was, like, it's like a twist in a Dateline episode, where you're like, you mean, it wasn't the husband, Brian  6:04   so this is  Jason  6:05   so what happened with it? Brian  6:06   Yeah, yeah, what was the story? Speaker 1  6:08   It really kind of affected cattle. And that's the thing. Is, this wasn't a human poisoning. Is that some of the features you know, your your GI distress, joint pain that should sound familiar to folks that kind of clock, some of these metallic poisoning things. But there's also a big part of crime that involves, like, wildlife related like people will actually, like, try to hurt each other's cattle or try to poison crops, right? Like, sabotage level tomfoolery. And so it was about, you know, the real impact of this on this livestock, and then how did they kind of map it out and kind of get to the root of things? And so it, you know, that kind of a crime. Sometimes we're so focused on human-involving action, which I understand why we all do, but to just see how they apply the same type of toxicology work and, like sleuthing to be like, who is poisoning these cows was, like, really interesting to me. But again, also, because it's just an element that, I mean, it's just not one that we talk about. It's not, you know, one of the most when we talk, like, biologically, you're like, yeah, yeah, it's the same seven elements. Okay, you know, a lot of time on carbon, a lot of time, you know, and you got your coinage metals, and you're like, sure, sure, snooze fest. But when you hear something that's like an element that even you forgot about as a chemist, is kind of like, Oh, Brian  7:39   I'm trying to think so there are, there's a surprising number of elements, the micro trace elements you need, like Selenium, and you need a little bit of cobalt, and you need, I think you probably do need, a little bit of molybdenum. And there's a couple of, what else Am I forgetting? What are some of the weird ones? You need some zinc. You need a little bit of copper.  Raychelle  7:56   Oh, you need plenty of zinc. Yeah.  Brian  7:58   Oh, you do? Raychelle  7:58   You need copper. not too much, all right? Not too much, but, but Selenium, and the fact that you said that, that is another one where we know that it's got some real positive benefit, right, biologically. So sometimes people will take and they hear this, they hear a snippet in the news of, you know, some, usually it's some type of, you know, trace element that is important from a tallow point, you know, and like the research, gets interpreted as being like, Brian  8:24   they poison themselves. They completely overdo. Speaker 1  8:27   Yes, unfortunately. They a little bit go too far. And as we know, too much of good thing is actually bad. Brian  8:34   Yeah, that's, that's the classic human thing. Well, if a little is good, then more must be better Jason  8:38   The dose makes the poison. Raychelle  8:39   And also sometimes dose makes the poison, but also sometimes unit conversions, you know, we know, if you're talking about quote, micron, Brian  8:51   yeah, what is, what is, what is a microgram anyway, right? Raychelle  8:55   But then somebody is like, Oh, they, they dispersed a milligram. Yikes. Brian  9:02   I think having a mu symbol in the metric is probably bad, because I've actually, have you seen this where people will use these symbol fonts, and then everything gets converted over during the process of, like, inter converting a document, and your little symbol font, mu turns into an M, and all of a sudden your microgram is a milligram, Speaker 1  9:19   yep. And you can see how it happens, right? And then it's like, oh no. And it is this, it's unfortunate. It is an accident. It is a mishap. And people, you know, sometimes they're trying to do the right thing, they think, okay, I take my daily vitamin. I've taken a bit of extra whatever. And you can go too far. That's, that's the story of the periodic table. You can, in fact go too far. Brian  9:44   So let's see. So the story was, some cows got heavy metal poisoning from molybdenum, right? Is that the this was a news story? Unknown Speaker  9:51    No, no, this was, I found it in a journal article.  Brian  9:54   Oh, that's cool. Can you share that with us? Raychelle  9:56   but I also, I mean, I also go looking for these things, sure, sure. Sure. Yeah. So you're like, Yeah, I just casually came across this mass poisoning. I will share it with you. It is, but I, you know, because of my background again, I I kind of look for these things, which is that says something, all right. Brian  10:16   What about you, Jason, did you find us anything cool?  Jason  10:18   I did actually something related to this. I found glowing plants. So I've always been fascinated with luminescence, and some of our listeners may have heard about like the Firefly Petunia, which naturally glows due to a light emitting compound it creates. Brian  10:33   Well, not naturally. We had to make this.  Jason  10:35   Yes, yeah, it was genetically engineered. This is something else, actually. It relates to the game, because what this group did is that they took a bunch of micro particles, so metallic micro particles that will naturally absorb light and then re emit it over a long period of time, several hours, and they injected it into succulents, and they kind of spread throughout the leaves, and they became these glowing plants. Brian  10:56   What kind of particles are these? I've heard about these aren't quantum nano dots. Are they? Jason  10:59   I don't that phrase was not used in the article.  Brian  11:03   That's probably not it. Then,  Jason  11:04   no, these are they called the micro particles because they're in about the seven micron, micron size. It was strontium aluminate, and by tweaking the chemistry or the size, they could change the color. They have this wonderful figure where they show a bunch of these little like succulent rosettes in like red and orange and green and blue. The problem is that you have to inject every leaf individually because they don't spread very far throughout the plant. Okay? And they, I mean, they did say that they showed no signs of toxicity in the 10 days that they were following them for the study. So Brian  11:38   I had plants that have been fine for 10 days without having being watered. Jason  11:43   Okay? So there's a lot still to do here, because this is definitely the sort of thing I can see, like, okay, at some point, someone or someone's pet is going to eat one of these. So there need to be some safety studies on those before they get released. But it's still a cool thing, because they can make this rainbow of colors. They have this great figure showing the different rainbow of it, and then someone standing in front of a plant, a glowing plant wall, where they just have a bunch of these succulents up on a wall, and they're just kind of glowing. Brian  12:07   I mean, that does sound amazing. Is the idea that this is to be a consumer product. Is that the intention?  Jason  12:13   I think that's the end goal. I mean, I think the end goal is that, I mean, it's probably going to be a novelty. I mean, people keep talking about, oh, we'll make glowing plants to replace lights at night. It's like, I don't think you can actually store enough light in a plant to do that Brian  12:25   yeah, energetically, that's going to really tax the plant Jason  12:28   so, but they make really cool novelties. So Brian  12:31   okay, all right, that's that is weird and cool, and I'm excited to see the wall of rainbow plants. Thank you for the wonderful chemical stories. But why don't we talk about the game periodic. Okay, so periodic is from genius games, one of our favorite board game companies, because they specialize in producing games with a hard science theme and usually a strong educational component, although the games are designed to be fun, not educational, because we've already learned how educational is a dirty word in the games industry. So the designers of this game are John Coveyou, who is the founder of genius games and has a designer credit on most, if not all, of their games, as well as Paul Solomon, who has designed some genius games, as well as some games for some other companies. He's done not only periodic, but also genotype, which we did earlier this season, as well as the game virulence, which we haven't played yet. Periodic is for two to five players, we'll play in about 40 minutes. We played way faster than that. I think it's always adjusted a little bit by player count. I think Jason and I had the game done at about half an hour, and that was Jason's first time playing. So probably we could get it done even faster than that, if we wanted to, but I don't know why you would. So what does the game look like? The center of the game is a periodic table. Well, it's an incomplete periodic table. The actinides and lanthanides are completely just kicked out. They're not even shown. They're not displayed. Jason  13:51   Those are for those who don't have that memorized. Those are the two rows that are always at the bottom, kind of floating off by themselves. Brian  13:58   Yeah, if this is the map of the United States. That's Hawaii. It's just kind of off on its own. Raychelle  14:03   Well, I have a little pushback about that, because numerically, right? That would be, like, you've removed the Midwest, because it makes your map awkward. Shove it down by Hawaii. Yeah, it makes it more square. Brian  14:16   We just take New Mexico and Arizona and just take them out and just say, well, we're going to put those off to the side somewhere. Brian  14:21    Here you go, yeah, yeah. Brian  14:24   Well, I hear that there's going to be some discussion about the exclusion of the actinides and lanthanides. Some other parts of the game are you're going to have these, a group of cards that they say, sort of a range in semicircles around each side. That's not really necessary. You could just stack them up, and each of those are going to represent major groups of the elements, so your non metals, or your halogens, this is easier, going to be easier to explain when we talk about how the periodic table works, but basically, groupings of elements are arranged around the sides of the board. So the periodic table is our game board. And what we're going to be doing is you have your little marker, which is an Erlenmeyer flask, which we've already decided there is nothing more scientific than an Erlenmeyer flask. Across the top of the board, you have a series of cards. And these are like, these are your goals. So these are groupings of elements. They can go from two to, I believe, up to, I think it's just three, or is it four? Jason, do you remember? Are there ever ones where it's only ever three, right? Jason  15:22    Yeah, the goal cards only have up to three elements you need to grab them. Okay? Brian  15:25   So, and these will be grouping. So, for instance, toxic metals, arsenic and tellurium or mercury or other toxic metals. There's actually two distinct toxic metal cards. There's three different cards that are based on groupings related to steel. So there's iron and carbon, things that you alloy with steel, and then there's stainless steel. Jason  15:44   There's the plant one, soil fertility, yeah. Plant ones, NPK. There were a few that had to do with lasers, some precious metals like gold and silver. And I don't think it was gold, silver, platinum, but there was something, oh, the ones used in medicine, like lithium, magnesium and platinum, Brian  16:01   yeah. So they've they've gone out and they've found sort of groupings of two or three elements that you can pull together to make some kind of a set or goal. And Jason  16:09   I bet this is why the lanthanides and actinides aren't there. Is because there's relatively few groupings of two to three metals that they could put together. And probably also something to do with the way you move on the board. It'd be hard to get to them Brian  16:20   I think it's purely about how you move things on the board. It's like, well, how do you jump down to this separate track of elements? But yeah, so those goal cards, they've got little like, fruity pebble markers that you'll mark, like which elements are on the board and where they are. And the game is really about moving your little Erlenmeyer flask to different places on the periodic table. You want to land on that element, and then you get to collect it. So the way that you move is you can move up and down by going up or down. Atomic number,  Jason  16:45   well, so okay move you say moving up and down, you're actually moving left and right. Brian  16:48    That's a good point. Yes, thank you. You're moving left and right on the periodic table, that is the one that actually lets you wrap around the board and go all the way from the right to the left, because the periodic table kind of has a Pac Man effect, where when you get to the end of one column, you actually wrap around and show up on the next column. I don't know. Are any of our listeners too young to understand what Pac Man is? Jason  17:08   Oh, definitely,  Raychelle  17:09   it's made a comeback. Brian  17:12   So other things you can do is you can move up and to the right, and this is called increasing ionization energy, or you can move down to the left, which is increasing atomic radii, increasing atomic mass or decreasing atomic mass, is either down into the right or up into the left. And that's it. You will. You get these little energy tokens. You pay one to do one of those trends, move your Erlenmeyer flask one time. You can pay two energy if you want to do a second movement. And you're just trying to collect these elements. You get points for collecting them. You'll have a private secret goal of like, Oh, I'm trying to get, you know, a bunch of ones of different difficulties, or something like that. The only other thing to contend with is there's two ways to finish the game. One is you go all the way through one of those goal stacks of cards of any difficulty. The other is, at the bottom you've got this academic track. So remember, around the side of the board, we've got the groupings of elements. Whenever you land on one, if it's the next one in the series, you kind of move a little marker around, and that lets you move up the academic track Jason  18:09   whenever you end your turn on one. So it takes a minimum of eight turns to go all the way around. Brian  18:15   Okay, Jason, anything that you feel like I missed? Jason  18:17   No, I think that gets it. I like how you described the and this not our word, we got this from a YouTube video. The little markers that say, Wait, markers that say which elements are the ones people want to be going for right now, based on the current goal, cards, look like little fruity pebbles. They like. I would nominate those as the most likely piece to be eaten in this entire game, because they look exactly like some little candy. Yeah. Like, even I look at it, I'm 40 some odd years old, I look at it like this looks kind of tasty. Brian  18:40   Like, is that, like, you've got a tide pod effect for the Fruity Pebbles.  Jason  18:44   That's what it looks like. So I was like, I definitely this one. Respect the age limit on this. Be careful if you're around little kids, because they do look like they should be sugary and sweet. Brian  18:52   So let's see. That'll be a new special category for gaming with science most likely to have pieces want to be eaten. Speaking of which, this is not a very space hungry game. This gets a high score on the bowl of chips factor. There is definitely room for to put a bowl of snacks there. Just make sure that you're not eating the game pieces by mistake. Brian  19:12   So that is the basics of the game. Why don't we talk a little bit about the science now? And Rachelle, you get to get a bunch of questions about the periodic table. Is that? Okay? Okay, so my first question is, what is the periodic table?  Raychelle  19:24   The periodic table is, you know, what I say to about to students is, we don't make you memorize stuff, because we put all the cool information in a single table, and then we literally post it everywhere on the wall, shower curtain, table cloth wall posters. What we would say are, these are kind of quote, the building blocks, right? And so the periodic table is our quick reference to, what are the build the Legos, the chemistry Legos at our disposal, and it's organized. Of course, you have, you know, people learn about Mendeleev and. Kind of first, you know, kind of to organize it, besides the fact that when you look at it, when you really understand how to read any data table, it becomes even more powerful, right? And so to look at it and realize it's organized, why we've organized it the way we have actually tells us something about how the chemicals behave. Kind of organized. You have columns and rows. And if you're in columns, we like to call those families. There's some similar behavior, but we know with all families, there's going to be the weirdo, the evil one, so it's they've got. I look at a very big table, and I'm like, wow, there's some real characters here. There's real personalities. But with that, you can get an idea of how things will behave and maybe how they'll behave together, what things will avoid each other. And so we've also organized the periodic table. If you go from, say, left to right, you go from metals to non metals. But then there's the fun, hydrogen, right? So hydrogen is in group one. Brian  21:00   Yeah, you're hitting a bunch of the questions I already had, Raychelle  21:02   yeah, but you have to drop to super extreme temperatures to see that kind of metal behavior of hydrogen. But it is definitely, I mean, it is number one, right? So it goes group one, number one. But what you'll see is periodic tables, especially ones that are often kind of posted in places. They try to be like, Sure, it's in group one, but let's put it up, float it up here, because we don't want people to think that it's gonna, you know, some of the other things in group one, yeah, the sodium, potassium,  Jason  21:36   it's not gonna explode when you put it with water,  Raychelle  21:38   it's not gonna Yeah, and it doesn't have the same type of behavior as some but then again, it does share behavior where they're, you know, kind of ionization energy, where that that one electron actually pretty easy to boot like energetically, the cost is is low, and that actually dictates some of the chemistry. But we don't see the same type of metallic behavior at kind of the same operational temperatures. But then again, I would say with families is, think about your family members. Do you have shared traits? Sure, but then you always have that one family member who's like, and what are you doing over there?  Brian  22:14   Oh, yeah, no, I'm thinking about that right now. Raychelle  22:18   So, you know, there, there's also this Raychelle  22:19   interesting thing is, you move, you know, down a family sometimes, like they do this with birth order, which, you know, that's not my area, right? But they talk about, what's that older kid versus the middle kids versus the baby? And if you go with more, like light, medium, heavy, you see that there's some real spread in behavior. Now, families are families. They do have an operating kind of, here's our vibe. But even within the families, there can be differences.  Brian  22:49   Families are the columns, right? Raychelle  22:50    Families are the columns. Okay, so let's see, so the so the periodic table, everything gets an atomic number, and that is based on the number of protons that you have in your nucleus. So, and actually that means that, like, and we've talked about this before, for all those people who want to discover new elements, I'm sorry all of the spaces are taken. The only place to get anything new is at the very bottom of the list, because we, we know everyone has just one more proton.  Raychelle  23:16   But, you know, the fun thing is, is, you know, we have currently 118 confirmed, and people are making there is some. I mean, if you look at some, if you go to any of your alma maters, or people might even remember this from high school, they're like, Wait, did she say 118 because I'm looking at period right, 114 or 112, or 109, right? When you see and you're seeing ones that might be kind of in in parentheses, or ones, it depends on the age of your periodic table, right? And you can actually see that there's been, hey, there's been some exciting updates, right? Yeah. And so that's kind of fun to see that. I do want to back up and say, yeah. What I love about the periodic table too, is, yes, we designate families, right, as being columns. But in to carry my kind of human family. A bit further, there's the family you're born into, and then there's the family you make, right? We have kind of circles of emote, you know, circles of kind of affinity. Brian  24:08   Are these out groupings. These are metalloids? Raychelle  24:10   These are groupings, right? Like you can have, well, you can have alkali metal, you can have alkali or, you know, you have earth metals. You have your transition metals, which, those are all actually in different families, but they have a big block called transition metals. So it's like, we try to say, Okay, who, which, which clan, gang group are you? Brian  24:28   So they're still, they're still to each other in their overall behavior than they are, right? Raychelle  24:33   Because you can talk about, oh, I'm a transition metal chemist, yeah, that's a big group, which one, or you can say that, or even an entire field called Organic Chemistry, you're like, so, just carbon, just carbon. But they don't really mean that, right? They might be focused on carbon, carbon bonds, but there's a lot of other like chemistries involved. But yeah, right. They're really exciting. I love, I love a metalloid. I love anybody who's like, I do whatever. On, I can be a metal. I can be a non metal. I adapt. Families are really cool Brian  25:06   Oh my gosh. We've touched on we've touched on so many topics I was hoping to cover. Is it okay if I go in with some more specific questions? Yeah, okay. So first of all, if I could just we talked about a couple things there. Let's start with the what are the families and where did their names come from? So in the game, it's alkali metals, alkali earth metals, transition metals, post transition metals, metalloids, halogens and noble gasses, some of those, I guess I get sort of embedded in that question, as you can imagine, is, why are there so many metals, and what makes something a metal versus a non metal? Raychelle  25:42    I mean, I think that that's a really interesting question. I think philosophically, because, you know, I have a PhD and so, and most, most, you know, chemists have a Master's or PhD or bachelor's, is that here's where you get to. The philosophical part is that we try to bin things, and we try, often, to do it in discrete categories, but that doesn't always work, right? And so what we've tried to do with the periodic table, and notice, I am using the royal we you're like, you didn't have a thing to do with the period table! Brian  26:15   No, you speak for all chemists, it's fine.  Raychelle  26:18   Ooh, is to is, is to find these relationships with chemical properties or chemical behaviors, right? And so we try to say, okay, what are some things that are unique in that group these things together in their chemical behavior, right? And we try, sometimes, to make those bins too rigid: it is a metal. It is a non metal. It is a there and then, and then the metalloids show up and go, really, are you sure Brian  26:51   we definitely have the exact same problem in biology all the time where we want things to fit nicely into bins.? And you know what. nature doesn't care about your bins Raychelle  26:58   It's a spectrum. And so as you actually look across the Periodic Table, yeah, you know, you can see this beautiful range of metallic behavior. And then we have things that kind of more fall if we think of it as more of a spectrum, and we think about things that are more on the metal. Metal, like what we think about as metals, is like Metallica,  Brian  27:19   Iron! Copper! Raychelle  27:19   but we think about things, you know, that they're malleable, that they maybe conduct electricity, that's not even all metals, right? But we think about what we think is metal behavior, right? And then you go across the Periodic Table, and like most people, if you ask the common person, is sodium and metal, they'll be like, is this a trick question? What we think of in our mind as being like metallic behavior, non metallic. And then you have, again, you have elements that are like, I do, what I want. I can, you know, and then what, what is a non metal? What do we mean by we're so you're identifying an element by what it's not? Brian  27:53   By what it's not? Yeah, I was thinking about that too. It's like, okay, so some of the traits would be things like malleability, conductivity would be things that we think of. But the thing is that those definitions are kind of, it's, well, I know a metal when I see it a little bit  Raychelle  28:09   It is. And then what you know, when you get things into groups and you start making compounds, then you you can start making things that you're like, oh, but that now conducts electricity, or gives off sparks, or we can do fun, which, okay, then what are we saying? Is, what are these properties? And then you, and that's the fun thing about science, is we've kind of got this on lock, but then when we're able to manipulate and build things that you're like, Oh, so this now can act like this over here, and that's kind of fun. Brian  28:41   I learned recently that there are some alloys that can gain magnetic, that can become magnetic, even if they're made from non magnetic starting materials, Raychelle  28:51   right? And so then what does that mean? Like proper, if we've if you define everything by what you think it can do and not do, right? When I mean, this is the philosophical part. That is the grappling of it that keeps, I think, a lot of chemists, when you can like at this top of the show, when you can think, what is something that blew your mind? When you can read something that you're like that is really has shaken What do I understand this thing to be, right? And that's kind of the really fun stuff. Is that even when we think in 2025 we a bit jaded sometimes with scientific thing, but when it comes to the fundamental thing of what do you mean it is that that can still blow your mind is kind of fun.  Brian  29:34   Sometimes in chemistry, you're adding one and two and you're getting seven,  Raychelle  29:38   which, again, loving it for us, because then you, you know, people think, like, hydrogen bonding, right? They're like, Oh, yeah. The Internet, whatever. We were finding out new things all the time about this interaction. And I'm sure in biology, given the fundamental importance of hydrogen bonding to protein structure, Brian  29:56    to, like, literally the entire thing, like, it's all, yeah, they. That you're like what we, you know, together, your DNA, yeah.  Raychelle  30:04   And I think that, you know, when I look at the periodic table, even though we try to give it, you know, firm, you know, there are these columns, are families, and there are blocks, and we have this, is this? What you actually are seeing is a spectrum of properties and behavior, which gives us a lot of dynamic flexibility, right to have, and it also just looking around, going Well, that explains this wild show that we're seeing, right? But, you know, if you like, if you get rubidium, and you give it enough energy of electronic transition is that it emits this beautiful, kind of, hard to describe the color of red, that it's kind of, kind of, I would say that, you know, a purplish red, okay, but not, not quite a burgundy. But there's just something that's really beautiful color. So while rubidium itself, you're like, snooze fest, right in the physical appearance of it. There are these dynamic we can do emission spectrum. It's one of the ways we can characterize all the elements in a periodic table. Or what are the unique electronic transitions? And some are in the visible range that we can see pretty colors, that's fireworks. You're looking at emission spectroscopy, yeah. And luckily, there's beauty parts you can see, and we can make green and yellow and purple and red and really fun stuff. And so even though we might look at the elements and be like, boring, boring, boring, boring, is that, if we put a little bit of energy in, which is what I love, too, about the game, is they got the currency, right? There's no such thing as a free lunch, everything costs.  Brian  31:39   Yeah, actually, there's this other conceit in the game where energy is not created or destroyed, it just gets moved around the board. Except it's not true for one specific reason that I think, like in there's one circumstance in a two player game where you actually get to get some new energy out of the box.  Jason  31:56   I think that's just because there's not enough energy floating around with only two players for that to work. But honestly, that's such a bad call most of the time. We never even used that move because it's like, just getting one energy for that is just such a bad choice.  Raychelle  32:09   See, I think at that point the game should just, like, explode and no, a physicist should just pop out and go, no, yeah. Jason  32:21   So actually, I've got some question about some of these odd balls you mentioned. So you said, how, like, in these families, there's always the black sheep, the weirdo one, so there's some ones, I know. Raychelle  32:31   So that's a judgment. I shouldn't be that judgmental, but I am. Jason  32:35   Okay, they're weird. Yeah, let's, let's put I'm gonna look point. I'm pointing right at Mercury here. It's like, liquid metal room temperature. What is going on there? What about that combination of that family in that row? How on earth do you get something that is a liquid metal at room temperature? Brian  32:51   You also got gallium, which is a liquid metal at slightly above room temperature, right?  Raychelle  32:54   The minute you put it in your hand Brian  32:56   , yeah, right. I want to get some gallium. I want some gallium. Yeah. Raychelle  32:59   And I think, like again, but they are the it's no one else in their family. That's it, right? And so doesn't that like? That is, I mean, people, you know, and I am not in a metallic or transition metal chemist or heavy metal chemist, but I could see why people would be absolutely obsessed with mercury or gallium to be like, what is, I mean, it isn't even within its family. Yes, there are shared traits, but even within its families, it's the one that is doing, like, what's happening here, right? And, and then the unique properties that that unfolds, I mean to me that, besides the liquid mercury is that is the high cohesion, right? You, you, quote, spill mercury, you pour it, it's like little bot, and it just rolls around like, and you're just like, it doesn't. It has a lot of cohesion between the atoms where it's not like if you pour water, what a mess, right? It spreads. It wets the surface, true? There is this also chemical interaction where the mercury is like it Jason  34:00   It doesn't. It's not touchy feely. It does not like to touch other things. Raychelle  34:03    It does not like to wet. And I like, you know, there isn't this kind of, you know, just distribution of that matter across a large surface area. It's actually like, No, we don't like to hang out with you other people. We want to be by ourselves. And so, like, what are, you know, those are some interesting features. But again, I would come back to every family has, you know, and again, I'm putting my own, but that's how we could understand the periodic table. Is, what are these groups, families? And there's the again, there's so many circles of connectivity where, even when, and oftentimes across the rows, you know, people very much focus on columns. But then when we look at big blocks of behavior, like even we mentioned earlier that lanthanides and the antsides and the lanthanides, right, that's a row that's a different way there. They do have shared behavior, and there's a whole group of chemists that are transition metals, but then their subset is, ah, but we're first row transition metal. Brian  34:59   So I guess everybody's got to have their little niche on the table, Raychelle  35:05   Well, it turns out that there's unique behavior with that first row transition. So what we're finding out is, even in the, you know, 100 plus odd years we've had, what we would think is the structure of the periodic table is that it also reveals what some of the genius was of binning them in their behavior. We're still learning about the elements. We're still deciding that, hey, yes, there are the column behavior, but there's also row dynamics, but there's also this bigger kind of bigger group behavior that we see. And so I think that's what I also liked about the game, is that it tries to get you to get a bit of exposure to, hey, there's a lot of property. There's a way we can group these things, not just by columns, but we also have to talk about, what are some energies involved, right where they're kind of located. And I think it, hopefully it gives people an idea of this table is organized, yes, by atomic number, right? But the more important thing, at least for as, my opinion, as a chemist, is that it's organized based on function. But as I'm sure, as a biologist, right away, you should be like, and that's structure, right? Yes, is that? And at this stage, though, it's structure at the atomic level, yeah. So you're looking at both. You're getting it's just jam packed full of information on the periodic table. Brian  36:31   There's a reason that the periodic table appears on napkins and shower curtains. It's just It's probably one of the most beautiful representations of science, right? One of the, one of the real victories of science is the periodic table.  Raychelle  36:45   We got good branding.  Brian  36:47   Yeah, great branding, great branding.  Raychelle  36:49   And Good job with the color coding. Yeah, I feel like that's the other thing is, like, if we make it color coded, Brian  36:55   it's like, I think the the we talked about how the Erlenmeyer flask is the most sciencey thing, DNA, the periodic table,  Raychelle  37:02   yep, there are just certain symbols.  Brian  37:04   These are the lucky charms of of science. Well, we touched on this a little bit, but I did want to ask you said the first column transition metals. So we've got yttrium, which I know is one that you obviously like, because you use it in your social media, and then scandium, and then you jump down, and those two boxes expand out into entire rows, and like, you've got some interesting players in there, like uranium, Neptunium, Plutonium, how do the Okay? Why are the actinides and lanthanides in quarantine, in their own separate space on the table? And how do they relate to yttrium and scandium, which are not  Raychelle  37:41   if you look at the the atomic number right? You you jump from barium, which is group two, and you see a 56 and you're like, super and then you go right down radium, is that, quote, last element in group two, and it is 88 and then all of a sudden, you move to the transition metals, which is right next door. And you see that, Okay, number wise, you like, okay, 57, 89 and then you move again, and you're like, am I going insane, or is that it goes 57, 72 Yeah, it goes 89 104, now I'm sure that there are, you know, people will say, oh, there's good they did. They wanted it to be rectangular, yeah. Brian  38:23   They wanted it to fit on a single page. Raychelle  38:24   It is a space saving move, yeah, fit on it, which makes us, you know, fit on a single printable sheet and and sometimes, depending on who's produced the periodic table, like, if you look at the NIST periodic table, or one of the great versions, which is one I use a lot in my classroom. Jason  38:44   And this is like National Institute of what standards and technology? Raychelle  38:48   Yes, so NIST is National Institute Standards and Technology is that they actually do this cool thing, which they show the ribbon effect of after barium and radium, because where it's split is also very interesting is that some periodic tables will split it at LA, you know, and AC. And what the NIST periodic table does is it's actually shows you a ribbon that kind of floats from the two and then the ribbon connects it to the lower so that people will clue into the fact of No, no, these, these should actually go smack right here, which would push the periodic table Brian  39:28   way, way, way, WAY longer, way, way,  Raychelle  39:31   like a baguette, yeah, Jason  39:33   long and thin. Raychelle  39:35   And so I, you know, it's a space saving move. I mean, it makes sense printing wise and kind of to condense it, but what it does is sometimes almost out of sight, out of mind. Brian  39:48   I mean, that's very true in this game, which we're going to come back to for the nitpick section.  Jason  39:53   And I have a question about this, actually, so my you mentioned how the structure of the periodic table is due to the structure of the elements. And I Want to confirm if I've got this in my head, right, because I seem to remember from high school chemistry, the reason why you have the jumps where you do, why you have the number in rows, is because it's it's not the proton. So as much as it's the electrons that orbit around them, it's like the first like layer you can stick electrons in. Only has space for two, which is why there's only two elements in the first one, and then, like the next layer.  Raychelle  40:22   So we have a numeric order, which would be, why, if you count over, you should have, you know, goes up by one, but you're absolutely right where, then you can get to the principal quantum number. And if you count down where you have, you will go 1, 2,3, 4, and that is the one, like you would say with. And orbitals are not actual physical locations. They are probability distribution maps of where the electrons should be, Jason  40:47   We are not getting into Quantum mechanics this episode Brian  40:52   We gotta find a different game to talk about that for sure, Raychelle  40:54   but that quantum energy level is is sometimes on the periodic table that what again, is so jam packed full of information. But besides the group number, which would be across the top left to right, there are numbers that go from that first row right down and it's seven. And remember that the lanthanides and the actinides are actually six and seven, because they should slot back in. Those are the energy levels, right? So like when talking about electronic configuration, which again, is our construction of trying to organize spatially, where are the probability distribution maps? Is we say that you have the lowest energy to the highest energy, so one through seven, and that's also that great organization is also telling you about, okay, where spatially these things are. So there is both organization on, on, on the entire atomic level, right where we talk about where the two big subatomic particles that we tend to spend a lot of time on, which would be proton number, yeah, and electron number, or electron density. That's a really, it's a fun I mean, when you look at it, we often, again, focus on atomic number, but you're absolutely right. There is. It is also telling you about electron density, which gets us back to the trend, right? Because you're talking about ionization energy. Yeah, it's one of the big trends, atomic radius, which has to deal with both, well, the interaction right between the pull of you have all these electrons which hate each other, but also attracted to this dense positive core like and then the more you add and the more you know, then you get this kind of size. So you actually have a couple different properties that are dealing with the fact of you have to look at the holistic approach of the atom. You have to look at the protons, the electrons. You have to look at the interplay between them, if you try to remove them, if you add more, if you have less. And so that's what you're looking at. Brian  42:50    Do we have to look at the neutrons? Or can we just ignore the neutrons? Raychelle  42:53   No, I love I love a neutron moment because they're sly. They're very massive. I love that because they're sly. They're just like, we don't have a charge, so no one, we're just going to be over here. They're massive, like, just, you know, they the electrons are puny, but they're negative, so everyone focuses on them, yeah, they're also important in bonding. I shouldn't dismiss them, but, but the neutrons, right? You get isotopes which are so critical, you know, and so telling. I love isotopes because they are snitches. Jason  43:23   Can you define what an isotope is? Brian  43:25    Wait, wait, I want to, I want to jump back, and then I want to come back to neutrons. So we've got the atomic number is the number of protons, right? Yep, but the number of protons determines the number of electrons, and all chemistry really is about those electrons, right? And where they are? No, it's not the electrons Raychelle  43:43   I mean you want to reduce, You want to reduce an entire field to one subatomic particle. Is that? Is that what we're doing? Okay? Brian  43:52   Let's do it this way. What percentage of chemistry is defined by the electrons? Raychelle  43:56   I wouldn't even but that's, but that's still trying to reduce it down to a single particle, when really we got to talk about relationships Brian  44:02   Okay, I guess I'm breaking the whole thing that you just said about the holistic nature of an individual atom is, electrons are important. Protons are important. Neutrons are important too.  Raychelle  44:11   If it was just electrons like that doesn't get us to Why do certain bonds form and others don't? Okay? So the electrons, I'm not saying they're not important, but we can't ignore that. There is a lot of other stuff going on. We said with ionization energy, there are trends, right? If you the first group removing that first electron, relatively easy peasy. You try to remove the second electron, though, we're gonna fight that is the energy cost jumps enormously, and that's because you have got, you know, the the force right of all that positive charge now you've removed an electron. But what's actually happened too is that attractive force between those subatomic particles is actually even more like trying to remove a second electron. That energy cost is prohibitive. And anyone who plays the game and wants to try it, I'm not even sure you can do it, because it's like a first ionization. It's just going with first ionizations across the trend. But as students will recall, if you try to remove from lithium the second electron, good luck. I mean, you can do it, but it is going to cost you an enormous amount of energy, and that is not only about the electron. That's about the pull of the nucleus is now that attractive force, because you actually have more positive than negative, because you've tipped the balance, and now we're pulling off the second electron is much harder. Is that just an electron problem? Because that sounds like that's a that's an atomic Jason  45:42   Yeah, yeah. And I've, I've got another one that I learned at Dragon Con this past year. And Raychelle, I don't remember if you were on this panel. So we talked about isotopes, which is where you have extra neutrons, or fewer neutrons in the nucleus. Apparently, if you use heavy water, so yes, water where the hydrogen has extra neutrons in it, yeah, it tastes sweet. It actually changes the flavor of the water because it changes some interaction of like this. The way the water behaves and how it affects our sweet receptor.  Brian  46:10   I think that our sweet receptors are broken, the number of things that are not sugar, that tastes sweet. I mean, artificial sweeteners, water, lead, yeah. I mean, come on. Raychelle  46:20   But I think that that, again, that tells you right the bait and switch. But I think so. Isotopes are you have the option of differing numbers of neutrons, and you can get to heavier. We often say that, okay, what's the and it's about probability. What's the one that's most frequently occurring? And then you might have a  soupçon of others, although there are some elements where it's nearly, you know, it's actually like a two thirds, 1/3 or a 50/50, split. But so you have those kind of variety and and with water, again, taste is perception. So you you gave people that, and you asked them to rate it. So part of it is perception. And I'm sure all of the people doing human studies trial, when you ask people those questions, that's got to be done in a very specific way. But the science of it is, you know that that even that slight change in mass and and how you know the compound and the receptor interact there, there is this potential that you have this difference in how it's perceived by the taster now, most of the time with isotopes, especially forensically, what we can kind of use them for is because we have mapped out we know so much about the statistical portion right of all of these elements and their isotopes. We've also mapped out the world in a lot of isotopic abundance for some key elements like oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and the proportion, say, in different ocean waters, in different soil types, in different parts of the world, and also different elements like strontium, that it can actually be really helpful when you're trying to link up. Where did this come from in the world? And one big way that it's used in forensics is identifying, say, there was a really great special issue in a forensic science journal about identifying civilians and combatants that were involved in kind of actions in World War One, and they had a lot of, unfortunately, huge mass graves, right? Large numbers of casualties, but then trying to match people up. Now, when we have the technology to do so, to do identification, sure we have DNA, we can get but you still have to, then I still need enough information to get a standard from a living family member. You've got to, you've got to narrow it down. If we literally are looking at this open grave in Flanders or something, and you're like, Well, where are the combatants from? Where should I even look to get this information? So they were using isotopic abundance to say, hey, in the formative years, when your bones are really growing and forming and you're really taking uptake of those elements, certain key elements, turns out Canada, and not only Canada, but a particular region to Canada they were able to identify going back, well, we need to go to the Canadian Armed Forces, and we need to say, Okay, who was in this part of this country in this time, and that so helped narrow it down, right that they can then say, have a discrete amount of samples they can collect with DNA, and say it needs to be Canadian forces deployed here. From here, it really helps narrow it down, because of we have so much information on the probability distribution of those elements. So to me, isotopes, they're the MVPs. They help us track so much stuff. Forensically, I have a special place in my heart. There's certain elements that denote that, hey, you had a lot of seafood or access to kind of sea based stuff versus, Oh, you were probably having more of grains that. And then grains, you know, where do we get most of those from in this country? And then if more cattle or more beef, so even that can still be really helpful. And. Help kind of point to what do you have access to, sometimes, mostly, again, your really formative years when the when the bones are really on the uptake, and so that can still be really helpful. It's super helpful too. With tracking, this is going to sound weird, but linking together drugs, certain, right? If you're growing, say, like cocaine, natural product, even if it's purely synthetic. What was the water source used for that synthesis? What were the solvents where they purchased some of these things from that could still and if you're trying to link up, say, a particular to see is this all the same kind of manufacturing chain? You're not even trying to perhaps localize it to where in the world is Carmen Sandi-, no, you're trying to link it Brian  50:44   up notorious drug lord. Carmen Sandiego, Raychelle  50:46   yeah, that I did not say that do not come for me, Disney or whoever Conglomerate is, is, are these batches produced in a very similar way where they you know this, this huge distribution. Is the kilo found here? Is it chemically linked to the kilo over here? Interesting, right? And so that kind of information, besides just a good general chemical scan of what compounds and what proportion the isotopic abundance can also be very revealing about what are the water sources, what are the solvent compositions that might have been employed? And so, you know, that's why sometimes I joke that isotopes are snitches, but I mean that in the best way. Brian  51:31   So isotopes, same number of protons, increase neutrons, and I think I've had this explained that, like biology is lazy and will favor the lighter version of that isotope. So you'll see accumulation of lighter carbon, for instance,  Jason  51:47   I think that depends, because, I mean, one of the things I think Raychelle was mentioning is you can tell like carbon source. So corn uses a certain type of photosynthesis different from like wheat and rice, and they end up with different carbon isotope ratios from that. So you can tell if you had a more corn based diet or more wheat and rice. And I know here in the US, it turns out that we're all eating secondhand corn, because most of the corn we grown is actually fed to animals, yeah, pigs and cows and chicken and so we're getting all like our diet when you're if you're here in the US and you're eating beef or chicken or pork, you're probably actually eating corn based stuff, as opposed to some other and you can tell that in the the ratios of the carbon that are in your body, Raychelle  52:28   yeah, I mean, and also in food fraud, it's a big thing butter from grass fed cows. And you're like, first of all, this better be butter, not margarine, because we have real strict laws, right? But also, you've said a certain type of feeding for this cow. Well, isotopes, interesting, will really clock that. And so it's become too a way that Jason  52:50   listeners didn't see this, but she put it the whole like, point up, pointed her eyes like, I got my eyes on you Raychelle  52:55   I got my eyes on you, right? So isotopes will help us get real ideas about sources of stuff, but it all, it all comes back down to probability. We have low probability. We have high probability stuff. And that's why, you know, getting these backgrounds, you've got to have a good set of what's, what is the probability for, just like this area, this background, they've also done this with we saw in certain parts of the world, historically, like, lead pipes were the like, and, I mean, like, Roman Right? Like, they were like, Oh, the fall of the Roman Empire, which, by the way, is never on my mind on a daily basis. But the fall of the Roman Empire, it's because there were so many lead pipes. Or, like, you know, there's if a person was, a historical person, was poisoned. You're like, oh, it's arsenic. Well, you also have to get the background of where was the person at, because there's actually arsenic just that appears in your person. There's also, if you're buried in the ground, what was the soil? Did it leach in? And so one of the first things they'll do is, okay, well, what's, what's the background? Here's the target of the person, we think, is poison. Now get samples from everybody else in the graveyard. Well, not everybody, but some proportion, right? And then what's the background so you can get Okay, is this actually a signal? Is it actually significantly greater, gotcha, or is this just like the norm? Brian  54:16   Awesome. I think we should probably start wrapping up at this point. I did want to ask Raychelle, do you have a favorite board game that you like to play? Raychelle  54:23    Yes, well, I grew up in a family that played board games and but I'm gonna go super retro, and I'm gonna go with monopoly. Brian  54:31   Okay, all right, we haven't had anybody say monopoly yet.  Raychelle  54:33   I gonna saw monopoly because my family, we would play Monopoly and monopoly like we would be like, we're never playing this game again, because we would always fight. It never went well. It really reveals a lot about how greedy people are and how closely they will bankrupt you. But on the other hand, there was just something about that game that we you could just It was wild, like I had some of the funnest nights was playing and just realizing how crafty, especially I'm like my mom is viscous, and she is the nicest lady I know, but she will be like, I love you. I'm taking all of your hotels.  Brian  55:16   Actually let's, let's move into our nitpick corner, because I think it's time for that. This is where we do, well, actually, or this isn't quite right, or we love this game, but so Rachelle, go. You have something teed up, I can tell. Raychelle  55:28   Well, you know, part of it too was the groups they chose. Like, the was it, they're called Goal Cards, the,  Brian  55:35   yes, the groupings of elements, Jason  55:37    yeah, like, two or three elements that have some common theme to them that help you collect points, Brian  55:41    yeah? Like, toxic, yeah? Just something that connects these in terms of how we use them, Raychelle  55:45    yeah, I think. But again, I mean, I was like, these are the ones they use? but I also, I just look at the periodic table based on my I'm an analytical chemist. I'm a forensic Chemist. I look at it in a different way, as we all should. So that's a very petty kind of thing. But also, again, they booted some of the coolest elements. They were like, we don't want, we don't want these ones down here. Brian  56:07   So literally, uranium is not on the list. Jason  56:13   That maybe they were saving that for the expansion. The trend now is that you release a board game and you already have the first three expansions planned. Maybe they have the lanthanide and actinide expansion, Raychelle  56:23   then that is flip the script. And I'm like, brilliant, because I would get it just to be like, is that in expansion pack one? One like that would be so cool. Also, the wraparound, there's only one trend that lets you wrap around. They were like, You can't do that with any of the other trends. And I was like, watch me, yeah. Jason  56:44   So my, my nitpick is a little bit related to that, and just has to do with the goal cards, because we noticed this as we were going through the elements are not represented equally.  Brian  56:52   No, not even close Jason  56:53   some elements show up time again and again and again, and some elements you'll never see on a goal card. And I just would have, I'd like, I mean, realize there's only so many things you can make groups of that your average consumer would actually recognize, but it still be nice to have those spread out. And it did feel like the difficulty of collecting the goals was not correlated to the number of points you got. I didn't do a thorough investigation of that, but it seems like it should be like, okay, the harder goals, like goals difficulty two, three and four all require three elements each. So there should be, it should require, like, more moves to get the ones at level four and then level two. And I assume there are, but it didn't really feel like there were definitely times where, like, oh, in this one turn, I can collect the level three goal just with my normal moves.  Brian  57:39   Some of those goal cards were weird. It was like, the the element in its group with the lowest heat capacity. It's like, you say that these are things that average people know that is a weird like, I had to look that up. It's like, what does that mean? It's like, I know water has anyway. My my nitpick is similar to Raychelle's is the exclusion of the lanthanides and the actinides. But that's not right, is it? How have you been saying it? Raychelle  58:02    no, no, don't. Do not go with me there,  Brian  58:04   okay. All right. All right, sorry, sorry, Jason  58:06   I think we've determined the elements are like dinosaurs. It doesn't matter how you say.  Brian  58:11   There's not an official Pronunciation Guide. That may very well be true. The thing is, okay, I understand the utility. I understand why they did it. I still think they have a booklet, like all genius games, the science in the game, it would have been very easy to put a full periodic table in there, and they didn't even put it there. It's like, you know, your game is periodic you got the periodic table. Just show one periodic table where you haven't excluded these. Do you know what I mean, just take one page,  Raychelle  58:37   and I would have liked to see some Goal Cards. I mean, again, this is just a judgment call, but if you're building, if you're using this game in a classroom or in some kind of a science camp thing, I think a fun thing would be like, what is the expansion pack that you would build? Right? Because then you might have people be like, you know, what? What about like, I move diagonally? It's like, Yeah, but if I want to move along the metalloids, you're going to have to do a diagonal move. Like, what are some fun? What's some new rules? And what's a new expansion pack? Like, talking about, you know, your things that are naturally liquids at ambient, what we define as ambient temperature, things that are gasses. What is the fun expansion packs and groups that they would come up with? Like, what are your biologically significant? You know, sometimes there's tons of elements on the periodic table. And, you know, you get to biology, and you're like, these seven, because then, then you prime people to think like, and they're surprised when you have zinc that shows up and is critical, right? Brian  59:33   I mean, it's CHON, it's CHON, let's be it's carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. Phosphorus gets to play to Raychelle  59:40   Like, it's like, going to gap and getting khaki pants in a black shirt. You're like, again, you're like,  Brian  59:46   but they're the Lego bricks of everything.  Raychelle  59:49   But, yeah, but we there's a reason for that. What are the fundamentals, right? What are the key things you have? Brian  59:55   Either new rules or new game, new goal cards would be really fun, right? Yeah? Like, hey, come up with some new goal cards,  Raychelle  1:00:00   new goal cards, new what are different trends? Maybe there are people that want to talk about, hey, what are some different trends? And I think that that's the fun thing about this game, is even when you're critical about a game and people like, Well, I would have done this, and I will then do it, yeah, for sure. Then you come up with the modification. Because then, especially in a teaching tool like this, or even a fun game, in order to come up with an expansion pack, new goal cards, new rules. That means you know a hell of a lot about it, and my master plan to trap you into learning chemistry has, in fact, succeeded, Brian  1:00:36   all right. Well, I think this is again, Rachelle, you are wonderful at helping us transition between sections, as the conversation just kind of goes, but why don't we move into grades? Because I think we're talking about what we like about this game. I am happy to go first. I think that for the science here, I'm trying to decide how much I want to ding it for the actinide lanthanide thing. And I think I'm going, I'm actually, I'm not going to dock it. I think that the intentionality is there. I think that the practice using the periodic table, because that's really what this is. We the periodic table is our game board. We've had other games where the periodic table was just where you kept track of your score. Here, it's all about the periodic table. And you learn a lot about the periodic table just by playing the game. You got to when the new goal card comes up, he's like, Okay, where is this element? Right? Like, without even realizing it, playing this game, you are practicing and familiarizing yourself with how the periodic table is laid out, where things are found, how they relate to one another. I have no issue giving it an A on science. I think for fun, I did enjoy it. It's quick. I even beat Jason by one point, which has never happened before in the entire gaming with science, every game that we've played, with the exception of one bonus episode, this is the first time I legitimately beat him by one point. So it should be more fun for me for that reason. But actually, no, I'm still probably just going to give it a B. I don't think this is going to enter into my regular roster.  Jason  1:01:59   Yeah, I'll agree. I'll agree with both those. I will give it an A for science. I think that it represents what it wants to represent. Well, I think you can't play this game without learning about the periodic table and chemistry, including the grouping of elements for the goals. I think is an interesting thing that helps you think about some stuff. Also just the trends of like, Oh, if I move this direction, that is increasing ionization energy, if I move this direction, things get the radius gets bigger, like these properties of atoms that I don't usually think about because I'm not a chemist. You can't play the game without becoming familiar with them. So I think A for science is perfectly fine. I'd also put it a B for gameplay and fun,  Brian  1:02:35   because I beat you  Jason  1:02:36   No, actually. So just because, when I played, and I actually, I did do the like test run myself before we played it together. And both times I felt like, once I was like, four or five turns is like, Okay, I now understand the game. Now it's just the process of playing it out. Felt like the strategic depth of it that I usually go for games is not quite there. I again, put it as B, I would not be opposed to playing it. But I'm probably not going to go for this as my my choice pick. Brian  1:03:04    I think this is an excellent game for the classroom. I really do easy and quick to learn, quick to play, and like really, just without even realizing it, you are learning about the periodic table. You have to  Jason  1:03:15    now. Raychelle, what do you think  Raychelle  1:03:19   I'm gonna go with the B minus? Jason  1:03:20   Oh, wow, okay. Oh, the chemist has weighed in, Raychelle  1:03:25   no, but I think what I found, yeah, sure, there's the missing parts of periodic table, but I was like, why is this called an academic track? True, like, but also, like, the goal cards, but that I'm just like, but that's that gets to a personal preference that's not really about, okay, the quality of the game. There are other games that are very popular that I'm like, not for me, right? Like, so, but what I could see, and I would, I would give it, I would move it into the A category, is that there is, is using it in the classroom, and then having giving students the freedom to Modify and Expand the game. Because I think that the potential of the game is for them to do what we're doing is to really be critical to think about gameplay, but also to think about how would I modify, revise, expand, correct. And I think there's a real useful power in that.  Brian  1:04:23   So as a lesson coupled to critical peer review, this would be an A Raychelle  1:04:27   yes. And I think that that that part. And also, can we talk about the little I love, an earlenmeyer flask I love, like the gate, like the tokens and the energy. I think the energy tokens, too is everything costs. There is no so I there is a lot of parts that I like. So maybe I am a as, maybe, wow, maybe I agree with my students. I'm a harsh grader. Maybe, Brian  1:04:52   maybe, maybe this should be a B and not a b minus that. Raychelle  1:04:57   I think you're right. I will, I will modify. look at me. Look at the growth. I will say  Brian  1:05:06   you haven't had a chance to play it yet. So did you want to try to give it a maybe not a fun but interested in playing? Raychelle  1:05:12    I watched the videos about the game. Yeah, I would. I think actually I would like to play the game, because I'm wondering if some of my harshness is because of just trying to wrap my head around about, like this seemed kind of a bit awkward about Wait, there it goes. There's a stuff, and I'm I'm watching it being played is very different than being in it and actually having the tactile experience. Jason  1:05:37    All right, so we need to wrap up, Raychelle, where can people find you?  Raychelle  1:05:40   Ah, you can find me on the crime ridden streets of DC. No, it's not. It's we're at a 30 year low, everybody. But no, you can find me on social media, radium, vitrium, and also doctor a video on Tiktok. Brian  1:05:55   You also write for I was, I was looking on your Tiktok. It links to some opinion pieces. Raychelle  1:06:01   Yeah, I write a column, a forensic science column called Trace analysis, where, if you want to learn more about like, I literally have written about, like, isotopes helping crack a butter fraud case, and and and vampire DNA work in a graveyard. Yes, it is true. Salem, witch trials. So what's the forensic science there? So check out my column, trace analysis at chemistry world for all things creepy science and crime ridden. Brian  1:06:31    That's awesome. And then, do you do Dragon Con? Every year? Raychelle  1:06:33    I have been doing it every year. So I was on that panel Jason about the weird kind of physics things, which was kind of fun, because I'm like, how am I on this column? This on this panel, but yes, I plan to be back next year doing more weird stuff.  Brian  1:06:48   All right, we're trying to collect people from each of the tracks at Dragon Con.  Raychelle  1:06:52   That would be awesome. Yes, yes.  Brian  1:06:55   All right, I think with that, we should probably wrap it up.  Raychelle  1:06:58   So fun to talk to you guys.  Brian  1:07:00   Thank you for joining us. I hope you have a great month and great games.  Jason  1:07:03   And as always, everyone have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.  Brian  1:07:08   This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.  Transcribed by https://otter.ai  

#Daybreak #CMYKGames #Climatechange #ClimateScience #BoardGames #ScienceCommunication #SciComm  Things are warming up in this episode as we talk with Dr. Jacquelyn Gill about Daybreak, a cooperative game about combatting climate change while keeping society intact. We cover tipping points, carbon drawdown, ocean acidification, the clean energy transition, what fossil fuels actually are, and some actually good news about climate change. Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 01:31 - Baby pterosaurs and frog saunas 06:11 - Playing Daybreak 22:53 - Designer choices 27:50 - Sense of urgency 32:45 - Tipping points 40:44 - Ocean acidification 47:05 - Clean energy as the focus 52:53 - RCP and climate projections 58:50 - What are fossil fuels? 1:02:00 - Niggling nitpicks 1:07:12 - Final grades Links Daybreak Official Site (CYMK Games) Designer diary FSC Certification (sustainable components) Matteo Menapace site  Warm Regards (Jacquelyn's podcast)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:11   Today, we're going to discuss Daybreak by CMYK. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian.  Jason  0:20   This is Jason Brian  0:21   and we're joined today by a special guest, Jacquelyn Gill. Jacquelyn, can you please introduce yourself? Jacquelyn  0:26   Hi, I'm Jacquelyn. I'm a paleoecologist from the University of Maine, and I am also a science communicator, and I focus on climate change. Brian  0:34   That's cool. And then you also said that you are, in fact, a board gamer yourself. What games do you enjoy playing? Jacquelyn  0:41   Oh gosh, I have been a gamer of many stripes for a long time, everything from video games to tabletop RPGs to board games. And these days, I've been getting really into two player games because we haven't really found our gaming community. So I get really excited when I have a new two player game, and I think my husband's just going to be really excited to play daybreak, because we've been playing a lot of twilight struggle, which is a cold war game where one of you plays the Soviet Union and the other plays the United States.  Brian  1:14   Oh, man.  Jacquelyn  1:14   And you know, that's starting to feel a little too close to home these days. So yeah, and it also takes a million years to get through.  Brian  1:21   Well, I don't think this game takes a million years to get through, but I would say that this is not a light game either from that perspective. But you know, you can when you win. Man, does it feel good, though. Before we get into the game, we'll do our science banter, some kind of story or topic or something from the world of science that we want to discuss. We usually let the guest host go first. Jacquelyn, do you have something you like to share? Jacquelyn  1:42   I do. And, you know, the folks might have seen those T shirts or mugs that have a dinosaur on them that say all my friends are dead. As a paleoecologist, I feel this, you know, this is my life. So this is not a this is not a happy story. You know, when we talk about a highly productive fossil site, we're talking about a death trap. So, I mean, on September 5, there was this really cool study that came out in the journal Current Biology, and it's all about baby pterosaurs. So these were these, yeah, these  Brian  2:13   dead baby pterosaurs.  Jacquelyn  2:14   Dead baby pterosaurs. I know, and we know. So the fossils themselves are, I would classify them as cute. They're pretty small and but it turns out that this, this particular location, does have a tendency to have a lot of young pterosaurs in it. The fossils that are kind of coming out of this location tend to be on the young side, and these particular baby pterosaurs had evidence in their bones of there's like twisting and breakages, and it's thought that they were basically killed in a severe windstorm. And and pterosaur fossils in general are very rare because they have really fragile bones, and so the fact that we have juveniles with direct evidence of trauma is pretty unique and exciting. These kinds of fossils for from animals from a young age help us to understand more about the biomechanics or the ability of these animals to fly. But also, there are of the hundreds of pterosaur fossils that have been found, A lot of them are very small and very young, and it just suggests that, you know, this was a really rough life for these animals to be flyers when the when the storms were, you know, maybe even more intense than some of the ones that we might see now because of the climate conditions at the time. Brian  3:30   Yeah, I know we've had will and David on from common descent. And they always say the best paleontology starts with tragedy.  Jacquelyn  3:35   It really does. It's true. Jason  3:38   Well, I have something a little bit more upbeat for my science fact. So this was one I ran across a month or two ago, and it talks about frog saunas. This is one of those things that sounds silly until you actually dig into it, because here's the thing. So some people listening may know that a lot of amphibians worldwide are suffering. They're having problems, and that frogs especially are having issues with various fungal infections. And there was a group in Australia that took this one fact people knows, like, oh, the fungus does better at lower temperatures, and that in like this, one particular part of their study area that had a bunch of rocks, the frogs were doing better around the rocks. And they hypothesized that, okay, these rocks could be storing heat during the day and helping the frogs keep their body temperature up in order to fight off this fungus better. And so they built these little frog saunas, which are essentially just bricks with with holes that are the right size for frogs to go in them. And they just stuck them out where they get plenty of sun. I think they may have put some little greenhouses over them, and they actually found that, yes, like when they put these out, they would then go and they'd capture frogs and put them near the saunas. And this frogs apparently did a good job, like getting inside on their own. It actually helped them fight off the fungus better. And this is actually a really nice thing, because it's a very low cost, easy thing to do. You put some bricks around that have the right size holes in them, and you can help these frogs fight off this infection. And so this is one of those. I love it. When science can take something cheap and easy and make a meaningful impact. And so I loved when I ran across as like, Oh, this is great. And it has the nice headlining thing of building frog saunas to try to save the to save the species. Brian  5:14   So Jason's encouraging everybody to throw bricks at frogs, yes? Jason  5:18   Not at frogs. Just deposit them near frogs. It's like, you don't throw a sauna at a person. Just build a sauna near a person.  Brian  5:26   Yeah, that's true. You can throw a person into a sauna, I suppose. But this is going to have the cutest little things in the show notes. It's going to be little frogs sitting inside of bricks and Little Baby pterosaurs, right? Jacquelyn  5:38    With with little like broken arms,  Brian  5:40   like little pterosaurs with their arms in slings. This, when you first said frog sauna, I was thinking, I don't even know, do we call this an idiom about the frog sitting in the pot of water that is slowly heating up? Is that also a good transition? Jacquelyn  5:51   Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. It's like, well, we talk about the frog in a in a pot, metaphor for climate change, and you just crank the heat up a little bit, a little bit. And the idea is, you don't know you're being boiled until it's, you know, too warm to do anything about it. Brian  6:03   Okay? Thank you very much. Both really good things. Should we hop into discussing this game?  Jason  6:09   Oh, that was a bad one.  Brian  6:11   Oh, what do you mean? Oh, oh, hop into it. Man, I didn't even catch that. So Daybreak was designed by Matt Leacock and Matteo manapace and published by CMYK in 2023 it's for one to four players. Plays in about 60 to 90 minutes, and it's suggested for ages 10 and up in the game, you're going to play one of four global powers, and you're working collaboratively to transition to green energy and build social resilience, ecological resilience and infrastructure resilience, all while dealing with crises and planetary effects of all of this carbon being pumped into the atmosphere and raising the global temperature. And you win the game by getting to the point where you are producing less carbon than the planet can absorb, and getting through a round of the crisis phase without failing. Everything in the game has a very distinct color block art style. The center of the board is a world map with a giant thermometer running down one side a couple little tracks that are scattered on the world that are tracking different things like loss of global sea ice, desertification, ocean acidification, things like that. I believe, if our memory serves. There are six tracks. We'll get into them in more detail later. Jason  7:23   Basically all the bad things that happen due to climate change.  Brian  7:26   Yeah, at a at a global, planetary level, there are also, you'll have a place where you can put these little wooden tree tokens representing the forests and their ability to absorb carbon, as well as some spots on the ocean that can absorb carbon as well. That's pretty much everything that's going to happen on that main board. The actual the board is really could be smaller and sort of fit everything, but it's not. It's this big, chunky, you know, a completely global map. Now, most of the working part of the game is actually happening in front of the individual players. So you're going to have sort of just a regular set of playing card sized cards. You have to have five of them in front of you, and then you also have a player board in front of you that helps to track sort of other things. It's cardboard with a little inset, and it will track how much energy demand does your community have. There are four different places that you can play in the game, United States, China, Europe and majority world, which is just everybody else, really. This is meant to represent the developing world. They went with majority world instead. I'm sure there was a lot of conversation about the best thing to call this. On that little board in front of you, you'll be tracking with a little token. What is your energy demand for your region? How much dirty energy are you using? Basically how much energy you're using that is putting carbon into the atmosphere. How much clean energy are you using, and then all of these other sources of emissions. And there's, it actually looks quite intimidating, because there's a huge diversity of these. But you know, it's your vehicles, your industry, buildings, agriculture, energy extraction, waste, every one of those is something that's going to be generating carbon, putting it into the atmosphere. The last things that you track are your resilience that comes in three flavors, social resilience, ecological resilience and infrastructure resilience. So those will your little tokens. Think that they each have little icons. So it'll look like a the infrastructure of, I think it's a series of cross railroads, for instance, whereas the social one is sort of a, you know, a raised fist in solidarity. And ecological, ecology, of course, is a leaf. Ecology is always a leaf. And then the other thing you'll be tracking is your communities in crisis. That is actually a very pretty little icon for what it represents. It's little figures in rainbow colors holding hands that is representing a community that is in trouble from something that is happening in your region globally, related to climate change, you can accumulate up to 12 of those, and that's it. If you get more than 12, that's one of the loss states that we're going to talk about in the game. The only other thing to discuss is the in terms of cards, you have oversized cards that will sit to the left and right of the main Global Map board. One represents global projects. This is things that everybody gets to work on together and that can benefit everybody. And on the other side are crises, things that are very bad that everybody has to work together to try to avoid. under normal states, you get to see what one of those will be. It's called the forecasted crisis, and then you'll have more that you don't get to see. So there's always some surprises that are coming up. when you're playing the game. It happens in multiple rounds. The first round is you get to choose one of these global projects, right? Oh, well, which one of these do we want to focus on? Right? So this is that first opportunity to as a group. Let's decide what we want to work on together. This game very, very, very much encourages communication, being open, planning together. What you're going to do, really, with that idea of like, this is how this problem must be solved, is with communication and cooperation. So you're literally are starting with a global summit of some kind. What should we focus on as a planet to try to fix these problems? After that, you'll move to the local phase. You'll draw five cards from your hands, and you'll get to lay them down. And those can do different things for you. So for instance, you may have a card that says, discard one card to remove a dirty energy token, right? Just take it off the board. Or, you know, oh, you could stack this one up on top of another stack. It can allow you to gain more ecological resilience. Now, you only have five places to put these local project cards down. Whichever card is on top is deciding what the power is. But you could also tuck cards underneath. There's 12 different tags, but like, for instance, a card may say you can add one clean energy for every solar energy tag that you have tucked into this stack, right? So this is how you can use your cards. You can play them on top to gain a new power. You can play them underneath to power up what that other ability is. You can discard them to use abilities. Or you can use them to help with those global projects or those crises cards. You want to hold on to a few just in case, because usually you need to protect yourselves. Jason  12:06   Yeah, these cards are basically the core resource of the game. They're really what makes it go around. They're what gives you power. And not surprisingly, there are effects in the game that reduce how many cards you draw or that you have, which is a pretty severe cost, because that's what you use to literally do everything in the game, Brian  12:21   yet, that's one of the things that happens, is I mentioned those communities in crisis. As those build up, basically, as you have more communities in crisis on hand, you get to do less. You can't do as much because more of your people are unable to contribute. So instead of being able to choose five cards, you can only choose four, and then only three, and then you just lose. Jason  12:41   Yes, being a co op game, there are many, many ways to lose, and only one way to win. Brian  12:45   There is only one way to win, and it is complicated and difficult to achieve. The other thing that's nice about this is it really encourages it's like, everybody look at everything together, discuss what you want to do. What is the best strategy to use these cards? It's like, oh, well, I have this, well, I have this ability over here that lets me give you a card. Do you need that card? Oh, well, should I do this? Like, what should we consider? How can we work towards all of these global objectives together? There are no rounds when you're in this phase, everybody can do things at the same time. Everybody can play as many cards as they want, use as many abilities as they want, until everyone decides they're done or can't do anything else, Jason  13:19   which is really good for gameplay speed, because otherwise this game would literally take like, three to four times as long to get through. So it is nice that everyone can resolve stuff simultaneously, or kind of do independently, if you want. So I think it helps avoid the Alpha gamer situation where one person is telling everyone else what they should do. Brian  13:34   That's one of the things I really do enjoy about cooperative games, is it gives this opportunity. It's like, well, what's your opinion? We get to sort of work as a team. What is a good strategy? If we do this, then what about that? Have we considered this route that that thing that you really only get, you really only get most effectively in a cooperative game, is that joint strategy, that feeling like you're working together to try to achieve goal. After everybody's done all of their actions. The next thing is your emission stage. Now, everybody's going to produce all of that carbon from their dirty energy plants and all of their waste and buildings and agriculture and everything else. So on the little track, it's got, it's they try to make it as easy as possible. There's a number that runs across the top, all of your your black tokens, your dark gray tokens, you just add up the total amount of carbon, and that goes onto that central board as emissions, as the new global carbon. Everybody has to do it together and oh, man, it feels bad when you first start. You're putting just tons of carbon into the atmosphere. There's actually really clever design on the carbon tokens. They've got the little cubes like Jason likes, although these are wooden instead of acrylic, they made specific choices about using sustainable materials in the packaging. So sorry, Jason, no acrylic cubes this time only wooden. Jason  14:51   Oh, well, they're representing carbon. So I think it's appropriate. Brian  14:55   They have a tile that represents five which actually, if you look at it. Looks like you'd had a stack of five of these little cubes, and you mush them down into a square. So like, in terms of graphics, it represents it quite well. You take the carbon from the emissions, and you're able to sequester as much of that as you can, right? Like every tree can hold one carbon, every wave in the ocean can hold one carbon. Anything that doesn't get sequestered goes onto the thermometer, and based on the number of players you have, there are spots where every five carbon fills up a little spot. When you've filled up across the thermometer, you take that carbon, you replace it with the temperature band. The global temperature just went up 0.2 degrees. And that's when things potentially start getting bad. You start having to add more crisis cards. You those planetary effects, those start amplifying and magnifying after the emissions have been dealt with, you adjust the thermometer. The next thing is, you have to roll the planetary die to see okay. What went bad? Did we lose sea ice this year? Did we have desertification this year? Did we have ocean acidification or whatever? So you roll a six sided die, whatever symbol it is, you move the little token up one and each of those tracks has tipping points on it, and they're differentially spaced across different ones. If you hit one of those tipping points, something bad happens. You add more carbon, or you take away trees, or something like that. I know this probably sounds super complicated. It's actually all explained very well on the card. Then you have to go through all your crises cards. It's like, hey, one, actually one of the best crisis cards in this game is pandemic. Jason  16:33   Appropriate, given that it was Matt Leacock who made it. Yeah, for sure. Crises are basically more things that go wrong which cause further problems on your board, or the global board, or just mucking things up, making the game harder. Basically,  Brian  16:47   yeah, things that can screw up your resilience, things that can add carbon, things that can make you discard cards. So hey, you had a great turn. You used all your cards. Well, now a crisis came up, and oh, man, I wish I'd held on to one card so that I could help deal with this crisis. After all, that's done, the interesting thing is, the next step is, did you win? There is a did you win step where you check to see so to win the game we already mentioned, there's only one way to win. You have to reach draw down. You have to be at a point where the planet can absorb more carbon than you are collectively producing. If that happens, and you can get through all those crises, then you have won the game. The next thing you do is you move your energy demand up one and you start the whole process over. I think I've covered all the mechanics. I know that was a lot of time talking about little moving bits and pieces. It's a complicated game in terms of its moving parts, but honestly, if you just follow the steps from beginning to end, it's well designed. You shouldn't have a problem getting through it. Is there anything you feel like I missed?  Jason  17:48   There's a few little things like the the resilience bits are important for crises, because basically the more resilience you have, the more you're able to ignore the crises. And that worked out well for me, because when Brian and I were playing this, I basically got a resilience engine going for two out of my three resiliences, and so I was just able to ignore a lot of things, and then a hurricane hit, and I didn't have much ecological resilience, and my entire country got destroyed. Brian  18:12   Jason and I won when we played, but it was definitely a but at what cost? Because it's it felt like if we had a round seven things would have immediately gone over the tipping point and there wouldn't have been any recovery. On the other hand, I played last night with my wife and our friend and we we did great. We got really good, powerful abilities set up early. You know, we actually played by the rules this time. Because the first time my wife and I played, we used the entire thermometer. It's set by the number of players. If you've got four players, you can fill up all four slots. You got two players. You only get to fill up two slots. It's like a balancing mechanic. But no, we played legit. We won in round three.  Jason  18:48   Holy cow Brian  18:49   yeah, it was great. It felt really good. Of course, we did play on the easiest suggested setup for three players. But I feel like I'm getting a handle on it. I'm enjoying learning how to play daybreak. So Jacquelyn, you said you didn't get a chance to play, but you looked at people playing the game, is that right? Jacquelyn  19:02   I did and I bought the game, I did the unboxing, and read through the instructions, watched a couple of videos, and I'm actually really excited not just to play this for myself, but also to bring it into the classroom, because I think it does a really nice job of conveying in a short time the same urgency and trade offs that humanity is currently facing and will face over years to decades. And it's nice to be able to really experience and internalize that and in within the time span of a game. And I know I read it, actually read an article The Associated Press followed an event at the COP 29 meetings in last year, last November, where they actually had world leaders play this game, and some of them just lost within 20 minutes. So, I mean, it is, you know, compared to some games, it's a little bit of a less of a steep learning curve to jump in you're not committing to, you know, the next four hours of your life. Brian  19:59   Yeah. Yeah, that's true. You could definitely lose this game fast if you were doing it wrong. Jason  20:03   Oh, I did think of one thing more, Brian, the QR codes. So like, every, almost every little card has this tiny, little QR code you can scan, and it takes you to a website that gives you a lot more information about what that card is talking about. And by a lot more. I don't mean to just mean, like, Oh, here's a few lines of flavor text. I mean, the what the few I checked out, there's like a full page, like, someone's essentially essay with research and background about here's what this means, here's how it's in play. Here's how this affects, like, the game and everything, but also here's how it is in real life. Like, there's a lot of information that you don't see about the game that's hidden behind those QR codes. But for an educational setting, like, I could definitely see using this in a classroom, just like, Hey, everyone, take a card scan the QR code. Your job is to report on this thing to the rest of the class. Jacquelyn  20:49   Oh, yeah Brian  20:50   Easily. And that's a huge deck, and, and you're right. Most cards just have that one line of flavor text right in holotype, it's the name, who discovered it and when. But in these ones, it's, your it's, it's, it's an article. It's also answers questions about how you use that card, connects to other cards and to external resources. It also has a picture of the illustration. It's, it's actually quite clever. The one thing that I worry a little bit about stuff like this, because there's been a lot more internet and web integration. We've played a couple games with apps. There's these websites and stuff like that, is the what happens when that website isn't maintained anymore for something like this, it's probably fine, because the Internet Archive is still a thing, right? Jason  21:30   Yeah, I haven't checked. Hopefully they have, like, a PDF you can just download that has all of those things on it for later look up. But if they don't, they should Brian  21:38   I. don't think they do. And you're right, that is a good idea. Would just be to have a full downloadable, I mean, booklet, basically a booklet, book. It would be about it would be about two inches thick if they had everything in there for every single card. And every card has a QR code on it, every crisis, every global program, every local project card, every single one of them, ton of work to write and put together all the stuff for this game. Jason  22:03    Oh yeah, lots of work went in there, and a lot of it, that part's not going to be seen by most people, but it's definitely they did their homework really well. Jacquelyn  22:10   I was just going to add, I like, I do like that. It's sort of, it's not buried, but it's not required, so it doesn't have this preachy, textbooky feel to it when you play it, but it's there. If you want it, you can go and find more information. It's well referenced and resourced, but it's not sort of in your face. It doesn't when you sit down to play it, you don't feel like you're doing homework. Brian  22:31   And actually, I made use of that. There were plenty of times where, like, some cards are like, well, I don't even know what this is. What is this? And I could just scan the QR code and it take me right to it and explain, you know, what kind of social or economic policy this was because, I gotta be honest, economics is not Jason, and I's strong suit. But it was great to be able to have that resource there to look at. The materials also were specifically and implicitly designed to be used with all sustainable materials. Jason  22:59   Well, I know, when I first picked this up from the game store, I noticed, oh, there's no shrink wrap on this. Instead, it has four little stickers covering the edge that says, Hey, these are an eco friendly shrink wrap alternative, yeah. Jacquelyn  23:09   And mine came in the mail, and it was not in any external packaging. It was not shrink wrapped. It just had the four stickers I needed a little you know, goo be gone to get those off. If, you know, if those of you who are fastidious about your game packaging, but the mailing label was just slapped right on top of the box that peeled right off. And so it definitely gave me a moment of pause to think about all of the packaging that normally comes with the things that we get in the mail. I live in a really, a really rural place, and so we can't always get things from our local game stores, and so I did appreciate them kind of walking the walk, because I know that for a lot of people, those the delivery mechanism matters, because it lends credibility to all of the messaging that comes afterwards. And I could see people really thinking if they had to unpack every single thing from a little plastic baggie and generated a whole bunch of trash just just to play the game. I think that that would set people off on the wrong foot to start Brian  24:08   with, in the designer diary, they actually had a sustainability consultant. So one of the things, for instance, was the choice not to use a drawstring bag when they package things. Instead of using Ziploc bags, they use fiberboard boxes, and still, it's a very high quality product. Jason  24:26   Yeah, maybe we should now transition with that whole walking the walk. Let's transition from the game itself to the science it's showing. Because there's a lot of science in here. They definitely did a lot of research, Brian  24:37   actually, if it's okay, before we get into that, I would actually like to talk about the designers a little bit, because I actually read their designer diary. One of the things that's great there is, how is the science being represented? Where did they have to make choices of what to put in and what to leave out? Usually we would talk about the designers a little bit, and I think these designers are worth talking about. So one of these designers is Matt Leacock, who is the. Lead designer of pandemic, which we have already done an episode on, arguably one of the most popular collaborative games that have ever been released, and the his co designer is Matteo Menapace, who seems to specialize in co-designing cooperative games. He's only done a few games, one of his on memory loss. He's got one on food politics. And then he did this, this game in particular. And he basically specializes in co-designing socially aware games, cooperative games to help deal with societal problems, kind of a very unique niche that he has decided to make for himself. when they were choosing to make this game, and that actually started with a conversation on Twitter. By the way, funny enough. They started talking about this because, actually, Matt Leacock said that during the pandemic was when he started thinking about all of the things that Pandemic didn't quite get right, and wanting to do a game that actually put more effort into because I think we've already talked about Pandemic. The board game is a pandemic on easy mode, right? Yes, yeah. So let's deal with this other problem of climate change. And they had four goals in how they wanted to design this game. One was they wanted to create a game about systemic solutions, this idea that you can't solve climate change through individual action, that it actually takes collaborative, collective action. Yes, they wanted a game that was cooperative, but where people still got to make their own choices, individual autonomy. They wanted the game to feel empowering. I have had that experience. I have also had the scary experience of all that carbon filling up on the thermometer right away, but when you start getting under control. It does feel empowering. And then there's the last thing, which I actually do want to talk about. They wanted a game that was realistic, but not quote, unquote, and that's actually by them educational they were, is as explicit goal. Right at the beginning, they don't want to make an educational game. Actually, there was the thing of, they don't want chocolate-dipped broccoli?  Jacquelyn  27:00   Nice. Yeah. Brian  27:01   And that makes me kind of sad, if I'm honest.  Jason  27:05   Well, we've talked about how educational is a dirty word in the game industry, Brian  27:09   and I think that's why it's in quotation marks, right? They like, they don't, they don't. They want to make a game where the science is accurate. It's realistic to what's actually happening. It's communicating the feel it's showing people how to work together to solve problems. But oh no, no, no, no, it's not educational. Of course, it's not educational.  Jason  27:28   I wonder if that's just the perception that an educational game must have education as its primary goal  Jacquelyn  27:33   rather than entertainment. Yeah,  Jason  27:35   yeah. Maybe this is a secondary or tertiary goal.  Brian  27:38   Jason, you said you want to talk about some of the science in here. Did you have something specifically you wanted to bring up? Or Jacquelyn? Did you have something that you wanted to bring up? I have a bulleted list, of course, but if one of you would like to lead a topic that is totally fine. Jacquelyn  27:50   I was just impressed, in general, with the thoughtfulness that went into the way that the game mechanics leveraged the science to create a sense of urgency, rather than trying to gloss over the science for the sake of game mechanics, I think, I think oftentimes, you know, I'm a big science fiction fan, for example, and oftentimes people think that if we are true to the science, that's going to come at some sort of sacrifice to the storytelling or the characters. But I often find that if you approach the problem with the idea that the science can actually enhance the story or the entertainment value of the game, or whatever it is you're looking at, these two ideas don't have to be in opposition to each other. And so Daybreak starts really difficult. There's not a slow ramp up. It doesn't the game doesn't start in 1900 right? It starts right now where we've already experienced at least 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming. And so, which was the case when the game came out in 2023, and so it's it very much drops you in the middle of the problem, which then creates the sense of urgency. It's not something like, oh, I have, I have five or six rounds before the temperature gage starts to crank up. And we can, you know, put our resources on the board, we have some time to really think about how we're going to do this, which would be nice. It would be nice, from a gameplay perspective, to have a few freebies where we can just set things up the way that we want, with the with this eye towards towards creating a better world. Our world leaders had that opportunity, and they chose not to make those choices. And so now the game that we are playing in real life is one where we have to make decisions based on the conditions as they are and and so one thing that I really appreciate about daybreak is that it drops you right into the action, not into some hypothetical future, but into the current reality. And so I really appreciated that. The other thing I really appreciate is just from the get go, it is a cooperative game. The reason that I that I like that very much, is that climate change is kind of the ultimate cooperative game. You know, we are going to ultimately win or lose together. We talk about winners and losers in the near term, and certainly, the effects of climate change are not shared equally, at least initially, but now. Now, as we've been progressing along our little turn tracker in the real world, we're starting to see those impacts happening everywhere. You know, when they those crisis cards that you mentioned, I really appreciate that they reflect real world, recognizable processes, right? Well, the kinds of events you know, things like storm surges, wildfires, drought, sea level rise, that get triggered each round and intensify with the temperature, which is exactly what we see in the science, that those kinds of events become, you know, more frequent, more intense as warming goes on. And also that there's a there's a planetary effects die that's rolled based on the temperature bands, as you warm, you know, increase your warming. And the fact that you can trigger a set of environmental tipping points like desertification, which will cause you to remove tree tokens, or Amazon die back, which is an even bigger event where you add carbon remove trees, you can trigger Arctic sea ice loss. You can trigger permafrost thaw or ocean acidification. And so we have both these sort of short term events, these individual climate induced disasters, as well as these larger scale planetary effects that happen. You know, there's also these linkages back to human society, right? You decrease your infrastructure, you decrease your resilience, you increase the number of communities in crisis, right? And it shows the interconnectedness of how these individual events, when they start to happen more frequently, can then start to undermine our ability to deal with them on a planetary scale. And so they're considering how complicated climate change is in terms of, you know, we say it's an everything problem. I feel like the game manages to capture that in a way that's, as you said, really easy to convey. It doesn't take a lot to learn. You can play around and lose in 20 minutes. But also, you know, from everything that I'm seeing and the way that people are describing the game, the designers really want you to understand the sense of urgency, and it is intentionally challenging in the beginning, as opposed to having this sort of gradual ramp up that then, you know, increases in difficulty over time. Brian  32:17   So it starts, you're right, it starts hard, and if you're not careful, it can accelerate and get even worse at a cracker level, actually, let's talk about from a scientific perspective, this idea of the tipping point. Yeah. So funny enough, this reminds me very specifically about something similar that we had in Terraforming Mars, which Funny enough, these are both terraforming games. Jacquelyn  32:41   I mean, we are literally terraforming Earth right now. Yeah. Jason  32:43   I was just gonna say we talked even back then about how if we had the technology to terraform Mars, then we also have the technology to terraform Earth, which is exactly what this game is showing, for better or worse. Brian  32:54   But let's talk about so what is this idea of a tipping point? The melting permafrost might be one of the best and easiest ways to kind of look at first. So actually, Jacquelyn, can you tell us about melting permafrost and sort of how that affects the climate?  Jacquelyn  33:06   Yeah. So a large amount of the carbon that is in our sort of global carbon budget is stored frozen in the ground in the in the Arctic, where you have the cold temperatures that keep most of the ground frozen for most of the year, there's an active layer at the top that warms up. And when that active layer warms up, you get increases in microbial activity, and those microbes will release, will it start to decompose the organic matter that's in the upper layers of that soil, and they'll release carbon, including via methane. And so Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas that that warms the planet on a per unit basis, more than CO2. And so, you know, another form of carbon. And so, you know, this is one of the greenhouse gasses that we really keep an eye on. And because so much of the Arctic has a lot of old organic material that's been frozen in this soil for 1000s of years or hundreds of 1000s of years. In some cases, it's basically just like a bank, a bank of carbon that's just been stored. And if the soil starts to warm up, then you get more of that decomposition and microbial activity, and you start to get more carbon released into the atmosphere, which then warms the planet, which then thaws more soil, which then releases more carbon. And you can see how this could start to spin up like a like just a big runaway snowball effect,  Brian  34:34   and get, like, a positive feedback loop. Yes, tipping points,  Jacquelyn  34:38   exactly. And so a tipping point or a critical transition. You know the we talk about these as what we call non linear effects, meaning they don't. You just don't. If you, if you crank up the temperature a little bit and the or you crank up the CO2 a little bit, and the temperature increases by a predictable amount, and you crank up the temperature, or the. The CO2 a little bit, the temperature increases by a predictable amount, right? And that creates a straight line going upwards in your sort of mental graph. That's what we would call linear, right? It's a straight line where, as a tipping point, you can suddenly see a very fast change in the rate of the response that is not necessarily predictable. And the tricky part about a tipping point. When we think about these kinds of events, we use the term, what's called hysteresis, which, if you imagine yourself, and if any of you have ever been in a canoe before, you know that canoes are a little wiggly. They are a little tippy, but you also know that you have a little bit of wiggle room on either side. You can kind of shift to the right or to the left, and then at a certain point, if you push the boundaries of what that canoe can tolerate, it will flip over. And if you've ever flipped a canoe before, which I hope you haven't, but if you ever have, you know it's a lot harder to flip it back than it was to tip it over the first time. And so in these sort of, you know, hysteresis responses, these two states, upright canoe and flipped over canoe are both possible, but once you flip from one to the other, it's a lot harder to go back. And so in these tipping point scenarios, when we talk about things like the collapse of of, of, you know, certain ice shelves in the Antarctic, or the you know, permafrost thaw, what happens is that it's easier. It can be easier to release that carbon from the permafrost than it is to to return it to its original state. And in some cases, it might be impossible, at least on the time scales that are relevant to us as humans, right? You know, it might take 1000s or millions of years to reverse those effects, and we want to avoid them, because they often come with big jumps in the conditions that we're experiencing. Right? If we were to release all, if we were to warm all of that permafrost to the extent that all of that carbon that's been trapped for 1000s and 1000s of years was suddenly released, then we're going to see a big jump in the amount of carbon that's in our atmosphere, and that's going to drive a big jump in our temperature. So again, a non linear response can be really hard to predict, and this is where tipping points become really challenging. You'll often hear about them in the media, or we're about to reach a tipping point when it comes to this Antarctic ice shelf, or about to reach a tipping point when it comes to ocean currents. But the problem is that there's been a lot of different attempts to try to predict a tipping point that's coming based on these early warning detection systems, which, in our case, we don't have little red lights that go off. We have statistical processes that we can use to try to identify a tipping point before it comes. But I often say, you know, based on what we know from the from the Paleo record, we've The Earth has experienced things like climate change & extinction before we know a lot about how the Earth system responds to those kinds of processes. We're not walking into the future with a blindfold on, but with tipping points. We kind of are, to an extent, because we don't necessarily know exactly when they will happen. And you might say, oh, plus or minus 10 years that that's a big deal for human societies that rely on a certain set of conditions in order to operate, like our agricultural systems or our transportation systems, or, you know, our ability to make sure that all of the people who live along the coasts still have places to live and aren't going to be impacted by, you know, major sea level rises. Brian  38:43   I think a lot of our when we talk about infrastructural resilience, or all these types of resilience, we were talking about this recently, it's really based on flexibility, like, if your assumption is that tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that are going to be exactly like this, and your system only functions. If that's true, you have no flexibility, right? Jason  39:01   That? Yeah, that's what resilience means, the ability to take a hit and keep on going, yeah. Jacquelyn  39:06   And so if those hits push you out of the range that you're prepared for, and that's, you know, tipping points often, like I said, involve these big jumps in your conditions, if an ice shelf collapses and melts really quickly, that is going to rise sea level much more quickly than the sort of slower, more gradual process of a little bit of melt every year. And so when you can see, okay, we're seeing sea levels rising by this many millimeters per year. We have these coastal communities where we need to start to prepare for that sea level rise, as we're also working on the problem of drawdown, right? We want to reduce our emissions through mitigation, but we also need adaptation, because the impacts of climate change are already with us. But when you start to talk about these non linear responses, these large jumps in our conditions to a new state, or we sort of crank up the dial really quickly. That becomes really difficult if you say, live in a coastal community where you have to get to and from work every day by crossing over a low lying bridge, or your home is near the ocean, or your clean water is being infiltrated by sea water, or all of the other impacts that sea level rise is having. Brian  40:16   So you've mentioned another one, this loss of Arctic sea ice, a couple of these tracks, actually, I think, will be familiar to most people. More severe weather. Loss of sea ice is a thing that we hear about routinely when it comes to climate change, desertification. I think this idea of the change of rainfall makes sense that we've been hearing about the die back of the Amazon for a very long time as well. Well, die back and also actively removal of the Amazon ocean acidification. Can we talk about ocean acidification a little bit? Jacquelyn  40:46    Yeah, absolutely. So, as CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere, the oceans have a capacity to absorb some of that, but that is that actually changes the pH of the oceans, right? Because the CO2 is slightly more acidic. And so now you might think, Well, we know we're not talking about, you know, walking into a literal bath of acid here. If you, if you put your hand in an acidified ocean, you're not going to come out with a bunch of burns and pustules all over your hand, right? This isn't something that necessarily we would notice. These are very small changes in the pH of the oceans. But now imagine that you are an ocean dwelling creature that makes a shell. What are shells made out of calcium carbonate? What do you take when you have an acidic stomach, Tums? What are Tums made out of calcium carbonate? You can start to see now where this becomes a problem, where by just small changes in the chemistry of the oceans, making shells as a small, you know, plankton or other creature becomes really difficult. And you might think, Okay, well, so what? So some small shell creating creatures in the ocean have a harder time making their their physical structures. Well, what eats those creatures? Right? What you start to think about this from a whole food web perspective, and there are, if we look at the fossil record, for example, when we look at mass extinctions in the past, they typically are not necessarily, at least in the oceans, driven so much by warming temperatures as they are driven by ocean acidification. Now, those were on much larger scales of warming than what we're expected to see by the end of the century. But we're also, you know, we don't need to lose 97% of all genera in the oceans before we do something about climate change, right? Even small amounts of ocean acidification can start to cause, and are already starting to cause disruptions to our ocean based food webs, the oceans feed us, right? They also produce a lot of our oxygen. And so you can see how, as these connections among all living things, you know, mean that when you pull on one thread, the whole tapestry can start to unravel. And you know, Jason, you mentioned resilience, I like to think about ecosystems, if I can mix metaphors for like, the fourth time here as a Jenga tower, right? You can pull some blocks out and your Jenga tower will be okay, but at a certain point, you just reach that tipping point where pulling one one more piece out causes the whole tower to collapse. And we don't want to get anywhere near that.  Brian  43:14   Jason likes to say that ecosystems are held together with duct tape and spit. So, oh yeah, whether you're paraphrasing someone, right? Jason  43:21   I'd say that they're basically, they're they're not in harmony. They're everything pulling against everything else as hard as they can. And so if you start losing members, then suddenly the balance gets lost, Brian  43:32   not enough people on one side. Then everything gets pulled in the wrong direction, and everybody falls Yeah. Jacquelyn  43:37   And there is, you know, I people often think of these ecosystems as having as being extremely sensitive that just like a sneeze, will cause everything to collapse. And no, I mean, we we've seen a large amount of climate swings, and, you know, species changes and extinctions over the last, you know, millennia to millions of years, there is some resilience built into the system, and we see that in Paleo records, but we also see that extinction does happen, and extinction is forever, and a lot of that extinction is has been driven by climate change and and so, you know, to me, this just reminds us that we do have a little bit of wiggle room. We have some buffer space, you know, but that doesn't mean that we that we don't have to act urgently, because, again, these tipping points can surprise us, and I would rather not figure out where they are by crossing over them. Brian  44:33   I guess in the case of the ocean, we literally have buffer space, right? Jacquelyn  44:36   Yeah, yeah, right. From an ocean acidification perspective, yeah, yeah.  Jason  44:40   And I was like, I'm glad we talked about it, because I was going to mention the two ways that carbon gets drawn down to the system, the trees and the ocean waves. The trees I think most people would get because people understand trees suck in carbon dioxide. The ocean waves, I think, are less obvious, and so it's basically this process of the ocean sucking it down. But there's a cost, that there's a limit to. Its capacity to do so without causing other problems, is that, basically the summary, Jacquelyn  45:04   yeah, at least on shorter timescales. I mean, the other way you can there's another way that nature draws down carbon from the atmosphere, which is just through, you know, CO2 dissolved in rain, which can then dissolve rock as the rain hits that rock, and then it basically gets washed out to sea and buried at the bottom of the ocean. That's how, that's sort of Earth's carbon removal process that plays out over millions of years. It's how, you know, it's one of the reasons why we don't have the same levels of CO2 naturally that we did during the Cretaceous, right the time of the dinosaurs. So these natural processes of carbon burial, but they happen over really long timescales. But some people are talking about leveraging that process to to actually, you know, capture carbon, bury it in these massive blocks, and just, you know, sink them down into the bottom of the ocean, and just do, do it in an artificial way. Brian  45:59   I have actually not managed to play a game of Daybreak. Yet where it's I've gotten into effect direct air capture. Jacquelyn  46:04   Yeah, yeah. That's what? Yeah. That's the sort of thing I was just mentioning. Is this idea of right now, this is still science fiction. So we don't have technological solutions to the climate crisis, other than green the green energy transition. We don't have this. There is no real ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere using technology, unless you want to call a plant technology, yeah. So people often say, oh, yeah, well, we'll just sort of techno solve our way out of this problem that currently remains science fiction at this point. It does not that technology does not exist. There have been attempts to try it, but so far, the plants that have been attempting to do this have taken more energy than they have pulled out of the atmosphere in terms of their carbon budgets. So they actually create more emissions than they've reduced. Brian  46:57   That's kind of what I would assume like. If you're not using clean energy to do that, then how are you making the problem any better? Jacquelyn  47:03   Yeah Jason  47:05   which actually is another question I had so Brian and I noticed that in the game, there's like seven or eight different sources of carbon that go into the atmosphere. He mentioned, like industry, agriculture, waste, transportation and then just plain energy. And we noticed that the game very much skews in favor of switching energy generation from dirty to clean, and it's actually very hard to switch any of these other things over. There's a few cards that hit a few of them. There's one or two, though, I don't think we found any cards that targeted them specifically. You just got, like, one or two cards that would let you hit any type. But some of them are very hard. Brian  47:42   Having gone through the whole deck, there is nothing specifically that lets you get rid of energy extraction or waste. Jacquelyn  47:48   Interesting. Jason  47:48   My question is, the game has it so that the easiest way of going from emitting carbon to not emitting carbon, to basically reduce your carbon input, is to  Brian  47:56   is changing the energy economy?  Jason  47:58   Yes, yeah, going from dirty energy to clean energy, and it's very hard to change other our other sources of carbon emissions. Does that is that the case in reality is that our best bet of changing how much carbon dioxide we produce, Brian  48:11   because this might be a nitpick, if it's not, because this is definitely how Daybreak says this is the only way you're going to win, is by doing this. Jacquelyn  48:18   So at scale, maybe it's there's a lot of focus on energy consumption there. I guess you could, they could have gotten into other approaches, like changing diets, right? Because if you think about one of the biggest sources of emissions is actually the food that we eat. People often spend a lot of time on transportation, but globally, I believe flying is something like 2.5% of global emissions, whereas beef consumption is actually much higher than flying. And so the biggest thing that you can do, if you if we want to focus at individual actions that scale up as collective actions, one of the biggest things that you can do is just eat less meat. Not not eat no meat, even, you know, I know people will freak out, but you can eat less meat, and that makes a huge difference. My guess is they didn't want to get into the mechanics of emissions in that sense, because then you start to have to deal with all kinds of, you know, it's like, well, what are they going to eat instead? Right? And then there's, there's an energy budget that's associated with with each of those things. Because, in the case of beef, it's, you know, the methane the cows themselves physically release. But it's also the deforestation that goes into, you know, creating land for pasture to meet global demand. It's also the, you know, the transportation budget of driving or flying cows and beef around, right? And so there's all these sort of add ons, you know, it's not, it's not just the the methane associated with them, with the animals themselves. So I think. Like, the simplest and most clean way is to think about energy transition, and that is honestly the way that makes the most sense. I think, as long as we're also factoring in transportation, which is globally really important. But then there's also things like cement. Like global cement production is actually a huge source of emissions. You know, where does that fall like there? There are direct emissions that are not coming from the burning of fossil fuels for electricity or combust internal combustion engines for for propulsion. You know that that do matter. But I think once you start to open that can of worms, the game becomes like Terraforming Mars and and then it becomes like its own hobby is just that is the game itself. And so I do think maybe they wanted to avoid some of the those basics and really focus on green energy, and not to knock the green energy transition. It's been when I started grad school, the likeliest climate scenario for our future was warmer than what is turning out to be the likeliest scenario now, and we have bent the arc of our climate future downwards, and a large part of that is a faster than predicted increase in green Energy, especially in places like China, and a faster than predicted collapse of the coal industry, and so that has actually made a like a multi degree difference in terms of the climate future. The worst case scenarios of you know, even 15-20, years ago are no longer on the table. Neither are the best case scenarios, but we're sort of in the middle right, which I'll take it compared to the worst case scenarios, right? RCP-8.5 which is an emissions scenario that people have talked about and often was sort of seen as the likeliest scenario, is now considered a highly unlikely scenario because, again, of this clean energy transition. And so I think the game is right in a way to focus on that, because at these global scales, with policy initiatives, that's a really nice lever, right that you can focus on from for the purposes of a game. In reality, it's a little more complicated, which is why we say, you know, climate change is an everything problem, because there's really no aspect of our lives that that is that doesn't touch on climate change in some way. But, you know, it becomes, I think, more complicated if you're going to start talking about diets and and manufacturing materials that you know, like concrete emits carbon just by existing, right? And so then you start to think about, well, what is that? How do we even start to tap into that as from a, from a game mechanics question? And I can, I can understand that, that the reluctance to go down thatathway, Brian  52:53   p can I ask you to follow up on one thing you mentioned, you said, RCP, could you tell me what that means when Jacquelyn  52:58   I said RCP-8.5 that's referring to what we call a representative concentration pathway. So that is a human scenario that climate scientists then use to model potential futures. And the number 8.5 actually refers to how much what we call radiative forcing in the year 2100 so that's how much extra energy in watts per square meter that are trapped in Earth's atmosphere compared to our pre industrial baseline. So people have probably heard of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And every seven or so years, the world scientists and policy makers get together, and they basically take a snapshot of the current best science on climate change, both in terms of emission sources as well as emissions impacts. And as part of those reports that come out, the IPCC, reports that come out every seven ish years or so, there are projections of what we're looking at in terms of our future climate scenarios. What is, what is our climate future going to be? Well, it's uncertain, and it's well, I talked about some uncertainties in terms of things like tipping points or how the Earth system is going to respond to a certain amount of warming or a certain amount of emissions. It turns out that the biggest source of uncertainty when it comes to climate change, is actually not how the Earth system itself will respond. It's what people are going to do. Are we going to share technology? Are we going to treat this as a cooperative board game and not a competitive one? Are we going to invest in certain types of infrastructure or or technologies are what's the pop human population going to do? How are we going to eat? What is our fingerprint like globally going to look like at different in different parts of the world? Those that human question means that predicting or projecting into the future any one particular climate future becomes really challenging. So if you were. Say, what is it going to look like in 100 years? I can say, well, if we have a lot of war and people don't get along very well, and, you know, we have a bunch of countries who start these initiatives to increase our fossil fuel use, and we decide that green energy is, you know, not politically expedient, etc, then and human population trajectories in different parts of the world look like this, then we're going to follow this emissions pathway. And if, and if we have a collaborative world community where we share new emerging technologies, we have a very involved public that starts protesting or demanding action from world leaders and votes in certain ways. And we see this kind of leadership. We see this kind of growth in technology. I mean, these are the social scientists map all of these likely trajectories out. Then we're going to follow this slope in terms of our emissions pathways.  Brian  56:03   That's fascinating. So basically, the best models of climate change are not by climate scientists. They're by social scientists. Jacquelyn  56:11   Well, it starts with the social scientists. So the social scientists say this is what we think will happen. And then the climate modelers all get together and they run what we call ensemble models. So there's maybe 10-14, different models that get used. And because some models are better at some things, some models are really good at clouds, some models are really good at the oceans, right? And so they all have different strengths. We run them all together, we look at sort of what the error is, and we take those different emissions scenarios, and we run them through the model, and we allow the model to tell us how warm things will get based on those emission scenarios. And then we say, Okay, with this particular scenario, we are going to predict 4.5 degrees Celsius. With this particular scenario, we're going to predict two to four degrees Celsius. And so for a while, RCP 8.5 was called business as usual. That was the pathway that we thought we were on, or that was maybe most likely, and that was associated with about four to five degrees Celsius. Global average temperature increases by 2100 higher in the Arctic, which again starts to raise the specter of tipping points. If the Arctic is warming faster, you get more CO2 and then maybe we get even warmer.  Brian  57:26   Yeah, you get your feedback loops.  Jacquelyn  57:28   Yeah. So it was once nicknamed the business as usual scenario, but now most experts see it as an unlikely worst case. Coal has not grown as fast as once assumed, and it's often still used as a benchmark. People might have heard of, heard of this term, but we don't think it's a likely future anymore. It is a useful warning in terms of what happens if we slam our foot on the gas and never hit the brakes. But you know what I like to remind people of, because this is daybreak. This is a game where we're trying to solve this crisis. The reason that RCP 8.5 ended up being an unlikely scenario. Is not because we got the science wrong. It's just because humans, our human society, followed a different trajectory, one where we saw an unprecedented rise in a Global Youth Climate movement, one where we saw a faster than predicted growth in green energy and a faster than predicted collapse in coal. Brian  58:24   Thay's hope. That's hopeful. That sounds  Jacquelyn  58:26   it is hopeful. Yeah, it's not just that. Oh, we kind of guessed, and we guessed wrong. The models were wrong. It's no we are literally bending the arc of our climate future downwards. We're not warming as we're not on that ski slope up. Brian  58:39   There's, there's a bunch of other things that I wish we could talk about. We are running out of time just a little bit. But I did want to ask you one more very dumb question, if that's okay,  Jacquelyn  58:49   please. Yeah.  Brian  58:50   Okay. So what is a fossil fuel and where do they come from? Jacquelyn  58:54   Oh, such a great question,  Brian  58:56   because, because the number of coffee mugs that have a dinosaur turning into gasoline. And I know it's it. So we're going to take this opportunity, because, as Jason says, it's times like this that we get to talk about things I don't know another game that's going to let us talk about this topic. So, what is a fossil fuel? Where did they come from? Jacquelyn  59:14    It's great. It I mean, and they are fossils. They're just not the animal, the vertebrate, the dinosaur fossils that that we often like to think. People think, Oh, I'm burning dinosaurs in my gas tank. Actually, in some ways, I think it's even cooler if I can say that they're even older. And so these are basically typically ancient plants, algae or even other microorganisms that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. So most of our oil and coal and gas deposits formed during the Carboniferous. So like it says on the tin right, carboniferous is very carbony period, and that was about 360 to 300 million years ago. And there was just a really, there were these large scale swamps which were really. Really perfect for preserving organic matter. There were, like, massive wetlands all over the large part, parts of the planet. And so you're really burning like ancient ferns, ancient early plants and algae. And so that's where those deposits are coming from, long before, you know, hundreds, hundreds of millions of years before the time of the dinosaurs, you know. So you are burning fossils, but they're mostly fossil plants and algae. But really, if you think about it, you're burning ancient light, right, ancient sunlight. So, the sun, you know, these plants are photosynthesizing, these algae are photosynthesizing, and they're, using that sunlight to create sugars and build their bodies. And so really, what we're doing is we're taking sunlight that took so that solar energy that took hundreds of millions of years to accumulate, and we're releasing it in decades or centuries. So that's an incredible amount of carbon that took a very long time to build up, and then we're just letting it all out in a very short period of time. And sometimes, you know, in the past, volcanoes have done things like this, and they've had disastrous consequences, you know, for mass extinctions. And now we are the force, the geologic force, that is sort of burping all of this carbon into the atmosphere. Brian  1:01:22   So listeners, listen to season one, episode one, our very first episode on photosynthesis, all that sunlight you're using to grow trees, and then it gets buried and just stays as a tree. So the next time you see somebody saying you're putting old dinosaurs into your gas tank, just you're not, Nope, okay. And you could tell them that they're wrong, and Jacquelyn and explained it for you, well, Jacquelyn  1:01:43   actually, they're old tree ferns. Yeah, Jason  1:01:47   all those Sinclair gas stations are just wrong. Brian  1:01:50   Yeah, I actually think it's their fault. I really do.  Jason  1:01:54   They just need to replace their mascot from a was a sauropod to be a tree fern. Jacquelyn  1:01:58   Yep, yep. I'm on board Brian  1:02:00   nitpick corner. I'm happy to go first in terms of the nitpick with the science. I think that this game really tries to represent a lot a lot of those things, plant based diets, alternate concrete, they're all there. They're little bonus activities that you can do that help but but really the thing that this is not even a game nitpick. This is just the thing that bothers me. If you go to the daybreak website, if you scroll down to the bottom, they have resources for educators, right? And if you click on that tab, all it says is website under development, and it doesn't have anything. And to be honest, this is not the first time I've seen this. These things just never seem to quite materialize. That you know, there's always the best intentions, and then they just never seem to get over that last step. So that's because kind of sad. The game is great, but like, the fact that they had to put educational in quotation marks just really troubles me. Jacquelyn  1:02:54   Missed opportunity. Yeah, Jason  1:02:56   yeah, I'd say mine is something we already alluded to. Is the like, the fact that Brian and I won, but we were pretty sure that global civilization was going to collapse next turn. Brian  1:03:06    When you were rolling the planet dice, the planetary effects dice four times or something every round. Jason  1:03:12   Yeah, it's just this case like, well, if I won, I'd like to feel like I not only won, but the human society would be okay, not that I have 11 communities in crisis, and all the tipping points have been hit, and like, as soon as next society, next turn happens, like just things are going to completely fall apart. So I guess I'd like that, but I also understand that could make it a much, much longer game or a much, much harder game. I mean, they have to balance the co op. And I will say my take home from this is that real solving climate change is going to be very hard because the game is purely Co Op. We were working together. When I look around the global political scheme, I don't see international cooperation on the scale I would like to see in which I'm actually glad Jacquelyn, that you mentioned that bending the curve down, because that actually gives me some hope that, yes, things can happen. It's not just doom and gloom, as is reported so often in newspapers. So  Brian  1:04:06   I still like to think that there's an opportunity for a better future. Here. We're seeing populations sort of reaching stabilizing. People are trying. Things are at least moving in the direction we'd hoped they would. Just needs to be more and faster. Jacquelyn, what do you think? Jacquelyn  1:04:19   Yeah, I would say, for me, I think the biggest nitpick, if I, if I can, if I have to say something critical, Brian  1:04:26   you don't have to,  Jacquelyn  1:04:26   oh no, no, no, I, I've got it is, is that, you know, it does a beautiful job of showing that climate, climate change is a global cooperation problem, but you know, it does have to simplify. And I think one of the ways in which one of the important aspects of the climate crisis that don't come through the game because of some choices to simplify, which I understand it would be a totally different game, is that, you know, the like the global South, the, you know, the, what was the phrase that they used in the game, the majority world? Yeah, it's far more. More, you know, diverse than one player card can capture. And also, you know, it in a lot of ways, it's not, it's not equal in terms of power or in terms of its contribution to the climate crisis that other other, these other components, you know, North America, Europe, etc, have and and so one thing that I feel is sort of missing from this, this vision of this game, which is understandable because it's focused on solutions, is that this idea that the communities that have contributed the least to climate change will suffer, or are suffering the first and the most, and so the countries that have emitted the least are experiencing the impacts first and and I think that gets glossed over a little bit in this kind of cooperative model, and also just the fact that, you know, there's almost a part of me, as I was kind of reading through this that wanted to, yes, the fossil fuel industry is portrayed negatively throughout the game, but it almost feels like it's this, like Silent antagonist, like it's, it's, I almost wanted someone, no one would want to play the fossil fuel industry right, like you would, but they don't play fair Jason  1:06:09   Traitor  mechanic! Jacquelyn  1:06:10   They don't play by the rules, right? And so I almost thought to myself, like, what would it be like if somebody played as a fossil fuel industry deliberately trying to undermine every single thing that all these interesting doing throughout the whole process, because that's what's happening. They are paying lobbyists, you know? They are undermining climate science, and they are responsive, right? They are. They are responsive to what everyone else is doing to sort of as we each try to respond to what the fossil fuel industry has enabled. The fossil fuel industry also adapts and changes, and so that is kind of missing. They're, they're, they're ever present, but somewhat almost passive in a way, and I but again, like you'd be, you'd spend like half an hour fighting over who had to play the fossil fuel industry. That would be like the game, like you have to just draw a random card. Or maybe it could be one of those, like, silent, you know, the games where you have, like, a secret identity, Brian  1:07:05   I can imagine people who would be anxious to play the antagonist. Jacquelyn  1:07:08   Yeah, that's fair. I think I've got one of those in my gaming group too. Brian  1:07:12   Okay, well, let's do grades. I'm happy to start. And actually, I think I know we usually do these separately, but let's just do the science and the fun grades together. If that's okay, if you want to kind of justify, I'm actually comfortable with both an A on science for intentionality. Yes, there's always simplifications, and yet they've tried to really robustly represent the system. Again, it's they, I think that they met their goal of being where realism was the target. I know that they really shot for that. In terms of fun, Jason and I are going to be going to a gaming con, running some games. I switched my game that I was going to play to this game. I wanted to play Daybreak with people. I wanted to teach people how to play daybreak. I I've enjoyed it, and I am excited to play it more. So I'm going to be double A, Jason  1:07:59   I'd say, probably A to A minus range for fun, and I just have to play another time or two to figure out which one of those two it is, because first time is always fairly challenging. But overall it seemed, it seemed entertaining and good. There was lots of moving parts that I could try to figure out how to make work for science A plus. This is, this is possibly one of the few games I've seen that has more science in it than wingspan, and a lot of that is hidden behind the QR codes, but it's there, and I want to acknowledge that they did the work to get the science down and to get it right and to put a lot of it there and accessible in the game, for those who want to look for it, Brian  1:08:36   pretty good for a game that was explicit about not wanting it to be educational. Jacquelyn  1:08:40   Yeah, I would, I mean, I still, I would say A in terms of want to play, because I haven't had a chance to actually, I've watched other people play it, but it's a game where, when I when you have to confess, when you first invited me to talk about it, I was initially like, oh my gosh, this sounds so cool. I love pandemic. This sounds like right up my alley. And then immediately thought, oh my God, no one's ever going to want to play this with me. It's going to feel, well, just thinking like it's going to feel Jason  1:09:07   Preachy? Jacquelyn  1:09:08   like, like the, I mean, just like a downer, or it's going to be difficult, or it's going to be too sciencey, or too too nerdy, like, I can't get anyone to play Terraforming Mars with me, right? And and then when I actually got a chance to unbox it and watch some videos, I realized, oh no, no, this, this will not be a hard game to sell to other people, to in terms of come and hang out with me and play daybreak, or bringing it in the classroom and actually being able to get through it in a session. And so I would say A in terms of, you know, just ease of an excitement about playing, and everything that I've seen and read about and just explored on my own. I would definitely say A plus for science. Brian  1:09:46   Do you think this will be a good match for the classroom? Jacquelyn  1:09:48   I do. I bring board games into my field, Natural History class towards the end of the semester, when everything's kind of cold and dark and dead and there's not a whole. A lot of field to do and and a lot of times, some of those games have not translated very well into the classroom. We've needed, like game ambassadors who need to learn the rules and then teach them in the class, and they get so bogged down in the details and in the gameplay mechanics that it becomes difficult, unless you have someone who's like, oh yeah, I know wingspan. Let me have let my table have that one. You really do kind of need someone to sort of convince everybody else how to play. Or we get through, we get through the end of the hour. And I think this is going to be a I think this is worth trying. Brian  1:10:37   Are you going to have to buy multiple copies? How do you do that? Jacquelyn  1:10:40   usually What I've done is I've had a collection of games that students have them kind of pulled from. I just did this for the first time last year, because it turns out, I have so many natural history related games that became finally doable, but now I'm sort of scheming about potentially doing something like that, where I get a whole bunch of copies and then disperse them throughout the room and have this be its own exercise. Brian  1:11:04   This sounds occasionally they're those little pockets of money that can come up at a university. And this seems like one of those things you might be able to convince somebody that this is worthwhile, yeah. Jacquelyn  1:11:14   Or maybe if Matt hears this podcast and the fact that I was reluctant to say anything too negative about it, he'll be like, hey, Jason  1:11:23    well, I will say I clicked on the link that Brian mentioned for educators. It still says it's under construction, but it says that if you're an educator and you want discounted copies for use in the classroom, it tells you how to contact them. Brian  1:11:35   Oh, Jason canceled out my nitpick. Never mind. I mean,  Jason  1:11:38   well, that's all it has. It says, Oh, we also want to put up here, like lesson plans and letters for requesting budget stuff. Those aren't there yet, but at least there's the way to contact the company. Brian  1:11:46   I mean, the game released in 2023 so it's, I think it's probably not comeing at this point. But anyway, you know the hope springs eternal. Okay, fantastic. Well, I think, unfortunately, we were gonna have to cut it there. I really appreciate you, Jacquelyn, coming on. I We don't move in the same scientific circles, but knowing that you're a board gamer, maybe, maybe someday we'll be in the same space and we can play a game together with that would be really fun.  Jacquelyn  1:12:12   That would be great. I would love that. Yeah.  Jason  1:12:13   So where can people find you? Jacquelyn  1:12:15   Well, you can find me on blue sky, just with my name. Jacquelyn Gill, j, A, C, Q, U, E, L, y n, I'm one of the L, y n, Jacquelyns and I also have a climate podcast. It wrapped up a couple of years ago, but it was called warmer guards. It was one of the earliest climate podcasts. All of our episodes are still out there. Our last season focused around data, and it's my favorite season. We didn't talk about games. We should have and but we also have a new podcast that I'm working on right now with Phoebe Cohen from Williams, called Jacs and Phoebe make a planet where we're going to take you through the entire process of how the Earth became habitable, everything from its formation all the way to the first land plants, the sort of evolution of modern day animals. And the sort of frame for the podcast is that two science friends are going to make an apple pie. And as Carl Sagan says, if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. So we're going to build the whole planet so we can make our apple pie. Brian  1:13:22   That's fantastic. Please let us know when the podcast goes live. We'll make sure that we give you a shout out. Thank you, dear listeners. Please go live. Give a listen to Jacquelyn's podcast. When the time comes, we're going to call it there. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you have a great month and great games. Jason  1:13:39   And as always, have fun playing dice with the universe, see ya,  Brian  1:13:44   this has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. Jacquelyn  1:14:08   Sorry, my speaking of Energy Transition, lights just went off in my office. Brian  1:14:15   Yeah, I've seen people do this dance before. Jason  1:14:19   Anyone remember the old movie. Gremlins 2, where they talked about they were in this super futuristic building, and the lights got turned off because the guy didn't move. And then I realized in my postdoc, that was the reality I was living in.  Jacquelyn  1:14:31   Yeah, that's the future. We didn't get flying cars. We just had our lights randomly shut off. I'm so sorry, Jason, can you ask me your question again? Transcribed by https://otter.ai  

#genetics #genotype #GeniusGames #mendel #peas #BoardGames #Science This month we're talking about Genotype, by Genius Games, where you get to play a field assistant to the father of modern genetic, Gregor Mendel. We'll talk about who Mendel was, why his peas were so important to biology, how he got a bit lucky, and how many different ways there are to break a gene. (Also, why it's weird that some humans can drink milk as adults, and why cats and borrowed board games don't mix.) Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:30 New paper on Mendel's Peas 04:46 Overview of Genotype Game 08:16 The Meatball Incident 13:45 Who was Gregor Mendel? 16:08 The seven pea genes 20:36 How to break a gene 27:47 The Modern Synthesis of biology 31:04 Dominant and recessive genes 38:22 Mendelian genes in humans 44:59 Nitpick corner 48:40 Final grades Links Genotype (Genius Games) Massive study of Mendel's pea genes (Nature) Hankweed: Mendel's unfortunate second choice for plants to study (PubMed Central) Evolution of human lactase persistence (=drinking milk as adults) (Nature Genetics)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:01   Brian. Brian  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:13   Today, we will be talking about Genotype by genius games. Brian  0:19   Hey, I'm Brian, and I am joined by a very special guest today, an expert in plant genetics. Jason Wallace, yay! Jason  0:26   Hey everyone. So I know you already know who I am, but this is, like, today's topic is what I do for my bread and butter. This is my research area. So we figured we'd run with this. It's been a while since it's been just us for a full episode. So Brian  0:38   yeah, it has. This is gonna be, this is gonna be harder work than we normally have to do, but, you know, but you are the expert today, so you are going to talk about it, and I'm going to be here to ping you with questions, Speaker 1  0:47   yeah, which means I probably should give a little bit of background, because I'm not sure I've ever done that. So we're both researchers at the University of Georgia, both associate professors. My background is in genetics and molecular biology and informatics, which basically means studying very small things and how they get passed down from organism to organism in bacteria and now plants. And my specific area, which we may talk about later, is quantitative genetics, which is complex traits, but not actually the very simple traits, like we're going to talk about with Mendel's peas for today in the game genotype, but traits that are controlled by many, many, many genes and that have more complex interactions.  Brian  1:28   Cool, cool, cool, cool.  Jason  1:30   Let's go ahead and start off with a fun science fact. And Brian, I'm going to throw this to you, because I'm going to be talking a lot this episode Brian  1:35   Yeah. I mean, totally, totally fine. There was a paper published recently in Nature, where they described and identified the genes responsible for the last three of Mendel's seven traits. So could not be more appropriate for this game. Four of the genes were known, so Mendel studied seven different traits. Jason  1:54   We'll talk about that later, and we'll probably talk about this paper a lot later. Yeah, Brian  1:59   we probably will. Honestly, I'm hoping you can explain it to me, because I study bacterial genetics, and it's way easier than plant genetics, but basically, the four of the genes had been described previously, three of them had not. And this study was a massive genome sequencing effort across a huge diversity of domesticated and wild pea species, and they were able to do something called a genome wide association study. So they looked to see which plants had a particular phenotype, they looked at their genotype, and we're kind of able to say it's like, well, if we look at this sort of mathematically, we can see that everything that has this feature seems to be pointed down to this region of the genome. And we're able to identify these last three genes and and really it's interesting, right? Because we knew about genetics way earlier than we understand how heredity actually worked, how DNA worked, how any of that stuff worked, because it follows simple mathematic principles. And actually, what's interesting is a lot of times it's about how genes get broken. And this study in particular was sort of understanding the for the most part, the way that these traits were associated with breaking these seven genes in very specific and very different ways. It's a real smorgasbord of different ways that genes get busted, like lots lots of transposons interrupting genes, lots of premature stop codons interrupting protein sequences. It's just every single one of them seems to tell a unique story of all the ways that you can break a gene.  Jason  3:25   Brian, you just throw out so much vocabulary I have to define for people now.  Brian  3:28   Sorry, sorry.  Jason  3:28   So we'll go over some of this later. So genotype, phenotype, codon, transposon, like, if you don't know what those mean, that's okay. But basically, the idea of the studies, they looked at like 700 different peas. And then they did math, essentially to figure out, okay, we can see a bunch of ways that these are different from each other at the genetic level, which of these differences actually shows some sort of association with the traits we care about? And that's how they were able to narrow down on them. And they found a bunch of different ways that, like Brian said, genes can be broken basically, because most of these are the original plant, which biologists call the wild type. It's something got broken at some point, and humans said, Hey, I like that. And so we kept it. It became more common in some of our varieties that we cultivate. And so now it's common in, say, our domesticated peas that people grow in gardens, or in some varieties of them, but not in the wild ones. Usually, not always, Brian  4:24   yeah? So, like, and again, this is kind of a weird science fact, because this is actually going to blend in with our discussion of the game, right? But, like, yeah, okay, so like, flower color, like, there's, there's a series of gene. Have we talked about that DNA really doesn't do very much. Maybe, I feel like, maybe this is the wrong story, because honestly, discussing this paper is discussing this game, so maybe we should just let ourselves move ahead so we can talk about it in more detail.  Speaker 1  4:46   I think so probably yes, let's, let's let it go. All right, so let's talk about this game then. So genotype by genius games, basic stats, it's for one to five players, obligatory first player or single player mode takes about an hour to play. Okay, ages 14 and up, but again, depending on your kid, it can be younger. I had a my nine year old played it with me several times, and she actually quite enjoyed it. So it is, it is kind of complicated. There are a lot of moving parts to be aware of. Suggested retail price is about $60 which may be a bit on the pricey side, but they have a bunch of custom components. You get a bunch of custom dice, bunch of custom punched out tokens, and some trowel shaped meeples, which I think are just lovely and such, because the whole point of this game, the conceit of the game is that you are playing assistants to Gregor Mendel, who is essentially the father of modern genetics. And we'll talk more about him in a bit. At Thomas Abbey, way back in the 1800s and you are essentially his field assistants going out doing the work to try to get the data and validate these traits he's studying in peas. And so you have your little trowel meeples, which represent the work you're putting in. You've got dice, which are the genes. And because reproduction is a little bit of a random process, you roll the dice to figure out what types of plants you get every generation. The game is basically a combination of a worker placement game and a drafting game, because it goes into few phases. In the first phase, you place your little trowell meeples to indicate what sort of stuff you're doing. Most of this is actually just set up for the second phase, where you roll dice, and then you take turns picking those dice to be able to mark off your plants and score points from them. And then there is a third phase where you can buy upgrades that will let you do these things better in future rounds. There's only five rounds, so the game goes pretty fast, and the goal is to get as many points as possible, which most of which happens from marking off these pea plants, although there are a few other things, partially competed. Plants are worth a few points. You can pick up these little coin resources that are also worth points, but generally they're probably better spent buying upgrades and other things, just because the pea plants are really what give you the most points. Brian  6:56   One of the things that I've noticed because, you know, there's an entire ecosystem of of teaching people how to play games on YouTube and everything, I had a really hard time finding good videos teaching how to play Genotype because that first round, that setup round, doesn't make a lot of sense if you don't understand what you're doing in the second part, where you're actually planting and and while I understand the desire and the impulse to well, "you should start at the beginning. It's a very good place to start." Actually, you should not start at the beginning. You should start at the two things so that you understand what you're doing. And it took a very long time for me to wait, what are we even doing here? Why are, what does any of this mean? You got to explain what it means before you can understand how those setup activities even do anything. Jason  7:39   But yeah, when I was explaining this to my kids, I would do with a high level overview, like, this is what you're doing. Here are your plants. You're going to be taking these dice in order to mark these off and do the broad scope of the entire game. And then I would zoom in, like, Okay, here's round one. Here are your options in round one. Here's round two. Here's what we do here. So I give that overview first, and it sounds like that's what the videos may be missing.  Brian  8:01   I think we could put out a good how to play genotype video. Maybe we should do that. I don't know. Jason  8:05   I have now explained it to my children twice, so I've got practice. So Okay, put that together if you want. Brian  8:10    I mean, let's do it. Why not? It'll be a bonus thing. Can I tell an anecdote about this game? Jason  8:15   Sure Brian  8:16   When I first got introduced to genotype, it was on Jason and I's list of things to play for a long time, and we went to our public library. A lot of your public libraries actually have pretty good collections of games. So it's like, oh, this is so excited. I wanted to play this anyway, and now I don't have to buy it, right? So we we checked it out, we brought it home. I read the book, I watched the videos. It was getting late, so what I did was I got the entire board all nicely set up, taught my wife how to play, and then we just put a blanket down over it. It's like, okay, well, it's too late to play this tonight. We're going to play it in the morning. We put a blanket down to protect it from our very wonderful, very over affectionate and very Cat, cat who does like to knock things over. Some of you can probably suspect where this is going. The blanket did not dissuade him. We wake up in the morning and every component has been scattered to the four winds in every corner of the room. We had to search the entire house to figure out where Meatball, which is the cast I'm had put everything we found, every meeple, we found every little cardboard token. We found everything except for three of these custom dice that we still have not found. They are hiding somewhere in the house. Remember, I checked this out from the library, so I had to buy a whole copy of genotype so that I could return an intact copy to the library. So the copy that we played is our replacement copy with a couple of like, generic, faceless dice that I had to draw the little symbols on. So anyway, thank you, Meatball for that good story. We did get meatball from a local animal rescue called odd paws that specializes in special needs cats and neonates. So if you happen to live in Georgia or the Athens area and you would be interested in having a truly wonderful animal who will destroy your board game experience, check out odd paws.  Jason  9:58   Yes, and we're not being paid for that. Like,  Brian  10:00   absolutely not Jason  10:01   Brian had a good experience, and wanted to give them a plug. Yeah. So before we go on to the science, I want to talk a little bit about the game and playing the games. Like the game went pretty fast. I thought it was enjoyable because it seemed to have a good mix of like, control and randomness. So there is some amount of randomness there, but within the constraints of that, there are decisions I can make to position myself in better positions, and that's kind of the mix I like, is where it's not fully under my control, because then things tend to get kind of staid and they get predictable, but it's not too random for me to think that I have no power.  Brian  10:36   Yeah, that makes sense.  Jason  10:37   And in the vein of all good work replacement games, there's always more things you want to do than you can  Brian  10:41   so many more.  Jason  10:43   It's like, you want to buy all the upgrades. You want to place all the meeples and all that sort of and of course, one of the upgrade you can buy is additional meeples, which is I always went for. But, man, those upgrades are expensive, and the more they get bought, the more expensive they get. So it's hard. There are definitely some rounds. It's like, I want an upgrade and I have no money, therefore I must look at them sadly and pass Brian  11:03   we should play this with a higher player count, because one of the things about worker placement games that two, just two players, is that you don't really that sort of like competing for sparse resources, doesn't come out as severely like in some of these like every time you buy a resource, there's a little thing that makes that more expensive, a little abacus that clicks up one die. So like, if you're not first, it really puts more emphasis on there's something that you can do to make sure that you'll be the first player in a round, and that becomes very important. The other thing is that, like, you get series of assistants that come out that have special abilities, you have tools that come out that have special abilities. Those will only be there for that round. If there's something cool out there and you don't get it right away, you may completely miss the opportunity. There's a huge FOMO associated with playing this game. Jason  11:55   Oh yeah, this game is built around FOMO is, like, every turn, all the pea plants, all the tools, all the assistants, they get wiped and reset. And so, like, if you don't grab it this turn, it's gone, and depending on the deck and how many players, it may not come back. Brian  12:09   So lots of replay value. But man, you really feel constrained with this one. This is a very, very worker placement. Like, the idea of worker placement, as you always have to make hard decisions here, and they always feel hard,  Jason  12:22   yeah, but I'll say I had a lot of fun. Like I really enjoy it. The game is beautiful. It's got very high quality art and like tactile design. The pieces the back of the game board is this beautiful watercolor of Thomas Abbey in the Czech Republic. They definitely put in their work to make it a nice looking game, and in a game that is nice and physically good to play, but also has a lot of strategy and tactics. Like I enjoyed the game.  Brian  12:45   They're sort of blending science and history in an interesting way. I know some of their they have a game called first in flight now, where they're talking about the Wright brothers and the first airplanes. And I can kind of see they're sort of edging in this direction. This is a wonderful, wonderful way of blending these two things together.  Jason  13:00   Plus, you probably figured there's only so many scientific concepts that concepts that readily lend themselves to a game, Brian  13:04   boo, no, that's not true. There's an infinite number of scientific concepts that lend themselves to games. We just, we just reviewed a game that was completely based on a single study. I think. No, no, no, no. Jason  13:15   Okay, fair. It does broaden their palate, though. Yes, now they can. Now they can appeal to history buffs and not just science buffs. Now, being a genius Games Game This, of course, did half my work for me. It comes with a nice insert that actually explains a lot of the background about Gregor Mendel and genetics and all that stuff. I am not going to just regurgitate that insert here, like if you want to read that, buy the game, read the insert. They'll tell you stuff. We're going to be talking about other kind of broader picture things here, but we will give some context. The core of this game is about Mendel and genetics, and so we really need to give a little bit of background about that. Now, you probably learned about Gregor Mendel in your like high school biology, because he is the father of modern genetics. He is arguably second only to Charles Darwin in terms of the foundations of modern biology. Mendel was a Christian monk. He lived in the mid 1800s he actually studied math and physics at Vienna, which is probably why he took this mathematical approach to biology. And the thing he's most famous for is this work at Thomas Abbey, which is in Brno in the Czech Republic, where he studied these seven different traits in pea plants over the course of like, eight years. And he basically wanted to figure out, Okay, how are these inherited? Because this was an active debate during his time, and it was actually an active debate for like, 50 years after his time, maybe a bit more, because Mendel's work was unfortunately forgotten for decades. He would publish it in sort of like a mid tier journal. Didn't get that much press, and apparently one of the issues was that people didn't like really think it applied outside of peas. It's like, okay, that's cute for pea plants, but what does that mean for humans and dogs and all these other things? And he got a little bit unlucky, because he did try to replicate it with a different species, um hiratium. Common name is Hank weed. I'd never heard of this.  Brian  15:10   Hank weed interesting.  Jason  15:11   Never heard of it. Don't know why it was picked.  Brian  15:13   Is it pretty?  Jason  15:14   It has a nice little orange flower that I saw. Okay, but he there's a problem with Hank weed in that. Now we know that a lot of Hank weed and the ones he studied are something that are called apomictic, which means that they make seeds without going through sexual reproduction.  Brian  15:31   That would be a problem. Jason  15:32    Yes, it is very problematic. It's basically the plants do not really undergo fertilization as normal, and so a lot of the offspring are basically clones of the parent. Even though they're seeds, they are clones, which completely throws all of Mendel's work out the window because he was looking at inheritance through normal sexual reproduction, and didn't realize that the second plant he picked doesn't actually do that. Brian  15:57   So he got really unlucky with his second pick, and insanely lucky with his first pick. I don't even know how to explain. I'm trying to decide what level of detail we want to go into here the seven traits, right? Yeah. Jason  16:08   So the luck with pea plants is they study these seven traits, and the things that came out of Mendel were called the laws of segregation and independence assortment. This basically means, if you have varieties for a trait, they go independently of each other, and that they can move off in a different offspring. A very non technical definition there. But the idea the independent one, especially, is that Mendel thought every trait was independent of every other trait. They did not care about each other. Now we know that's incorrect, because all our genes are on the DNA. DNA is a long string. It's in chromosomes. Genes that are close together on a chromosome are actually not independent. They tend to travel together. And in fact, that's the basis of the genome wide association study that was mentioned in this in that paper at the beginning is that you use the fact that DNA that is close to the gene you care about tends to travel with it in order to track it. Brian  17:01   What a wonderful modern paradox that the very study that allowed us to identify these genes breaks the rules that Mendel thought controlled genetics.  Jason  17:09   Yeah, basically. But the luck that Mendel got is that he picked seven traits that happened to either be all on separate chromosomes, in which case they are independent or very far apart on the same chromosome, far enough apart that they act like they're independent, because within a chromosome, there is a little bit of breaking and shuffling that happens between the genes you got from your your biological parents, and so there's a little breaking and reshuffling. So if you're far enough apart on a chromosome, you are actually independent, and the ones he picked were far enough apart. There is one exception, there are two of his traits that might be close enough. And this gets into a thing we don't actually know which varieties of peas Mendel was working with, so people have tried to figure this out based off of what varieties were available. What's out there in the populations that big study Brian mentioned, which we're going to keep coming back to, found that for most of these traits, there really is only one variation out there. And so that's what Mendel was working with. But some of them have a few different ones. And so one of the traits, I believe it, is whether the pod is edible or not.  Brian  18:12   Yeah, the edible pod, they found, there are two genes that control that, and they don't know which one he had. Jason  18:17   They don't know which one he may have actually had both, because they may have come from different ones. One of those is actually close enough to the plant height gene that they are linked. So if he worked with those, and if he looked at that particular combination, then he might have seen that linkage show up, that they are not independent. But it seems like either he didn't have that version, or he didn't look at that combination very much, and so that his things about the Independent Assortment hold for all the ones he worked out. They hold in general, we've just now know that, as always, biology is a lot more complicated than you think at first, but in general, that does pass, that does hold weight still.  Brian  18:54   Can we talk about the seven traits and what they were? Jason  18:56   Yeah, sure. So seven traits, the game only includes four of them. So the game has the round and wrinkled peas. So whether your pee is round and plump or whether it's shriveled and wrinkled when you dry it out, they have tall and short plants, which is probably one of the most famous ones you get in high school biology. It has whether the pea pod is green or yellow, and it has whether the flowers are purple or white. And then the other three traits he looked at was whether the seed is green or yellow, whether the pod is edible or the technical one was like whether it's inflated or constricted. So inflated is kind of like the normal pea pod you'd see, and constricted or flat are like the snow peas, where the pod is, like a little flat thing, and you could actually see the peas poking out through it. Brian  19:45   Yeah, I think they're like, missing some kind of papery parchment layer that is unpleasant to eat. So those are, like, basically just the vegetable peas. You pull them right off the plant and eat them, and they're quite delicious. Jason  19:55   And then the last one is about flower position. Basically, do you have flowers kind of going all up the stem, or are they all in one big group at the top of the stem? And those are his seven traits.  Brian  20:05   Where did Mendel get his peas from? They had seed catalogs in 18 in the 1800s and these seven traits were listed and being used by by pea breeders. Yeah, Jason  20:16   that's still a valid thing. I know the person who works in the lab next to me studies tomato fruit shape. And when she was starting her lab, she just looked through the seed catalog like, Oh, that was a cool looking tomato. Let's order that. The fascinating thing is, I say, we now know what every one of these things does. We've known about the traits for 150 years. Breeders were using them for decades before Mendel got a hold of them. But it's only now we actually know the chemical basis, the actual molecular change that happened, because every one of these is tied to some sort of change in the DNA, but the nature of that change is very different, and actually it's kind of cool with that study, most of these have different mechanisms for changing, so almost all of these are using a different way to break a gene. One or two of them have a big chunk of DNA that got inserted in the middle of it. Some of them are these, what we call selfish elements, or transposons, jumping genes. Jumping genes, you may have heard they're basically like even below a virus. They're just a short stretch of DNA, maybe only a few 100 or a few 1000 base pairs long. A base pair is one A, G, T or C, so very, very short, that they basically only code for enough proteins to cut themselves out or copy themselves out and stick them somewhere else. They're not even a virus level, but they are selfish, and they will jump around your DNA and your body thankfully has many, many systems in place to stop them from doing that, because it's generally bad when a random piece of DNA goes into some other part of your genome because it usually breaks things Brian  21:45   well, they can't be doing too good of a job. I mean, a huge percentage of our genome and plant genomes are transposons, right? Jason  21:51   Yeah. So if you've heard of how much of our genome is junk DNA, a lot of that are the remnants of these, these selfish elements, and they are doing a very good job. It's just when you're talking over evolutionary time, then you only have to let one or two through per generation, and you get a lot. I don't know what the rate is of those, suffice it, the mutation rate in the game is way higher than happens in normal life. Brian  22:17   I'm sensing a nitpick when we get to the end of the episode Jason  22:21   The game designers pointed out. So it's not really a nitpick anyway. So you've got big chunks of DNA that will sit down in some of these genes and break them. The round, wrinkled pea is due to one of those. One of these jumping genes went into a, I think it's a gene that controls starch, starch production, and jumped into that. Also the yellow versus green seed one, I think there's one there. It didn't jump into the gene itself. It jumped nearby, and it broke how it's regulated. So when it's turned on and when it's turned off. Brian  22:49   Have we had a chance previously to talk about DNA and how DNA works at all, or is this our first time doing it on gaming with science?  Jason  22:56   I think it's our first time.  Brian  22:57   Okay? I think we should just take a quick minute and just talk about that, and at least try to and try to make an analogy. I'm sure we've all heard these analogies before. What I think is interesting about DNA is we talk about DNA a lot. DNA, on its own, really doesn't do very much. It just stores the information. Jason  23:13   It's kind of like the hard drive on your computer. If you have just a hard drive, you can't do all that much. Brian  23:18   So it codes that information in sort of like Jason talked about base pairs, those As G, C's and T's, when you're in a gene region, every three bases codes for like a letter corresponding to one of the 20 amino acids that make up your proteins. So when the DNA gets read out, it's copied into a strand of messenger, RNA, just a single stranded DNA-like copy that then gets translated by the ribosome into each of those amino acids, which gets turned into little, a little chain of these things that folds up into the protein that actually does the thing. Jason  23:51    If you want to hear more about that process, go see our episode on cytosis, because that's basically the core of that game. Is you have your start from your DNA, very true, or your RNA, you go to protein and all those sorts of other stuff there. Yeah. Brian  24:03   So if you imagine that like your your little gene is sort of a sentence or word, right? And then somebody takes a whole nother sentence and jams it into the middle of it. It the sentence doesn't make any sense anymore. You've broken it, right? So it's going to start just fine. It's like a lorem ipsum. And then it turns into, you know, absolute garbage. And say, when you try to make the protein from that gene, you don't get a protein that works. You get a little busted up piece of something that doesn't do anything. Jason  24:30   Yeah, it'd be like, if you have your, like, your book library on the shelf and, like, you open it up to complete works of William Shakespeare, you open up to a sonnet, and then you paste in the middle of that, like  Brian  24:40   Dr Seuss Jason  24:40    12 lines, yes, 12 lines from Dr Seuss, like, you've broken the sonnet. It doesn't work anymore, but this is the basics of it stores information. That information gets moved out. But because it's so complicated, there's various ways that can be broken. So we talked about the selfish DNA coming in and either breaking the gene itself or breaking how. When it's turned on and when it's turned off. Brian  25:01    Yeah, which kind of can do almost the same thing. It's like, if the gene is there but never gets turned on, then you never get the protein, and it might as well not be there. Jason  25:10   Yep, there's a few of these. So the tall, short mutation for Mendel's peas is due to a single letter change in one gene that controls a plant growth hormone called gibberellin. That's sort of the smallest mutation you can have, is you switch out one letter for another. I think it's an A to a G, but I could be wrong about that. Brian  25:29   Yeah. So this is changing dear into bear, right? Big change in meaning by changing the one letter,  Jason  25:35   wait, deer into bear? Those are two letters Brian  25:36   Like, Hi, my dear. Jason  25:38   Oh, okay. I was thinking two animals. I was like, there's two letters difference. There not one. I thought you could turn in Deer into beer. Brian  25:46   Yeah, we could do that too. Okay, definitely a bigger change in meaning at that point. Jason  25:52   Anyway, you got those little individual letter changes. There's one that is another letter change. But instead of changing the protein that comes out, it actually changes the way that that the RNA, the secondary one that's made, gets cut and pasted together. So it gets cut and pasted together, wrong?  Jason  26:08   Oh, man, we are not going to talk about exons and introns, are we?  Jason  26:10   No, we are not  Brian  26:11   okay. Jason  26:12   Suffice to say, in us and most other complex organisms, the DNA is not read directly into a protein. It goes to the RNA. The RNA gets cut apart and then re glued together. And if something goes wrong there, it can also mess up the protein. Brian  26:26   It's so unnecessarily complicated I don't understand. Like bacteria really have this on lock. It's just the gene looks just like the mRNA and gets made into protein. It's so simple. I don't I don't know what happened to you. Eukaryotes drive me crazy. Humans, everything with a nucleus drives me crazy. Jason  26:46   It's thought that cut and pasting is one reason why we can get away with only like 20 or 25,000 genes is because they can be cut and pasted in different ways, and that's actually really important for our brain development. So don't knock it too bad. Brian  26:57    Okay, okay, well, I guess I needed exons and introns to have a brain complicated enough to almost sort of understand exons and introns. Jason  27:06   Other things are some small deletions. So little sections get removed. And like Brian was saying, since you have groups of three bases make essentially one amino acid, if you remove anything that's not a multiple of three, you mess up everything from there on out, and it usually just completely screws up the protein. So all of these different, these are all the different ways you can mess up your DNA. It's, it's actually kind of like those Co Op games where there's only one way to win and so many different ways to lose. A little bit. There are so many ways to mess up your DNA. Brian  27:37   And peas seem to these seven traits seem to cover, like, again, a huge spectrum of the opportunities to break a gene. Yes, Jason  27:43   so like, they show not every way, but they show a lot of ways you can break genes, which is really cool. Mendel was studying these traits in peas, and he gathered a bunch of data, and he published it, and it kind of got neglected and forgotten for like, 50 years. But then around the beginning of the 20th century, there were actually three different people who rediscovered them at the same time. It was Hugo de Vreis, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tsermach, people who were all working in genetics at the time. I guess they were all looking for similar stuff, results, and so they all found it, and within, like, a year, they'd all shared it with people, and they rediscovered Mendel's genetics. This did not actually solve the problem of genetics, which is what you may have heard in biology, because there was a raging debate going on about the nature of genetics, and it lasted for another like 10 to 20 years, which was how inheritance actually worked. And this actually goes into play with Charles Darwin and evolution, because one of the big issues with Darwin's publishing evolution by natural selection is that it was an explanation, but had no mechanism.  Brian  28:48   Yeah, Darwin didn't know how genetics worked. Nobody did Jason  28:51   yeah, and he had some speculation. It turns out his speculation was wrong. He he was a he was in favor what's called the blending model. And this makes sense when you look at like how humans behave. If you have a tall human and a short human, and they have a child together, you don't end up with only a tall human, only tall children, or only short children, or only children that come in exactly two heights. They tend to be somewhere in the middle. And humans don't come in exactly two heights. We have all sorts of different heights, and The Offspring tend to be a blend of the characteristics of their parents. Brian  29:23   So the blending model, if you had a plant with a red flower and a plant with a white flower, you would get a pink flower. That's what the blending model would predict, Jason  29:30    yes, and that was Darwin's idea about how it worked. But the problem is that if you do a little bit of math, you realize that completely undermines evolution by natural selection, because pretty soon everything is average and you have no variation for evolution to act on. The reason why Mendel's work is so important is because it brought back the idea of discrete genetics. And I believe this was floating around beforehand, but it actually gave data to support that. Yes, this is true is that genes are discrete units that get passed down wholesale, and so the. There is still variation there, and there was argument between the people who did the blending and the people who did the discrete stuff for a while, although some mathematicians showed relatively quickly that all you need is a bunch of genes that affect the same trait and you can end up with something that looks like blending, and that is essentially where we are today. This is called the modern synthesis of biology where we have genes as the basic unit of heredity and information, they're all discrete, although some of them are sometimes you have a single trait that is controlled by many, many, many of them, and that natural selection is the dominant, although not the only, force that changes which genes get passed down which ones survive in populations over time. That is the modern synthesis of biology. It is essentially what all modern biology is built off of, and it is extraordinarily powerful. It's what's behind pretty much all, maybe not all. I'm sure there's some exceptions, but it's between behind the vast majority of biology research being done today. Brian  31:00   You used one of the trigger words. You said dominant. So I think we should talk about Punnett squares.  Jason  31:04   Yes. Oh, okay, all right. Well, let's back off from the big picture. Then about large scale biology. Let's talk about what Mendel actually found. Because what he found is he found the pea plants he were working he was working with. He had tall ones and he had short ones. And when he crossed a tall one with a short one and a cross is basically he took pollen from one and put it on the pistol, the female part of the other, and made seeds. So basically he made offspring from a tall parent and a short parent. All of them were tall 100%. the short. It looked like this short trait had been erased, except when he then took those, all those tall parent, those tall offspring, and he let them self pollinate so they fertilized themselves, which is what peas normally do, the offs their offspring. So the grandchildren of the original cross actually came in both tall and short varieties, and they had about three times as many tall ones as short ones. Brian  31:57   You ever heard the old adage about things skipping a generation? Yeah, Jason  32:01   that's basically what's going on here. And the the term that came out of this is dominant and recessive. So we need to define some vocabulary right here. A gene is a section of DNA that controls a trait and that is good enough for us. Brian  32:14   I'm realizing that us both like this, having it be specifically in our area of expertise is not helping us, sort of like skip jargon, Jason  32:23   I know we're doing what the best we can bear with us, please gentle listeners as we geek out about our own fields. So anyway, that is your gene, a section of DNA that controls a trait, an allele, is a variation at that gene that has different trait values. So we have the height gene here in the peas, and it can have a tall allele and a short allele, so a tall version and a short version. And then what Brian was getting at is that you have a dom, you can have a dominant or a recessive one. So dominant means that it kind of overrules The other option. So in this case, tall is dominant to short. If you have a tall allele, then it will mask the short allele, whereas short is recessive, where essentially you need to be pure short. Because the math of this is that all the peas had two copies,  Brian  33:14   one from mom and one from dad.  Jason  33:16   Yeah, the original parents were either pure tall or pure short. The first generation offspring were a mix. They were 50/50, tall, short, but because tall is dominant, they were all tall. The offspring from that are a random mix of that you get randomly, one from the paternal line, one from the maternal line, one from mom, one from dad. When you're self fertilizing, like in peas, mom and dad's the same thing, but it's still random which one you get. It's basically a roll of the dice, which is why they have you rolling dice here in the game. And so you have a 50% chance of your first one being tall and 50% of being short, and also the second one tall and short. You work out the math. Three quarters of the time you'll have at least one tall gene and you'll be tall. One quarter of the time you'll have both short genes, and you'll be short and that math is reflected in the game. They actually have what's called a Punnett Square, named for Dr Punnett, who, I guess, used or popularized these that shows the gene combinations you have, and that shows the probability based on the die rolls of what you what sort of trait you get out and it's part of the game. You can actually adjust those squares by essentially picking different parents to go into your cross to make the ones that you want more likely and or to make the ones that your opponents want less likely or even impossible. Brian  34:32   Would it be okay if we dig into that just a little bit? Because I think we've talked about broken genes and not broken genes and alleles, but I think the idea that the inheritance the dominant recessive is tied to that in an interesting way, is something that a lot of people sort of don't get introduced to. It's very common for people to learn about a Punnett Square and a dominant and recessive gene. But let's talk about that, what that means, and let's we can use specifically the example of the tall and short to do so, right? Jason already said that the tall plants are able to make, is it a receptor for the plant growth hormone, gibberellin, or is it the actual synthesis itself? Jason  35:05   I think it's the actual hormone gibberellin itself.  Brian  35:08   Let's just, let's just assume that it is, because it's easier to discuss it that way. So if you've got the functional, wild type version of the gibberellin gene, you're making this plant growth hormone, which is why you're able to grow tall, right? If you have the broken version of the gene, you're not making that hormone, so you stay short, right? So if you imagine this, it's like if you're getting a wild type copy of the gene from one parent and a broken copy of the gene from the other, you still have one working copy. You're still making the gibberellin. So you look like the wild type strain, right? So that's why the one with the mixture ends up being tall because it has one copy of the working gene, and that's all you really need.  Jason  35:45   And important to point out, in this specific instance, one copy is enough. There are other instances where it's not where you would if you had one copy, you would be medium height because you had more than the short one, but less than the tall one. Brian  35:56   Another example of how Mendel got lucky, because all of his traits were these traits where you had a clear one copy is enough, Jason  36:04   yeah. And so that's how dominance and recessive genes work. Most genes are not strictly dominant or recessive. Again, Mendel was a little lucky, or maybe he was wise in which traits he picked. A lot of them actually show independent stuff. So there are definitely examples where you cross a red flower and a white flower plant, you get a pink flower out, or maybe you get like a light pink one out, or a dark pink one out. Like there's different gradations here. And then, of course, there's the traits that are actually controlled by many, many genes, the quantitative traits, as we call them. Now this is what my area, my research area, focuses on, which can be controlled by hundreds or 1000s of genes. I was just looking at before this recording what the current estimate is of human height. So human height is very quantitative, lots and lots of genes there. The most recent study I found, found like 12,000 possible mutations that were associated with it in like 8000 spots on the genome. And the fact is, there's probably even more than that, because each one of these is controlling such a minuscule amount of the of what's going on. Like we're talking one of these genes, a big effect from one of these genes might be like a millimeter of height difference. That'd be an enormous effect for most of these.  Brian  37:18   Well, thank goodness. Mendel identified a good, simple model system so that you could define the rules that then your area could go on to understand and break and understand the true complexity. Jason  37:30   Yeah, that's the importance of model systems in biology, we know that a lot of our systems are not reflective of the messy complexity of the real world, but they let us figure out fundamental principles. And that's what Mendel's peas did, is that they let us figure out fundamental principles. Real life is much more messy than this, with a lot more complicated genes we there's also the fact that, you know, most traits are also influenced by environment. Going back to human heights, we are taller than people were 200 years ago, not because our genetics have changed, but because we eat better, we have better nutrition. And so this is nature versus nurture issue, and we're not going to get into that debate, because when talking strictly speaking about biology, you can usually actually figure out what it is.  Brian  38:12   Yeah, it's not a debate. It's just something you can measure. Jason  38:15   Yeah, and we measure it, we calculate it out. And I do that all the time for the work I'm on, and they range all over the place. So some some traits are nearly 100% genetic, some traits are nearly 100% environmental, and a lot of them are somewhere in the middle this core of looking at these peas and these very simple traits is a good, a good way of simplifying the system and being able to make it tractable. I actually looked up for this, what Mendelian traits, so traits that follow this sort of simple, dominant, recessive pattern, what sort of traits like this humans have? And turns out most of them are diseases, because basically something important gets broken, and then that disease follows a a Mendelian pattern, because you either have a broken gene or you don't. Brian  39:05   Oh, this is, this would be hemophilia in the royal families of Europe,  Jason  39:09   hemophilia, sickle cell, anemia, Tay sachs disease, albinism. A lot of these are recessive. So, like, if you have one working copy, you're probably fine. Some of these may be, like, partially dominant, so that if you have one copy, you're like, okay, but not great. Technically, sickle cell is like this. So if you have one sickle cell and one not sickle cell allele copy, technically, at the molecular level, you do have traits, and that's what gives resistance to malaria. You've probably heard that the reason sickle cell sticks around is because it does provide resistance to malaria. One copy does that, but it's not enough to actually cause disease symptoms, but it is a single gene trait, and we know exactly the gene mutation that caused that, an interesting one on this list, lactase persistence, so that's the fancy scientific way of saying you can continue to drink milk as an adult. Hmm, for people in the West, you may not realize this, but the ability to drink milk as an adult is actually really weird and uncommon in biology  Brian  40:08   and recent in human history, right?  Jason  40:10   Yes, it's actually one of the best examples of human evolution, like human evolution of traits, because when you look at at the ability to drink milk as an adult. What happens is, everyone, unless something's really broken, can drink milk as an infant, because that's how human infants are reared. You drink milk, especially historically, before formulas and stuff like that, was it. You had to drink mother's milk or get a wet nurse or something, or you died. Brian  40:37    Yep, you are a mammal, believe it or not.  Jason  40:40   Yes. So, but once the infant was weaned, there's no reason to keep making all the the proteins and enzyme needed to keep drinking milk, especially lactose, which is the sugar in it. And so your body would turn that off, because that's just a waste of energy to make that. There's no point making all this protein that is trying to digest something you're not drinking. However, once humans started keeping animals for dairy, then it started becoming advantageous to be able to keep drinking milk. The thought is that it started with fermentation, so like cheeses and yogurts and stuff, stuff where you let bacteria digest the sugar first, so we didn't have to deal with it. But under those conditions, if someone had a mutation that let them continue to drink milk into adulthood, they could suddenly access this entire other nutrient resource that all of their peers couldn't, or at least, they could access it better. They could get more out of it, which I believe there was a study a few years ago showed that that meant they left like eight times as many offspring as people who didn't have it in these cultures. Whoa, which is insane. Brian  41:45   That is a huge that is a huge advantage. Jason  41:49   That is an enormous selective advantage, which is why lactase, persistence, the ability to continue to drink milk as an adult, is so common in cultures that have a long history of dairy production, because it spread through the population, because it was so beneficial, and it is apparently down to a single gene. And at least according to this list I'm looking at, it is dominant. So if you have one copy of it, you're fine. You can continue to drink milk into adulthood, just fine.  Brian  42:14   Very, very cool.  Jason  42:15   I assume anyone listening to this already knows if you can or not. So whether you have one copy or two, I don't know, you'd have to get gene tested for that, but you, if you can, you probably have at least one copy. Yeah, Brian  42:25   this is the problem with recessive genes. Is they like to hide, right? You can't always tell that they're there. This is why a lot of these, well, you mentioned a lot of these diseases in humans, so a lot of very problematic ones are genetically based, and a lot of them are recessive. So for certain diseases, that's why genetic screening can be important to tell if your child will have the risk of inheriting one of these extremely detrimental diseases.  Jason  42:49   Yes, especially there are certain ethnic groups that have that are known to have elevated frequencies of some of these diseases, and so it's recommended to get testing there if, like you and your spouse are both of that, or if you know that you have a family history of this, it's worth testing to see, do I have this mutation, and especially, do I have it, and does my spouse have it, so that we can see, okay, what are the odds that we will have a child who inherits it's both broken copies and thus ends up with some sort of genetic disease? All right, so we really need to start wrapping this up. I'm sure we could keep talking about this for another for another hour, because, again, this is our specialty. We suffer the Curse of the specialist is there's so much stuff we want to talk about, we want to share, and we can only squeeze stuff in one hour. So dear in the best we can. Dear Brian  43:33   listener, please let us know. Did how did we do? Did we actually talk this at a level that was appropriate, or did we, like, forget ourselves, because we were too much of a specialist in this.  Jason  43:44   Anyway. The take home from this, though, is that genes are the fundamental unit of information in biology. They're what pass information from parent to offspring. They're the raw material on which evolution acts, and Mendel is the one who found the first evidence of that. There's one little interesting aside here is that ever since Mendel's stuff was rediscovered, there's been an argument raging on whether he cooks the books a little bit, because people have pointed out the numbers he get are a little like, a little too close, or a little closer to what his theory would predict than you'd expect by actual random chance. But they're not so close as like, oh, okay, he definitely just fudged the numbers. And so people have argued back and forth for a century now over whether Mendel may have, like, fudged numbers just a little bit to make them fit a little bit better. But suffice to say, the theories that came out of the models that came out are correct and are the basis of modern biology and genetics. So that's the thing to take home. Brian  44:40   Also, if he was, if he was cooking the books, then his Hank weed experiments, kind of throw that into some sort of like what I mean, he did a whole careful things, learned something really important, and then the second time he did it, it all fell apart. Maybe he would have picked something different, or, I don't know, whatever. It just doesn't seem like the act of someone who's putting their thumb on the scale. To me, Jason  44:59   I agree. Yeah. So, all right, let's get down here. So, so nit pick corner, which I always feel bad calling the nitpick corner. I just like the, let's call it the improvement corner or something.  Brian  45:09   I think nitpicks are fine. It's just, again, we're very positive about these games, but I think it's, it's nice to have an opportunity to complain about things that are put I want to be reviewer two. Jason  45:17   Okay, all right, Brian, reviewer number two, what would you change about the game? Brian  45:22   No comments. It's perfect. Well, actually, no, I, I'm just getting in terms of comments about the game. The mutation die. The mutation rate is not only high, but the problem is that it is. It is a completely appropriate game mechanic, and that is why it exists. The problem is, is, if the real biology worked that way, and you were randomly mutating things that happen to look like your phenotypic trait, it wouldn't be the real Gene. And that whole idea of discrete genetics, you'd actually break the entire game. If you were really getting mutations that way and generating your traits, you would not be confirming it, because, again, we talked about all the different ways to break a gene. You're not going to break it the same way twice. You're going to make a new break, and maybe it's in the same gene, and it would be fine, but I don't know that that this is my nitpick, is the way that they're using mutation is real and completely inappropriate for the specifics of this game.  Jason  46:12   Yeah, and probably one of those decisions that was made for the sake of gameplay, like they wanted to represent mutation somehow, I don't think they wanted a one in 10 million chance of actually having a mutation. Because I don't think that's like at that point. Why even have the mechanic? Brian  46:26   No, no, no, no. Yeah. I mean, you're right. Of course, I understand, and there's always that compromise for the sake of having an enjoyable game. Jason  46:33   Yep, mine is, it's almost more of a curiosity question. So in genetics, when you have these traits and these alleles, you usually represent them by a letter and on the game board, it has the letters for these different traits, and it's usually like a capital for the dominant one and a lowercase for the recessive one. So like the round one is big R and little r, the flower color is big F and little f. The thing is, these aren't the symbols that are used by scientists. No, they're not. So R is the same for the wrinkled and round, but like the flower colors at the A locus, is that the A position? So these big A and little a, or the tall is not big T, little T, it's Le. For some reason, I don't know why green and yellow pod is actually Gp, instead of just g, so I would, I'd be interested why. I assume this is another one of like, let's make it easy. Because why on earth would flower color have A as a letter? I suspect it was just to make it easy for the people playing it. I just they never mentioned that in their little insert. And I'm kind of curious about that, because I never saw them referred to by the games ones anywhere, either. Brian  47:42   No. I mean, you're right, it is, it is A and I guess, I mean, there is an answer. I just don't know it. I mean, I would guess anthocyanin perhaps, yeah, because anthocyanins Jason  47:51   are one of the common pigments in plants, they're usually the ones that are kind of your purples and pinks and bluish ones. Brian  47:57   So they, they use the same type of way that we would represent a dominant and recessive, which is the uppercase versus lowercase, but they didn't use the real gene names because or gene designations because it's confusing.  Jason  48:10   That's what I'm guessing. Yeah,  Brian  48:12   but would it have really been that confusing, though, because it's on all the cards. They could have just done it right. Jason  48:17   They could have, but thinking with my game designer hat on that could be a friction point, and at least as a designer, unless it's important for the game, my goal is to remove as many friction points as possible, okay? And I think that particular one does not affect the game. It doesn't affect the science they're trying to portray. So I can agree with them changing Brian  48:36   that, okay, all right, fair enough. Well, I mean, hey, oh, I guess we got to do our grades then, huh?  Jason  48:41   Yep, final grade. So how about you for gameplay? What do you think about gameplay here? Brian  48:46   Gameplay? Um, I think I it's gonna get docked just a little bit as a game. That's actually kind of hard to learn. And I don't really, I don't really know how to get around that. I mean, everybody has a hard time learning just from the book. Do you primarily learn how to play games by reading the rule book? Is that your approach?  Jason  49:03   That's the first pass Yes, I'll either read. I'll read the rule book. I will watch how to plays. Sometimes the order of those, which one I do do first, which one I do second changes. But yeah, I will usually read through the rule book. Brian  49:14    Okay? I usually watch the videos first, then read the rule book, and then kind of lay everything out to try to understand how it's going this one's way harder to learn than you'd expect for a game that once you've got it plays very quick and easily. I think I'm going to dock it just a bit for that, because the teach is difficult. I'm just going to give it a, B. They can argue with me if they feel like that's an undergrad. What about you?  Jason  49:34   Well, I'll argue with you. I was going to think about an A, but I think you bring up a valid point, that it is a little challenging to teach because of the moving parts and the way the order that the game happens is not the best order to actually teach it in. So I'm going to just say A minus, because I thought this was really fun to play. I enjoyed it. I managed to get my nine year old to play it multiple times, so she enjoyed it. So like, the game's fun. I like, once I get past that, once I get past. Has to learn. Once I understand what's going on, it plays relatively fast and fun. Brian  50:04    I think if we're grading for the Wallace girls, we're really grading the rest of society on our curve, though you've been training them from like, you know, for as soon as they could talk how to play games. I think maybe, maybe they're not exactly at the mean on that particular bell curve? Jason  50:22    I don't know, but I am very proud when I hear my 14 year old talking about, like, choosing the optimal play for the games we're playing. It's like, there you go.  Brian  50:30   Yeah. Well, she is your clone, let's be honest. She definitely got that trait from you. Jason  50:34   Okay, all right, science, so give me a moment to think about this science grade for what it's trying to portray here. I think I'm going to go with an A minus again for the science grade. I think the core of it like, Oh, here's genetics and your Punnett squares and rolling the dice. I think that's fine. The place I'm going to dock it is actually in some of the ancillary stuff, some of the like, the tools you can use to accomplish certain things, and the like, some of the assistants, where, mechanically, they make perfect sense, they're giving you some access to an additional resource, or an additional thing to do that helps make your moves more powerful. But logically, it doesn't necessarily make sense. Like, why does the rake do this particular effect? I'd understand. Why does a pruning shear let me take another die, or something like that. I forget what all the tools do. The one that makes sense is the pollen brush, where you basically pick up the pollen and you brush it along all your different plants like that. One actually makes sense, yeah. And so that's it's like, it's that there's a little bit of a disconnect of the metaphor for me in those positions that said I do like the fact that one of the spots on the board is basically you paying the university money to do your research for you. So, yeah, I'll give it another A minus there. Brian  51:49   Yeah, I think I'm actually comfortable with an A, and I'm gonna give it an A for the use of the Punnett Square and setting the parental genotypes to create the dice drafting system. I've seen other games do genetics in different ways. This is the only one I've seen where they're actually trying to replicate that process of genetic inheritance in a way that mimics how it happens in nature. Usually, there's just sort of a very, sort of a vague approach to it, but this is much more specific, and that practice with the Punnett Square is really useful. It's kind of in the same way that, like if you play cytosis and then go take cell biology, oh, well, you already know all the principles here. If you play genotype, you're going to understand how to do a Punnett square, because that you're just going to be doing it a bunch of times. You're going to be getting a ton of practice using Punnett squares and manipulating Punnett squares in a fun way. Jason  52:37   Yeah, I'll agree with that. So I definitely think it would give a good foundation there. I wonder, because of the age range, this is ages 14 plus. So you're talking middle school already. I think many of those students have already been exposed to Punnett squares by that point, which may make the game easier to pick up. Who knows? Brian  52:51   But, yeah, probably. But, I mean, like, again turning Well, that's not a bad thing. If they know how to use a Punnett square, it's just helping to reinforce it, right? Yeah, probably. Jason  52:59   And, I mean, let's, let's face it, I mean, how much stuff does your average sixth grader remember by the time they get to eighth grade? So it's like a refresher, like this would be helpful. All right, I think we're going to wrap it up there. Keep an eye out. We may do a how to play genotype if you want to see more of that. If you're interested in the game, go pick it up from genius games or your friendly local game store. And with that, have a great month and have great games. Brian  53:21   Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.  Jason  53:25   This has been the game of the Science Podcast, copyright 2025. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to Game of the science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. You. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

#Atiwa #Bats #UweRosenberg #LookoutGames #Extension #Outreach #SciComm #BoardGames #Science Overview It's time for bats! In this episode, we talk about Atiwa, a worker-placement game by Uwe Rosenberg based on a specific scientific study showing how fruit bats provide enormous ecological benefit to communities in Ghana. We're also joined by Mariëlle van Toor, one of the researchers involved in that exact study, to help explain why this whole thing is so important. So grab some fruit, settle into your favorite roost, and let's talk about Atiwa. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:30 Humans and honeyguides 05:55 Bats avoiding collisions during rush-hour 09:43 Atiwa gameplay 21:12 The study behind Atiwa 26:58 What is that fruit? 31:44 Uwe Rosenberg does great outreach 35:25 Exosystem services 39:48 More bat facts! 42:10 Nitpick corner 45:58 Final grades Links Atiwa (Lookout Games) Original study by Mariëlle van Toor et. al. (Current Biology) Video abstract for the above (Youtube) Press release for the above, with photo by Christian Ziegler (Max Planck) Straw-colored fruit bat eating a banana (Youtube) Paper on honeyguides working with humans (Science) Paper on convergent evolution of hearing genes in bats and whales (PubMed Central) The Eidolon monitoring network Tautonym - When genus and species have the same name (Wikipedia) Sugar plum tree (Upaca kirkiana) (iNaturalist) Research article on the New York Land Acquisition Program to limit pollution to New York City (Pace Environmental Law Review)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Unknown Speaker  0:00   Brian, hello Jason  0:06   and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:10   Today, we're going to discuss a T wop by lookout games. All right, hello. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian.  Jason  0:21   This is Jason,  Marielle  0:22   and this is Marielle. And I'm a researcher at Linnaeus University in southeast Sweden, and I mostly work on combinational movement ecology, and especially looking into the role of animal movement for the spread of pathogens. And sometimes I also look into dispersion of seeds by animals. So this is what is relevant for the game today. Brian  0:42   Very much, and we're extremely excited to have Marielle van Toor here. This is a unique example of a science game for us. This game was explicitly inspired by a study that was published by Marielle and Dina Dechmann in it wasn't even that long ago when was the study published? Marielle  0:58    2019  Brian  0:58   in 2019 so that's relatively recent in Current Biology, which is a is a very bright and shiny journal. So very excited to be able to make this arrangement here to talk about a Atiwa and sort of environmental activism, scientific environmental activism and ecological services and bats and Ghana, okay, but before we get into that, we usually start with some kind of a science banter, science fact, Jason, you are up this time. Marielle, I think you said you might have something as well. So usually we give the guest host first dibs. So do you want to share us something with us?  Marielle  1:30   SoI have one thing that I think is really cool, and that is in some way related to the game, even though it's on a completely different system, but also located in Africa. So there's a researcher whose name is Claire Spottiswoode, and she works in South Africa, and she's been working on a system of mutualism, and that means interactions that are mutual or beneficial to both partners between humans and birds. And this is particularly the greater Honeyguide, which is a species that kind of indicates to honey badgers, but also humans, in this case, where to find bee nests as a resource for honey and for the honey guides also as a resource for the beeswax. And she's been working on this for a great time, a great long time. And I once saw a couple of years ago a plenary talk by her having never heard about her work. And it was absolutely amazing, because so this greater honey guide. The Latin name for that is Indicator indicator, which I think is really fun. Brian  2:25   I love a I can't remember the term for when the genus and species are the same name. It's my very favorite.  Marielle  2:31   I also don't remember,  Brian  2:32   yeah, I'll look it up. I did know that taxonomically, you cannot do that for plants.  Marielle  2:36   It's, it is, yeah, just animals. And I don't know about mushrooms.  Brian  2:39   I don't know about mushrooms either. I might look that up.  Marielle  2:43   But anyway, so she studies these in multiple different locations with different tribes of African peoples. And there is basically a way to make the interaction between humans and these honeyguides more likely, and that is because these people have developed, basically calls and whistles that attract the species. It's like, this is something that it's similar as to what you would do with your dog. You call it by its name, okay? But here's basically a specific type of whistle, and the birds locally to that, to that group of people would respond to that one more likely than to any other kind of like human sound.  Brian  3:17   That's fascinating. Are honey guides corvids, because this sounds like a crow thing. Marielle  3:22   Oh, now you're asking me things I do not know.  Brian  3:24   I also when I I've heard about honeyguides before, but I've usually heard them in the context of, don't they have a a symbiotic relationship with honey badgers? Marielle  3:31   Yes. So, so this is the same kind of this the same kind of behavior, only that they don't do it with honey badgers, but also with people, Jason  3:38   So I just looked it up. It looks like they're actually in the woodpecker family, or sister to the woodpecker family. Yes.  Brian  3:44   Okay, weird. If they were crows or corvids, I'd be like, Oh, well, of course. But to see this, like, pop up at a completely different group is actually very cool. Marielle  3:52   yeah. So anyway, she gave this talk, and it was completely mind blowing. So if you want, I can put in a link for one of her studies that was published in, think, Nature. So that would also give, like, a nice introduction to what is happening there. Brian  3:52   Yeah, absolutely. We'd be happy to, we'd be excited to put that into the show notes. For sure, is this like, sort of almost, like a form of, like, pre-domestication? Marielle  4:13   maybe it's a couple of years ago, so I don't really remember much, but I thought it was really, it's not something that we hear of usually. So this is quite unique, I think, yeah, if you don't consider, of course, kind of like interactions with domestic animals.  Jason  4:26   Yeah. Well, I want to know is, this sounds like humans are co-opting, what the birds already do with the Badgers. And I want to know how that came about. Like, obviously there's a mutualism. I assume the Badger gets the food and the honey guide gets, you said, the wax out of it. But how did the birds and the Badgers learn to communicate with each other? Marielle  4:42   Well, the question is, is it specific? Did it specifically evolve between honeyguides and Badgers, or is this a more kind of, like opportunistic behavior from the birds, like, in terms of like observing that there are species that prey on honey, kind of like bees Colonies, and then kind of use that information. It might not be specific to honey badgers from the start, but Iwouldn't know.  Jason  5:05   What do they use the wax for? I assume it's building their nest. Marielle  5:09   Let me just briefly check, because I don't actually know. Brian  5:11    I guess the other thing is thinking about like, is this a is this a learned behavior? Is this something they have to be taught? Is this something that every Honey Badger and honey guide sort of have to develop this relationship. Does the mama Honey Badger have to exp like, you know, indicate to the to the juveniles, like, Hey, you should pay attention to these birds.  Jason  5:11   Well, Wikipedia to take  Brian  5:28   the ultimate source of all scientific information Jason  5:34   Wikipedia says that they feed on wax,  Brian  5:37   okay,  Marielle  5:38   but also all the little critters that lives in there, like pupae and bees.  Brian  5:38   Okay, so this is like when you eat your little babybel cheese, and then you just bite through the wax, I guess. All right, thank you. That's extremely cool. And again, I think it's, it's fun to think about how these relationships sort of like pop up at this point. Jason, what did you have Jason  5:56   i I'm starting to follow your lead and try to find things that are on point with what we're talking about. So I started to find what was cool about bats recently, and I found one from a few months back, where some researchers fitted very, very tiny little microphones to bats in order to figure out their echolocation. Because there's a question of, how on earth do bats echolocate when they're leaving caves, when there are literally 1000s of bats all chirping at the same time trying to get their way out, and they use that echolocation to to find their way out and not crash into each other, into walls. But how do they do that when there's literally 1000s of them all doing the same thing, and those echoes are bouncing all around everywhere? So what they did is they made these teeny, teeny, tiny little microphones, like four gram microphones, because the bat is only 40 grams, so they didn't want to add a huge amount of weight to the poor bat, and they found that, yes, there is a huge cacophony, like up to like, 80, 90% of the echolocation could be masked at the time of leaving the cave, because there's just so much noise around. But the bats that were closest to the one bat going, especially the one in front, were also still the clearest, especially the one in front, it's echolocating straight ahead, so it is interfere so the ones you're most likely to collide with are also the least likely to get interfered with. And then as soon as they get out of the cave entrance, they spread out really fast. And so that they reduce those odds. Apparently it doesn't reduce the odds to zero, like there are occasional mid air bat collisions, but the way they work and the way they do their echolocation, it seems to minimize those number of those, number of collisions, and they didn't mention this, but I imagine they still don't spread out super far, because I remember that when the bats are leaving, it's a great time for them to be predated on by like birds of prey and such. And so they still want to group together for safety, but they also want to spread apart so they don't crash into each other. So maybe there may be some conflicting forces here.  Brian  7:37   Just out of curiosity, Brian  7:38   Jason, Jason, did they mention any kind of real life application, this seems like, oh, and we can use this to better inform air traffic control or something like that. Jason  7:47   My suspicion would be, yeah, some sort of, like, drone control or something because that, I imagine, if you I, like, I didn't read that explicitly, but I'm guessing that it's that, it's if you're trying to control a whole bunch of stuff using autonomous vehicles or something where there's a bunch of noise in the system. How can you optimize that system so as to minimize the number of conflicts that happen? And so this would be for like drones or autonomous vehicles or something, is my suspicion, like, again, I don't remember reading that in the article itself. Marielle  8:15   Also interesting how it's not entirely dissimilar from how that works if you use visual cues instead, because I think that is relatively similar in fish and bird swarms that you kind of like weight the input from the ones that are closest to you most. Brian  8:28   Do we call it a murmuration of bats, the same way we do for birds or or not?  Jason  8:32   with a collective noun? Brian  8:34   no like, with like, the murmuration behavior where like a bird can track is only ever tracking like the three birds around it, and that's where you get all the weird like wave behaviors, as you see big flocks. I guess bats aren't really notorious for flocking. I suppose so maybe not. I have a bonus fact now, because Jason's thing reminded me of something else. Now, first of all, again, I know fruit bats don't echo locate, which we're going to talk about that later, Marielle  8:56   with one exception.  Brian  8:56   Oh, there's one exception? Marielle  8:56    Yes,  Brian  8:56   what's the exception?  Marielle  8:57   There's a couple of species in the genus Rousette, who have a different form of echolocation, but I think has evolved independently. Egyptian Rousette is a species that is most known for it, but I think it had there's a couple of other species in that genus that also do that.  Brian  9:14   Well, then, hey, that actually ties into everything else. Because I was going to talk about another example of convergent echolocation evolution, the auditory genes in bats and whales have converged. The genes that control their hearing, they have the same type of mutation. Which is  Jason  9:29   cool.  Marielle  9:30   That's cool.  Brian  9:30   Yeah, it's very interesting, right? Because obviously that had to be hit on separately from similar mammalian starting material.  Marielle  9:37   I did not know that.  Brian  9:38   Yeah, that's just my little bonus fact. We'll put that in the thing too. But okay, all right, who wants to talk about a board game?  Brian  9:43   So today, we're going to be talking about atiwa. Atiwa, there is a pronunciation guide for how it would be. It's like a di waa, which is based on the Atiwa range of a rain forest. So this game was created by Uwe Rosenberg, who is a prolific and celebrated board game designer. From Germany, looking on his Wikipedia page, it has six, six games on board. Game Geek in the top 100 with sort of a consistent mechanic. He is the co-founder of Lookout games, which published Atiwa. Jason  10:13   What are some of his other big hits?  Brian  10:14   Oh Agricola would be the one that would be probably his oldest and probably most renowned Feast of Odin. There's a two player game called Patchwork that I own and have never played. But yes, there's several games, I think, in terms of the ones that are on the the top 100 patchwork Agricola Feast of Odin. I don't think Atiwa broke into the top 100 unfortunately, but he puts out a game like every couple of years, like he is prolific. So the game itself is for one to four players got to have that solo player mode. Now, it does play fast, only about 30 minutes to play when you set it up, which always when you look at a game that looks as complicated, that seems like it's impossible, but it's really not like we'll talk about this later. 12 and up seems about right to me. I mean, Jason's daughters, yes, absolutely, 12 and up, but maybe not. Every 12 year old is going to necessarily but I mean, your your mileage may vary. So the game, what does it look like? It is this is a worker placement game, which is a very common sort of designer board game, where you'll have all these little action spots that you can put on the board that will let you do different key things. Both of the players have three sets of little workers that they can go out and to assign to collect various resources. There's one sort of central board in the middle. It's got a very distinct, sort of, like top down aerial illustration style, actually, conveniently, maybe about drone height, or maybe bat height would be the better way to think about it, sort of looking down at the landscape. So it's sort of a village in Ghana. There's trees, there's depictions of tiny, little goats, tiny little wild animals, which I wasn't really clear what those were at first, but actually, from looking into it a little bit more, hold on, I took a note on the type of animal that this was, ah, a Duekir. Here it is a is. It is a small antelope. I believe, one of the only animals other than the bats, that is specifically mentioned by name somewhere in the game, and the board has a lot of different action points on it. Other than that, you have cards that represent either terrain, so that may be like a cave, a marshland, an orchard, or a location, and these are where your villagers are going to live, and those go from farmstead is smallest up to a town with the most based on how many houses they can accommodate. In front of each player, you'll have a little board where you put your entire little stack of different little wooden meeples, and those represent goats and wild animals and trees and fruit  Jason  12:30   and people,  Brian  12:31   yes, and people, families specifically. And your goal in the game is to assemble like upwards of eight of these little tiles representing either the terrain or the locations, and sort of build a little Tableau where your people will live, where they will collect resources. And one of the important Uwe Rosenberg mechanics that he uses in most of his games is that you have to feed your people at the end of the turn, you have to have enough resources to make sure that your people are fed. So the conceit of the game is based on bat's, ability to reforest is like one of the main mechanics in the game. So as you're playing your people need to have a couple of things. They need to have food, and they need to have gold. They need to have some kind of economy, and they'll use that to plus wood build their houses. There's several different things that they can eat. If you have goats, they'll provide some food just as milk. Or you can slaughter the goat and get extra food. You can hunt for wild animals. You can collect fruit, or you can eat bats. And if you don't have that, you can also pay for food. So the main mechanic in the game is these families you have. They call them trained and untrained families. So when you start your family is untrained. Evidently, they have not been informed about the ecological benefits of bats. So those families have a couple different things that distinguish them. They at the end of each turn, they go out, and they will mine for gold, and that is associated with pollution. You will actually block out spaces on your tiles, the pollution associated with collecting gold, with artisanal gold mining.  Jason  13:58   And important part here is that you're not guaranteed to find the gold you draw it out of the bag. You might get one, you might get zero, you might get very, very lucky and get two. But that almost never happens. So it's like you're guaranteed to pollute your land, but you're not guaranteed to actually earn anything. Brian  14:11   That's true. So the untrained families will mine. The untrained families also will have the ability to eat bats. They will provide one food as bush meat, presumably a trained family on the and that's familiar with the advantages of bats. They don't have to go mining. They just receive gold. I don't know what that represents. I suppose that's supposed to represent the additional economic benefit of working with the bats.  Jason  14:32   I was actually explaining this to my family last night. I was just saying, we're gonna be recording this today, and it's like, yeah, and then you train the family, and then, like, they can have a bat live with them, and then they just earn money because of that. So my 18-year old daughter says, Well, it sounds like people are just paying them to like bats maybe, well, yes. And I thought I was like, Yeah, but actually it's more like the bats are paying them rent. So if we wanted to completely break the metaphor of the game, what happens is the bats are now the ones mining gold, and they're justbetter at it than the humans, and they're paying the humans rent. In reality, yes, it is probably like, Oh, this is the benefits of agroforestry or something like that. But it is funny, if you sort of like, twist the metaphor of the game a bit,  Brian  15:12   a little bit yeah,  Marielle  15:13   and maybe it's kind of going in the direction it's like, these bats obviously don't only disperse seeds of fruit trees, but also of seeds that are otherwise economically important. I think this is like the most important seed disperser for African teak, which is quite valuable as lumber.  Brian  15:28   The other thing that a trained family can do, and Jason already alluded to this, is that they can allow a bat to live, I guess, in their house, or at least on their property. I don't know if the idea is the bat's actually living in the hut itself, but just close by, and they can't eat the bats anymore, but the gold to bat trade off seems like it completely like covers for that to get your little houses to expand your village, you need to pay for gold and trees. So you have to cut down trees that are on your tableau to do it, and that's where the bats really come into play, because the bats are able to eat fruit and cause trees to just spread and sprout. And actually, you can get a pretty efficient bat to tree engine going at a certain point and just have a ton of trees growing every turn. Basically,  Marielle  16:11   free food.  Brian  16:11   Yep, free food, free wood, free everything. Let's see, I think the game is based on victory points. You get victory points for how much gold you have. You get victory points for you know, how many things you have on your tableau, in terms of trees and wild animals and goats and particularly people, you get points for the cards that you've put into your tableau, your locations and your villages and stuff. Some of the terrain cards actually give you negative points. Some of the terrain cards are like, Hey, here's like, a free house. So actually, that's, that's very powerful. So you're actually going to lose some points for doing that. One of my very favorite terrain cards is this very goofy card that Jason knows what I'm going to talk about. This is the haunted house card. Oh, yeah. So it is an empty house. It is depicted in the night form, and it has a spot to put bats all around it, Jason  16:56   yeah. The thing is, it's actually not empty. It's just a dilapidated, broken down house. And there it does show a family inside. Brian  17:04   And yeah, I think that that is the basis of the game. Is there anything that you feel like I missed Jason? Jason  17:08   My impression playing this game is, it's a very, it feels like a very complex game, because when we were playing any given turn, there were like 20 different options I had for where to put my meeple to try to get something done. And so I kind of had to take the approach of, instead of like, of all these options, which is the optimal to do? It was more like, Okay, here's my goal. Which of these options will get me closer to that goal? They would change a little bit which of those actions are available, just shifts a little bit over time. It's not a huge amount, but it does change a bit to make each game a little bit unique. And we talked about how you were trying to figure out, Is it possible to, like, win the game just through the gold mining method? And I think the answer that is no,  Brian  17:46   absolutely no. I don't think you can. Jason  17:48    You're destroying your board to be able to put stuff there, which is what gets you most points. And you're not guaranteed to get the gold back. You train a family, you're guaranteed to get the gold. It's just better. So they're not subtle in the messaging of the game is that having the bats around and living in harmony with the bats is just paying better for trying to win the game. Brian  18:04   It sort of takes that idea of board game metaphor and like what you take away from and it's like, okay, don't do this. This is bad. You literally cannot win this way. One of these days, I am just gonna have to try being the like, Captain Planet, the bad guy, the villain, who would just know I don't like bats and I refuse to work with them. We'll just see how bad it actually goes.  Jason  18:23   Eat all the bats and mine all the gold.  Brian  18:25   And yep, eat all the bats, mine all the gold, cut down all the trees,  Marielle  18:28   hunt down all the wildlife.  Brian  18:30   Yep, just goats. Nothing but goats. Jason  18:32   It was a little a little bit of dissonance in that we worked out that mathematically, at the end of your last turn, you still have to feed everyone and stuff. And so that's the point at which the wild animals aren't worth very many victory points. And so that last turn, the most optimal way of feeding all your families is just to slaughter all the wild life Brian  18:50   Yeah, you just, you just drive all the wild animals extinct. It's fine, they'll come back.  Jason  18:53   That's a little bit of dissonance, but that's it's only in the last turn,  Brian  18:57   to be honest, that last turn change in strategy is also really common for a lot of these games. There's usually things that you would do in the last turn that would make no sense any other time. I imagine that for an optimizer like you, Jason, this game probably did seem really complicated. I gotta be honest, I was dreading this game just a little bit. I was concerned that as a very Euro worker placement game, by the pinnacle of Euro worker placement game designers, Uwe Rosenberg, that this was going to favor strategic complexity over fun, that this was going to be like the game for the Board Game Geek, Board Game Geek extremist, yeah, so in in magic terminology, you have the Spike archetype, the person who there to master the rules and to win through understanding the game better than their opponents. This is like how the world record Scrabble people aren't necessarily people who speak English, they just have memorized the dictionary. Were you aware of that?  Jason  19:49   I was not aware of that.  Brian  19:50   Yeah, some of the anyway that's that is a complete and utter tangent. So we don't need to go down that route. But Mariel, have you had a chance to play Atiwa before?  Marielle  19:59   A couple of. Times, yes, yeah. That's a bit of time ago. Okay, I have to say I'm not that particularly strategic about these games. I just do what I think is fun.  Brian  20:07   Yep, me too. Marielle  20:07    and I'll see what what happens in the end. Which means that in another one of Uwe Rosenberg's games, Caverna, I tend to lose, and it's always the same person who wins in our little board game group, yeah, because that's the thing that I never do, but here I've one time managed to win. Brian  20:23   It sounds like you may have a similar board game dynamic to Jason and I, where I am the less strategic player I play for fun.  Marielle  20:31   Yeah, fun is good.  Brian  20:32   Are you a board game nerd? Marielle, I forgot to ask.  Marielle  20:35   Not a nerd. Marielle  20:37   I think that's more my friends. Okay. I'll go along happily, though.  Brian  20:40   All right,  Jason  20:41   you did say, before we started recording, you're a podcaster, though,right?  Marielle  20:45   Long time ago. It's quite some time ago, but I did that during my PhD with a friend of mine, science news podcast. Brian  20:51   What was the title? Is it still like around?  Marielle  20:54   No, it's like, it's no longer active. I think you can still find the episodes on YouTube or so. It's in German, though the name of the podcast was, and you can pronounce it two different ways, conscience or con science, because we were both located in Conscience in southern Germany. Brian  21:08   Oh, well, that's a cool triple pun. I like that a lot, all right. So yeah, let's, let's try to talk about the science. Here we again. We're in this absolutely unique circumstance of having a game inspired, having the researcher who inspired the game here to talk about the science, one of one of the researchers, one of the researchers Marielle  21:24   Exactly. Yeah, we need to basically do a little disclaimer, because the study system is mostly that of Dina Dechmann, who is at the Max Planck Institute for nowadays animal behavior, and she's a former colleague of mine, so I did my PhD there, and she has been working with the study system for at least since 2009 I think. And I joined for this one one study, because our interests kind of combined, and we said, it's like, oh, it would be cool to, kind of like, do this in this other way. And that is where my expertise came in. Yeah. But she's been working with this particular bat species in that particular area for a very long time, together with others. Of course, Brian  22:00   you're still colleagues, right? You just you were at Max. Planck, is that correct?  Marielle  22:03   Yes,  Brian  22:04   okay, all right, I understand it's like, I don't think she died.  Marielle  22:10   No, Jason  22:13   that would explain why she didn't respond to emails. No offense if you're listening. Dina, Brian  22:17   yeah. Is she gonna listen to this? Should we give her a hard time for not coming on? Marielle  22:18   Oh, no, I don't think we should,  Brian  22:21   okay. Jason  22:22   I know schedule probably very, very busy conducting research out there in the real world to help you, Brian  22:27   anybody can make time to actually like to have professors schedules coordinate for things like this is always seems like a small miracle. So, you know, no shade, if she, you know, I am sure she would have come if she was, if she was able. But yeah, Dina Dechmann and yourself, you guys were colleagues on this, and she has done a lot of work on the bats. But let's actually so some of the things that we had here was like, so How accurate do you think the science is as depicted in Atiwa? Brian  22:52   So maybe we should say a little bit about what the study was,  Brian  22:52   yes please, of course,  that would make perfect sense, Marielle  22:56   because otherwise it will be harder to understand. So this is mostly based on the study of our species of fruit bat that is called straw colored fruit bats. And as far as I'm aware, it's the most common kind of like individual numerous species of mammals in Africa.  Brian  23:14   Wow,  Marielle  23:14   African continent. And what they do with this really special is so they they hang out during the day in trees, roosts in colony sizes up to a million. So it's a huge amount of fruit bats making a lot of noise, probably. And what they do is they they commute at night. So when, when dusk falls, they fly out from their roost, seemingly independently, in different directions, and then they go in search of flowering or fruiting trees. And then they will, if it's if it's a flowering tree, they will basically just try to slurp up the nectar, maybe eat some some pollen. And if it's a fruiting tree, they will go there. They will pick a fruit fly to a feeding roost, like a different tree that's a little bit away, which is more safe, because obviously, if you have a fruiting tree that's like attracting a lot of animals, you will also have predators. And then they will eat this fruit. If it's one that has a large seed, they will kind of like squeeze out the fruit juice and just drink that and then drop the seed where they eat. And if it's small seeds, they might ingest them. And then that is when these long distances that they cover during a single night, so these these food trees, can be up to 80 to 90 kilometers away from where they sleep during the daytime.  Jason  24:21   Wow.  Marielle  24:22   That is when this kind of like having seeds in their gut and transporting them over very long distances is ecologically very important, because they will just poop off the seeds wherever they go. Brian  24:33   So you're used to hearing about birds having this kind of behavior. Marielle  24:36   Yes, and here the thought is, why are bats particularly good at this? Because they eat the seeds that they actually eat are usually small ones, and small seeds are common in pioneering and trees that are able to kind of colonize open areas. And what bats do, different from a lot of forest bird species is actually cross open areas.  Brian  24:54   Oh, okay,  Marielle  24:55   which a lot of birds don't really like doing, especially if they're forest specialists. Whereas these bats don't care, because they fly at night. Jason  25:02   And you said earlier, these bats don't echo locate,  Marielle  25:05   no,  Jason  25:05   presumably because they're not trying to. They can navigate well by sight, and they probably seek out their food more by smell. Is that right? I assume they have really good senses ofsmell.  Marielle  25:14   Might be, yeah, and, and, I mean, obviously they're, they're mostly, they get it gets underway while it's still dusky, so there's like twilight around. And what you can how you can always tell a species of bat that is echolocating from one that is using sight. The ones with sight have really, really big eyes. The ones that don't echolocate and Eidolon, the straw colored fruit bat, has huge eyes.  Brian  25:35   They're very cute.  Marielle  25:36   They are, I mean, watch them eat a banana. Brian  25:42   Yeah? We will absolutely put a video of that into the show notes. Marielle  25:46   So in the study that we did was basically we had tracks, GPS tracks from these bats, and what I did was basically train a movement model based on that and do a bunch of simulations to kind of look at given their behavior that they do, and given on the colony sizes that we are aware of during different times of year. What would we expect to see in terms of seed dispersal for an entire colony instead of just a single individual, kind of like a spatially explicit prediction of what we think might happen. Jason  26:12   Okay, what was your take home from that  Marielle  26:14   that they probably, just like most of the seeds will probably disperse to relatively close to the roosting site because they have very long gut retention times. And gut retention time means, how long does the seed stay inside the body of the bat? How long does it take before it exits the bats again? I mean, we did. We did the simulation basically for a single night based on the assumption that all that these bats are eating during this night is like small seeded fruits, huge amounts, I mean, amazing amounts of poop spread over the environment. Jason  26:41   Hey, bat guanos have been a resource for centuries. So, Marielle  26:46   yeah. So actually, the seeds get deposited with their own little heap of fertilizer.  Brian  26:50   It's a good relationship Marielle  26:51    more relevant for elephant dung, I guess, with seeds, but less competition, because less seeds in the single droplet.  Brian  26:58   So I did want to ask, so the game, what it depicts, it's just fruit. It's incredibly generic. And basically every tree has sort of this, like, I'm not sure it's just a generic orange colored fruit. Jason  27:10   It looks like a pumpkin to me, but it's probably meant to be more like a peach or apricot or some other, like, Marielle  27:15   no its a very specific fruits.  Brian  27:19   Is it Shea? Is it Shea fruit?  Marielle  27:21   Oh, help. I used to know this. I don't remember,  Brian  27:24   because this is Brian  27:24   something I was not able like I was trying to figure out, you know, I found the duiker antelope and everything. And then the only other species that's specifically mentioned by name in the game, other than Eidolon, other than the straw collar fruit bat itself, is the baobab tree. But I'm trying to figure out what this fruit is. It looks a little bit like a shea tree fruit, but I don't think people eat that. Marielle  27:42   The species is Uapaca kirkiana. I can also look at the English name. Hold on, so it's called Sugar Plum in German. Yeah, sugar plum. Brian  27:50   So I'm assuming, based on a name like that, that must be good  Marielle  27:54   or ridiculously sweet, and nothing else. I don't know, but it would be obviously a good energy source for bats, if it's very dense in sugars. Brian  28:01   Okay, so the particular fruit that's depicted in the game is probably supposed to Oh, it is. It is. Look at that. That has a lot of different colors. That's neat. Okay, well, we're gonna have to link to that too. Thank you for sharing that, because I could not figure it out. So I was like, I was trying to look up native fruit trees in Ghana, and there were a lot of ones that were mentioned as economically important, but this one wasn't on the list. So thank you. Marielle  28:24   Yeah. The thing is, I probably know which photo this kind of illustration is kind of inspired by, Brian  28:29   oh yeah, like the original illustration of the bat eating the fruit.  Marielle  28:33   There is a photo, photograph of that that's also in the press release that was mentioned in the little information booklet that comes with the game. And a photo has been taken by Christian Ziegler, because, like a very well known nature photographer who works a lot with scientists at the Max Planck Brian  28:49   Institute, this is such a unique experience of having this game that is tied so explicitly to this study. It's very, very fun. Okay, so one of the other things I wanted to ask based on this conversation about the idea of the large fruited the large seeded fruit versus the small seeded fruit is it does make me curious if there's any evidence of co-evolution, or a symbiotic relationship between specific fruit trees and between the bats, because it seems like there's sort of a natural compatibility here. Marielle  29:16   I don't know whether that would be the case in any kind of like seed dispersal as such. What you do see is kind of CO evolution between particularly bats, particular bat species and tree species that require bats for pollination. So flowers are often much more morphologically, kind of like adapted to their pollinators, as opposed to fruit, because fruits that will be tasty to nearly everyone, okay, that makes sense. I'm not aware of any like specific species specific some mutualisms with straw colored fruit bats, but I think there's a couple of examples for it in meso Northern America in terms of pollinating bats. Brian  29:54   Okay, so co evolution from a pollination perspective, but not necessarily for explicitly seed dispersal. Marielle  30:00   not that I'm aware of at least.  Brian  30:01   Okay, all right, so how do you like again? The whole point of the game is bats eat fruit, grow trees like that. If that conceit seems like that is at the core of how this is working. Obviously, all games are a metaphor. It's not a perfect representation. You're not going to grow a tree and well, it's always a little unclear. How much time is passing when we're dealing with these things. Jason, do you want to like, how would we approximate the amount of time that is passing? Jason  30:28   Well, so at the end of every turn you have your reproduction phase, which is where, if you have enough of a certain type of meeple on there, the families, the goats, the wild animals, they make more of themselves. So I think a year is probably a good one. The people I assume are less like this is families growing. More like, hey, a new family has moved into the neighborhood, into the village, from somewhere else. But if we're assuming, like the wild animals and the goats, probably about a year, Brian  30:53   okay, so, but a tree is not going to grow in a year. No, Jason  30:58   that's an abstraction, yeah, Brian  31:00   but I don't know any game, video game or board game. Well, with the, I guess, with the notable exception of photosynthesis, where growing the tree is the entire mechanic of the game, where the trees aren't growing way too fast, right? That's just nobody wants to wait for trees to grow as long as they actually take to grow, right? Marielle  31:15   That would be a very long let's create 35 rounds of this before we commit the first harvest. Brian  31:23   Maybe that's that's going a little bit too far down the simulation route, I suppose. Again, one of the things I wanted to mention is, and I love it whenever a game does this, because, again, it's very helpful to me, is that there's an accompanying booklet that comes with the game, sort of explaining the history of Ghana, the study from a lay perspective, how it is represented in the game, gold mining, all of this stuff. It's like, Oh, okay. Well, here's my designer notes. Also in the rule booklet, there is a little tiny caricature of Uwe Rosenberg, sort of explaining the implementation of different aspects in the game, which I think when you get to the point where you're putting your own a caricature of your own head into the game, that must mean that you, you're a celebrated and recognized board game designer, I suppose, Marielle  32:03   also some level of, probably kind of personal engagement with this that goes beyond just like, oh, I had this idea for a game  Brian  32:10   that's true, Marielle  32:11    like, personal interest in the entire system. Probably, yeah, because I think as far as I've heard, he wanted to write a book about this.  Brian  32:19   He did. I, although it was supposed to be, yes, there was supposed to be, like a full companion non fiction book. I don't speak German, Weckruf aus Ghana.  Marielle  32:26   Yeah, it's like wake up call,  Brian  32:28   but as far as I can tell, unfortunately, it looks like that was never published. There's an ISBN number that doesn't go anywhere. It seems like maybe, maybe Atiwa didn't sell as many copies as they wanted to kind of justify it. But, you know, the game is out there, and I have to imagine that the game has attracted attention, and that's not a bad thing. Again, this idea of games as educational tools, particularly, this is really specifically an outreach tool, isn't something I've really seen very much. So Marielle  32:54   no, this is, this is definitely the best, like, this study has had the best outreach I've ever seen. Like, Let's all make board games about studies, because then people will actually be interested in it. Jason  33:04   Well, let's all make good board games. Good board we have talked about the issue where educational board games are almost a dirty word, because most of the scientists making the games are not game designers. They don't know how to make the game fun. I think it really helps here that you had a world class, literally, world class game designer translate the science into something that is an actually very fun, strategically complex worker placement game that still manages to convey the point of the science, Marielle  33:32   yes, but also creating some somewhat of a "what if "scenario. Because obviously, I mean, part of the motivation for working with bats can also be they get a lot of bad representation elsewhere. It's like they have not always the best names, and they're not only from a scientific standpoint, straw colored fruit bats are not only interesting in terms of ecosystem services, but also, of course, zoonotic diseases, zoonotic being diseases that can spread from animals to humans. Jason  34:00   Yeah, I believe bats are like one of the huge reservoirs of coronaviruses in the world, aka, where COVID probably came from, if you step it back, a few mutations. Marielle  34:09   So doing something to kind of show is like these are not only negative, but that can also be like a positive association, and to a degree that we're probably not fully aware of, that is kind of like the study, and then what he did was basically, it's like, what if people actually were aware, were actually aware of this in a particular region? How could you develop a system where you have cooperation, instead of eating them just for bush meat? Because that is what happens.  Jason  34:34   That was a question we had. Is there any sort of outreach, extension programs in place to to do what happens at the game, to educate families and say, Hey, this is actually helping you out in the long run. So let's try to get this harmony going. Is, do those programs actually exist? Marielle  34:51   This is something that would obviously be better answered by Dina, because she she is aware of that more and also involved in some of kind of like monitoring projects and so on. So. Have, they have, like, an Africa wide Eidolon monitoring program that they're running where they do also educate people, I think, but that is then really people who are kind of, like local and interested in that to begin with. I'm not aware of any larger scaled education in that Brian  35:14   regard. So that that really is the what if scenario. It's like, what if we did do this. It's not representing something that's actually happening. It's more of like we really should be doing. This is that the idea of like ecosystem services, this idea of the sort of like unseen economic benefits that come from a healthy ecosystem, it's very hard to communicate, because it's like, you've got to you can't see it, or you just assume it, versus that tangible benefit of money in hand, right? It's It's tricky, and I know this is one example of that, of the benefits of bats for reforestation. I think wetlands, we talk about that, for their ecosystem services, for what they do, for the water system, for cleaning up water. And the ways to calculate it is, if you didn't have that, how much would it cost to do that yourself. How much would it cost for humans to replicate that? And usually it's not practical. It's like, you shouldn't be doing it, right? You can't do it, Marielle  36:08   yeah. And sometimes it's also really kind of, like, hard to understand what is actually going on. And, like, how much of a deal is it like, what are the kind of, what is kind of the rattail of all of this? Because we assume that there is a huge impact of huge bat colonies on seed dispersal and probably also nutrient spread, but we don't know, and the only way to really test that out is to kind of take away all the bats. Oh, no, we shouldn't test at all.  Brian  36:34   Not a good thing for a controlled experiment. I don't think,  Marielle  36:37   no,  Brian  36:37   but I guess that's why studies like this are so important, right is to try to get a clearer understanding about what the benefits actually are.  Jason  36:45   Yeah, I was gonna say there are examples where we do get this right. So my understanding is, and we can, I can double check this, but in the show notes, is that part of the reason why a large part of upstate New York, here in the States, is state park or wilderness or stuff, is to essentially maintain the drinking water quality for New York City. It's like the Hudson drains like half the state. And apparently, long time ago, they recognized that we need to protect this so that New York City actually has quality drinking water. And so that's why the development up there has been much less. And I'll double check that and put in the link in the show notes for the sources for that. Brian  37:19   I guess I'm also curious, what was the what was the context of this game happening? You were approached about this for permission, or what was that? How did that happen? Jason  37:29   How do we get Uwe Rosenberg to make a game out of our research? That's what he's asking,  Brian  37:34   not really, but, but sure.  Marielle  37:36   No, actually, I had nothing to do with that at all. It's like at the time that the game was nearly finished, and they were looking for some additional information for their little um info booklet.  Brian  37:45   Oh, wow.  Marielle  37:45   They kind of put in with the game. They told us, it's like, Oh, yeah. So Uwe Rosenberg made this game, would you like us to include any more additional information? And you're like, is this spam? And the only reason why I kind of, like, looked at it to begin with, was because lookout games and the name Uwe Rosenberg rang a bell. So as I said, I'm not the Board Game Nerd, so I didn't immediately recognize the name, but like, sounds familiar, and that's why I looked at it. I was like, Oh, I think this is a big deal. I had to ask my nerd friends first Brian  38:08    man, he really must have got inspired by your study. It's got to feel really good. It's just like he read a press release related to the study, and it was like, this is the seed of a thing that I'm going to spend the next year of my life working on Marielle  38:32   somehow. Yes, I don't know how that happened, and maybe it was just this. I think in the booklet, he mentioned specifically some reference to a local King, yeah, who does exist and who is quite fond of these bats and lets them kind of like roost in his private gardens. And that is kind of like an example for for the local community, maybe. But the problem is, I've never actually been there. So as I said, it's Dina's study system, and I was just a local computer nerd to do some calculations. Brian  38:59   Jason is also my local computer nerd. Although I guess you spend more time in the field than I do. I'm really the laboratory, so I shouldn't, like, point any, any shade you're in your direction, Jason  39:11   yeah, although I say, like, it's definitely people ask me for gardening information, just because they hear I work on corn. It's like, wrong skill set. Like, you want to genome analyzed. I'm good. Its a miracle my corn survives at the end of the season. Marielle  39:23   Yeah. Also, don't dare put me in a lab. Brian  39:26   Oh, are you? You are not a wet lab person?  Marielle  39:28   No it's like I did some lab, lab work during my education, but I no, okay, I'm not very good at that. Brian  39:37   That's totally fair. My lab smells very bad. That's my usual thing. I like to point out to people. But anyway, let's see. What else is there? Anything else that we should talk about that we haven't yet related to the science? Jason  39:48   Well I'm curious. Let's broaden this a little bit. So we focused a lot on this particular study system, with these particular fruit bats. How widespread are fruit bats? Most of the bats I think about are the echo locating bats, which presumably are not fruit bats. Bats. But are there fruit bats on every continent? Like? How many species are there like, Brian  40:04   except for Antarctica, there's no, there's no Antarctic. Yes, there's no fruit bats in Antarctica.  Jason  40:04   I don't think there's any like those Antarctica. Ignore Antarctica like the penguins can have it. We'll just ignore it for the purposes of every continent step statements.  Marielle  40:20   Oh, and now you're asking the non bat experts. So I think this last time I heard there was, like around there was more than 1400 species of bats, most of which are what you call the microbats, Microchiroptera, which is the echolocating ones, but some of those are also fruit eating, kind of like you have these two big branches. One is mega bats, the other one is micro bats. She tells you something about the size Brian  40:44   we need some nano bats we'll have to work on that. Marielle  40:50   And I think I mean, this might be completely wrong, that there's around 250 species or so of the larger ones Brian  40:56   aren't most mammals, bats? Marielle  40:58    uh, no rodents, I think are more species rich, okay, according to this reference, 197 species of megabats Brian  41:05   We just need three more to get the even 200  Marielle  41:08   Yeah, that's probably gonna happen, because there's a lot of like, I mean, especially in the microbats, there's a lot of cryptic speciation, where you have species that look the same but they're not actually the same species. Jason  41:18   Yeah, genetic data will probably start separating that out some. Brian  41:21   Yeah, I was gonna say, Jason, that's your job. You could be the genome guy, right? Get us those extra three species of bats? Marielle  41:27   I mean, the one that I mentioned Rousettus, the echolocating mega bats. Seems there's like a bunch of subspecies with very distinct distribution areas. Maybe there's something more to that. And then you would get above your 200 Brian  41:38   I gotta say that genus name is fantastic. Eidolon. What a fantastic like, I'm used to only hearing that in fantasy settings, but that's a good one.  Jason  41:46   So when you say mega bat is big, big bat. Like, how big of a bat are we talking about? Is it like cat sized with wings, or Marielle  41:54   they're much more lightweight. So I don't want it not the largest, but also not the smallest. And they, I think, weigh up to 350 grams, but the wingspan is like 75 centimeters. Oh, wow, quite large. There's larger ones, especially if you go to Southeast Asia, Brian  42:10   if there's no other specific scientific topics, I think maybe we should do one of my favorite parts of the episode, which is the nitpick corner, which is, where is a little thing that was like, you know, that's not exactly this. Is where we do the um, actually this right? Or how we would make things better. We just give ourselves permission to nitpick, right? We don't actually expect the game to be perfectly accurate, but we just want to point out anything that's not quite like that actually would be in science. So obviously, we already talked about trees don't grow in a year. I think everybody already knows that, but it's worth mentioning. Marielle, is there something that you had that you wanted to point out? Marielle  42:43   So I think what Dina would like me to point out is that the picture on the front of the box doesn't actually show a straw colored fruit bat.  Brian  42:52   Oh no! Oh, what is it?  Marielle  42:54   Well, I don't remember, but if you look at the straw colored fruit bat, the head is much doesn't go grey,  Brian  43:00   more straw colored.  Marielle  43:01   Yeah, exactly. And especially, they have this kind of, like, yellow strip of fur on the sides of their neck, which is where the name, I think, comes from. As I said, it's like, I can show you the picture that I think inspired this to some degree, because it's the same fruit, but I don't think it depicts it correctly. Brian  43:16   Okay, that is a pretty big and legitimate nitpick. I think, to have the whole game be about straw colored fruit bats, and have the cover image not be a straw colored fruit bat. Marielle  43:26   Yeah. Dina would know which one one is shown there. But as I said, I'm a bit more iffy on my bats.  Brian  43:31   Okay, all right, Jason, did you have something you wanted to pick at?  Jason  43:34   The only one I could think of is that one end of game thing where it's like, okay, now time to slaughter all the wild animals and eat them for food, because I get more points that way. That's the one thing.  Brian  43:47   Is there a way that you would penalize that? I guess you just need to make the wild animals worth more points or something? Jason  43:48   Basically, yeah, okay, the only reason they do that is because they're worth a lot fewer points than goats, but they give you the same amount of food just about Brian  43:55   and mine actually isn't even in the game, but I'm gonna pick anyway. It's in the accompanying booklet, the section about the benefits of fruit bats. When they go to the list, there's a thing the list of bat superpowers is long. They see with their ears, use ultrasound to orient themselves in the dark. That's true, but that's not, that's not these bats, right? There's also the comments about they their cells slow down the aging process. So I think that maybe some bats, obviously, maybe live for long times or have cancer repairing genes. But again, it's like, that's not wrong. It's just not specifically these fruit bats, Marielle  44:27   no. But bats are generally quite long, lived Brian  44:29    okay, for their size? Brian  44:30   More than you would expect? Marielle  44:31    So they, I think I once had in my hand a captive bats that was one of the horseshoe bats. That lady was 20 years old, and that is not uncommon to see in that  Brian  44:35   that's a long time for an animal that's that size, right? I guess.  Marielle  44:45   Yeah.  Brian  44:46   Do they do? They break the the heartbeat rule, or that rule of thumb? Marielle  44:50   Well, what is an average heart rate if you have a species that goes into torpor,  Brian  44:54   good point,  Marielle  44:55   Hibernate? Yeah, that's hard to tell, but I think they do okay. That comes especially. Actually, I think so what they do, like they would usually, you would expect them to consume more energy, if we're not talking about echolocating bats, because Echolocation is energetically costly. But what they do is they time it with their wing beads, and that makes it cheaper. Brian  45:12   I never really thought about there being a cost to echolocate. Marielle  45:15   I mean more bats, if you measure it right in front of their face, I think it's like 120 decibels. That's a loud scream.  Brian  45:23   So they're yelling so much they're burning calories. That's very cool. Okay, let's see, there was, you used an idiom. I wasn't familiar with the rat tail Marielle  45:34   Oh, sorry, that's like a German Yeah,  Brian  45:36   I figured it was a German idiom. What does that mean? Marielle  45:39    It basically means, like, everything that's somehow attached to it. It's like, the chain of consequences. Brian  45:44   Okay, okay, okay, that's cool. I don't know if we haven't I couldn't Marielle  45:48   remember what I wanted to say. So it's like,  Brian  45:50   it's fine. No, this is, this is the fun thing about having people from all over the world, they get to talk to us, and we get to learn different idioms and stuff. Okay, so I think if that's our nitpick corner, why don't we move on to grading, and then we can wrap up this. One's a little tricky. Let's start with science. Jason, why don't you go first? Jason  46:07   So I am not a bat expert, so I'm going off the vibe I've gotten from talking with Marielle here and the other stuff, I'd say my metric is generally like, how well is it getting across was trying to do? And the metric here is, is trying to show that if we cooperate with the fruit bats, then things work out better in the long term. That part seems solid. I would probably put it in the maybe, like the A- range. It seems pretty good. Probably a few things that could be a little better. You mentioned some of the stuff in the rule book, where it's talking about the superpowers of like all bats as a unit, as opposed to, like this particular bat. But overall, I think it seems pretty good. And I mean, this was done, like, without necessarily consulting the scientists, just like, hey, this is a cool story. Let's do the research. Let's make this work. I mean, that may deserve some extra credit to bump up to A. Brian  46:51   That's a good point. I mean, I guess we think that most of the people that are designing science games aren't necessarily communicating with scientists at the design scientists at the design stage, right, Jason  46:59   yes, but most of them are also working off of general level science, as opposed to, like, this very specific research study that came out. Okay, Brian  47:07   so let's see, in terms of the things here, I think that there is the reforestation capacity of the fruit bats. So that is being represented. There is the, I don't really know if it's specifically representing the ecological advantages of fruit bats, in the sense of like, it doesn't really explain the gold mechanic. It does say that gold mining is bad. And I mean, I did find a study that the sort of local, small scale gold mining is involved with a lot of removal of top vegetation. Because, again, they're not going deep, they're going shallow. So you're cutting down way more vegetation, way more trees to do it. They are using mercury to extract the gold from the soil. And that, you know, is presumably what we're talking about, the pollution. It's it is a damaging process. So I'd say those two things, the bat reforestation and the pollution associated with gold mining. I think it does a good job there. I don't see anything wrong with an A-, like you've said before, Jason, like you say a lot. They're not trying to represent a lot of science here, but I think what they are trying to do, they're doing pretty well. And that whole thing about the echolocation, that's just a tiny little note in the accompanying booklet, and it's not even in the rule book, but it does. I wish more people knew that only some bats echolacate, that's all Okay, so I'm fine with A-. What do you think Marielle? Marielle  48:22   Okay. So disclaimer, I'm obviously not entirely unbiased in this. Brian  48:29   We wouldn't expect you to be. I'm sure you have strong opinions. Marielle  48:32   So if I, if I think back to how it was playing the game for the first time, as I said, it's like, I haven't been involved in this game at all up until the time that they said, it's like, we have this game to take this idea and make a game out of it, and not just make it into, as you said, like a, like a small bad game, but like a well designed game that takes this front and center. I think that's really cool. I also think it was really kind of how it emerges from using this kind of, like bits of knowledge. Is like, hey, let's train families to make better use of bats than just bush meat. I think that comes across really well when playing it's something that is a fun way of playing the game. So I'm fine with that. Okay, Brian  49:12   so what do you think A- then, oh, wait, no, we said we have a different grading scheme. What was it? Again? Marielle  49:16   Yes. So I work in Sweden, as I said, and there you grade students on based on what this they have like, there's fail, there's pass, and there is, like, very good, like, pass with distinction, and an A-, i think would fall for us with a distinct a pass with distinction. Brian  49:33   So you think this is, this is a pass with distinction? Marielle  49:36   Yeah, if we're kind of aligned on the general like, science rating, then I think, Okay, Brian  49:41   well, I think we should definitely use your version of the grading I mean, you, you're free to use whichever grading scale you find the most convenient, so we don't all have to use the same rubric necessarily. What about fun? I'm not kidding. I was thinking, Oh my God, I am not going to enjoy this game. And I don't know how much that colored my perspective. I actually really like this game. It's fun. It's quick to play, maybe, like, you know, I'm not the most tactical player, so I'm not super concerned about it, but it's enjoyable. It's a lot of fun to, sort of like, make all your your little choices. And the other thing that surprised me is it really does play quick. I mean, it's a half an hour game and you're done. It takes, it takes longer to set up the game than it does to play the game, which I guess does happen sometimes. So am I gonna pull it off the shelf and play it again? Absolutely, I am. I think I've got a couple people I want to play it with. In particular, we got some people coming in this weekend. I think we might try to play with so I'm giving that an A. That's that is my metric for how fun it is. Is am I going to get it off the shelf and play it again? So it's an A, or I'm sorry I pass with distinction. Jason  50:37   I'm definitely gonna give it a pass. I think I need to play it a few more times to see if it is passed with distinction or not. Because the the one time we played like I got sort of a feel for it, I'd want to do some replaying on it. Brian  50:48   So, Jason, by 20 points, you sort of got a feel for it?. I think you figured it out, man. But okay, Jason  50:56   I just want to try it out a few more times where I could be playing the game and get into the groove of it, other than just learning at a time it's gonna be somewhere in their a range, A, A minus. I don't know exactly where it would fall. Okay, it probably doesn't matter. It's like, would I play this again? Yes, that's probably the only thing that actuallymatters.  Brian  51:10   That's true. And Marielle, I know that you said you're not like a committed Board Game Nerd, but you're there for it. So did you want to give it a fun grade, too? Marielle  51:18   Yes. So I'm probably more in the camp Brian when it comes to how I play board games, more like for the fun rather than for for the winning specifically. And as I said, I am biased. But having having played another another couple games that kind of like go in this direction, for example, another one of Uwe Rosenberg's, which is Caverna, I think I like it for the fun and not necessarily for the competition. And here, I think, compared to Caverna, for example, it is less what happens less is kind of like frustrating the other players by your choices, just because there's so many different choices on the board, some of which kind of like lead into the same resources. So if you if you're less of a naughty player, to frustrate other people's Brian  52:01   strategy. It's great you're less like Jason, who likes to mess with people. Marielle  52:05   So for me, I enjoyed myself a lot. So I was actually surprised. So I was also thinking, like, oh, is this gonna be as good? But I liked it a lot, so I'll, I'll go along with the pass pass with distinction. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. And it's like, it's the little star, because I'm biased. Maybe Brian  52:22   I think in this situation, you can be forgiven for having some bias Marielle  52:26   Also can I just say wooden meeples? You get a bonus point for that Brian  52:30   Actually, I think the little wild animal meeples are some of my favorite meeples ever, just these like I do love the idea of a generic animal, like nothing in particular, of course. Now I know it's actually this Duiker but Marielle  52:43   I think I know which species you're referring to. I would call it the "Diker", but just because I'm Dutch, and I kind of automatically do that when I see something that looks Dutch.  Brian  52:52   Yeah, you're probably right.  Marielle  52:53   And I think the bat of the little meep looks exactly like the photos that I have in my hand from this particular species of antelope. Brian  53:01   Okay, nice. All right, so I guess with that, we should maybe think about wrapping up the recording. Marielle, Is there anywhere where you'd like anybody to be able to reach you do you social media? I know it's not like professors aren't always amazing at that. I know neither are we, but sometimes we want to give people the opportunity.  Marielle  53:18   Yeah, I'm not great with social media, also not a professor. But what I would like to share is maybe, for when we published the study, we made a we, which was mostly Dina and Teague, while they were out in the field, together with film team, a video abstract. So if you want to have a little look more into what it looks like in that particular area, although that they made this in Kasanka  National Park in Zambia. But if you want to see a struggle at fruit bats and just how amazing it looks when you have hundreds of 1000s of bats flying out from a roost, then you should look,  Brian  53:52   oh, my goodness. So we would love, I mean, try to stop us. Show us the link. No, we will definitely share that. Man. We might, I might need to try to figure out if I because we do little videos that we put out for these episodes, I put them on, like, tick tock and stuff like that. Maybe I want to, like, edit in just the tiniest little clip of that. That would be fun. I might try. We'll see how that goes. Anyway. Okay, well, I'm really glad that you're able to find time to join us and talk about this, you know, unique game and this sort of unique link between a scientific study and a game. I guess with that, we're gonna wrap it up here. So I want to thank our listeners for tuning in, though, until next time, have a great month and great games, and as always, Jason  54:29   have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. This has been Brian  54:32   the gaming with Science Podcast, copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you, and have fun playing dice with the universe.  Transcribed by https://otter.ai  

#Harmonies #PlanetGame #Ecology #NichePartitioning #BoardGames #Science We have a short bonus episode today, going over two science-inspired games, Harmonies and Planet. Both of these games touch on ecology and what animals need in their environment, but in a very science-light manner. We talk about niche partitioning, compare and contrast the games, and even have a cool science fact about trees using lightning to kill their neighbors. Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 01:06 Trees weaponizing lightning 03:54 Harmonies overview 08:31 Planet overview 12:25 Compare and contrast 17:24 Humans and vertebrate bias 19:39 Niche specialization 22:53 No science grades 24:18 Fun grades Links Harmonies official site (Libellud) Planet official site (Blue Orange Games) Tonka bean trees survive lightning (LiveScience.com) Interview with Harmonies creator (Youtube, French) Translated and cleaned transcript Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Brian  0:05   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:11   In today's bonus episode, we're going to discuss harmonies by Libellud Jason  0:15   and planet by blue, orange games.  Brian  0:18   hey, I'm Brian.  Jason  0:19   This is Jason. Brian  0:20   It's just the two of us. Welcome to a bonus episode anyway. So we're supposed to take a break midway through the season, and we have this is  gonna be a bonus episode. It's gonna be a little weird. We're talking about two games today, harmonies and planet. These games are similar. I've decided that these games are, instead of being based on a true story, they're inspired by a true story. Both of these have a strong nature theme, but it you know, they weren't really trying to directly model anything in science. They just sort of did it by accident.  Jason  0:52   and they're both completely coincidentally French, Brian  0:56   and have a lot of other similarities too, in terms of overall mechanics and also having some some fun gimmicks associated with them, you actually have a science fact. So, you know, it's a bonus episode, but what's your science fact?  Jason  1:08   This was some research that came out about trees in the Panama rainforest. Relevant, because this is all about ecology and plants competing well. So it turns out that tall trees in the rainforest get struck by lightning a lot, and it's actually thought to be one of the major contributors to tree mortality, to killing the tall trees and then opening up space. Well, turns out there's this one species of tree called a tonka bean tree, that apparently just survives lightning unscathed.  Brian  1:35   What?  Jason  1:36   but lightning strikes kill all of the parasitic vines on it, or most of them, and a lot of it's nearby competitors, and so it may actually be using the lightning strikes as a way of gaining a competitive advantage. They did research over time, looking at looking exactly where lightning struck, looking at the trees before and after, looking at long historical records. And apparently, for other trees, being next to a tonka bean tree is actually a very high risk for mortality. You are likely to die next to one of them, presumably because getting struck by lightning and kind of using that to kill you. Brian  2:06   This is the strangest thing to imagine, having a selective advantage. This is so bizarre.  Brian  2:06   Well, think about it, though, like lightning generally strikes the tallest thing, and in a rainforest, it's always a game of trying to reach the light, and so lots of trees are benefited from getting really tall, but if a lightning strike comes by and hits you, then you're dead. And so I don't know, I think there's actually a decent selective advantage of like, Hey, if you can survive lightning, great. And then, because presumably, if you get struck by lightning, a lot of that current is going through whatever is nearby to you as well or touching you, then it may be able to clear off some of your competitors or parasites that aren't so adapted.  Jason  2:23   But? but how do? how do? How survive lightning? Jason  2:49   So the article I read, which I will link in the show notes, I think it's a hypothesis. I don't think they have the mechanism yet, but they hypothesize that the interior is like highly conductive, and so it conducts the electricity without really building up a lot of heat, which the heat happens because of resistance?  Brian  3:07   Yeah Jason  3:07    So if it conducts it well, then it's almost like an insulated wire, where the it's essentially grounding itself out. And so the heat that actually caused the damage to it doesn't build up, Brian  3:18   yeah, because it would like boil the sap and cause the tree to explode. So that doesn't happen, Jason  3:22   apparently, not now this is from the high level summary I read. So now that this is out, I'm sure that there will be lots of follow ups. They're already talking about looking at this in other systems where you have tall trees that dominate the ecosystem and all. So I'm sure there'll be much more data on this in the future. But for now, like they seem to have solid data that these things survive lightning strikes and other things that are nearby them, don't, holy Brian  3:42   holy crap. In Pokemon terms, this is now a lightning grass type,  Jason  3:47   apparently, yes, Brian  3:49   that's nuts. Wow, that's a great thank you for finding that. Fact  Jason  3:52   that's too cool to skip  Brian  3:53   Absolutely. Okay, so let's talk about these games for a little bit. We're going to try to keep this brief. I'm going to talk about harmonies first, and then Jason's going to talk about planet, and then we're going to kind of compare and contrast, talk about some things we like, maybe some things that we don't like. Harmonies sort of just fell out of nowhere. Last year. It wasn't on Kickstarter or anything like that. It just showed up in stores. My wife and I bought it on a whim. Also, did you know harmonies is ranked 85 on Board Game Geek? I did not. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's literally in the top 100 I think it has become my favorite game. I have probably played this game more than any other game on my shelf, and it is a French game. It's a French publisher. It is a French designing team. I usually try to do a little bit of research on these games to sort of get some context for this. I could not find an interview, except for some interviews in French to try to do research for this, I took the transcript of the French YouTube video which put that through Google Translate, and then got one of the generative AIs to try to clean up all of the translation artifacts to the point where I could actually read it. Jason  3:55   So at this point, you're reading more of an AI than you are the actual original transcript.  Brian  4:04   I mean, presumably, like, we do have one friend who speaks French, but I didn't get a chance to get her to, like, tell me how. Right or wrong. This was so I am kind of assume. I mean, it sounds okay, like, you know, it's, it's, it makes sense to me, and it seems like it's consistent with what's there. There wasn't, as far as I can tell from this interview, any specific intentionality in terms of reflecting particular biomes or or composition, or anything like that. Let me just talk about the game, because I haven't done that yet. So what you have is a little placement in front of you with a little hex grid. It's a 3d landscape building game. There's five different color these nice little chunky wooden tokens, and they're going to represent trees or mountains or rivers or water or Plains or cities. Take these little tiles and you kind of stack them up. So you're building little mountain ranges, or you're building little rivers or little planes or trees. Your trees actually come in two sections. There's both trunks and canopies, kind of like reminiscent of Earth. And what you're trying to do is create patterns on your little landscape that will fit these beautifully illustrated animal cards. So you'll draft an animal card and try to create the habitat that it needs. So for instance, it might need, like, a two tall mountain next to a river or something like that.  Jason  4:04   That's two, as in, t, w, o,  Brian  6:08   yes, two little mountain tiles on top of each other next to a river or a tree or something like that. You're building habitats for these little animals, and what you're trying to do is sort of fit them all together harmoniously to try to maximize how much habitat you can create for your different things. It's like turn based open drafting game. The cards are absolutely gorgeous. And actually, the one thing that did come out from the interview was that in some early phases, they were it was going to be much more abstract. It was just going to be a picture of the animal with maybe some sort of vague frame representing its habitat. But they didn't do that. They are these wonderful full color illustrations with these beautiful landscapes, with the animals sort of existing in its environment. So it's very evocative. There's 32 different animal cards. And then they also have these things called animal spirits, special animals, so like a mountain goat with some ridiculous, crazy horns or something like that. And those will sort of like change the way that the point system works. Like you'll get bonus points for building extra tall mountains if you're working with that particular animal spirit.  Jason  7:12   Yeah, if we were to extract these, those are basically your personal goals, yes, that you're aiming for the things that every player has one copy of this, which puts you towards something different, like when Brian I played this my my little spirit animal thing was something about mountains, and so I was just trying to get as many mountains as I could.  Brian  7:29   The way that you get points in the game is, again, you'll get points for creating habitats for your little animals. On your cards, you get points for your landscape itself. So for instance, you'll get points for having mountains in a chain. They have to be in a chain or they don't count. You'll get points for your little cities. They have to be two tall, and they have to be in harmony. So they have to be surrounded by at least three different types of tiles for them to count. Points for trees and stuff like that. But your tree has to have a canopy on top of it, otherwise it's a dead tree, and you don't get any points for dead trees. And then you'll get some additional bonus points based on your your animal spirit thing. And those have different you know, the extra points for usually, like a plain, you only get points for having, like, a group of two, anything more than that doesn't count. But the the lion animal spirit that sits right on the front box actually gives you extra points for having extra large plains. So that's harmonies. Uh, Jason, why don't you explain planet? by the way, planet was suggested to me by one of our listeners at Dragon Con. I'm sorry I don't have your name. If that was you, get on our Discord and let us know. Jason  8:30   Okay, so planet is by blue, orange games. It was designed by Urtis Sulinskas. I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that name who I could not find any information on but you can tell that this game is built around a central gimmick. It is also about creating habitat. But instead of having a flat player board, you actually have a dodecahedron, so a D12, a 12 sided object with a bunch of metal plates on each side. And you are placing these magnetic tiles on each one of those sides to build your planet up. So the game takes place over 12 turns. Each turn you place one of these little tiles. The tiles are laid out. You go in player order. You draft one. So the first player picks one out of the five available that turn. They pick which one they want, then the second player, then the third player, and so on. And as you're building it, you're trying to essentially recruit these animals. Again, very animal focused. Recruit the animals to your planet by meeting their condition. And their condition is usually either you have the biggest contiguous patch of whatever territory there is, so they have like ice and plains and desert and forest and mountain, I think so fairly similar to harmonies, you try to get the largest single patch, and usually has to be either the largest patch that is touching a specific other type of habitat or the largest patch that is not touching a specific other type of habitat, so the largest forest that is also touching some desert, or the largest ocean that is not touching ice. You can also just get ones that require the largest total little triangles that each one of these patches is in across your little world. And so as you go along, you start with a blank dodecahedron. First turn, you add one tile, then another, then another. Over the course, eventually you start recruiting animals. The animals give you points. And then there are some personal objectives where each person secretly has one of the types of territory, the water, the ice, the forest, that they are trying to get as many as they can, because that will give them bonus points. But there's this little tension in that you actually get more points for recruiting animals that are not part of your primary objective. There's a trade off. There is that if you go whole, like if I have forests, and I do only forests, as many as I can get, I'll probably actually get less points than if I diversified a bit and try to bring in some other animals at the end.  Brian  8:31   So you don't get as many points if you're building the forest moon of Endor.  Jason  10:50   No, no. Single biome. Planets don't get very far. Yeah. Anyway, the games for two to four players, they only have four dodecahedrons. You're kind of hard, limited at how many people can be part of it, and plays in about 20 to 30 minutes. It's actually a pretty fast game. It's won several awards for family games. So it's when we compare and contrast. This is definitely the simpler game, but it also seems to be aimed at a bit younger audience. This seems to be a game that is meant to be played if you have kids in like the eight to 12 range. Minimum age is eight, so something that a child could actually probably have a lot of fun with, because very tactile. You have your your little dodecedron You're putting tiles on. It's a very physical game that you're manipulating without super deep, complex rules, so that it's something that you could play as a family or with kids in a in a class, or niece, nephew, whatever, and be able to have fun with them and still have a decent amount of strategic depth.  Brian  11:42   The rules are really simple, uh, the little magnetic hexes. I know that you said that they've got triangles split up on them, so you kind of, if you like, draw a line across the center of it. Each edge will correspond to, like, one biome type, right? Jason  11:55    So, yeah, they're all pentagon shaped, and they're just five triangles glued, essentially stuck together into a pentagon, and some variation of things. I usually, we all know, saw like two or three different biomes on each of them, and there's definitely none that have only one, although it can be challenging late game when you have like, 80% of your planet filled up, and you're like, rotating around and trying to keep track of is this contiguous with this other part, and counting up all the triangles. And that part can get a little tricky, because I can't see all edges of my dodecahedron at the same time. So why don't Brian  12:25   we compare and contrast some of these games? What do you think we should do? Jason, what's the best way to start this discussion?  Jason  12:30   Well, let's start with what's the same so they're both drafting systems. So in harmonies, you draft the animals like the animals are out, and when it's your turn, you can choose an animal. You also get to choose which set of various tiles are out. So there's like five groups of three tiles, and you get to pick which one you want. Whereas planet, you're drafting the the ecosystem tiles. So each round there are five little pentagon tiles that you get to choose from. And so again, you go and turn order first player first, and you're picking which one. And then that rotates each time. So everyone has a chance of being first. So they've got the drafting mechanic in place. They also have you wanting to build specific arrangements of ecosystems or biomes, or whatever we want to call these things. In planet, it's usually just bigger, is usually better, although there is some stuff about what it is or is not touching. Whereas in harmonies, it's much smaller. It tends to do with like these two or three tiles that are next to each other need to have this specific arrangement. But it doesn't care about the overall shape of the of your island or your desert or whatever it is you're building on.  Brian  13:33   Something that's different about the games is because the difference in scale, right. in Planet, you're building an entire planet, which, you know, I mean, these planets clearly don't have, like, polar caps or whatever, but like that doesn't really matter.  Jason  13:35   Well, they do if you build one on there.  Brian  13:38   No, that's true. I mean, I guess you could try to build a polar cap, I don't think you'd do very well in terms of scoring the game if you did that, but you could do it in harmonies. The scale is a lot different. Like, it's not really clear what the scale is. One of them, it's like, you're sort of building an island. I think that's the easiest way to think about it. And it's like, it's not super clear how big the island is, but when you do think that, like one of your little tiles is supposed to correspond to a mountain, I feel like that's one of the best ways to kind of get a feel for scale. If this is a mountain and this is a section of river, then you're not putting down a tree. You're putting down a section, more like a section of forest, or like an area of forest. And one thing that we do have that's different in harmonies versus planet, is the existence of, like human structures, buildings are part of it. Then, as you're building, you're kind of building little mountain ranges and rivers. You're placing little towns or cities or forests. So you really start to get sort of a feel of, kind of like being down at the scale, sort of occupying this landscape that you're building. And in harmonies, the animals physically take up space. When you place your cube there, the animal is now in that space. And that's different in Planet, right?  Jason  13:32   Yeah, in planet, you're just collecting the cards. So you have the cards, you recruit it. Not sure what the metaphor is, because, like, if you look at this literally, like you're basically a bunch of nature Gods building planets and trying to recruit animals to live on your planet, as opposed to someone else's planet. So not exactly sure how that works, but eh, it's fine. That's just, we're not going to stretch the metaphor again. These are inspired by science, not actually based on science. Yeah, I guess it could be a sort of collective thing, of like you're deciding which one, which planet, the animal would be happiest on, and they get to put the animal there. Something in common, though, is the nature of the requirements. So the types of biomes and environments you have to build do make sense. So like in harmonies, like you'll say, Oh, the honeybee needs to have a plains next to a two tall tree. The honeybee actually lives on the tree, which was a little odd at first, but then you think about, like, Oh,  Jason  15:03   that's its hive.  Jason  15:18   The planes are like the opens area. Yes, it put the honeybees build their hives and trees, but it needs an open area with, like, wildflowers and stuff for it to actually forage in which forests are not good for that. Or I've got some stuff here in planet and, like, the narwhal, needs to have ice that is not connected to forest, so cold areas, which is where narwhals live, or giraffes are live based on the largest piece of sand you have that is next to forest. So they're kind of the open savanna area. It's like, there's only so much you can do with as simple characteristics they have here. But even though it still makes sense, you look at these like, okay, yeah, I can see kind of where the metaphor is, like, it kind of makes sense based on what it actually lives. On our planet.  Brian  16:23   In planet you're sort of building, presumably entire biomes. The simplest way to think about a biome is a combination of temperature and precipitation. Are the sort of things that determine sort of what can live there in terms of plant life, in terms of animal life, and it's sort of one of the ways that ecology kind of naturally partitions out is temperature and precipitation. Planet again, really strips it down to the bare basics, right?  Jason  16:46   Oh yeah. I mean, it only has five in the entire world that you're working with. So it takes a little bit of abstraction that you've got your water, your ice, your forest, your mountain, your desert, or sand, or whatever you want to call it very coarse grained there. But you could, you could, you could use some imagination and see a little bit more of that, Brian  17:03   whereas in harmonies, we're building, again, at a smaller scale, more like building an island or a landscape. So we're really, at that point, creating habitats, and I've tried to find some, like actual good dictionary definition of habitats. Like a habitat has to provide with the creature, with what it needs, in terms of food, water, shelter and space, it has to be able to complete its life cycle within that area. And one of the things we also get in harmonies that we don't have in Planet is that we have human built structures. And like nine of the 32 animals that are in the game and their habitat includes a building. So these would be things like squirrels or crows, things that do well around people. Jason  17:41   And I like that, because too often in these ecological conversations, we're talking is like, oh, like everything humans do is bad for the environment. And, okay, let's be honest, a lot of things we do is bad for the environment, but  Brian  17:52   a lot of things we do are bad.  Jason  17:53   Yes, a lot of things are, but they don't necessarily have to be. And then you can argue the point of harmonies is showing that it is possible to be in harmony with nature is that we can get what we need, and then other things can get what they need. And if you do it right, you can make it so everybody wins.  Brian  18:07   And the way that the game represents that for your city, for your building, to earn you points, it has to, again, be in harmony with nature. So how do we represent that? It means that the city has to be surrounded by three different types of tiles, so by a mountain, by a river, by a forest you can't build some. You know, huge metropolitan city where it's just city after city, building after building after building that won't earn you any points. You can do it. But basically, you are now not in harmony. You have not balanced your human buildings with the rest of nature. So it's kind of a fun way of playing with that metaphor as well. Humans get to be part of nature instead of separate from it. One of the things that we did notice about these games, and look, I 100% get it, it's fine. I understand this. These are both have this huge vertebrate bias in terms of what is represented in the game, most animals, most living animals, are, are bugs, right? Areinsects, or things like that, or arthropods. This is all vertebrates, with very few exceptions, all things with backbones in harmonies. There are in the main cards, there are out of 32 there's two insects, honeybees and ladybugs. Everything else is a vertebrate. What about in planet?  Jason  19:17   So we have three. We have jelly, jellyfish, octopi and scorpions.  Brian  19:21   So planet actually did better than harmonies with that. But I think, you know, maybe I don't know, there are some pretty charismatic insects in there. I did want to say, in the animal spirits, where, like, there's only 10 of those, you do have the dragonfly and a swallowtail butterfly. So we get, we get four insects total in the game. The rest are all vertebrates.  Jason  19:39   Well, let's talk a little bit about the science we can get out of this. Because there is, as you say, inspired by science and looking at these, the one that really comes to mind is like, okay, yes, ecology, but we already talked about general ecology with earth and such. It's really more the idea of, like niches, of an ecological niche, or niche, depending on how you want to pronounce it, that an organism in. Is occupying, and that basically just means, like this is its little specialized part of the world that it focuses on. Well, they're actually mostly defined by how they avoid competing with other things. So maybe you have animals that specialize at eating grass instead of broadleaf things, or maybe they specialize at leading eating the leaves that are, you know, less than two meters high, as opposed to, like a giraffe that eats the ones that are way up top into the tree tops. And so there's certain parts of their environment they're really good at exploiting, and there are other parts of the environment they don't bother with, which lets something else occupy that part of the environment. And so each of these animals has their own little habitat, their own little niche that they are as they're occupying. And really, if you look across the entire game, you have different animals that are trying to occupy different parts of the environment and different things that you're building together. What I especially like with harmonies is that part of the gameplay rewards you for finding animals that have complementary habitats, because, as Brian said, like when you place your little animal cube saying, hey, there's an animal here, you get points for that, but it only occupies one of the tile spaces, but usually requires at least two, sometimes three tile spaces in order to trigger that, leaving those other two open. So if you can find another animal that uses part of that and overlaps, then you can use that overlapping part to build its habitat and put it there. And so you can try to have complementary animals occupying your landscape, so that you get essentially as many of them in there as possible, while having a again harmonious existence, because they're all occupying different parts of the landscape. Brian  21:40   And I think harmonies represents niche, niche partitioning really well, actually, because of that exact reason, like the animal physically occupies space, and really only one animal can be on that tile, right? Whereas with planet, kind of, once you recruit your animals, they just kind of sit in a stack and you never think about it again, which is sort of a little different, unfortunately, Brian  22:00    yes, but there is the thing where, so the way you draft the animals, the animals, you see them all like lined out for the course of the game. So you know what's coming down. There's a variant rule where you don't but so you see what's happening. So you can build your planet saying, Hey, I'm not going to get anything this term, but I'm going to try to aim in three turns when I'm first player, I'm going to try to go for that Orca, which requires a large amount of ocean touching ice, so I'm going to make sure I have a really big ocean touching ice. But that decision means that, you know, two turns later, when there's something that needs a lot of ocean that does not touch ice, you're out of luck. And so there is a little bit of that habitat partitioning going on. It's less within your own little environment and more among the different planets that are being built. It's like by choosing to go after one particular setup, I am sort of cutting myself off from a different one, leaving someone else to take it and specialize that way. Brian  22:52   Let's jump into why we're not doing science grades. It's not that we couldn't, but just like we're now, I don't think we're going to, right? Jason  22:59   yeah probably not again these. I mean your your litmus test is, will people have some wrong idea about the science? I don't think it's deep enough to really merit that. My thing is, does it portray what it's trying to portray? Well, honestly, I think so yes, but they're not trying to portray too much. I think harmonies probably went deeper than planet on purpose, and I think they both hit kind of the level they were going at. But this is not a science game. This is not something from genius games or Elizabeth Hargrave where, like, the science is central to it. This is like, Oh, here's this metaphor from nature that we can take and we'll use that to make a fun game. Brian  23:34    I've been thinking about what it takes to make a hard science game. I don't think they sat down and did a ton of research on each of these 32 animals, how they would work together, and what their specific habitat requirements were. It's just sort of a, just a representation based on almost common knowledge about these things, although some of them are really cute, right? Like you said, with the honeybee having the tree surrounded by the by the field, it's, it's very evocative. It's very it's a great role play, to be able to to play harmonies and sort of place all of those things, but they weren't really trying to do science. And I don't think anybody's going to learn anything wrong from either of these games, right? Jason  24:10   I mean, the only way someone learns something wrong is if one of these has some habitat that doesn't make sense for its animal, and neither of us spotted anything like that. So I think. Brian  24:18   I think they're just fine. But let's talk about the fun. And we can talk about the fun, in this case, in terms of compare and contrast. Harmonies is my favorite game, also one of the only games I've ever beat Jason at. So that's interesting. But you know, since this is a bonus episode, it doesn't count. The thing that I like about harmonies is that you it's just just the right amount of sort of strategic balance. For me, you always feel like there's something that you can do that's helpful, right? You never feel like you're stuck with only bad choices, because even if you can't satisfy any of your animal habitats, you can work towards some kind of a landscape goal, like building up your mountain chain, or trying to build a city somewhere or something like that. Harmonies is an A+ for me. For fun. I would play this pretty much anytime. Planets, it has a great gimmick, and I agree with you that the rules were made simple on purpose to try to make it easier to play with kids. And it plays fast too, right? I mean, both of these games play fast, but planet plays really fast, particularly with only two people. There's not quite as many choices to make, and you do kind of end up feeling a little hamstrung by previous choices and what's in front of you. So if I have to choose between the two, I'm going to choose harmonies. I think planet, I'll probably give a B, because I think the gimmick of the three dimensional planet is the most appealing thing about it.  Jason  25:34   Yeah, I think mine will come out close. I think I give harmonies an A and planet, a B+ for basically the same reasons, and I don't want to knock on planet. It's like it is simple on purpose. It's simpler than I prefer. But this would be great to play with my nine year old. Like, I would love getting this out for a quick 20 minute game. And I think that would be perfect. And I would love doing that. I wouldn't necessarily pull it out with my peer group of adults who want to have some more strategic depth, but since it is aimed at a younger audience like I think it does that part very well. So it it almost, I'd almost give it a context dependent grade. given like, if I had my choice between this and Exploding Kittens, I would take this 100% of the time, guaranteed. So on the Exploding Kitten scale, me with my peers, okay, B+ me with my kids. A, I would go with it. I would definitely take this with my kids. I would love doing that.  Brian  26:27   The simplicity and the speed, you know, planet might actually be a good fit for a classroom. You already mentioned that, but I kind of think it's true for the I'm not sure what the best age would be. I feel like for an elementary school level, if you're having your ecology or your biome unit, planet, would probably be a nice supporting activity.  Jason  26:46   Yep, probably elementary school, maybe, maybe up to middle school. It may get a little too simple for them by the time you get into like, eighth or ninth grade. But no, I think it'll work. I mean, and honestly, even into high school, I think it would be, well, high school at that point becomes more fun than instructional. But yeah, elementary to middle school is probably the sweet spot there. Brian  27:02   All right. Well, thank you for joining us for our break bonus episode, thanks for tuning in. Have a great month and great games Jason  27:11   and have fun playing dice with universe, see ya.  Brian  27:14   This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we've talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.  Transcribed by https://otter.ai  

#PlanetX #PlanetaryScience #ExtrasolarPlanets #SolarSystemEvolution  #Telescopes #Observatories #ScienceGames #BoardGames #Science Overview We're going back into space this episode with The Search for Planet X, by Foxtrot Games and Renegade Game Studios. Join us with our guest, Addie Dove, planetary scientist and co-host of the Walkabout the Galaxy podcast, as we search for the mysterious Planet X while juggling the issues of scheduling telescope time, publishing papers, and attending conferences.  Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 03:02 - Space smells and asteroid threats 07:28 - Game overview 16:46 - What is Planet X? 20:22 - Hunting for things in our solar system 27:14 - What do we learn from planetary science? 31:56 - Extrasolar planets 38:03 - Logic rules and real bodies 43:39 - In-game publishing & real-world controveries 47:18 - Nitpick corner 50:17 - Final grades 55:49 - Wrap-up Links The Search for Planet X (Renegade Game Studios) Walkabout the Galaxy Podcast  Article on Planet X history (The Planetary Society)  Citronaut Dave (Addy's instagram) Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Unknown Speaker  0:00   Music. Brian  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:11   Today, we'll be talking about the search for Planet X by Fox Trot games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason,  Brian  0:20   this is Brian, Addie  0:22   and I'm Addie Dove.  Jason  0:23   All right, we have the inestimable, incorrigible Addie Dove, who told us just before recording, that she comes from the best podcast walk about the galaxy. Addie  0:33   I have the shirt on today too. Brian  0:35   Oh, cool,  Jason  0:36   which, sorry, listeners. We can't show you that. It's an audio podcast. You can look it up. I'm sure they have it for sale somewhere. Anyway, Addie, can you introduce yourself to our audience, let them know who you are and why you're on the show about finding Planet X. Addie  0:48   Happy to Yeah, hi. I'm Addie Dove. I'm a planetary scientist and physicist at the University of Central Florida. So My day job is that I do research understanding planetary surfaces. I study dust in space, so dust, specifically on the moon and asteroids, and how it behaves and how we understand it. I'm involved in a number of experimental projects and missions, and my favorite part about my research is that I've done things on on orbital assets, so on the ISS, on cube sats and on the vomit comet. So I've actually flown on the parabolic airplane flights.  Jason  1:25   Fun or, well, I don't know I've heard about the vomit comet, maybe not so fun, but it's fun.  Addie  1:31   I love it so much.  Jason  1:32   So you are an astro quark. That's what the host of the walk about the Galaxy podcast call themselves.  Addie  1:36   Yes, it is.  Brian  1:38   Yes. Are you bottom quark or charm? You are. Charm. Quark, Jason was right, He's right, Addie  1:45   Yeah. So we have strange and charm, and then we also have bottom. And lately, our newest Astro quark is down. So this is a, this is a clever name that we have because we're mostly astronomy folks, and it's astronomy podcast, and quarks are sort of like the fundamental units, right, of matter. And so there's strange charm, top bottom or truth and beauty, if you like those names a little bit better, instead of top and bottom, and then up and down. Brian  2:11   Truth and beauty are substitutes for which ones then? Addie  2:14   top and bottom.  Jason  2:15   Yeah, same initials, but more poetic, yes.  Okay, one of our quarks enjoys being beauty, not bottom.  Brian  2:22   So are you allowed to have more than six hosts? Then do you just have to nominate people on and kick people off?  Addie  2:29   We've had two tops technically. So as we've had people iterate through,  Jason  2:34   well, you can get someone to be the gluon, holding them together.  Addie  2:37   Yeah, exactly. And some quirks have lasted longer than others. So we've, we've had a couple of replacements, Jason  2:43   All right, well, I think that's already given us one fun science fact is the quarks in matter, but let's go on.  Brian  2:48   I guess it is.  Jason  2:49   We'd like to start with some fun science fact and Addie as our guest. You get priority. Is there something fun about science that you've learned or run across lately you want to share? Addie  2:58   Oh, man, let me go. Let me go. Second, I have to think about it a little bit Brian  3:02   more. Okay, then I will go first. But I think this is probably something you already know. So if you want to hop in, that's fine. So my challenge is always, how can I make this about onions in some weird way? So what does the moon smell like? I learned what the moon smells like from the people who have been there. And I know Addie, you definitely know this for the people who have been to the move lunar regolith smells like spent gunpowder, evidently, although it doesn't last, because when those samples were brought back to Earth, it's now odorless. So there's been some speculation about why it's like that. Now I have another question for you, Addy, I again, you probably already know the answer, so I'm going to make Jason guess we're going to do a stump question, like you guys do  Addie  3:40   a stumper, Brian  3:41    yeah, what astronomical body smells like a combination of cat urine, burnt matches, and rotten eggs? Jason  3:48   Okay, cat urine, burnt matches and rotten eggs. So cat urine is going to be like ammonia compounds, probably urea. Burnt matches is phosphorus and rotten eggs is sulfur. So we've got ammonia, phosphorus and sulfur, I'm going to guess IO Jupiter's volcanic Moon  Brian  4:05   comets stink like that, according to the organic molecule. So of the we've found organic molecules in lots of astronomical bodies in asteroids, in dust, yes, in planets, of course. But the missions that went to the asteroids picked up glycine, which is an amino acid. They also picked up hydrogen sulfide, which is one of the flavor components of onion. So if you were to have a human mission to an asteroid and go inside, it would smell really, really bad.  Addie  4:30   Oh yeah. I was trying to think, is it Titan? Is it Venus? Interesting? Okay, okay.  Jason  4:35   I mean, I guess you're protected by the spacesuit until you bring the samples inside with you, and then you've just contaminated your entire spaceship with rotten onion smell  Brian  4:44   and cat urine, Addie  4:48   which like future safe spaceships, maybe you're gonna smell like anyway, I can hope, in some ways.  Brian  4:54   So that was, that was my, that was my science fact, yeah. Comets smell bad.  Addie  5:01   I like it,  Jason  5:02   How about you addie, you come up with one? Addie  5:03   Yeah, I'm starting to think there's been a bunch of interesting JWST results out lately. So the James Webb Space Telescope, so I've been, I feel like a lot of my sort of like new science things are from that, but I don't know if they're facts. They're like new things we're seeing that are, that are sort of like blowing our mind, right?  Brian  5:19   Can I? Can I pitch something you guys were so excited about on your own podcast? Yes, you talk about here? Addie  5:24   sure. Brian  5:25    So there was that asteroid that we thought would hit the Earth, and now it's, oh, now it's gonna hit the moon, or at least there's a better chance it's gonna hit the moon, right?  Addie  5:33   Yeah. So there's an asteroid that's great. Yes, I love talking about YR4. So there's this asteroid, YR4 2024 YR4, which has to do with like when it was discovered, and what discovered it. And it's this like asteroid that has a very elliptical orbit. So it came near the earth back in 2024 and it's going to come back in 2028 and 2032 based on its orbit, we hadn't seen it before, and then we discovered it. And the predictions were that when it comes by in 2032 it was going to hit the Earth, and it was a 3% chance that it was going to hit the Earth, which is actually a staggeringly high percentage chance for asteroid encounters like we just that's the highest we've had in a really long time. But then we looked at it with more telescopes and got more data about it, and it's not going to hit the Earth, which is great in a lot of ways, but also kind of disappointing we get to study so much. Yeah,  Jason  5:36   How big is this asteroid?  Addie  5:46   It was, it's pretty small. So, like, it would, it would be something that, like, if it hit in a city, it would be really bad news. But like, statistically speaking, it would hit in the ocean, and we'd be able to, like, observe it coming in and see it disintegrating, and see the big splash. And it wouldn't be, it's not like a dinosaur killer asteroid. It was more of like a Tunguska event kind of thing, where it wipes out a big area, which is this old location that it hit. It was an old meteor that actually, like, sort of disintegrated in the atmosphere, and so it created a shock burst and leveled trees for miles, but didn't destroy anything. So probably something more like that. So now, so we don't think it's going to hit the Earth, but there's a small chance now that it might hit the moon, which is even which is kind of exciting. Jason  7:04   that I agree is going to be cool, because if we can see that and not be in any danger from it, that sounds great.  Addie  7:10   Exactly, right. Yeah, Brian  7:12   yeah. You guys were all bubbling with excitement about the idea that it might hit the moon, and what it would mean for study, like knowing it was going to happen, being able to point every telescope at the moon when this happened. Addie  7:21   for so long, and we'd see the impact and we'd learn a lot about it, and the moon so much data. Jason  7:28   All right. Well, let's segue onto this game, which also actually involves asteroids, not impactors, just trying to find them and point a bunch of telescopes at them. So game for today is the search for Planet X. So quick background. This is by Foxtrot games and Renegade games studios. I assume Foxtrot is like the creator of it, and Renegade is more the distributor of it. It's actually very highly rated. It's 107 on Board Game Geek overall. So 107 out of all the games there, which is actually really, really high basic stats, plays for one to four players. Again, the obligatory single player mode, about an hour run time, ages 13 plus, which, as we now know, means that they didn't test the pieces for safety for eating. So do not eat the pieces of this game. We don't know what will happen.  Brian  8:11   Yeah, something bad.  Jason  8:12   Retail Price is $45 currently on Renegade's site. And what does this game consist of? So this is a deduction game, which for having two of these in the past three episodes. I didn't know about this genre as a genre until earlier this year. So we when we're choosing these games, we don't choose them based off of the type of game. We choose them based off of the science and the field of science we're talking about. And so this is complete coincidence. We've had two out of the last three be the same genre, but the idea is similar to Turing machine. You are trying to find something out. In this case, it is the location of Planet X, which is this mysterious 10th planet in the solar system, maybe ninth. Now, due to Pluto getting demoted, you're trying to find it, and you're trying to figure out other things like asteroids and comets and gas clouds and their relationships to each other. So the board is this large, circular board that if you're playing normal mode, it has 12 sectors. If you're playing advanced mode, it has 18 sectors, and each sector has something in it. That something can be Planet X, or it could be asteroids or comets or gas clouds or a dwarf planet or nothing. Some of them are just empty. And the thing is, there are logic rules that control where certain things show up. So comets can only show up in sectors that are prime numbered. Dwarf Planets can't be next to a gas cloud or something like that. I don't remember what all the logic rules are, but they have logic rules that connect where certain things are in relationship to each other. And your job, you have a little these cute little telescope shaped meeples, which are actually based off of four real telescopes in the world that represent your players. And you're going around the circular track that represents time. And so the idea is that as you go around the track, you're doing one of several things. You are usually surveying the sky, looking for a certain type of object, or you are doing a targeted analysis, where you get a lot. Of data on one specific sector. Or you're doing research which doesn't tell you anything about the sky, but gives you some more logic rules that help you kind of figure out the relationships among individuals. Or you're trying to figure out you say where Planet X is, and importantly, to win, you have to know not only where Planet X is, but you also need to know its neighbors to the right and to the left. So you can't just guess randomly and hope to have it, the odds of that are just too small. And if you guess wrong, there's actually a significant time penalty in terms of moving your piece ahead. And so it's guessing is bad like guessing generally is a bad thing. Other various components of the game, there are little player screens that tell you all the logic rules. They actually have a clever little card insert that will replace the basic rules with the advanced rules. If you're playing the advanced version, it has the highest quality score pads I've ever seen. They're all in full color. There are four different ones for which side of the board you're sitting on, and they're front and back for basic and expert mode. So like, these are high quality stuff like I've I've never seen so much effort put into a score pad before. I was impressed.  Addie  11:00   They looked nice.  Jason  11:01   And then the one other thing in the box which I was not expecting is actually an advertisement for the Planetary Society, which is a non profit organization that funds space research. And I thought that was cool. I actually used to be part of the Planetary Society. I think I let my membership lapse a few years ago, sorry, Bill Nye, I need to start that up again. But I thought that was cool. The Planetary Society is doing a lot of good public science outreach, including on, I know asteroids that might impact Earth. That's one of their major things, is looking for potential impactors. Brian  11:29   Was there a deeper connection there, other than just like, this is something we want people to know about, or was the Planetary Society involved in the game in some way? Jason  11:37   I don't know if the Planetary Society was involved. They might have been consulted for it. I couldn't find any evidence that they were involved in the creation of the game. There is one other very important game component, though, that's not in the box, and that's the app. So if you remember from our discussion, from Turing Machine two episodes back, the whole thing is like, who has the information you're trying to get out? And that game trying to solve it by saying, Okay, we the game has the information, and we have these fiddly little boards with holes. This is how you get that information out of the game. The search for Planet X has the same ideas like the players don't have information the game does, but they just use an app to tell you where things are. Now, if you don't want to do that, there is actually a free download on their website where you can download a game master kit where you can have one of your friends play the role of the app. And essentially, you ask them questions, they give you answers, and you just really hope that they're right and they don't mess up, because if they do, they're gonna mess up your game. So I'd probably stick with the app, just because I trust the computer to not make a mistake. So that's basically the game. As you go around, you spend your turn making observations, doing research, different actions have different time costs, so you can actually take different number of turns over the course of the game. One kind of nice little aspect of the game I liked is that there's a little turn tracker thing that goes around the board that tells you which half of the sky is visible right now. Because the idea is that you're all astronomers making observations. You can only look at the side of the sky that is dark, the side that has the sun, you can't see anything. And so you can only make observations in the half of the sky that's currently dark, and as you move around, that position changes. And so it kind of limits what you're able to look you can't just look at any sector anytime. You have to think ahead of like, Oh, if I do this, suddenly these sectors will go away next turn. I can't do that. There are definitely times when Brian and I were playing that I made some choices based off of which sectors would appear or disappear, based off of what decisions I made on my turn.  Brian  13:26   and there were times that I made decisions that I ended up immediately regretting, because it's like, oh, well, now I can't get that piece of information. So we talk about when we play games, sometimes like Earth, where it's very fiddly, there's lots of little pieces to manage, lots of little cubes and cards and dice and everything else that you have to do. Search for Planet X is anti fiddly. This is the cleanest board game setup I've ever seen. It's a disc in the middle. It's your little meeples. It's just, I mean, and a lot of it's because you have to, you're handing your phone back and forth so that people can use the app in turn. But this game definitely leaves you with room for a bowl of chips.  Jason  14:00   Yeah, that's the thing. We have definitely had games where there is no chip room on the table afterwards. This one's fine. Addie  14:06    Oh no.  Jason  14:07   Possibly that simplicity is why they could splurge so much on the scorecards, is because there weren't a bunch of meeples and cubes and other things. So they could just make a really nice, printed scorecard. Brian  14:15   If they had to develop an app that could that must have cost something. Jason  14:19   True that probably cost a decent amount. Okay, yeah, you don't have to hand the phone around. If you all have the app, then you can just type in the random game code and it will give you the same game each time. But again, make sure you type in the right code, or else you're playing different games and it won't work.  Brian  14:33   Yeah, we actually did have to hand the phone around because I was using my phone to record us playing, so we couldn't do that.  Jason  14:39   So that's the idea of the game. It's actually, as Brian said, it's a fairly elegant game. I thought it was actually really fun playing. It's nice and simple, like, just try to find this thing. And there's one other part I forgot to mention, is as you go around the board and as the Earth is moving around, it triggers different things. It triggers what's called a theory phase, where, essentially you put out a publication saying, I think this item. Is in this sector, and it takes a few turns for that to work its way in and be revealed. And it's one of those interesting things where you get points for being right. You're penalized for being wrong. So you want to put it out, and you want to be right, but no matter what it is, you're giving information to your opponents, because if you're right, they suddenly know what's in that sector. If you're wrong, they know what's not in that sector. And so there's this little tension of, do I want the points, or do I want to keep that information to myself, but possibly be scooped by one of my opponents? And then there is also actually a Planet X conference event that happens when you reach a certain point, which there's nothing fancy about, you just learn a new logic rule about where Planet X is located, like it's not opposite an asteroid, or it's within three sectors of a comet or something like that. It's called a conference. You don't actually confer as a group, but it's a fun little thing that they put that in to kind of keep up the appearance of you're actually scientists doing scientific things like putting forth theories and publications and going to conferences. Brian  15:55   Yeah there was a keynote address, and everybody's like, looking at their own data. Now it's like, Oh, wait. How does this inform my logical deductions about which sector's actually empty? Addie  16:04   Yeah, I really appreciate, I mean, there's a lot of mechanics that we can, we can talk about, but I really appreciated some of those, like, additional features that sort of give you. There's like, oh, there's a community knowledge aspect, and then there's, yeah, you have to publish your results to get the points for them. It's so true to the scientific endeavor. Jason  16:22   It is. And that's the thing. Like, if you go into actual scientific fact, there's almost none in this game. I mean, there are logic rules of which things have to be next to each other. Maybe, well, maybe we can talk about that later. There's not that much science. And yet it feels like science, which is an interesting thing, yeah. And so now we're going to pivot to talking about that science, and maybe not so much the science in the game as the science that the game is representing. And so Addie, I have a very crucial critical question for you to start us off. What is Planet X and why haven't we found it yet?  Addie  16:54   Yeah, it's a trick question. So Planet X is, I guess, I would say the most recent incarnation is sort of this hypothetical planet, right? And even in the game, right? It's in a blank sector of space, and you're hypothesizing that it's there. And the most Yeah, so I said the most recent incarnation because there actually was, think when, oh, man, I'm totally blanking on his name right now, when Lowell was looking for something that was like Neptune.  Jason  17:22   Percival, Lowell? Addie  17:23    Percival Lowell, sorry, was first looking for another planet that would sort of explain irregularities in Uranus and Neptune's orbits they called sort of a companion planet, Planet X. So they ended up finding Pluto, which actually didn't explain the irregularities that they were looking for because it needed to be something with a higher mass. So that's sort of, I think, where the name potentially comes from. And so in the in the most recent incarnation, there's sort of this hypothetical planet X or Planet Nine, or, I don't know, we've called it Egotron A few times on our podcast, and there's other fun names that you can come up with for it.  Brian  17:59   Why is it egotron?  Addie  18:00   Why don't even entirely remember the the full etymology of that name, but it has to do with the fact that, like sometimes when people are saying these things about discovering planets, it has to do with egos. But I think that there's additional etymology to it that I have to would like go back in the catalog and remember why we called it that. Okay, Jason  18:20   I assumed it had something to do with Unicron from Transformers The ego, doesn't Addie  18:24   it doesn't. You have to. I think if for our podcast, you probably have to assume some sort of Star Trek reference. But I actually don't think there is one for this. So, so Planet X or Planet Nine is a, is a hypothesized additional planet that is sort of Neptune sized, that is far, far out beyond Pluto's orbit. So this is the planet that would be in the outer solar system, and it would have to be like, really far out. We think that it's there potentially, based on a number of lines of evidence. And this is one of the fun things about the existence or non existence of it is there's different hypotheses. And we trade, that the community trades papers about whether or not it exists based on new observations all the time. And so the original observations are based on some dynamical observations of smaller bodies in the solar system. So there's a couple of astronomers, including Mike Brown, the Pluto killer, who have have had some observations of a bunch of other small bodies that are further out in the solar system that sort of have these interesting groupings dynamically. So like, if you look in in space and you're just looking out, they sort of okay, they're distributed. But if you plot them in interesting ways, they sort of group together. And so that could potentially be to the existence, due to the existence, of another large Neptuneish sized body that influences the gravity and gravitational perturbations of those planets. And so that's some of the original observations. And I think that was in like 2019 that sort of inspired this. There's some other folks who have said, like, well, those orbits that they're on could happen due to these other reasons also. And there's also. So other things that would happen if you had something that large out there. So where's the observations for that? And then there's been some more recent observations. It's like, Nope, it probably is there, because this other line of evidence. So there's been really interesting sort of training of why we think it might be out there. If it's out there, it's really far out so it's hard to see. But if it's as large as Neptune, there should be some observational evidence of it so, but we haven't directly ever observed it.  Jason  20:22   That was going to be my next question, actually, is, if we're when we're looking for this or for other bodies out there, how do we go about looking for them? Like, what do we use to try to spy new bodies? I know the Hubble Space Telescope, I imagine it's not used for planet hunting, but what do we use?  Addie  20:37   Yeah, so when we're looking for planets in our own solar system, or planets and other solar systems, or other planetary systems, we often use indirect observation techniques. So we look at the wobble of a star, for instance, when we're finding extra solar planets, where we see that like we were looking at a star, very bright object. You can see it from really far away, right? So we can observe it from here on earth, from the ground, with our little ground based telescopes in the game even. And we say we can see something that's out there. We can see this star, but it's it's orbit actually maybe wobbles. So that has to do with, like, gravitational tugs. So like, Jupiter actually tugs our Sun, and it sort of wobbles if we were observing it from outside the solar system. So other large planets do that to their stars also, and we've detected a lot of extra solar planets from that wobble. You can also do transit techniques, where a planet will go in front of a star and then the light blinks right. And so that's what Kepler is really well known for, the Kepler space telescope. And so where there's several of those sort of indirect techniques. For planets in our solar system and for asteroids and comets in our solar system, sometimes we do have direct observations. So we see them by either staring a long time into one part of the sky, which I think is one of the techniques you can use in the game, sort of like look, do a deep search in that part of the sky, right? And then you see, like, does something come across my telescope in that time, right? Or you can sort of be scanning all the time. So we have some telescopes on Earth that are like Pan-STARRS. As one example, it's located in Hawaii. That just does, like, sort of observations of large portions of the sky night after night after night, and then you look for changes over night after night to see if we discover new objects,  Brian  22:12   like planets are hard to see, right? I mean, I remember when, when New Horizons went out to Pluto. It's like the best picture we had with Hubble of Pluto was terrible. Addie  22:21   So most of the sort of canonical planets, right? The traditional eight planets are observable from ground based telescopes and even like binoculars, mostly right. Mercury is very difficult because it's very tiny and very close to the sun, but you can, sort of, you can see them as points of light in the sky. Pluto very, very challenging to see, even with ground based telescopes. The best one we had for a long time was from the Hubble Space Telescope. And even it was not very resolved, so it just sort of looked like a fuzzy blob. It wasn't until we got better, better imaging from that. And then, like you said, New Horizons got out there, and we were like, Oh, wait, this is a full geologically active planetary body. So they are especially when they're as far out as Neptune or Pluto, they're very hard to observe. Just because it's dim out there. Planets don't emit their own light, so the only way we detect them is from these gravitational techniques or from reflected light, right? And the sun is very dim the further out you get. And so it takes a lot of staring at an object for a long time to get to collect enough light that's been reflected back from it.  Jason  23:24   Okay, so is it mostly visible light? Or can we also use, I know, radio, infrared or other stuff, to try to see these things? Addie  23:31   Sure. Yeah, most of what we think about when we think about looking at these objects is visible light. I know a lot of our ground based telescopes are in the visible part of the spectrum, because that's what gets through our atmosphere. You get a lot of really interesting information. Interesting information about other planets from infrared. So that tells you about the heat that's being emitted and different cloud layers. On Jupiter, for instance, we learn about that in the infrared, but that's hard to do from the ground, because our atmosphere blocks a lot of that infrared light from coming into ground based telescopes. So you have to do space based telescopes for those observations, and then, like UV light also, yeah, there's a lot of really interesting information that comes from the UV but we have to again, thanks, ozone layer actually, right? We like that for our skin cells and everything, but and our DNA, but not for not so much for observing. So like those kinds of telescopes we typically have to put in space, there's really interesting data that can come from radio a lot of asteroids, for instance, and things we've detected we used to detect with the Arecibo observatory. So that was bouncing radio waves off of things, and you can use that to detect objects as well. Brian  24:34   I'm picturing some kind of malevolent AI astronomer bot who wants to eliminate the ozone layer and the atmosphere so that they can get a cleaner view of space. Addie  24:45   That's right, astronomers are always like "atmosphere!". I was shaking my fist for the listeners.  Jason  24:52   I was actually wondering about that, because with visible light, one thing I've heard just kind of scrolling through science news, is that a lot of astronomers are concerned with the number of satellites we're sending up, especially these giant arrays of like Starlink, where there's like 10s of 1000s of satellites that are all reflecting light down to us, and they're making these streaks across the telescopes. How is that affecting observations and stuff, and how can we get around? Because I don't think they're going to take it down internet access, global internet access, anytime soon. So what is the astronomy field doing to adjust? Addie  25:20   Yeah, it's challenging. So that's one of those things that like, yeah, what is the the greater good? And all sorts of arguments you can make there. Astronomers are always getting mad about things getting in our light. Just turn off all the lights all the time too, by the way. So it's challenging. It does show up in a lot like so Starlink and other constellations, right? That there's more and more of them do show up in observations and do create streaks across images. The worst time is if you're observing, sort of around sunrise and sunset, because the satellites sort of glint the most during those observation conditions. So like, if you're not observing, then the statistically, you have fewer of these streaks if you are, they show up. There should, in theory, be ways to remove them pretty easily from the data, like, they're pretty obvious, and there's usually several sets of them that go through an image, but if they happen to go right in front of the object, you're trying to view bad news, right? And as they're become more and more and more of them, it just it makes it more challenging to do the observations that you intend. Brian  26:17   And we're getting, like, SpaceX photo bombed?  Addie  26:20   Yeah, there's a lot of photo bombing.  Jason  26:22   Yeah, I almost wonder. That sounds like the sort of thing that AI would actually be a good use for is that, as you're recording the data, instead of just putting it all in a single image, like you stream it through, it's like, oh, that's a satellite going through. I'm just gonna, like, remove that part of it, and so it doesn't get saved in the final image or whatever. Addie  26:38   Yeah. And I mean, astronomers have had to do a lot of image processing and removal of of streaks and things like that for a long time, right? So that kind of stuff is like, especially because they're relatively they're going to be linear features, they're pretty easy to like detect. So even without AI, there are techniques to remove those types of things. I think it's, yeah, it's something that you have to have adaptive versions of your analysis pipelines to be able to handle some of this stuff. I don't, I mean, and I think that's going to be the solution, right? I don't think, yeah, like you said, I don't think we're not going to have these satellite constellations so or more space based telescopes. So those are way more expensive and so,  Jason  27:14   so I then want to zoom back a little bit, even from from this specifically, but talking about planetary science, people have been staring at the planets for 1000s of years. We've been using telescopes on them for hundreds of years. What's it for? What are we pulling out of planetary science that is worth pouring all this time and energy and papers and conferences and all sorts of stuff to try to find stuff on these planets?  Addie  27:38   What? What is it for? That's a great that's a great question. I think. I mean, so planetary science is, for a lot of us and for a lot of people, is about understanding the Earth's place in the universe. So planetary scientists are typically studying other planets in order to understand things about those other planets, but also to understand the basics of how those planets formed and how the solar system formed, and how the earth came to be, and why all of these things are like they are right now, to understand, like, how the earth came to be and how life came to be. A lot of it is just sort of a really innate curiosity, I think, about the universe, right that drives us to be astronomers and planetary scientists, the same as a lot of scientists are just sort of innately curious about the things around them. And so I think that, like, how that's expressed then becomes, like, this thing that is studying planetary bodies, or planetary bodies in our solar system, or in extra solar systems. And yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to, like, why are we here now, in this place in the universe, and how did we come to be here? And what is that, and how might we evolve? Right? Because we can learn a lot about the evolution of planets and the evolution of stars and planetary systems by looking at our own and then at others. Jason  28:48   Yeah. Actually, I was on a road trip with my daughter this past week, and due to some podcasts we were listening to, we ended up talking about the Drake Equation,  Brian  28:55   yeah, yeah,  Jason  28:56   which is, is basically our place in the universe, and how special are we? Like, What's the odds that we would contact another alien race, essentially, that is at a similar technological level, and has all these factors of like, okay, the number of stars in the universe, the number of stars that are kind of like our Sun, that could host life, the ones that have planets, the ones that have planets in that the right spot, and so on and so forth. Like all these different terms. And so far, no one knows the answer to most of those. So it seems like, while the purpose of it is not to fill out, that I don't think the Drake Equation motivates many people. It seems like it's that same idea of like, figuring out where we fit, for lack of better word, how special are we, and trying to to keep that in perspective, which I feel like the thread of science for the past 500 years has basically been keeping us humble and pointing out that we are less and less and less the center of the universe that we thought we were. Addie  29:46   Right, we're definitely trending that direction. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's funny because yeah, the Drake Equation is always a fun one to think about. And like so Frank Drake came up with it in like, the 60s, I think, and it was this sort of, yeah. A statistical probabilistic argument about what the number of civilizations might be, right? And there's occasionally people propose a new term to add to the equation, but like, when he proposed it, we had very we had almost no information about any of the variables that he included in the equation. And so, like, it could be one, right? It's an N, where N could be one. It could just be us, but it has to do with, like, the number of stars in the galaxy. And so every time we discover new things, the statistics about how many planets there are out there, and how many planets there are around stars, right? Like all of that's happened in the last two decades, and that's really given us a lot more knowledge about how to sort of fill out that equation. But there's always this question of, like, how many of those actually have life, and how long does life and civilization last on a planet? And then also, like, if it exists on a planet, how does it move away from that planet? And like, that's another thing. That's the aspect of my interest is in exploration, right? So if we understand how what it's like on the moon or on Mars, and how do we go there as a civilization also, and sort of expand our presence in space, I think that's an ongoing driving theme as well. Jason  31:03   Yeah, we've actually done two previous games on space exploration and colonization, Terraforming Mars and stellar horizons. Addie  31:10   I love Terraforming Mars.  Brian  31:11   Do you love stellar horizons?  Addie  31:13   I've never played that one.  Brian  31:14   Okay, well, set aside a weekend because the full campaign takes how long to play full eight hours. Eight hours.  Addie  31:21   Oh man, it's longer than Mars.  Brian  31:23   Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. Because in stellar horizons, each turn is a year, and you play through 200 years or so, you only get your funding every ten. You get your funding every decade, which certainly feels very real right now. Yeah I should say, too soon. Jason  31:39   So if any of you listeners haven't listened to that, you can go ahead, go ahead go ahead back and listen to that. We have a NASA engineer on talking about that, but for now, we're sticking with searching for Planet X and yes, Addie, when I asked you about planetary science and getting information, I was kind of implicitly talking about the planets in our solar system. But you mentioned studying extra solar planets. What information can we get from them? Like, what data can we get about something that, as I understand it, is not even a pinprick of light in our telescopes. What can we get from it when we try to find them and look at them? Addie  32:08   Yeah, increasingly, when we talk about planetary science, we do talk about extrasolar planets, right? And planets around other stars, and part of that is those of us who study rocky planetary bodies or bodies in the inner solar system, typically, like those are very specific ones that are close to the sun and like the Earth and Mars and Venus, right? But then we, when we talk about those, we also include things like moons of outer planets. Now, sometimes in those discussions, like I mentioned earlier, Titan is this really crazy moon around Saturn that has a really thick atmosphere, and it has like weather processes similar to the earth, but, like, the rocks are basically ices instead of rock material, right? So it's really interesting to think about, like, what other sort of potentially places we could go, or where life could exist, or where we could go and have habitats might exist in our solar system. And so I'm coming back to your question, which is, like when we're studying other planetary systems that are very far away, right? They're around other stars, they're very far away, we get a lot of secondary information. So I was talking about earlier, the different ways we detect them, is by indirect methods for wobble or transit, but we are increasingly being able to get more direct methods. So if you have the transit method, and there's like an atmosphere of the planet, as the planet goes in front of the star, some of the light from the star goes through the atmosphere, and then you can actually measure spectroscopically some of the some of the constituents of the atmosphere. So you can actually get information about the atmospheres. You can get better information about the sizes of those planets. And so these things all tell us about, like, how many planets are there around other stars, and what's the chemistry of those planets, and do they have atmospheres, or are they rocky? And so all of that can tell us again, about, like, how unique the evolution of our solar system has been. And like, 15 years ago, so when I was in so N years ago, when I was in undergrad, right? We actually didn't have a lot of extrasolar planets we've detected yet. And even, like, 15 years ago, when we'd just been starting to detect them, we're like, okay, these are all weird sort of configurations we're discovering. Like, we're discovering Jupiter-sized planets that are close in and Jupiter-sized planets that are, like, at the location of Earth, right? And like, those are all super weird, but it's because that's the type of thing we can detect. Like it's easier to detect those things. That's not like representative. But as it turns out, as we've discovered 1000s and 1000s of extra solar systems, the like configurations of those planetary systems is statistically not like our configuration in our solar system. So all of our like ideas we've had for I don't know, 60 years about how our solar system is shaped and evolved have had to be restructured in light of these other observations to think like, why is our solar system configuration so unique, and how has it maybe changed throughout the evolution of the solar system to be the configuration we see today, and how would that have affected nacent life on early planetary bodies and how they evolve. That's interesting to think about, because again, there's this trending of assuming that we are very typical, we are very average, we are very bland. Because that has been the pattern of science as we have gone, is that there is nothing particularly special about us. But as we're learning more about solar systems, that's not exactly true. Our solar system is a little weird, or at least a little atypical. Yeah it is. It's super atypical. And, like, we still have some observational biases. Like, it's still really hard to find, like, an earth around another star because it's small, so like, it's not you're not going to be able to directly detect it, but also, it's small, so it's not going to cause its star to wobble very much, right? So there's a lot of biases against detecting those things, but we're still seeing, like, way more planets close in. Like, large planets close in than these large planets close out. And we have enough data now to be able to detecting more of those. So it's really interesting. And I think, yeah, there's, like, the cosmological principle, and I think we apply that in other things too. Is like, remember making these assumptions. You have to assume that, like, you're not observing a special place or a special time, because that it makes it hard to like, make broader assumptions about the thing and like and extend those observations. But it does turn out that, like, some parts of where we are in the solar system are special, and some parts about the evolution of our solar system are special. And like, how does that apply to then one of the variables in the Drake equation, right? How does that apply to us understanding, like, how unique we are and how unique the evolution of life is. Jason  36:23   Hey and you talked about the evolution of our solar system, you can maybe answer something. I have heard that according to recent models, the idea is that originally, Jupiter and Saturn were in the opposite order. Is that true?  Brian  36:36   What? Addie  36:38   Yes, yes. And like Uranus and Neptune, we're in totally different places too. Yeah, so there's this, there's these fun sets of models called the Nice model, but it's nice France, so it looks like the Nice model, and it's a very nice model. Yeah, those jokes are probably a decade old now,  Brian  36:55   not to us! Addie  36:56   So that model, yay. So that model has and then there's a newer one called the Grand tack. But anyway, they're dynamical models of like the evolution of the solar system. And the current configuration of the solar system is pretty stable, like things aren't moving around very much, but probably way back in the past, things were in different orders, and like Uranus and Neptune were closer in, and Saturn and Jupiter could have been switched. And then due to gravitational interactions, they like, sort of tug at each other, and they would have, like, caused one to sort of move in and one to move out. And then this also scattered a lot of asteroids out to further out in the solar system. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Brian  37:36   Oh, man, all my mnemonics are going to have to change based on the model. You can't be "My Very Energetic Mother", and then everything else is out of order. Addie  37:43   I know.  Brian  37:43   Oh, geez,  Addie  37:44   I know. And then the whole system's out of order. Jason  37:47   I'm pretty sure your mnemonics have been valid for at least the past 2 billion years. Brian  37:51   OK, all right, fair enough. Addie  37:53   It's been a long time. And actually part of this ties to like the cratering we see on the moon and when that happened. And so there's some interesting, very close in ties to this evidence for that,  Jason  38:03   Addie I've got a question on some of the logic rules here in the game, because they have rules about what shows up where, and I don't know if any of these represent are somehow reflecting reality, like comets can only show up in prime numbered sectors, but I think just means they can only show up some places, but not others. Yeah, or a gas cloud has to be next to empty space. Or asteroids always appear in clumps. Do these reflect the way our the solar system is actually laid out?  Addie  38:29   Yeah, first of all, I don't know why there are glass gas clouds. What is that? I don't know why there are gas clouds in our solar system. That one seemed a little strange to me. There's so many types of objects you could have picked, but Brian  38:39   What should they have picked? What should they have picked? We're almost doing our nitpick corner. What would have been better than gas clouds? Addie  38:44   Oh, I don't, I guess I don't fully understand what they're supposed to represent. So I don't know. Brian  38:49   I hear about clouds of gas being things that exist out in the world, but not in a solar system. Usually, all the gas should be in planets and stuff, right? Addie  38:56   Yeah, there's gas on like, there's clouds on planets, and there's gas in planets, and then there are like, gas clouds and molecular clouds and things like that out in the broader galaxy. But, yeah, we don't know, like gas clouds, per se, there are dust clouds,  you could call them dust clouds, So asteroids, I think I understand. So asteroids, there's like the asteroid belt, right, which is in between Mars and Jupiter, and there's like, sort of other groupings of asteroid-like objects that tend to be sort of dynamically grouped together, so in the same sort of place in the solar system. And that has to do with, like, probably how they were formed, and how they broke up from an object and then sort of stayed together. So like, I can, kind of, I can kind of see that rule, I think that's supposed to represent maybe, like the asteroid belt, or like asteroid families, because we do have families of asteroids that we call them. For the comets. Comets come from further out in the solar system, typically, and they have long orbits, and there's different sort of types of things. So maybe that that represents that they can only, yeah, I don't know that we only see them periodically. Right? So like, maybe something like that. You can think of like Halley's comet as the one we think of. It comes by every 86 years or whatever, right? Because they go really far out in the solar system, and they come close in. Maybe it has something to do with that. They're only in prime numbered spots. There's fewer of them.  Brian  40:15   It's interesting that we actually didn't even, and I mean, not that you would have to know this, but when we played this other deduction game. They wouldn't use something like, Oh, it must be in a prime number, because they weren't assuming that people knew what that is, right?  Addie  40:28   Oh wow.  Jason  40:29   Well, this one is easy on the scorecard. They don't print a commet unless it can actually show up there, so I guess they could control that. Brian  40:35   Yeah, it's not like design. I'm not assuming people we did have a discussion about whether or not two is a prime number. You remember asking,  Addie  40:42   oh, Jason  40:43   Two is a prime number. And the last one is that a dwarf planet can't be next to Planet X, and that's part of what you have to use to figure out where Planet X is in the game. Does that reflect like this grouping of planets that you say, some people are using to say where Planet X is, like, would it have, like, gobbled it up, or, like, cleared its orbit, or, Brian  41:05   yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. If we, if we find a Neptune like object, is it going to be a planet or not? Addie  41:14   If we find a Neptune sized object far out in the solar system, it would most likely be a planet. by the current definition, I'm using air quotes, for definition, even it's a terrible definition. I'm fine with Pluto not being a planet, but I still hate the definition. Anyway. That's my take on that, so I think that would make sense. So part of what the deal is with Planet X is that it's like there are some gaps in where we don't see some of these small objects further out in the solar system. And there are certain like arrangements of some of the dwarf planets we have discovered. And so part of the hypothesis for Planet X is the reason there you see those things the way they are is because of the gravity of this larger planet is sort of pushing them into those locations. So I am okay with that rule. Brian  42:03   Can we talk about the dwarf planet definition and how you don't like it, or do you not want to talk about it anymore? No, I'm happy to talk about because our last episode, we had a bunch of controversy too. So evidently, this is the, this is the controversial season of gaming with science.  Addie  42:17   I love it. Yeah. So the, the IAU definition of like, what is a planet, right? Has these like, different things. So there's it has to be spherical. So it has to be, like, large enough to sort of make its shape spherical. And that has to do with, like, basically how big it is. And then there's this other sort of, much more controversial rule about it has to have cleared its orbit. And so that's like, sort of a dynamical argument of like, where it's going in space, and there aren't a lot of other things right in that in the same orbit. Doesn't make any sense. That's a dumb rule, because, like, Neptune and Pluto's orbits cross, and there's lots of these other, like, types of objects in both of those orbits, and there's lots of other objects in Jupiter's orbit. There's other things in our orbit. So, like, there's, it's just not a great definition. There probably should be some sort of, like geological definition, potentially, of a planet. Or there's lots of other ways you could go. And there's other other definitions that have been proposed. But I think the idea of having, like, sort of canonical planets, and then dwarf planets and sort of having some size differentiators is fine. We have different types of bodies of water right on the earth, and there are different classifications for, like, rivers and streams and things like that, right? So, like, there could be sort of these different definitions, and I think that's fine. And you have Pluto in the Plutinos which is also a great band name. So there's, there can be a little bit more nuance, or, like, uncertainty and nomenclature, I think. Jason  43:39   so, last thing I want to cover about the game here is the aspect of the doing science it covers. So like the you put forth the theories, and Brian had determined that the fact that you put down a theory, but then it takes like, two or three turns for it to work its way towards the center, and you actually see what it is that's peer review.  Brian  43:56   That's peer review  Jason  43:56   it's like the peer reviewers are doing it, and the  Addie  44:01   reviewer number two! Jason  44:02   yes, yeah. See our previous episode on Publish or Perish. So yeah, but the interesting thing is that just like real science, it rewards you for being first. So if you're the first person to publish that and get it right, you get a bonus point at the end of the game. If your paper is essentially in peer review at that time, you still get points, but after it's revealed, you don't get any points for saying it again. Because I it again, because, like, that's already no no one cares about you, like you saying I have rediscovered Mars, it's like that doesn't do anything, Addie  44:31   although people rediscover water on Mars all the time. Brian  44:33   Yeah that's true. You get to put it in your annual performance review. There you go. I complain about this. And I did complain about it when we talked about publish or perish, and I complain about it in general, science is supposed to be repeatable. If somebody discovers the same thing using a different line of evidence, that's a good thing. That means that the system is working. Yeah, so, but you're right. There is this priority. It's like they don't get to be the one to name it. That's just the fact that it's a human. Jobness being on top of the scientific endeavor, right?  Jason  45:04   Maybe. But my question is, like in the planetary science field, like, what are the current arguments that are going back and forth in the literature, where people are pushing one way or another, that things haven't been settled? You mentioned that the existence of Planet X is one of them where people argue for or against it based off certain evidence. What other stuff is out there right now that's being debated? Addie  45:25   Ooh fun question. All so many things. It's funny, like we have all of this information, but like every time we have new planetary missions, right, it opens up new questions and opens up new debates about things. One of the big ones that's been, I actually haven't seen an update on this in a little while, but that's been going around the last few years. Few years is this question of, like, sort of life producing products in Venus, on Venus and in Venus's atmosphere. That was a popular one for a while. So there was this paper that was published that there was phosphine, which is a specific type of molecule in Venus's atmosphere. Remember that? And the big thing about big thing about that, right was that it's probably produced by biological compounds. Like, it has to be a biologic origin. There had to be something biologic producing it, yes, so this was the paper, but there's been all these other things since then, of like, oh well, there's all these abiotic ways to make it. Or maybe that's not a detection of that line that you think it is. It's like a because it was a spectroscopy, so it was a specific line and an observation. And so like, maybe it was, you're looking at, actually a different line, it was a different molecule, right? So there's been a fun, a lot of fun back and forth about that. And, like, if there's life on Venus recently, that's been a fun one. There's a lot of hypotheses for, so I study the Moon a lot these days. There's a lot of different hypotheses for, like, how different things formed in different places on the moon, and what that tells us about, like, the history of the Moon's evolution, and also the Earth's evolution. And so those are always really interesting, I think, like, yeah, this big question about, like, are there other large planets out, further out in the solar system? Is going to be one we keep having? And then also, like, sort of the astronomical scale, there's all there's all these questions of, like, what is dark matter, and what are, what is dark energy, and what do those things tell us about the evolution of the universe? Big questions that have a lot of, like, different hypotheses that sort of come bubble up to the surface every now and then and get pushed back down, and then another one bubbles up. All right, well, Jason  47:18   we need to start wrapping it up. So, Brian, you like doing the nitpick corner. So do you have any nitpicks about this? There's not that much science in this two pick. Brian  47:27   I do have a nitpick, and it is as you are proposing your theory, and it advances through the peer review process, and then it gets flipped over. It's always correct. It's just, you know, as it goes through peer review, it is now the truth and it will reflect the truth, and that's all that there is to it. So, so that's my science nitpick.  Jason  47:46   Well, I guess, yeah, in reality, we don't have an omniscient app that we can just ask if we got it right. That would actually make our jobs a lot easier. Brian  47:52   Yeah, it would be great if we just had an app that had all the answers. My gaming nitpick is not even in a gaming nitpick, it's just the the truth of any kind of logical deduction game, the first time you make a mistake, you're screwed. Jason  48:06   Yeah, you cross something off in the wrong in the wrong region. Brian  48:08   I did something in the wrong place, in the wrong time. And it's like, technically, if you're really careful, and if you're really diligent about how you've coded all of your all your information, you could go back and figure out, back out again in single player mode, sure, but if you're actually playing with other people, you don't have time to go back and be like re logicing All of your logic. So that's just, you know, again, another example of me being bad at games. So Jason  48:30   the scorecard actually has space for you to record all your moves and all your opponents moves. If somehow you have the brain space to be able to think what they're trying to deduce, too. I, I don't know how people can do that, but congratulations to you if you can.  Addie  48:43   Well, it's nice to kind of have a place to write it down, actually, because a lot of times you're sort of trying to keep track of those things in your head. So it is kind of nice to have a place to write it down,  Brian  48:51   for sure.  Jason  48:51   I don't have nit picks. There's not much science to pick at in this game. And I actually really enjoyed it. I thought it was quite well put together. Brian  48:58   I guess we already know Addie's. There's no gas clouds in the solar system. Addie  49:02   My nit was the gas clouds. Jason  49:05   From here on out, whenever we play, they are dust clouds. We find dust clouds out in the solar system. Yes,  Brian  49:10   or hey, what else should it be? I mean, if there's something else it should be, we're just going to print up new cards and it'll just be, Addie  49:16   well, I love Yeah, I don't know. I'll think about it.  Brian  49:19   Egotron radiation. Addie  49:22   yeah. Oh, you could have, yeah, you could have, like, solar wind plasma or something.  Brian  49:26   OK that sounds cool. I think that one of the things is that, like, that's probably for, you know, people like myself, I wouldn't really know the difference between solar wind plasma and a gas cloud. I would assume that they were the same thing.  Jason  49:37   aren't they the same thing?  Addie  49:39   Oh, no, no. Jason  49:41   See what happens when you ask a biologist space questions? Brian  49:44   Well, every time you're saying evolution, I'm having to recalibrate my brain. It's like, okay, not that kind of, yeah, it's a different type of evolution. But no, I mean different type. I kind of appreciate that. The challenge is, they were trying to use stuff in the solar system that is hard to see, hard to observe. Right? So, but that people would also know, so I think that's why we ended up with gas clouds.  Addie  50:06   Probably, yeah,  Brian  50:07   but they're, they're cool with people knowing what Prime numbers are, but they're not going to say plasma, Addie  50:11   right, or different types of radiation. Jason  50:17   All right? Well, let's go on the grading. So we're all university professors here, Addy, you can participate or not if you want, but we like giving a letter grade for just how well did it do for the fun and how well for the science? Let's start with science, since that's what you're just talking about. Brian standing on your plasma clouds and peer review and everything, what would you give this for the science? Brian  50:35   Let me think. Let me think. Let me think. Let me think. So. My biggest concern is, are you going to come away with something fundamentally wrong from the way that the science is being depicted in this game. I don't think you will. I think like this one sort of, again, leans a little bit more towards the process and a little bit less towards the like, okay, asteroids are not going to be necessarily be found right next to each other. I don't have a problem with a B. Does anybody think I'm being too harsh? Am I going to get a request for a regrade. If I give this a B, should this be a B+?  Jason  51:04   I was going to put forth a B plus. Okay, similar things in that there's not, it's not trying to convey a bunch of science fact, but there's all those little things It didn't have to do, like the whole the papers and the peer review and the conferences and stuff. Those help make it feel like science. And so I want to bump it up a little bit for that,  Brian  51:23   modeling the little meeples after actual telescopes, making sure that the night sky had to move and that you couldn't observe everything at the same time, which makes it very tactical, but also brings in this not realism, but because you can't do realism, but a fun metaphor for what you're actually trying to do. Addie  51:41   Yeah, I think even, like, the turn mechanics, right, where they it took, it took different amounts of time to do different types of observations and like that would give you different amounts of information. I think that that added, like, an interesting realism to, like how long it takes to do science,  Jason  51:56   oh, yeah, and how you have to declare what you're doing to everyone, because Brian  51:58    you got to book that telescope time.  Jason  52:00   Yeah, you're booking the telescope time. I was actually just looking at the board to see if there were any actual constellations on the background. I couldn't spot any. So I think it's just an artistic star background. But that would have been cool if they put a few of those into All right? What about gameplay? So I guess I'll go first. Addie, you didn't have a chance to play this, right? You were able to watch some actual plays and stuff. Yeah, it Addie  52:20   looks fun. I would like to play it. I'm gonna try to find a if I can find it around here somewhere. Brian  52:25   I'm sorry we didn't get to play. I was in Florida, but our schedules just did not align. Addie  52:30   Yeah, that would have been fun.  Jason  52:31   Appropriate enough. It's only when the planets align we're actually able to play a game with someone. Sorry, I couldn't pass that up.  Brian  52:38   Addie, Are you cool with the B+, because I had one of my, uh, somebody listened to the podcast, I got a comment that said that we didn't let the guest give a grade last time we had a guest on not on purpose. But I think the conversation just moved away from it.  Addie  52:52   I think I'm okay with a B+. I also don't have, like, the grading scale, right? So fine with with this be that being a B+ Brian  53:00   okay, yeah, we definitely do great inflation. We start at a B, and you could do better or worse than that. Jason  53:06   Okay, all right, so fun. I'll take the lead on this. And I thought this was really fun. I actually really enjoyed playing it. I think the little fun science touches were good. I think the play balance of like, Oh, I'm using this many turns and trying to find things, it just felt fun. And this is weird, because last time we when we talked about Turing machine, we talked about going for the pure mathematical abstraction and not skinning something else on top of it. And this is the complete opposite. This has totally been skinned about science and finding things that has nothing to do with the logic rules behind it. And yet I found it really fun. I actually found it more fun than Turing machine, I think because it resonated with me of like, Oh, I'm hunting for this thing, and there's comets and asteroids and stuff, rather than this logic rule about triangles and squares being more than circles or something like that. So I'm gonna give it an A like, this is a game I would gladly play again. So I definitely give it an A, A minus at the lowest, it's Brian  53:56   Addie. You didn't get a chance to play, so I guess you're gonna abstain. I haven't Addie  53:59   Okay. Mine's a pending. I Brian  54:02   have an incomplete grade. Okay, all right, Addie  54:04   I'll have to update it next semester. Okay, oh, Brian  54:07   Jason, this is hard because I crapped out at the game like I screwed it up. So maybe, maybe I'm gonna give it a B, because I want to give it another try. And I actually do legitimately feel bad, because we were very complimentary about what Turing machine did. It's like, oh, it's just pure deduction. It's just a puzzle. But you're right. It's so much more fun if you get to pretend that you're doing something. The role play is so much more fun to be. Like, well, I am an astronomer looking for a planet. Now I'm going to publish that information. Jason  54:36   I respect the people who did Turing machine for making that choice, and I think for what they wanted to do, it was the right choice. I enjoyed this one more. And I think for this game, it was the right choice, like they wanted it to be fun. And I mean, it seems to have worked, like I said, 107 on Board Game Geek, they've seemed to have cracked the code to get a really high ranking deduction game.  Brian  54:55   And where is Turing machine on that ranking? Not that I want to apply appeal to the masses to see which game is. Better, but I am curious. Jason  55:01   Let me look that up. Okay, I think Turing Machine probably has a much smaller distribution, so I don't know that that's necessarily fair.  Brian  55:08   and Turing machine also has a very ardent group of supporters. Jason  55:13   Okay, Turing machine is 324, okay, so lower, but actually not that much lower, yeah, like when you're talking about the 10s of 1000s of games on Board Game Geek anywhere in the top 500 to 1000 I consider good. So, yeah, Turing machine is also up there.  Brian  55:27   OK, now I'm curious if there anyway, this is, this will be extra credit. I'll see if there are any deduction games that are higher on the list that we haven't looked at yet.  Jason  55:35   Yeah, they probably have nothing to do with science, unfortunately. Yeah, so we can't talk about them. Nope. They're both, at least on this podcast, Brian  55:41   until we have that like gaming without science bonus episode that we've been talking about. Jason  55:49   All right? Well, I think we're going to wrap it up there. Addie, if people want to look you up, where can they find you?  Addie  55:54   You can find me on Walkabout the galaxy, or wherever you get your podcasts or walkaboutthegalaxy.com, you can also find me at the University of Central Florida. And let's see, I'm on Instagram as Astro Addy. And I also have a mascot that has an Instagram. He's his name is Citronaut, underscore Dave, C, i, t, r, o, n, a, U, T, underscore Dave. And he goes to space and does fun space things, so he's fun to follow too. Brian  56:22   Like for like for realies. Like he really goes to space? Oh, she's going to fetch something. Awwe,  Addie  56:28   Dave, Jason  56:30   we're looking to a cute little stuffed green faced person. Yes, I'll see if I can find a picture that I can link in the show notes. But otherwise, look up Astro Addy on Instagram, and hopefully she has a link to Citronaut, Dave, Citronaut Dave and I have to ask, so your Instagram is basically consists of cool pictures of planets and stuff? Addie  56:48   No, that's actually my personal Instagram, and it consists of not a lot of things, because I don't use it very often Citronaut Dave's Instagram is much better because it consists of the my space flight projects.  Jason  57:01   Okay, I was asking because my family's card against humanity, one of the cards is cool pictures of planets and stuff. And I was hoping I could connect another game. Oh, well, all right, we should probably wrap this up before it goes completely off the rails.  Brian  57:15   Where the heck is the stock outro that I wrote? Where is it? I don't know where I left it. Do you know where it is? Jason  57:19    I'm looking at it.  Brian  57:19   Okay, good, good, good look. We could never end the episode properly, so we actually finally wrote it down, and now I don't know where it is. Jason  57:21   OK So thank you, Addie, so much for coming on. Hopefully we get to see you at Dragon Con again, if you're gonna be there again this year. And with that, we're gonna wrap it up. So thank you everyone for listening. Have a great month and great games Brian  57:42   and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya,  Jason  57:44   this has been the gaming with Science Podcast, copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to game with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.  

#Undergrove #AEGGames #mushrooms #fungi #mycorrhizae #mothertree #BoardGames #Science Summary Join us for a trip belowground as we explore Undergrove, a game about mushrooms and nutrient networks by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootten. We cover some basics of fungal biology, how and why these fungi form partnerships with trees, and the controversial idea of a "mother tree" selectively nourishing its seedlings through these networks. Timestamps 00:20 Introductions 02:33 Killer vines and efficient fungi 07:20 Game overview 17:30 What are fungi? 20:56 Different types of mycorrhizae 27:48 Nutrient exchange 30:45 The mother tree controversy 41:32 Nitpick corner 45:57 Grades 56:09 Avatar inspiration 58:04 Final thoughts Links Undergrove (Official Site) Lovevine parasitizing wasp galls (Current Biology) And Youtube video Massive mycorrhizae network experiment  (Nature) Ze Frank does slime molds (Youtube)  Finding The Mother Tree (Wikipedia) Suzanne Simard's TED talk (TED.com)  Point-by-point rebuttal (UCD Dublin; requires submitting information)  Another rebuttal (Scientific American)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net    This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:05   Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.  Brian  0:11   Today we're going to discuss Undergrove by AEG. Hey, how's it going? Welcome back to Gaming with Science. I'm Brian.  Jason  0:23   This is Jason Anny  0:24   And I'm Anny. Brian  0:25   Anny, how's it going? We've been talking about trying to get you on literally forever, and we finally found a good game to do it. Can you introduce yourself?  Anny  0:32   Yeah. My name is Anny Chung. I'm an associate professor in Plant Biology and Plant Pathology at the University of Georgia, I would classify myself as an ecologist. And what I usually am interested in is the ecology of plants and microbes that interact with plants, usually below ground, which is very appropriate for this game.  Brian  0:54   Anny's a fancy professor. She has an endowment. She's the Haynes. What is it? The Haynes professor for underground ecology, or below ground ecology.  Anny  1:02   It's very specific. I stumbled into it. But the, I think the full title is The Haynes Endowed Professor for below-ground botany, so specifically only below ground. Yeah, I don't get to do anything above ground. Brian  1:19   You have a counterpart who does the above ground stuff Anny  1:21   I do have a counterpart, Megan de Marsh, who is the above ground botany person. Brian  1:28   anyway. Well, your research is really cool, and I'm really glad to have you on. I know that you've said that you are not a card carrying mycologist, but I also know that you study fungi a lot more than most people that I know. For someone who is not a card carrying mycologist, I know it's a big part of your work. Speaker 1  1:42   Yeah, and that is right, in terms of the microbes that we do study below ground. My lab focuses on fungi, quite a lot more than we do bacteria. But yeah, I think the reason I say that I'm not a card carrying mycologist is that, that was never a part of my formal training, as I was doing my degrees coming into this position, but a lot of our work does involve fungi, and I do like them a lot.  Brian  2:07   Well, that's fine, Jason and I like bacteria, but you're still allowed anyway. Okay, so before we get into talking about Undergrove, and I am very excited to talk about it, because this is, this might be a spicy conversation. I did a little bit more research on this, and this is, there's some controversy here. Controversy can lead to fun conversations about sort of science and metaphor and how we communicate science. I think that's definitely part of this. But let's talk about some other science for a bit. So Anny, we usually send this to the guests first. Do you have an interesting science fact you'd like to share with our dear listeners? , Anny  2:42   yeah since you did tell me that you were gonna ask me this question, and I actually did, recently find out something super cool, and so a colleague of mine at Rice University recently published a short little correspondence in Current Biology where he and his students found an instance of a plant in some way eating an insect. And so this is a parasitic plant that usually parasitizes oaks, I believe. And this same oak is also parasitized by gall forming wasps. And so what they found is that this parasitic plant also actively parasitizes the galls that have the wasps in them and kills the Wasp, which is really cool. It's like a reversal of what you would imagine, you know, normally think of as trophic levels. Brian  3:30   So this is not a carnivorous plant, per se, but this is a plant eating a plant that is being parasitized by an insect, Anny  3:37   yeah, and it's while doing so also killing the insect. It's pretty cool. Jason  3:42    Is it getting nutrients out of that? Like, does it kill the insect? Does it? Does it seek out the galls? So, because the insect has, like, extra nitrogen or something in it,  Anny  3:50   so I don't think they actually have evidence of that yet. I'm sure he's working on it. This is, I think, just to get the phenomenon out. In the paper they do say that generally, where this parasitic plant attaches is not where galls frequently form on these trees, and so they're using that as evidence to say that, hey, these parasitic plants are maybe actively seeking out galls when they do happen, because that's not a normal attachment place for them. Brian  4:19   What is the parasitic plant? Is it one that we would have heard of before?  Anny  4:22   It's called a love vine.  Brian  4:24   A love vine, what a nice term for a parasite. Anny  4:28   The genus name is Cassythia, or Cassytha actually, Brian  4:32   okay, well, we will definitely drop this into the show notes for sure, so that people can check it out.  Anny  4:36   Fun little paper.  Brian  4:38   All right. Jason, did you something you wanted to share, too. Jason  4:41   I did. So I was looking up some things that might be relevant to this, and found that just a few months ago, there was a group in Europe that published on mycorrhizae, which are the fungi that we're gonna be talking about a lot. And they were trying to study how they grow their underground networks efficiently. Because we'll talk more about this later. But basically, these type of fungi, they send all these thin little networks of of hyphae, their cells out through the soil to get nutrients and stuff. But that takes a lot of energy. And so how do they do it well.  And so what they did, they had this really cool setup where they had the fungi these mycorrhizae growing in petri dishes, lots of them. And like, half the petri dish was just the fungus. Half also had some roots that they could colonize. And they had a robotic a robotic camera set up to take pictures of this automatically. And so they could scan this and automatically detect all the junctions and the way they formed and the way nutrients were flowing inside the hyphae. And they got, like, half a million junction points, they're able to catalog and study and be able to figure out, essentially, the rules of building a mycorrhizal network underground so that it functions well, okay, which is impressive for something that, I mean, it has no nervous system. It's just a fungus growing through the soil looking for nutrients. Brian  5:57   I've seen really cool, like time lapses, like Ze Frank did a thing on slime mold. Slime molds are not fungi, by the way, but of them basically like solving and recreating, like a map of the Japanese subway system. And ants can do stuff like this too. But I've never heard of anyone doing this in three dimensions. Jason  6:14   Well, this is on the petri dish, so still probably only two dimensional. Okay, so, but three dimensions would be very cool. Yeah. Anny  6:21   So I read that paper when it came out to it made quite a splash. It's very exciting. And I think one of the main one of the main labs that developed the study, or like was driving this study, I think they have these really cool systems where you can actually grow this specific type of mycorrhizal fungi, which usually cannot grow without a host on a petri dish, which, in and of itself is like a pretty difficult thing to do. And the fact that they were able to do all of this at such scale and then collaborate with another lab to develop this, like robotic imaging technology and like the algorithms to go through all of that imaging data is really cool.  Brian  6:58   Okay, so there's a bunch of different innovations. First of all, just growing the organism at all is kind of a big deal. Anny  7:04   Yeah. I mean, we've known how to do that, but it's hard. Okay, yeah.  Brian  7:08   All right, that's very cool. Well, thank you. Uh, should we talk about undergrove? What do you think  Jason  7:13   No, let's pick a different game. I think that would be better. Brian  7:15   Okay All right, um, let's talk about, I just got the fox experiment. Do you want to talk about that instead? So undergrove is a game that came out recently. It is published by a duo of Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootten. So Elizabeth Hargrave, we've talked about before, the lead designer of wingspan, which we can never get through an episode without talking about wingspan in terms of how it's revolutionized, sort of the science board game space in a meaningful way.  Jason  7:45   It wasn't even our fault last time we didn't say it at all, Steven brought it up and still mentioned wingspan. Brian  7:50   I know we just, we just, we're never gonna get away from wingspan, and I don't have a problem with that. But undergrowth is a game that I have been hyped for for a year. It's the first game that was coming out. It's like, I have to get this. I was excited to see it on Kickstarter. Elizabeth Hargrave of wingspan fame and Mark Wootton, this is the second game they've done. They did another game for AG, called mariposas, which is about the monarch butterfly migration. It is for one to four players, which all of these games have single player mode now, for 10 and up, which now we know means that they had to test to make sure that the pieces are not toxic for children to eat. 60 to 90 minutes, which How long did it take when we played? Because we actually had the convenience of being able to play together, which is always nice, Anny  8:30   I don't think that it took 90 minutes.  Brian  8:32   No, maybe that's for slow players.  Jason  8:34   I think the 60 to 90 minutes was about right. And especially if you have four players, it's going to take longer.  Anny  8:39   Yeah, that's true Brian  8:40   for sure. So what does this game look like? So the game has a series of 48 mushroom tiles, very specifically, mushroom tiles with just the above ground portions of the fungi. They seem to have been arbitrarily divided up into four different color groups. They're beautifully illustrated. They have, you know, little abilities on them, which we'll get into in a second.  Jason  9:01   They did actually divide it in a rational way. I found the designer diary. So it's based off of whether they have like, pores, which is the one with all the little dots, okay, whether they have a ring around their stalk, which is the one that's the cap, a cap without rings, I think. And then yeah, and then everything else. Anny  9:18   Okay. So it is based on like, morphology and identifiable features.  Brian  9:23   I'm glad to see that they did that, because, again, you know, with wingspan, there was that deep connection between abilities and actual biology. So they did split them up in some way that made sense. Yes, okay, so you the goal of the game is to lay these mushroom tiles out into a grid. You're kind of building your forest, and at each place where four tiles connect, there's a little round hole where you can put your little baby tree seedling, because in this game, you are playing as a mature Douglas fir tree. Each of the mushrooms will have different abilities on them, and as long as you have a little tiny root touching the fungi, you'll have the ability to use those abilities, and the fungi will let you collect nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium. As a plant yourself you generate carbon through photosynthesis, and a lot of the game is about sort of paying the fungi carbon to activate their ability. So you give them carbon and they will allow you to collect the other resources. The other conceit of the game is that those little seedlings are then able to,you're really only lending the fungi the carbon, like you will put the carbon out onto the fungi, and then the seedlings will say, Okay, I will take that back again. And they suck the carbon back up onto the seedling, so when they've accumulated enough, they sprout into a tree. You'll score points based on the points values of your different mushrooms and the ones that are touching roots with roots on the different mushrooms. Tracking of the game is done by how often do you absorb carbon? Every time you absorb carbon, you move up this little track. There's little benefits. When you get to the end of the track, you'll trigger the end game. And like a lot of these games, there's also sort of a public goals card based on weird things like, Do you how many trees do you have in a row, or how many different types of fungi are you interacting with, or or things like that, and like Earth and like a lot of games where plants are the focus, of course, they put animals only on those public goal cards, because animals are not really important to the bulk of what we're going to be talking about today. Jason  11:15   So it's just, it's like, it's a splash image.  Brian  11:17   It has a splash image. There's nothing to do with mechanics. It's just the one thing where they actually bother putting animals into the game, is there something that's tangential to the main focus of the game. Which I don't have any problem with that, right?  Jason  11:30   We talk about people, how people are blind to the plants and the fungi into the world, like it's okay to flip that around every now and then. It's like the animals can be the side show for a little bit. Brian  11:37   It's a beautiful game. The components are lovely. The little cardboard tokens are wonderful. The illustrations are lovely as well.  Jason  11:45   Well, one aspect of the game is that it's essentially, it's a resource management game, slash engine builder game, so you're trying to accumulate resources, you're trying to drive them in certain directions. You're trying to build your trees. All of this requires resources which are pretty scarce, I would say, based on how we played, like, we were always like, I always need more of something. Like, there's never a point. I was just like, rolling in resources and was fine with that. And then the engine building is kind of odd. It's like, it builds itself as an engine builder. And I felt that was weird, because I never really felt I got an engine going. But looking over the designer diary, apparently the idea is that you your engine. It's a slow engine. It rolls over several turns. So like, this turn, I do this, next turn, I do this. Next turn, I do this. That's my engine, okay? Because I'm more used to things where it's like, okay, I assemble bunch of things, and this turn, I just fire off, and that's my engine. So it's a, it's more of a slow roll engine, Brian  12:37   okay, that kind of makes sense. And I can kind of see that how it's like you have to run through multiple turns to run through the all the different actions. Talking about the resource being limited, I always feel like there's five different things that you can do in the game. In terms of actions, you can sprout a seedling. You can grow roots onto different mushrooms. Both of those, if you pay extra you can place a new mushroom tile to do something. Let's see those two of them. You can activate abilities on the mushrooms that are out there to get them to pull in stuff for you, you can absorb carbon. And then the last action, which always feels terrible, is photosynthesis, which, as a plant seems weird, because you always feel like, well, I don't really want to photosynthesize. That's so boring.  Anny  13:18   Yeah, it feels like you're wasting, you're wasting an action by photosynthesizing, which was something that I observed as well, because like that should just be happening by default, right? Brian  13:30   Yeah. I mean to be you should just be generating a little bit of carbon all the time, right? Yeah, instead of having to make a point of doing it,  Jason  13:36   apparently it was like that one of the early versions of the game, and then they changed it, and I don't remember why, or if they even mentioned why. So you mentioned the what the resources are. So we've mentioned carbon.  Brian  13:46   Carbon are little black circles, which sort of distinguishes them from the three different cubes. Now we've talked about soil fertility, at least in terms of agriculture, as being based on potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen, right? So you've got three different colored cubes that indicate those three different resources. And a lot of times cubes can be spent to do like, every time you want to place a mushroom, you just have to pay an extra cube. You've got to put some of your resources out to say, like, hey, fungi come out and come out and play. Nitrogen is sort of the weird how do they do this? It's like they explained this in the book. I think they said that phosphorus is important for seeds and you need potassium to, like, pay for moving nutrients around, nitrogen you use for, like, literally everything which kind of is reflected in the game. Because nitrogen is, like the most generic currency you can use it to pay for just about anything.  Anny  14:37   What, can I say one thing about the design of the game that I really kind of enjoyed, please is actually the color of the resources, because, well, at least for carbon and nitrogen, they reflect the most common colors that people use when, you know, when in Ecosystem Science, when people talk about carbon cycling, nitrogen cycling. A lot of times they are always black and blue and just kind of in the convention. So it kind of tickled me that that was those were the colors in the game as well.  Brian  15:07   I'm not sure why they used purple and orange for the other two. Though that's a little odd, because I don't think that's part of convention, but I actually never checked, Anny  15:14   yeah, it's beautiful, but yeah, those two I feel like aren't quite as convention.  Brian  15:20   This is one of these games where I feel like, when you're just playing on a regular table, you never feel like you have enough space for all the bits and pieces. It doesn't matter how big your table is. You always feel like something is in the way, and they never give a place where you're supposed to put a bowl of chips. Jason  15:34   Yeah, well, I will say, especially because you're building a common playing board, especially if you set it up without that in mind, you're not going to leave enough space around the edges as your mushroom board grows out bigger and bigger and bigger in potentially like very random directions, depending on how people want to lay things out and how people want to isolate themselves from other people. Brian  15:52   I think that pretty much covers it for the game. As you move up the carbon track, you'll get little benefits for doing so as you go up things, it's like, Hey, have a free nitrogen here. Get a free route, stuff like that, just like rewards for moving up that track. Yeah, Jason  16:05   I think a key part is that at the end of the game, it's a point scoring game, and your goal is to get as many points as possible. You get points based on your little seedlings, and you only get points based on the mushrooms they have roots on, and then also how robust your seedling is, like how much carbon is absorbed. So if you have only one carbon on it, you can only score one of the plant, one of the mushrooms it has a root on even if it has on all four it's touching. If it has two carbons, you do two as three, it turns into a tree. You can do them all. So there's a high incentive to turn something into a tree, because then every root that it has manages to score points at the end. And the different mushrooms are worth different points. And some of them are straightforward, like, Oh, this is worth two points. And some of them are more tricky, like, Oh, this is worth one point for every similar mushroom that is touching it, or this one. And when you use it, you can cache a resource on and it's worth two points for every cached resource and stuff. So there's a few different ways around there, plus there's some the bonus goals and some things you can pick up along the way. But that's it mostly  Brian  16:59   the points are actually indicated by pine cones. So I guess it's a it's a gentle nod to reproductive success. Jason  17:07   Well, I think in this game, they'd be a fir cone, wouldn't they? Brian  17:10   Ah, yes, you're right, of course, a cone. Sorry, but yeah. Basically, the the the you're going to get more points if you have a more robust mycorrhizal network with more trees in it, right? Okay, so, so that's the game. And we've talked about this a little bit, but I think we should talk about the science. So there was an old system. It's actually probably, I don't know, people probably still learn this, the whole five Kingdom systems for life. So everything that's microscopic gets split off into two kingdoms, the Monera and the protist. And we're not going to talk about those. Everything that you can see fall either into animals, plants or fungi, right? So, and I think that that's we don't use that system anymore, because the sort of phylo--, we know that there's a lot more diversity in the microscopic. And actually, everything you can see is this tiny, little iceberg tip sitting at the peak of like everything that has a nucleus all the eukaryotic cells. But what distinguishes fungi from plants? What what makes a fungi distinct from a plant from an animal?  Anny  18:15   Well so there are a couple of different things, right? Um, so we think of when we think about plant cells and animal cells, a big thing we talk about is the fact that their cell structures are very different, and that it is that is the same for fungal cells as well. Right? Fungi have very different cell wall structure compared to plant cells. That's one thing a lot of folks bring up, and also they just grow very differently. They have very different reproductive life cycles, and they form hyphae, instead of the kinds of root like structures that we think of plants as forming. What else Brian  18:53   so hyphy is just like a ones. It's like a hyphy is just like a single cell filament, right? One cell thick and just a long, thin strand, yeah.  Anny  19:04   And they can be, you know, Septate or aseptate. So whether there's actually any divisions between the cells, right? So, fun fact, for arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, a lot of them just have nuclei floating around all over the place Brian  19:18   Just one big cell with lots of nuclei in it,  Anny  19:21   kind of, yeah, right. So there's no, like, nice division separating one nucleus per cell, sort of situation. You just got nuclei flowing all over the place.  Brian  19:31   So let's see if we had to drill down to the bare basics, like animal cells, no cell walls. Plant cells have cell walls. They have got cellulose in them, and most of them can do photosynthesis, so they're going to use sun energy to go under. This is the problem with biology, right? There are exceptions. Fungi have rigid cell walls and they have chitin in them. They actually the same kind of polymer you'd have in an insect or an arthropod exoskeleton. They use in their cell walls, and they do not do  photosynthesis.  Anny  20:00   They do not okay. And they're mostly, they're all heterotrophic,  Brian  20:05   meaning they they in the same way that animals have to eat plants, fungi have to also eat plants and other things. They don't make their own energy. They have to break it down, yep, okay.  Anny  20:14   Some fungi form relationships with plants in this, like, very physically entwined way. And these are fungi we called mycorrhizas. And there's actually a whole lot of different types of mycorrhizae. The ones that are kind of modeled in the game are a type called ectomycorrhizae. And so these are the types of fungi that form mycorrhizas, with generally trees, often gymnosperm trees, but also some other trees as well.  Jason  20:47   So gymnosperms are kind of like your pines, your firs, the things that form cones, as opposed to things that form flowers, Anny  20:54   the things that form cones. Yep, that's right. Brian  20:56   So, and let's also break down the term Ecto, mycorrhiza. So Ecto would mean outside. And what's, what's the best thing for Ecto that we would have? Unfortunately, I think everybody thinks ectoplasm, but I don't know if there's a better thing that we could use that sort of helps people remember Ecto meaning outside. Any ideas. The only other thing I'm thinking is ectotherm, and that doesn't really help very much. Ectotherm would be for cold blooded animals, but heated from the outside. Anny  21:22   Yeah. Well, they rely on outside forces to regulate their temperature. Well, that's the kind of way to think about it, I suppose.  Brian  21:29   But so and they're called Ecto because there's, again, like Anny said, there's several different types of mycorrhizae. Some of them will actually send structures literally inside the plant cell itself. They will form structures across the plasma membrane inside but ectos Don't do that. Their relationship sort of ends at the plant cell wall. They actually don't send things inside the cells  Anny  21:49   well, so Okay, so that's not actually fully correct Brian  21:53   no? Okay, tell me Anny  21:55   so that is the really kind of confusing part about the name Ecto mycorrhiza, because they do actually penetrate inside the plant root, right? They don't just stay outside the plant root. Brian  22:06   But do they get past the plasma membrane? Do they actually send things inside the cells?  Anny  22:11   They don't usually send things inside the cell, so they go kind of in between the cells and form this structure called a Hartig net, yeah, but it is confusing for I think the name is confusing because a lot of people think about the term Ecto and then assume that they don't penetrate inside the roots at all.  Brian  22:30   So they do have this very intimate relationship where the little hyphae, the little mycelial threads, get completely inside the root, all in the cell wall, different tissue layers, but they never actually get inside this the plant cells themselves.  Jason  22:44   Well, let's put this way. That's probably how it usually works. Biology is messy. If you look hard enough, you will find an exception, but that seems to be the general rule. Brian  22:53   The general rule is that there's usually something that breaks the rule in biology. If you look hard enough, Anny  22:57   That's true. That's true. I'm like, Yeah, I feel like that's generally the case. And now that you've got me like making specific certain  Jason  23:04   well, let's just contrast this with the other major one, which is the arbuscular mycorrhizae.  Anny  23:08   And that's true. We can contrast this group with arbuscular mycorrhizae, which is one other major group of mycorrhizae. And these generally form relationships all across the plant Tree of Life, they form relationships with trees, with grasses, with forbs. One interesting plant that they don't usually form relationships with is arabidopsis, Brian  23:32   much to the sadness of plant biologists everywhere since arabidopsis, yeah, since arabidopsis is the model system that most work has been done with on plants, and this very important relationship  Anny  23:44   happens to not work with arabidopsis. anyway, but as Jason was alluding to So, these arbuscular mycorrhizae. They form structures inside the plant cells for resource storage and for Resource Exchange. And so the arbuscular part of the arbuscular mycorrhizae refers to the structures that they form inside plant cells, called arbuscules. And so that comes from the Latin root for tree like so it's like kind of a tree shaped structure that they form inside the plant cell. And that's where a lot of the resource exchange happens. They also form vesicles, which are these, like kind of big what's thought of its resource storage bubbles inside plant cells as well. And then there are two kind of other major groups of mycorrhizae that we think about. One is ericoid mycorrhizae, they generally form relationships with plants in the Ericaceae so like blueberries, rhododendrons and so on. And then the last group is orchid mycorrhizae, which are extremely important. And orchids are actually obligate an obligate symbiosis with orchid mycorrhizae, because their seeds are so tiny and have so few resources that they literally cannot germinate without symbiosis with an orchid Mycorrhiza, Brian  25:06   so obligate, means they have to do it all the time, and that would contrast with facultative, where they can do it. They don't have to do it. Sometimes they can. They don't really need to. Orchid Mycorrhizae are are crazy because, like orchid seeds are dust. They don't have endosperm. They have no food inside the seed. So if they don't have their they steal their nutrients from the mycorrhizae, right? Anny  25:31   Exactly in that very early stage of life, they're essentially the orchids are essentially a parasite.  Jason  25:36   So here's my question, a lot of orchids, I know they grow like in the treetops. So are there mycorrhiza spores, just like drifting around in the rainforest canopy? Anny  25:46   there are mycorrhizae spores just drifting around anywhere, really, even things that we think of that are, you know, arbuscular, mycorrhizal fungal spores, ectomycorrhizal fungal spores, you know, they're just drifting all over the place. There's actually evidence for in tropical rainforest where you can get these kind of soil mats built up on big tree branches on top of tall trees, right? Just debris falling down on these branches. They decompose. They kind of form these like kind of spongy layers. And then you get epiphytes and other plants starting to grow on top of these, like little bits of soil on a tree. People have found mycorrhizae in those circumstances. Brian  26:30   Okay, okay, okay, so we talked about the you've got ericoid orchid and arbuscular mycorrhizae, those are all kind of specialists for that. Or do they have to be mycorrhizae? Or can they live in other ways? Anny  26:45   Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are like kind of the special group here. They are not known to be very culturable Unless they are in symbiosis with a plant. So these are things that are on the fungal side, obligate with a plant host. Gotcha. Um, whereas for all the other mycorrhizal fungi and groups, you can actually grow them in culture without a plant, they will just do that Brian  27:13   So we can grow them in a petri plate, like we know how to do that  Anny  27:16   You can them on a petri plate, they sometimes will grow very slowly. You know, especially things like ericoid mycorrhizae tend to grow pretty slowly, if you have them in culture, but they will grow. They don't need a plant in order to, surprise, survive.  Brian  27:28   So what's neat about the Ecto mycorrhizae is that a lot of those are kind of like, they're very optional, like a lot of the things that we think of as mushrooms, a lot of like, very charismatic species that we would think of for fungi also form these kind of relationships, these Ecto mycorrhizal relationships, right? Yep. And what is not controversial is that they definitely is resource exchange happening, that is happening, right?  Anny  27:52   That is not controversial, yeah. Okay. And so they do form these mycorrhiza, so the mycorrhiza is like that combination of the fungus and the root, right? And it is not controversial that there's Resource Exchange happening, exchange meaning that there is resource going from one partner to the other partner, right? Whether that is driven by just concentration gradients or source-sink relationships with just surplus carbon flowing places. That's where, kind of the nitty gritty and what exactly is happening. How do we characterize it? So-called controversy can happen Jason  28:29   Yeah, but it's a basic idea that there's, there's a trade going on one way or another. The plant has lots of fixed carbon, so food, essentially sugars or fats that it will trade to the fungus, because that's what plants are really good at it is they turn sunlight into food, and so they're giving that to the fungus. And then the fungus, because of all these little hyphae that goes through the soil everywhere, is really good at getting water and nutrients from the soil, like the nitrogen, the phosphorus, the potassium that we talked about in the game. And so this sorts of resource goes from the fungus to the plant, and in theory, it's a great symbiosis. I know there are times where sometimes one or the other essentially is parasitizing its partner, but in theory, it's a good symbiosis where both are benefiting,  Anny  29:12   right exactly, and like, not just on the fungal side, not just because they're able to explore a much larger area, given their little hyphae going everywhere. But also they're able to produce enzymes and partner with other microorganisms that produce enzymes that plants cannot, right? So they're able to break down leaf litter, other organic forms of compounds out there, into forms that are easily accessible by the plant. Brian  29:41   You know, in a weird way, it kind of reminds me of the human gut microbiome that we just discussed. You've got microbes in your gut that help you break down resources so that you can digest. Now, plants don't have guts, but they do have roots, and they form associations with microbes that effectively are doing a similar thing, helping them access and break down nutrients that they wouldn't have access to otherwise. the symbiosis can be a lot tighter for mycorrhizae and roots, of course, but there's also that same sort of complexity. It's like, yes, it can be symbiotic, but as Jason likes to point out, the harmony in nature is an illusion based on everything pulling as hard as they can right in the same direction, and it all just kind of balances out Anny  30:22   exactly, yeah, I think the way, you know one of a lot of people that I talk to in the field think about it is it's a mutual exploitation, right? Yep. Brian  30:32   Okay, so there's nothing controversial about plants paying carbon or providing carbon, and that the fungi providing rare soil resources like nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. Now what is a little controversial here is this idea that the mature trees can focus and move carbon to their seedlings, specifically ones of their own species or genetic makeup. That is the mother tree concept, and that is something that sort of, at least on the there's a lot of people who think that the evidence for it is pretty scant. Anny  31:06   Yeah, I think that, you know, I think that whole part of it has a combination of different things, right? I think there's no disputing the fact that there have been experiments done where folks have shown using labeled carbon, where carbon from a mature tree or one tree seedling can go via the fungal connection to another tree. There, there are some studies showing that there are there is discrimination based on different species and how related they are, I think, kind of where some of the controversy happens with what we don't really know yet for sure is how frequently this actually happens in nature, in the field, right? Most of these studies have been done in the greenhouse, where you can actually do a lot of these more complicated manipulations to really, really drill down on the mechanisms. But as you can imagine, it can be really, really difficult to actually measure any of this in the field when you're dealing with an actual mature Doug fir tree, right? And so the evidence that we can get from the field can sometimes be more circumstantial, right? We can't drill down in every single mechanism that needs to happen in order to fully support this. And also, I think, just to kind of address the term "the mother tree", right? Hypothesis, I feel like that whole concept is something that has been born out in the public imagination, right? It's not necessarily a term that the original authors came up with as a scientific hypothesis, but because of a combination of the public imagination and future work that has been done in the area, it kind of became something that people refer to as a hypothesis, which adds to the confusion in the literature, as you might imagine. Brian  33:03   So it comes from a popular science book written by the ecologist Suzanne Simard. And a lot of this work and this idea comes from her specific research project. So there, there was an incredibly popular public science book on, you know, again, the it also invents this term of the world, wood Web. Am I saying that right? Jason  33:25   The wood Wide Web Brian  33:25   The wood Wide Web, which is this idea of the network of fungi and exchanging information and resources and sharing them. The the point of the book and this idea of, like, mature trees nurturing their offspring, was really purposely introduced as this idea of like helping people sort of connect to trees and anthropomorphize them. But the problem is, is that maybe it went a little farther than the evidence would fully support, or it's not clear, or there was a a lovely point by point, a counterpoint to some of these claims in these experiments about the dangers of anthropomorphizing, anthropomorphizing trees, and particularly the Mother Tree concept, how it doesn't match up with ecology, how we actually see that mature trees tend to heavily compete with seedlings in the soil, and that actually they don't really benefit from having a mature tree available. They do much better if there's no mature tree around, because you're not seeing as much of this competition for bare resources, but this very careful point by point was published in Trends in Plant Biology, and it sits behind a paywall. It took me forever to actually find any place where we'll be able to share this with our listeners. So the people that are trying to counter this as sort of pseudoscientific or not well supported, are not getting their message out in any way that the public in general would be able to access. Anny  34:47   Yeah, and just to kind of make sure that a lot of this is also represented on both sides, I will say that there is now a counter point-by-point paper that was just published at the end of last year from Simard's group, kind of countering the point by point that you had probably read the paper published by Justine Karst. And so there is this very active back and forth that is happening right now.  Jason  35:16   And I think it's important to point out like, this is how science gets done. It's like one experiment never completely seals off anything. You need to replicate it. Sometimes, if things are ambiguous, people argue, people have their own opinions, and it's by the community, engaging with each other and doing the experiments and looking at the work that it gets settled. And, I mean, it probably won't get settled until you get hard data, because ideally it's like the one arbiter of all of this is the data. Now there's the caveat that there are sometimes different ways to interpret that data, but at the end of the day, it's like, if it comes to if there's a conflict between your hypothesis and the results you got, the results win. And so at least that's how science is supposed to work. And so this back and forth, this arguing is the process of how we discover truth. I like to say that in science, truth, truth is not what emerges like shining and brilliant. Truth is what survives everything you can throw at it, and that's how we slowly, slowly, slowly, get a better idea of how the world works. Brian  36:16    But what if you're publishing your science in a popular science book that captures the public imagination. There's no peer review and automated correction problems. Process for things like that. Jason  36:26    That's where science communication has to work. And again, that process is part of it, of trying to get that out through good science communication. I mean, I have faced this. I have had to essentially contradict people who bring up these like 50 or 60 year old books talking about how plants can sense people's emotions, and it's like that did not hold up to replicated study. That was probably an error, and so some of those, yes, they still float around, because the popular science books have a much wider reach than the specialized scientific literature. That's why the communication of science is so important, and let's be honest, that's part of the reason why we do this podcast, is because we want to commute to communicate stuff like that out. Brian  37:04    In an interview with Elizabeth Hargrave, Mark Wootton, they kind of tangentially say that maybe it's not all figured out. They kind of don't, they don't handle it face on. They kind of like move to the side, Anny  37:16   right? But I think the main part of the mechanism of the game that really reflective of this kind of mother tree idea, right? Is the is when in the game you photosynthesize as a mature Doug fir, and then you move that carbon into one of the mushroom tiles, one of the fungi tiles, right? And then, in order to produce a seedling in and around those mushroom tiles, you have to then move that carbon and pay some sort of carbon cost from the mushroom specifically in order to make that seeding right. So I think that is the part of the mechanism that I found really interesting that they chose to do that because that that kind of very specifically introduces the idea that that is the way the carbon flow should be happening. And I might argue that even if right, let's say that there are, because we have some evidence that there is some carbon flow going I think most folks would agree that that is not the vast majority of carbon, the way the carbon flows through the system. That's not the vast majority of where a seedling that is germinating is getting their carbon from, yep.  Jason  38:27   And they actually mentioned that in the rule book that the amount of carbon that a seedling could take up through these networks is very, very small relative to the amount it can photosynthesize. And then put in the caveat, but maybe when you're a newly emerging seedling, that little bit can be important. I'll be honest. I'm not sure, I'll be honest. I'm not sure I get the metaphor of like. I know I'm supposed to be like the the mother tree. Like, doing all this work, but all the work is around the seedlings. I can only activate the mushrooms that my seedlings have roots on. It's like, I like. I can only move the nutrients around to use it for the seedlings. There's no actual Mother Tree anywhere in the game, except in, like, the abstract part of here's my player board, but it occupies no space. I almost feel like the game works like, Oh, you're just a bunch of little seedlings trying to make a go at it. And this is how it works. Brian  39:17    Carbon should just get fed into the network naturally, right?  Jason  39:20   Something like that, technically, is kind of what happens there is that one. So with the starting tile, there's a central mushroom, and then four on the outside, and the central one has the ability that if there's no carbon anywhere in the network, it will put carbon out there. And so it kind of has that,  Anny  39:35   yeah, but it's just weird that that's coming from a mushroom, right? Like, I think the part that the game doesn't make very explicit, is that all of this carbon flowing through a system is coming via photosynthesis, either from the seedling or from mature trees or any other plants in the ecosystem. If you want to think about this more realistically,  Jason  39:54   yeah, but it actually does make a little bit of sense of why that one's doing it, because it turns out that central tile on the starting tile is like the mycorrhizae that is in like every paper ever published, in terms of what is forming associations with, with the Douglas firs, it's apparently super, super common, and it doesn't have a common name because it doesn't actually form a mushroom, so it only has a Latin name. So Elizabeth Hargrave had to make up a name. She called it Earth lover, because that's basically the anglicization of its Latin name geophyllis. I think Anny  40:27   I dind't get that at all. Jason  40:29    So it's essentially the one that's networking with the entire forest, most likely, and that's probably where that carbon is coming from. Brian  40:36   Okay, so undergrove does a reasonable job of modeling this particular hypothesis, this particular of like the sharing of carbon, of carbon being used by seedlings, of the exchange of nutrients, representing mycorrhizae, in particular, Ecto mycorrhizae, which again, much more sort of dynamic, because a lot of them form mushrooms that people would recognize. Jason  40:59   much more photogenic Brian  41:00   photogenic. Photogenic. That's the best way to put it, because you can actually, like we talk about the all of the macroscopic life, and it's really like fungi. I guess mycelia can be visible, but usually the only part we ever see is the above ground part that comes up sometimes when it rains a bunch, Anny  41:18   right? And that's like such a small fraction of total fungal diversity that exists the world, right? All the things that I study in my lab None, none of them form mushrooms, so we just keep them on plates, and they look pretty drab. Sometimes they look really cool. But Brian  41:32    I feel like we don't need a distinct nitpick corner with this because, or maybe we do make I feel like we've already had some nitpicks at this point about things that maybe we don't think are quite as they should be. It's mostly it's been about photosynthesis being misrepresented. Jason  41:44   I just have one is that I wish the roots, little, little root triangle tokens you put on the board were higher contrast or something, because as the game progresses, you end up with more and more of these roots around it. They determine what you can do, which means your turn gets more and more complicated as you can only do one thing, but you, instead of having five things to choose from, you actually have like, 12. And finding my roots on the board can actually be kind of tricky. It's like, where do I have roots? Which mushrooms can I activate? It's like, okay, I've got that one and that one. And just like having a little bit higher contrast, maybe, like a white outline around them or something would have been nice. Brian  42:20   Color choices in these games are always hard because it just ends up as a blegh rainbow and like for for the trees, they used very tree like colors. It was like green and brown and beige and gray. I think I don't know, very neutral tones. Anny, did you have a nitpick?  Anny  42:37   Well, I think I we talked a lot about our my science nit picks, I think I was just very confused by the carbon economy in this game that just did not reflect my understanding of how the carbon economy generally works in these systems. So I guess that's not really a nitpick. That's just a pick. The part where you have to activate a mushroom was also a little bit funny to me, but it was interesting to me that there was a there was a component of competition that emerged in this game that I wasn't expecting, I think, as we were playing at one point where we all had little tree seedlings that were tapped into, quote, unquote, the same mushroom. And I remember at one point in when playing the game, we all kind of were trying to get carbon from that one mushroom, but we didn't want to get let anyone else have the carbon. I was trying to think really hard, like, Is there, like, a nat--, actual analog to this that would actually happen out in a, yeah, a type ecosystem? And I'm still trying to think whether that would actually happen if there is competition via mycorrhizal provided resources, if that's something that we know for sure can actually happen?  Brian  43:50   Interesting. I would be surprised if it, if you've got multiple individuals tapped into the same sort of individual, hyphael body, it would it not be reasonable to think that there would be competition? Anny  44:00    yeah, I think it's a very reasonable assumption that something could happen. I'm just trying to think if there's a good way to test that. I've actually seen more tests of the opposite, where you have multiple mycorrhizal taxa, the different mycorrhizal fungal species that are connected with the same plant. And so there are many studies in which folks have done what are called split root studies, where you kind of split the same plant and its various root structures into different pots, and then in each pot you inoculate kind of different fungi. And then, in some cases, people have shown that there is preferential carbon allocation to the fungal partners that are providing more nutrient benefits. Oh, interesting, yeah. So it's kind of, kind of, from the plant side, fungi competing for the plants resources.  Brian  44:53   Okay, that's interesting. But then I imagine there's also that, that counter argument, of like, maybe there just being a better sink for those nutrients. Anny  45:00   Exactly, right? That is the count, and that's why, that's why this whole field is so hard to get, like, 100% ironclad. This is exactly what's going on, right? Because you can measure, you can measure the flow of certain elements from one part to another part. You can measure how much of it there is. But there's always this question about, Hey, is it just a source sink dynamic? Is it just that plants have lots of surplus carbon that they need to get rid of, and they happen to do it in this way, and that causes the Exchange, or whether there is, like this sort of active, what's called biological markets theory, where people apply the concept to kind of the economic exchange rate to the rate of exchange of carbon versus other elements. And so those are kind of two very big theories that are somewhat in competition with each other when it comes to how this exchange sort of actually works in the real world.  Brian  45:57   I am terrified to do the science grade for this one, because I really just, I don't know how to judge it anymore. So actually, it is hard. It is difficult. I actually would love to hear each of your so let's move on to grading. We're going to do a grade for science and a grade for fun. We each kind of have our own scale. We definitely do great inflation on gaming with science. We usually assume a B, and then go from there. And I'd love to hear about the science grade and your rationale. You're going to help me make my own decision here, because I kind of went into it with some like, I don't know about this one, but I'd love to hear the arguments. So who would like to go first? Jason or Anny? Who's up? Who wants to be first up? Anny  46:33   I want Jason to go first. Jason  46:35   Okay, so I'm just kind of making my gut feeling here based off of the science it's trying to portray, and all of the science it's trying to portray, because we focus a lot on the mother tree, but there's also a bunch of the mycorrhizal symbiosis and the nutrient exchange of I would probably give it a B plus, and I would do that because a lot of the science it shows is correct. It's like plants make associations with mycorrhizae, there's nutrient exchange that way. It's especially important for getting these, the nitrogen and the phosphorus and stuff. It's like that part, like that interconnection between the plants and the fungi, and kind of getting to the point that these, this fungi, form this whole invisible ecosystem and network underneath the forest, forest floor, I think is correct, the whole Mother Tree thing, okay, yeah, that dings its grade a little bit because I don't know, maybe the controversy or the counterpoints of that weren't fully developed when they first started the game. You can imagine, if you get halfway through developing a game, and suddenly the science changes like, well, now what do we do? Brian  47:39   It's the danger of science is, it tends to be sort of shifts as we learn more, right?  Jason  47:43   Yeah. So, yeah, okay, that part, but I'll be honest, based on my playing of the game, that part of the metaphor is actually pretty dispensable. It's like, I forgot that that was actually part of the metaphor for most of my play of the game.  Brian  47:55   That's unfortunate. That's the whole thing. Jason  47:59   I don't think it's necessary. I'm playing with seedlings and fungi, and it works just fine. And a little bit of abstraction about the shared pool of resources, but I never really remembered, like, oh, right, I'm playing a tree that is trying to help its own little seedlings. I was like, whatever. So it's like, I'd say B plus for those reasons, like, what, most of what it shows is good. Some stuff, maybe not so much.  Brian  48:21   Okay, all right, Anny, what do you think you can abstain. You can abstain. You don't have to give a grade. Anny  48:27   Okay. Well, I think it's fun to give a grade. I'll give it a B minus. I think I'm a little more disturbed than Jason about the carbon economy that'sbeing represented in this game. I just can't get over it. I'm sorry, yeah, but I just like, remember thinking through the carbon economy of the game, and I'm just like, this is very confusing to me. And I think I appreciate, Jason that you brought up the fact that it is in the booklet, or somewhere where the game developers clarify that, like, you know, the amount of carbon that any seedling is getting from its fungal symbiotic partner is like a tiny, tiny fraction of all the carbon that it needs to actually grow and become a tree, which that is very important. And I think that is a really important thing. And I would hate for someone playing the game to, like, get the sort of misguided idea that when tree seedlings grow up like they're literally relying on the fungal partner to provide all the carbon they need to get into being a tree. So I feel like that's what brings my grade down to a B minus. I agree with you, Jason and that, like, the whole Mother Tree metaphor isn't super you can play it without really thinking about it. And honestly, I wasn't really thinking about it until, like, after being done with the game, I was like, Oh, why did we do that? Oh, I bet it's because of this thing. But yeah, I think the things that it does well is introducing the fact that plants interact with fungi and often in a mutualistic way, and that mutualism involves a resource flowing from the plant to the fungus, and then the fungus to the plant, and they work on different they capitalize on different resources and mutually exploit each other for different resources. So I think that part was well developed in the game.  Brian  50:16   Maybe if they had done orchids instead of Douglas firs, because we know orchids actually do need to exploit very specifically. So I think I'm gonna stick with my original opinion, and I think I'm gonna give an Elizabeth Hargrave game a C,  Jason  50:33   oh, that's harsh. Brian  50:34   It is harsh. Anny  50:35   I was trying to be a little less harsh Brian  50:37   yeah. And I think, you know, if she wants to apply for a regrade. That's fine, I understand. But the problem is, is that when I think about a science game, my biggest concern, and the games that have gotten low grades from me, is feeling like I'm worried that people will get their good facts mixed up with their bad facts. And unfortunately, the metaphor here, while it's clarified in a in a footnote in the game, in the rule book, that there's only a small fraction of the carbon. That is not how the game plays. You cannot grow your seedling into a tree until it's gotten three carbon and the ability for it to get carbon off the fungi is the most important thing in the whole game. That's how you score. That's everything is based on how much carbon are you absorbing. You literally move up the track to win the game based on absorbing carbon from fungi. It's the whole thing. And if that's the weakest part of the whole story, then unfortunately, and I hate this, because this is very cool. I love that it's a game about mycorrhizae. I love that the things about getting other rare nutrients, that's fine, but this whole idea of then moving that carbon back onto the seedlings, that's not nearly as solid as it's being portrayed. So I do worry that if somebody just plays this game, it reinforces ideas that may not actually end up holding up to the test of time. So I'm going to stick with my C I'm very sorry. You know you can apply for a re grade. Okay? We can discuss it in more detail. Jason  51:58   Now, we talk about the Yeah, we talk about having to make compromises between fun and reality, I know, and I'm gathering that there were some of those compromises made at when I skimmed the designer diary, they specifically mentioned that earlier versions were much more scientifically accurate, but really not all that fun. So they definitely intentionally made choices to try to make it a game you would like to play first, and that hopefully reflect the science. So let's get to the gameplay. Yeah, Brian  52:22   I yeah, I still think they could have done the same thing with orchids, and then it's orchids, and everybody loves orchids. Orchids are so cool, Jason  52:28   yes, but orchids don't make mushrooms  Brian  52:30   well, but we could orchid one way.  Jason  52:34   Yes, they do make orchids, but I think they This was because Elizabeth Hargrave makes games around things she loves she made she's a mushroom fan because she's a, yeah, she's a birder, she's a mushroomer, butterflyer, Brian  52:47   but she's not an orchid per- an orchid-er Jason  52:50   I don't know. Maybe that will be the next one. So anyway, Brian, your turn to go first. What's the grade? Brian  52:56   For fun? Um, I'm just a solid B on this. I liked it. I think you probably from talking to you, Jason, I think, you know, it would be nice if it was a different sort of engine game, right, where you kind of get to do a whole bunch of things all at once, the separation in time I didn't love. I love the little mushrooms. I think the components are great. I think it's a pretty game, and it's a game I'd be happy to play. So I will give it a B.  Jason  53:16   Anny what about you?  Anny  53:17   I don't play board games a lot.  Brian  53:19   Oh, you're not a nerd? Anny  53:21   I am a certified nerd.  Jason  53:22   Hey, hey, hey, there are many, many flavors of nerds. Not just board game nerds. Don't be elitist, Brian Brian  53:28   Sorry, sorry, sorry Anny  53:30   I'm just gonna give it an A because I don't play a lot of board games, and it was really fun. I had a great time, and I love the mushroom art. I'm very excited and happy that, like, mushrooms are entering the just like regular art zeitgeist, and now there's mushroom themed anything you can get, like at Target or anywhere. That's very true. And yeah, I just like, when I was playing the game, I found myself picking the mushrooms that looked the prettiest and play them becase why not? Jason  54:01   Oh yeah, you were always going after the You were always going after the purple mushrooms. That's true. Anny  54:05   I was always going after the purple mushrooms because they looked really cool. And that's right, that it's okay, that you don't have a whole lot of strategy when you put down mushrooms. So I'm gonna give it an A. It was a fun time.  Brian  54:16   All right. What about you? Jason? Jason  54:18   I'm probably gonna give this about a B plus as well, just because, like, it's fun, I felt a little frustrated because I kept feeling like I wanted to do more. And maybe it's because it was billed as an engine building game, and I never felt I got an engine going. to me, if I built an engine then turns late in the game should be more powerful than turns early in the game. And I never really felt like I got to that point. There's also just a lot to keep track of. So like the little flipping the tokens over to say, Oh, I've used this type of mushroom. I can't do that again until I refresh it somehow. that was, I'm sure it involves some sort of control over like and strategic choices, but mostly it was something that I tended to forget about. And it's like, oh, wait, could I do that? It's like, okay, yes, I can, and I'd do it, like, after the fact. So there's a lot of things to keep track of. Is a little bit it's kind of like getting a flow state is like, there's just enough to push you, but not so much you feel overwhelmed. And when there's near the end of the game, when there were like, 10 different mushrooms I could activate, and trying to figure out which one is the most strategically optimal one for me to activate like that was that was starting to get a little bit of outside that range. So I wouldn't mind playing this. I would actually like to play this again several more times. Yeah, now that I Brian  55:30   I'll bring it on Saturday. We'll play it on Saturday.  Jason  55:32   Okay, because basically part of that is the learning the game. The more I play a game, the more I'm able to make some of that sort of unconscious and assumed, and so I'm able to focus more on strategy. So I want to play this a few more times to see if I can get to that point. Brian  55:45   This is another problem with the gaming with science project is we're constantly playing something new. We play something a couple of times, and then we have to move on to the next thing, right?  Jason  55:54   Let's be honest, most of the board games on my shelves have gotten played like half a dozen times or less total in their entire lifespan, a game you go back to 10,20 times is like a winner. It's solid, Brian  56:05   yeah, but they look beautiful on the shelf. So they do Anny  56:09   Brian and Jason. I just, I actually just thought of this, like, fun, funny example for, like, the mycorrhizal network thing. Um, 2... 2, 3 years ago now, I was hiking in Patagonia, so in southern Chile, in the Torres del Paine National Park. And one of the people that I ended up kind of walking a lot with was this woman who was from Chile. She mostly spoke Spanish. I speak very little Spanish, and she spoke very little English. And those were very long hikes. And at some point we were trying to, like, talk about what we each did. And she was asking me about my research, which I was extremely incapable of explaining in Spanish. So it was trying to really hard to, like, you know, talk about plants and fungi. And then at a certain point she suddenly said, oh, like, Avatar,  Jason  57:02   yes, I was gonna bring that up. Like, the whole mycelium network was the inspiration for Avatar. There's that one scene with the two scientists Anny  57:09   That one scene where they connect, they're like, like, little cables into the tree, and then they, like, have a little, like, their USB, course, right? Like, Jason  57:18   yeah. But there's an earlier scene with the two scientists, like, one is poking, is like, look here, and you see over here, like, Look signal transduction. And it's like, yeah, those are actual scientists, because they're so excited that they've put wires on trees and there's a signal going between them, yeah. Anny  57:33   And so, like, this was just like, a crazy moment for me, like, right this, just like, complete stranger I met in Chile while hiking. The moment of connection that she could make to me, trying, very poorly to explain my research in Spanish, was Avatar, right? Like, that's the image that came to her mind when she suddenly made that connection. And I mean, I was kind of just like, yeah, kind of not exactly like, yes, kind of right, like, Brian  58:02   Less bioluminescence, Jason  58:04   yeah? But I think that's an important point for we talked about, like, the the mother tree and stuff, these things, even when they get it kind of wrong, it can form an entry point where you say, okay, yeah. Like, that's sort of based off of this. And now we can talk about the reality, which is more complicated and messy and stuff, Brian  58:21   narratives are useful, right? That's, I mean, we're telling stories in science all the time, and even a bad story can be a good starting point. All right, well, I think with that, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for talking about a spicy scientific controversy, which what that means for us is that people write passive aggressive papers every couple of months, that's right. Anny  58:45   Well, thank you so much for having me on. This was really fun, and I had a great time playing the game with you guys.  Brian  58:49   So Jason, do you want to take us out?  Jason  58:52   All right. Well, I think we're going to wrap it up there. So thank you, Anny, for coming on the show. Thank you everyone for tuning in. Have a great month and happy gaming  Brian  59:01   and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. You.  

#Computation #TuringMachine #AlanTuring #Logic #DeductionGames #BoardGames #Science #Math #STEM Summary Today we cover Turing Machine, a pure logic and deduction game where you use punchcards to identify the hidden code. We're joined by the inestimable Stephen Granade, grand high guru of the DragonCon Science Track, to help us understand who Alan Turing was, what a computer is, and how its logic works, plus cool facts about lasers and stuff.  Timestamps 0:00 - Introduction 2:11 - Laser cooling, plate tectonics, and DNA data storage 9:39 - Turing Machine game overview 18:37 - The magic behind the punchcards 23:15 - Who was Alan Turing and his machine? 32:54 - Data storage and punchcards 40:59 - Boolean math & quantum computing 46:06 - Nitpicks and final grades 54:38 - Final thoughts Links Official Game Site (TuringMachine.info) DNA for data storage (Harvard Magazine) Laser cooling (Wikipedia) Homologous recombination (Wikipedia) Fully synthetic genome (J Craig Venter Institute) Episode on Evolution  Turing Machine Designer Diary (Board Game Geek) How Dobble/Spot It works (Youtube) Running Minecraft as a computer Running Magic the Gathering as a computer Half-adder algorithm (Youtube) (note: still quite technical) Science vs Movies at Dragoncon video 1 and video 2 (Youtube) Gettysburg game (Board Game Geek)   Other stuff Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/  ) Stephen  0:00   Music. Brian  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:11   Today, we'll be talking about Turing Machine by Scorpion Masque. All right. Welcome back. Everyone to gaming with science. This is Jason. This is Brian. And today we have very special guest Stephen Granade. Stephen we know from science track at Dragon Con, which I think people have heard us talk about before. He is the lead guru and ring master of the science track, and manages to keep all the things running and fight for our space and make sure we have the resources we need. So we are very grateful to him.  Brian  0:41   The Grand Poobah. Stephen  0:42   You make me sound so organized. Jason  0:45   All you need is the illusion of organization, and you're fine.  Stephen  0:49   That's right,  Jason  0:49   anyway. But if you can kind of introduce yourself to the guest, what's your background? What's your what's your story? Stephen  0:54   So my background is that I spent my undergraduate years at a small liberal arts college as a member of the major of the Month Club. But as my chemistry professor said, I never dropped any of the majors. So after cramming four years into five, I had a Bachelor of Science, dual major, physics, chemistry, and then a bachelor of arts, theater arts, with a math minor. And I looked around at the options there and decided, you know, where the real business is. That's physics. Why I went to graduate school in physics. I studied atomic cooling and trapping, where we would use lasers to cool down atoms to ultra cold temperatures to the point where they started to act in concert. And you would get a basically a quantum super fluid, if you've ever heard of like liquid helium, where you cool it down enough that it doesn't have friction or things like that. We were doing that, but with dilute gasses of atoms. So also, again, just a great career decision. Lots of people wanting to cool atoms down a lot, but fortunately, it also involved lasers and optics. So I moved into working for companies doing sensors and image processing, which of course, turned into machine learning. So I just have this mishmash of different experiences and background  Brian  2:11   that is remarkable. I have tried to explain, tried to explain laser cooling to my oldest son, to no avail. Stephen  2:20    Oh, yeah, I bet. Brian  2:21    But can you explain? How do you cool something with a laser beam?  Speaker 1  2:26   The most straightforward way is a method called evaporative cooling that works like it sounds. It's sort of like what tends to happen if you've got a hot cup of coffee where the liquid in there is really, really hot, and so the water molecules bounce around. And then occasionally, they bounce around in such a way that one of them gets more energy and the other gets less energy, like the overall total is conserved, but one of them gets enough energy that it can turn into vapor and escape, leaving behind cooler atoms. So we would start with just as many atoms as we could pile into a trap that was formed out of the electromagnetic potential that you could create with atomic laser beams. And then you would it. So if you could imagine the atoms are all like rolling around in this laser beam, like trap that is sort of like marbles in a bowl, and then you keep lowering the edges of the bowl, and what that ends up doing is it lets the hottest atoms, the ones with the most energy after a collision, escape, and the rest of them get colder. And so then you lower the bowl a little more, more atoms escape with more energy. The ones that are left get colder. And you just sort of keep doing that and reducing it in temperature until you're as close to absolute zero as you can get. Brian  3:37   You're almost like filtering out the slow atoms. Stephen  3:41    Yeah, you're you're making it easier for the hottest atoms after they collide to escape, carrying off more than their fair share of energy, so that the remaining atoms drop in energy and are colder and are moving less fast. Brian  3:54   Wow, I study onions. Jason  4:00   Hey, there is some fascinating stuff going on with those onions and all the chemistry there. You told me about this. Anyway, we usually start with some sort of fun science fact. And Steven, as you are our guest, we give you priority. Do you have something fun you want to share? Speaker 1  4:12   Yes, I love collecting science facts. I think that's part of what has ended up happening with me being involved in the Dragon Con science track, because I get exposed to all of these other scientific disciplines that I am kind of a dumb, dumb about. My favorite current fact is that your fingernails grow at about the same rate that plate tectonics move. Brian  4:34   Yeah, I've heard that before. That's great. It gives such a fantastic visual representation of what's happening, right? Stephen  4:40   Well, it's such it feels like so very different scales, because you've got the, you know, inch, like fingernails on your fingers, and then you've got these giant plates, and they're both moving and growing at roughly the same kinds of speeds. And that's just wild to me to think about.  Jason  4:55   and yet, when I think of it like that, I think, wow, those plates are moving really fast. Because, like, I've seen this. In his book of world records, of those people that never cut their fingernails. And that's like, feet of fingernails over a lifespan. So that's, that's more than I would have expected. Brian  5:09   Jason has fast growing fingernails confirmed? Jason  5:12   I no, I have the nervous habit of picking em. I've never let them get that long. Like, if they start getting over, like, two millimeters, like, Oh no, they're bothering me. I must get rid of them.  Brian  5:23   Should I do my fact too? I mean, absolutely. So I have to turn everything I have a hammer of bacteria and genetics, so I have to turn everything into a nail. So what I found is it's a it's a pretty old story, but it's actually, it's not such an old idea at this point. A lot of this work was pioneered by a synthetic biologist and DNA guru, George Church, of using DNA to store digital information. So I thought that was appropriate for this. So DNA is incredibly dense in terms of the amount of information that you can store in a really small space, and it's also very stable, like you can under the proper conditions have DNA retain that information for 1000s of years, which we don't really have good storage media that could actually hold up to those long term archival states.  Jason  6:07   Yes, although, as we learned in the last episode, a chunk of Amber is not an appropriate archival state for DNA. Brian  6:13   No, it is not. No, it is not. In fact, they're even putting some archival information into living cells, so then you get the repair and replication mechanisms. So they're sort of like dropping little Rosetta libraries of human information into living organisms, kind of very like very sci fi. So it's great for archival. You can keep it for a long time. The problem is it's absolutely ridiculously expensive to write to DNA, because you are synthesizing new DNA molecules. You're storing digital information, you know, binary in the A, G, C's and T's, it's actually not too bad to get it back out again, because you can just sequence the information and turn it back into digital information. So that's not cheap, but it's a lot easier than synthesizing the DNA.  Stephen  6:54   How do they put that together? What does the synthesis step look like?  Brian  6:58   Oh, you can actually run through a process through just raw from raw chemical bases, synthesize a specific DNA sequence, like from scratch, stick it in a test tube. They were here. They're always working on, like, new ways to do this. Jason  7:11   Yeah, I think currently the limits probably about 100 to 150 base pairs is all you can get in one but then there are tricks to stitch them together so you can, like, yeast is apparently very good. If the ends are are match up to a relatively small out, like 20, 30 base pairs, the yeast will take a look like, Oh, those belong together, and they will just glue them together at that spot. And I think that's how they made there's a lot of stuff about making a fully synthetic genome about 10 years ago, which they did through this process of like starting from these tiny, little building blocks and then slowly building it up through many, many, many, many cycles of this recombination. It's called to glue them together, and presumably many, many, many, many hours of technician and graduate student time actually making this work and figuring out how to work, and figuring out all the ways it could go wrong, because they had to do things like the other problem with DNA is it's fragile. It's literally at one atom thick, and so any shear forces can just rip it apart. And so the pipettes we normally use sheer DNA down to about 10,000 base pairs, which is way too small for anything actually living. So they had to do all sorts of crazy workarounds to be very gentle with the DNA as they were handling it, so it wouldn't just get ripped to shreds by them trying to move it around.  Stephen  8:25   Well, that's wild.  Brian  8:27   That artificial synthetic genome also has watermarks in it. They wrote their names and a poem and a couple things. They left an HTML link in the DNA of this organism. So it's really weird.  Stephen  8:39   That is amazing. Biology is weird and squishes. Jason  8:46   That's why I love biology, is it's it's phenomenally complex, and you get all sorts of very interesting emergent properties out of it. I mean, when you get down to it, most of us are what hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, and they're just rearranging certain things, and you get phenomenally complex things like podcasters and plants and stuff. So Brian  9:07   yes, biology is squishy and stinky and fun.  Stephen  9:11   Well, thinking back to my orgo days, I'm like, All right, so what's the synthesis steps that gets you from pile of chemicals to podcaster Brian  9:19   a couple billion years, yeah,  Jason  9:21   so we had a previous episode in evolution, so we'll just link that in the show notes. Nice. Yeah, give it about 4 billion years and a whole bunch of trial and error, mostly error and right, what works will be around still, all right, but we're not talking about biology. Today. We are talking about computation. So let's dive into this game. So today we are talking about Turing Machine by Scorpion Masque, which was designed by Fabien Gridel and Yoann Levet. I hope I'm pronouncing those right. This is a very interesting game. Brian and I played this. This is outside our normal area. It is a deduction game. So the most famous deduction game that you're probably familiar with is Clue, the. Idea being that the point of the game is to uncover some particular piece of information and clue. It's like, okay, who did the murder, where and with what? And the designers of Turing Machine really liked the duction games, but they saw there was one major flaw, is that usually you are asking questions of the other players, so the players all have parts of the information, and you're trying to assemble the whole but usually some information is more valuable than other information, and so some players might get an advantage just by the cards that are dealt, or whatever include this would be, I'd say probably the rooms have the most value because they're the hardest to get to, and there's the most of them. So if you happen to get a handful of rooms, you have an advantage over everyone else. So I'll put in the show notes a link to the designer diary. It's actually really fascinating all the iterations they went through over this, but they eventually hit on the idea of, well, we won't have them ask other players. We'll have them ask the game itself. And that's how we have Turing machine. So the way this is set up is there's a central piece which is actually unnecessary. It's just a cool little visual piece. Brian  10:58   We need a word for that, for things that are totally unnecessary for the function of the game, but just make the game look a little cooler. Oh, yeah. Like fun, clicky element to it or something. I still haven't come up with it yet. What did we come up with? Jason? Jason  11:10   I think boondoggle was the closest we got.  Brian  11:13   Yeah,  Jason  11:15   goober, if we want to take from spider verse,  Stephen  11:18   yeah, Jason  11:19    widget, that's probably too useful. It's too I mean, a spandrel is actually kind of useful. It does something. So it's not just that. Brian  11:26   Well, listeners get in the discord. What term is this? We need to we are missing a term, and that's not allowed. Stephen  11:33    You know, I would have originally said those kinds of things were absolutely optional. I spent, you know, a chunk of time playing cheap ass games where you got basically the rules and some cardboard, like, if there was going to be a board, you'd get sort of thin card stock with it on there. And then they're like, you have dice, you have tokens, you have, you know, chits to count up things. Just pull those from monopoly or whatever other sad game that you should put to one side to play cheap ass games. And I like that. I was in grad school. I had no money, but I have gotten to really like the ones where it's like, we spent a little extra money, and now the meeples have a little bit of heft. You're like, Oh, that's really nice. Actually, something nice and tactile about those things.  Brian  12:14   Yeah, I'm a sucker for some glossy card stock. I know that Jason is as well.  Jason  12:19   Yeah, no, I like the tactile sensation. And so what this central thing? It's just a hexagon with some little like eight bit computer faces on it. It's just to organize things, because the real meat of it has there are six faces and around that you put anywhere from four to six cards, which are your condition cards. The goal of this game is to deduce a number that is hidden. And the thing is, the rulebook comes with about 20 of these. There's a website where they have, like, 7 million of them that they've programmatically generated. So like, you're never going to run out of puzzles to solve, but you have to get it because it is this very specific setup. So you set it up, you put out your four to six condition cards that have the conditions you're testing. I'll talk more about that in a minute. And then now each one of those is tied to a verification card, which tells you information. And the way this game works is you have a set of number cards, and so you put together a three digit number. The digits only go one to five. So there's five times five times five equals 125, possible numbers it can be and you take the three and there are tabs, whether it's the first digit, the second or the third. You put them together, and they have these punches in each of them, and it looks like an old fashioned computer punch card, and they designed it so that when you put your three digit code together, there is always exactly one hole open out of all of them, and every 125 different ones has a different hole open. And you hold this up to the verification card, and you get a check or an X. And that basically tells you that with its condition card, whether your number passed the condition or not, and you use that information to try to deduce what the actual real number is, because the real number passes all of the conditions out on the table. The one further wrinkle of this is that the condition cards do not have a single condition on them. They actually have multiple conditions, anywhere from two up to nine, and only one of those is actually being tested. So your job is first to figure out which of the many conditions on the board are actually in use, and then to determine from those which single number satisfies all of the conditions. And the authors are very clear in the rule book that in every puzzle, every single condition is needed. You can never just skip one and come to the answer, except by luck, like you need all of them in order to get it, which leads to some weird things where there are some conditions that can never be used in the game, because, like, one of the cards says the number of threes. There can be one three or there can be two threes, or there can be three threes. If there are three threes, that one card tells you the solution, therefore that condition will never be used. At least weird stuff like that. And the best way of thinking about this, this can be played one player or multiplayer. It's one to four players. This is one where I think maybe the one player version might actually be the most popular, because it's it's competitive puzzle solving. Think of it as if you were doing competitive Sudoku with a bunch of your friends. It's very much a solitaire. There's no way to interfere with each other whatsoever. Your little clues and stuff are hidden. You can play it cooperatively if you want. That's definitely an option. Or you can play it solo. And I did that a few times, and I could definitely see we say this a lot, actually, several of these games would be good apps. This would be a great app to just pull open and do with, like Wordle or connections or turning machine in the morning, just to kind of stretch your brain cells a little bit. I can see a lot of people liking it for that reason. Brian  15:24   But wouldn't you lose something without the little cards getting to pick them up and make the grid and hold them up to the thing and the sort of weird mathematical magic of, how does this work?  Jason  15:34   Well yes, you would lose the tactile sensation of it. Yes. On the other hand, you wouldn't have to have Turing machine set up for you to play every single morning, which is difficult with cats and children Stephen  15:44   So just the dedicated Turing Machine table off on one corner. Jason  15:49   Yes, and there's an interesting history. So right now, the final version of the game is pure numbers. It's just you have the three digit number you're trying to solve. They actually tried skinning it a few different ways during development. So first, and for a long time, you were trying to find out, like the number of different animals on the farm, and each of the farm hands only knew one thing, like, there are more pigs than chickens, or if you add up all the animals, and they are greater than six, which seemed like some pretty uninformed farm hands, but it was the metaphor of the game. Then to try to tie it to Turing Alan Turing, which we'll talk about more in a bit, they themed it as being trying to discover components of the German army, like, how many tanks did they have? How many infantry did they have, et cetera. And at the end, they decided that, you know, we're just gonna stick to pure numbers. We're just gonna make it a pure number deduction game, which I think is, I mean, I could see the skin being nice, but I really think what they were going for, they really just like the pure logical deduction. And I think keeping it pure like that really reinforces the feel and the vibe of the game they're going after.  Stephen  16:46   Yeah, I feel like, if this, where games where you have that skin, where it really you see sort of the abstract working of the mechanisms underneath the different engines, or things like that, then I want the skin to still be thematically resonant with the game. You know, if I think about something like wingspan, which at its heart is just, you're producing more resources that you put out in the form of, you know, eggs and things like that, and you're laying out the places for the birds and all of that. So you're getting your birds. The theme informs what those things are in a way that feels like actual birds and their habitats. The skinned versions you're talking about sounds more like, well, this is the thing that you're going to end up mostly ignoring and treating as abstract anyway.  Jason  17:28   I agree. I think that's why it works better as just pure numbers. Because ultimately, even though it bills itself as like the punch card computer game, it's really a game about logical deduction, and it's not actually a computer. The rule book actually says it's a proto computer, but I guess whoever was in charge of the box wanted to say it was a punch card computer game,  Stephen  17:47   right Jason  17:47   And it does feel a little magic to put all the punch cards together. There's always that one hole that's open and you get to look through and get your answer. And Brian, I've known this for several weeks, and I've hold off playing like I figured out the magic or how that happens, the mathemagic, the mathematic, they describe it very clearly in their design diary, and it turns out to be really, really simple. Brian  18:08   OK! I'm excited to hear about it. But you, you made a point when we started this endeavor. We can't just do biology games. We have to mix it up. You know, in the whole idea of STEM science, technology, engineering and math. This is our first this is a Math game. That is what this is, right? I don't think there's a lot of those out there. I don't think so well, where they just completely go for it. It's like, it's fully abstracted, just numbers. We don't need any theming,  Stephen  18:34   right Brian  18:34   Okay, now explain to me how this works, like, because I want to know. Jason  18:37   So when I first saw it, I was like, Oh, I thought this would be like, Spot it, or Dobble which I saw a video on a year ago. I'll link it in the notes. In spot it, you have this collection of cards, and every pair of cards shares exactly one symbol. And there's this whole mathematical thing to ensure that happens. I thought it'd be something like this. So every trio of cards would share exactly one hole. And then it explains like, oh, you take all 125 numbers, you put them in a grid, and then you randomize them, and then you just take whichever card. So this is the first digit, and it's a one. So all the ones that have a one in the first digit have a hole in them, and all the ones that have a two in the second digit, when you go into that one, you put a hole in them there.  Stephen  18:38   It's decimalencoded. It's a decimal place encoded basically, oh, that's super cool. Jason  19:16   The first versions, they actually had them in long strips because they were all adjacent to each other. They later realized it was actually much more fun when they randomized them. And so that's what we have, the final one. So there are basically 125 spots on the card where there could be a hole, anything that has that matches the digit of that card has this hole punched out. And so by definition, when you put all three of them together, there's only one hole left open. So Stephen  19:39   you have, like, all of the 500 numbers punched on the 500 card and all of the, like, 30 numbers that have number three number on the three card in the middle. Yeah, that's really cool.  Jason  19:50   And it's not completely random. They did put in some rules, because, I mean, you could do this, like, a bajillion different ways. So I think what they did is they just generated a bajillion different ones, and then they screened. Them because they wanted to make sure, okay, nothing has more than two in a row. You don't form any weird angles that might catch and tear. And the end result actually looks a lot like old fashioned computer punch card, because you all have these, like one and two slot holes all next to each other, and they're all spaced out and in different directions and stuff. And it looks really cool. And I think you're about to ask Brian about the numbers. So there's 125 possible codes. Brian  19:51    Yeah,  Jason  19:52   they're laid out in a 12 by 12 grid, with some of the corners left off for some symbols you use to match it up. But there's a, I think there's 133 available slots, which means there must be eight squares that are just never used, Brian  20:35   and that must be things like the 333, right? Jason  20:37   No, 333, is a valid number. You'll have a hole going through it there. It could be a valid code, just not with that one card. It could be a valid code for a different set of cards. Brian  20:46   Oh, man, yeah, I'm over my head. But that's okay. That's okay.  Stephen  20:50   I wonder if, if they added some blank ones so that they could ease the constraints of making sure that you wouldn't have cases where there were weird corners you could catch on, or they were too close, or things like that.  Jason  21:03   Maybe. I suspect it's just that a 12 by 12 grid is the smallest square grid you can fit 125 different numbers on. And so they just worked with that in the early versions of the game, it was actually a four digit code you were going after, and they dropped it down to three because it let them have smaller number of holes and bigger holes. So it worked out better, like bigger symbols, bigger holes, fewer of them. So that worked out well. They also used to have a lot more esoteric conditions. So now it's like, oh, the sum of these is equal to four or greater than four, whatever. Or this is odd. This is even. It used to be things like all of these things multiplied together, are this or this is a prime number, or other much more mathematical things that the the publisher said, No, these are too esoteric. Stephen  21:45   There's one non prime digit  Jason  21:48   Exactly. Brian  21:50   So they wanted to make sure that the conditions were things that didn't have too many assumptions about mathematical knowledge other than odds and evens bigger or lesser. Yeah, it's like that. Jason  21:59   The thing I want to know still, though, is that there are 48 condition cards. Each has at least two conditions on it, and many have more than that. But there's only 95 verification cards, which means some of them have to be pulling double duty. And I don't know how that works. That's the part they actually intentionally did not explain in the designer diary, so they left that one a mystery. Anyway. That's the game. If you like Sudoku, you will probably like Turing machine. That seems to be the pattern from what I've gotten online. If you want to check it out, definitely watch some videos. It is not intuitive to most people the first time around, but once you get it, it's like, once I figured, I was like, Oh, I get it, then I could do pretty well about 90% of the time. And then I'd forget something and make some stupid mistake and completely mess it up.  Brian  22:40   I mean, when we played, we played once on normal difficulty. We both did great. We got it on the same round of guesses. I think you used one fewer piece of information, no issues. We clicked out the difficulty one notch. We could not solve this code. We both sccrewed up multiple different times, right?  Jason  22:58   Well, I know where I messed up.  Brian  23:00   Okay.  Jason  23:01   We had one of the ones where there were like, six different conditions, and I accidentally, I misinterpreted my result and thought I had eliminated five of them, when I'd actually only eliminated four of them, and so I was going off of wrong information. All right, so that's enough about the game. Let's move on to the science, and Stephen, I'm hoping you can help fill in the information here, because although I work in bioinformatics, like, I'm not a computer scientist. I'm not heavy into that. I want to start with the namesake. So this is named after Alan Turing. It's a Turing machine. So who was Alan Turing, and what was his machine?  Stephen  23:30   So Alan Turing was a British mathematician and ended up founding a lot of like fundamental thought about how digital computers would work. He was doing a lot of this work in the 30s, and then, of course, in the 40s, got swept up in the race to crack the German's Enigma machine that they were using to encode secret messages, where a lot more sort of approaches to and tactics about doing digital computation occurred at a point where there were no general purpose digital computers. Everyone was having to do analog circuitry and wind things together. But what Turing did was reason mathematically about how these computers that didn't quite exist yet might work. And He came up with a mathematical model that, I believe he called it like the A machine, and then it later his advisor renamed it to be the Turing machine, but it was, rather than an actual machine, sort of a mathematical model, a thought experiment about how digital computers could work and how you could describe a system that, then you could do mathematical reasoning about because Turing was really interested to dive into the question of like, Are there problems that a digital computer can't solve? He was playing in some of the same kinds of areas. If you've ever heard of Gödel and Gödel's conjecture that there are axioms in any mathematical system that cannot be proven, you can ever have a perfectly self proving mathematical system. There's always going to be some axioms that you just sort of have to assume as first principles. Jason  25:06   And bit of vocabulary for listeners, axiom is basically the foundation, bedrock of math. They're the things you start it's like, okay, we know X, Y and Z from that we can derive other stuff. Your axioms are those that first bedrock stuff you lay down. It's Brian  25:20   It's also the ship in Wall-E.  Stephen  25:21   It's also the ship in Wall-E. So Alan Turing was trying to look for some of those same kinds of principles in these digital computation machines that you know don't exist yet. So he came up with a system. The idea is that you've got this infinite roll of tape that can be slid forwards and backwards underneath this little device that is looking at each little cell on the tape. So the tape is divided into regions, and you've got this device called a head that can look at one of the regions, and it can read the symbol that is written there. It can write a new symbol on there, and it has this set of rules called states that say what it does when it encounters a given symbol. So you could imagine, for example, a four symbol tape. You can have A, B, C, or D on one of these cells, and so when it looks at say an A, it says, Okay, move the tape one cell to the right. If it sees a B, move the tape one cell to the left. If you see a C, write a D, if you see a D, don't do anything. So now you've got a simple set of rules for moving the tape around and manipulating these symbols on the tape. The next level up is you say, Okay, those are the first set of rules for A, B and C, but if you see a D, now you're going to swap in a second set of rules. You're going to go to another state in the state machine. So it shifts a new set of rules about what it does with A, B, C or D, and maybe there's a third set of rules and a fourth set of rules. So it can swap in and out these rules depending on what symbols that it sees. So it could have a, you know, a case where it says, All right, an A says I move left, and then a B says I move right. But if I see two B's in a row, now I'm going to change my rule, so now that B means I shift it to the left. So it's simple sounding but abstract. But it turns out that given those operations, you can simulate any computer algorithm like top to bottom, they can get really complex. You can build up a whole set of symbols and a whole set of these rules, these states that the machine swaps in and out. But you can use that to have any digital algorithm. You can describe it using that machine and the proper set of symbols and rules. Jason  27:38   Do our computers work like that? This is one thing I've never been able to figure out. Like, is the Turing Machine an abstract concept, or is this essentially the foundation on which all actual hardware is built? Stephen  27:48   It is an abstract concept because it turns out, number one, if it's going to be an actual Turing machine, the tape has to be infinite, if you know,  Jason  27:58   okay, only minor, minor issue there. Stephen  28:00    It's a small, small wrinkle in building one of these things, yeah, because it turns out, if the tape is not infinite, let's say it's just merely super, super, super big, like you've got a Googol's worth of cells, there are some algorithms you're not going to be able to describe. So it's more that it was simple enough that you could do mathematical reasoning about it and create mathematical proofs to answer some of the questions that Alan Turing had about how digital computers would work. Jason  28:28   This almost seems like in biology, we have our model systems which are like our little like the lab mice and the E coli bacteria, which have been like they're very simple, they're very reduced, but we can do a lot with them to try to understand how things work out in the real world is that kind of this for computation? It's a very simplified model system that you can find out some rules and then apply that out into real computers. Stephen  28:48   Yes, you you have stripped the idea of a digital computer down to like the fewest things that you can get away with and still be able to describe all of these different algorithms. Jason  28:59   Okay, And in looking up research for this episode, I ran across a phrase called Turing complete, which apparently describes something about computers. But I couldn't figure out exactly what, what is Turing complete? Stephen  29:10   So if a device is Turing complete, it means that it can do all of the digital operations necessary to express these computer algorithms. So if you have a device that is not Turing complete, you are limited about the kind of algorithms that you can use, that you can describe with it, that you can, you know, create on this device. If it is Turing complete, then it matches the same characteristics as this hypothetical Turing machine, and should be able to express any digital algorithm that you can come up with,  Brian  29:42   Even though it doesn't have an infinite stretch of tape Stephen  29:45   Even though it doesn't have an infinite tape. Yes, yeah, thankfully, they managed to figure out how to do it without infinite tape. Brian  29:51   Think anytime you need infinity, maybe it's only it because very esoteric and abstract. Stephen  29:57    Oh listen, I come from physics. We ran into infinities. So we're like, you know how you get rid of those infinities? You divide them by other infinities, and we will call it renormalization. Jason  30:06   So it sounds like most of our digital computers nowadays are Turing complete, at least, like for me as a user, it seems like they're capable of running basically anything we want on them. Is that right? Like, is my cell phone Turing complete? Stephen  30:18   Yes, it has all of the operations necessary to create these digital algorithms, you end up being limited by the amount of memory that you have available, whether that's memory where you can shove all of the numbers that it's operating on in working memory, or to store it onto a disk or other medium, but it's able to do all of the operations that make it equivalent to that Turing device Jason  30:41   got it so I said it Turing complete in Theory and Practice, like storage becomes an issue, but in theory, right? What's what's not Turing complete then? Brian  30:49   yeah, like, what's an example from modern life of something that doesn't qualify?  Stephen  30:54   I really should have looked up this, because at this point, I'm not sure we've got a lot that isn't Turing complete, the fact that you can, you know, run Doom, literally on your toaster. Computer chips have become so cheap and so readily manufacturable that it is, I think, harder to get a device that is not Turing complete, at least on the computer side. A lot of this came out of the point where, as I mentioned, they were building computers using analog circuits, and there were a limit to the numbers and kinds of operations that you could create by winding resistors and getting capacitors and soldering them all together. So I think that was a much bigger barrier when you're talking about the 40s with the early steps of digital computing, with the UK's bombes that were working to crack the Enigma code, than it is at this point where computer chips are super cheap and super easy to get and you just don't do much in the way of analog computing anymore. Jason  31:58   So I just did a quick search on this and pulled up the Wikipedia page, and apparently, I think you're right, because there's, there's a list of things that are accidentally Turing complete, which includes stuff like Microsoft Excel, Minecraft and Magic, The Gathering. Yes,  Brian  32:12   wait, I'm Sorry. What does that mean? Jason  32:16   Run computer programs in magic. And I have seen the YouTube video that explains how to do so I'll link it in the show notes.  Brian  32:22   Yes, please put that in the show notes.  Stephen  32:24   You can do it in Excel with its formulas. You can create basically computer systems in Minecraft using the redstone bridges and the, you know, linking them all together and the switches that they've got available. You can create the different kind of logic gates that are required to build up to more complex mathematics.  Brian  32:43   but Magic, the Gathering too. So yes, you can design loops in magic.  Jason  32:47   Yes, you can is the world's most boring game of Magic, but you can do it. Brian  32:54   So when you were talking about the Turing machine, the analogies that you made, you had a read head and a writehead, you know, a long line of tape, symbols. I mean, all this sounds like magnetic tape. Is that? That's not a coincidence? Is it?  Stephen  33:07   No, and it gets to the thing you were talking about earlier, about like, how do you store information? Turing's machine, his mathematical model, used a symbol table, and you could have four symbols or five symbols, or things like that. But it turned out that it was a lot easier to build up these systems. If you just have two symbols, you have true and false, you have one and zero, and then you start building those up from there. And it turned out that you could store this in the direction of a magnetic moment. You know, if you think about the little old bar magnets, where you've got a North End and a south end, you can say, all right, if the North End is pointing up, that is one or true. If it is pointing down, then that is zero or false. And you can encode that on a magnetic tape by having the ferromagnetic particles where you hit them with a magnetic field to flip the direction that they're in. And then it persists, at least for a while. Eventually, the magnetism sort of wears off, depending on, you know, if you leave a tape in your hot car when you're, you know, 10, and then come back a month later and discover that it's all kind of gone. Jason  34:16   Yeah, but so tapes weren't actually the first one, though, and this plays right into the game, because the game has the whole punch card thing, and punch cards were among the first actual ways of storing information. They're not digital, like magnetic tape, but what I was reading like the Code Cracking for World War Two, they were generating like, 2 million punch cards a week to try to run all their computational stuff. Have you ever run a punch card computer?  Stephen  34:39   I have not but I have used punch cards and the ways that they were never meant to be done, because I was in a laser lab at a university where the professor had gotten what was probably multiple graduate students, entire PhD researches on punch cards, and then taken them away because they have little holes in them if you're trying to align a laser. Beam. It's really nice to have a place where you can have a little hole and pull it away, and a little hole and pull it away. So that's what we used our punch cards for. Jason  35:07   oh my, those poor graduate students, they're probably, I know, hopefully they weren't dead, but if they were, they probably were rolling over in their graves. Stephen  35:15   Yeah, I used to be pretty blase about the fact that we were using ex grad students graduate life work basically as a cheap way to not have to use a hole punch on cards. I was like, you know, whatever. But then I sort of realized what that felt like, because we were doing atom cooling and trapping, and there was a lot of race to try to be the first group to create a Bose Einstein condensate that had been predicted by Bose and Einstein back in like the 30s, and it was this giant effort. People couldn't get it to work and couldn't get it to work, and eventually did in like 95 and it was impressive enough that they were getting Nobel Prizes for it in 98 which is just a ridiculously fast turnaround for that. And then, like, by the year 2000 it was a very common undergraduate lab, like everybody was making Bose Einstein condensates in the lab just, you know, over two days, it's like, okay, Brian  36:10   Nobel Prize to undergraduate laboratory exercise in a couple of years. Amazing, Jason  36:15   yeah. But no, when I was looking up this punch card things, I mean, I did not appreciate, I understood that punch cards were used to program computers back in the day. I didn't appreciate they were data storage. They were the floppy disks of their day, because there wasn't actual permanent computer storage. And so you'd have all these punch cards, and they had to be read in in order, because you flip two of them, you completely mess up the program, you mess up the data. And so they'd have these big stacks. They'd have like, Sharpie lines on them to help you figure it out. And multiple places, I found something to the effect of woe betide the graduate student who dropped their stack of punch cards, and they just scattered everywhere, and you had to try to figure out how to get them back in order.  Brian  36:52   Were they not numbered? Stephen  36:53   Well, originally, they were just like long pieces of cardboard with a row of numbers, and then, you know, multiples of those rows, and they would be punched by hand, and then later, they would type in the thing that you wanted, and it would encode it into the space of the punch cards, because it's, it's spatial information storage in the same way that the game is storing information about the numbers. You know, each of those cards, for example, has the position of every number that starts with a three. Every three digit number that starts with a three is encoded by holes positionally punched on those cards. And I think because you would end up with just like stacks and stacks and stacks of them, because it was not a very information dense way of storing that information. You had bunches of them, and it took a while to get to numbering them. You would occasionally have ones that were a certain statement or operation that would be pretty common, like adding two numbers or, you know, moving information around. And so you could have punch cards that were commonly created that you just like, oh, I need one of these. Perhaps, instead of like, I'm going to hand create every single one each time. So yeah, I think there were some quality of life things that people had to come up with, like, numbering them, Jason  38:10   probably via lots of pain, because that's generally what happens. Like someone messes up, like, oh, I should have done that. Let's do that from now on, yes. Brian  38:19   Oh I'm sure I'll never drop it. It'll be fine. I'll be careful. Jason  38:22   So the history of these things is fascinating. I didn't realize I think about them with the 50s. So apparently, the first wide scale use was in the 1890 census. Because they're like, it's going to take us 15 years to tally the census we have to do every 10 years. Like this is not going to work. And there's someone who came up with a punch card system that you could just count. It was always doing, was tabulated, it was counting stuff, but it made it so they got it in like, three or four years, so super fast relative to what they thought. And that guy formed a company that, like, three or four name changes later became IBM, International Business Machines, which is still around. That's a pretty good record for a company, I think. And if you go back further, like, the first one that everyone brings up is the first punch card, like proto computer thing was used for weaving.  Stephen  39:05   Yes, the Jacquard loom,  Jason  39:07   yeah, it would determine where which parts would get lifted up and which parts would stay down. So you could make patterns and can make them reproducible. Some version of this is what powers the player pianos you see in the old westerns, where they've got all the holes in the circular paper that's determining which keys get pushed. Okay, in the grand scheme of technology, 200 years is not a long time, but it's way older than I thought it was. Stephen  39:27   Yeah, folks started to realize that you could encode information in holes in paper much earlier than you might imagine, especially if you're used to thinking of, yeah, computers are the things that kind of came out of World War Two and then really got a, you know, a jump start during the space race, and they're like, oh yeah. Jacquard loom,s were creating patterns for weaving that you would just bolt onto the side of your loom and have it do operations based on the holes in the cards. Brian  39:53   So stupid question. Is a player piano Turing complete? Stephen  39:58   I do not believe so. Because it is not doing any operations, it has no ability to swap rules in and out. It's just when this hold comes by, I press this key, Jason  40:08   I think a player piano is basically read only,  Stephen  40:10   yeah. Brian  40:11   Okay, so it's that, it's that is a key difference. You can program something that can just read. So a music box is programmable, but it has no ability to change what is on the recording, right? You can't write, you can only read, and that's the key difference? Stephen  40:26    Yeah.  Brian  40:26   Okay, cool, yay. Stephen  40:27   Now I'm, I'm curious if there are any Turing complete devices that would be read only, and I don't know, I guess if it's an infinite tape, but maybe you can get away with it, right? Jason  40:42   Hey, y'all quick aside here. So after we recorded this episode, I looked this up, and it turns out that while you can have a read only Turing machine, it is not Turing complete. Some operations just can't be done when you can't write to the table. So just want to put that in here, so we had the answer. And now back to the show. We probably actually need to start wrapping this up. There's been a great conversation. There's a few things I want to touch on before we do one is the great mystery of computers to me, how do you do math with just ones and zeros? You talked about how it's much easier to do all these operations if you just use on and off with the magnetic fields. But when you get down to how those actually mesh inside the CPU and are doing math and are doing the calculations that show what's on my computer screen, all that I do not understand how that works, like what is going on there in the guts of the CPU. Stephen  41:30   If you go all the way down to the base level, you're looking at Boolean algebra that was created by a mathematician named Boole back in, I think, the 1890s where he was looking at what kind of algebraic operations you could do if you had just ones and zeros. There's more to it, but for our purposes, let's just stick with ones and zeros. So every number is a one or a zero, and you can stack those together. So in decimal, where we would go 012345, instead, you go 01, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000 so it's more properly base two numbering, where we're used to base 10 numbering, and then you introduce, three operations, you introduce, AND you introduce, OR you introduce NOT. So if I have two one digit numbers that can be either 0 or 1, if I AND them together, the result is a one if both of the numbers that you started with is one. So if I have a 1 and I have a 1 and I AND them together, I get a 1. If I have a one and a zero, if a zero and a one half a zero and a zero, I get a zero. So both the first number and the second number have to be one to give you a one. The OR operation is like that, but it's a little more permissive. If one of the numbers or the other number is one, then it results in a one. If both of the numbers are zero, it results in a zero, and then the NOT operation changes the number. If you have a zero, the not of the zero is one. If you have a 1, the NOT of the 1 is 0. So you can start to take those operations, and you can take longer numbers, so you can and two bit numbers together. So like an 11 and a 10 added together, gives you 10, because the first digit is one on both of them, but on the second digit, only one of them is if I or a 10 and 11, I get 11. If I take 10 and I not it, I get a 1. So you can build up longer algorithms using only those three operations and OR and NOT. There are algorithms that let you start to create, for example, addition. It lets you create multiplication. If you want a really deep dive into this, I'd say, go look up a YouTube video describing how the half adder h, a, l, f, half adder algorithm works for adding numbers together using just bits and ANDs, ORs, and NOTs.  Jason  43:58   It sounds like we're back in the Turing Machine territory, where you've got a very simple setup, and then through this like layers and layers of complexity, you manage to build up to something that we would recognize,  Stephen  44:08   Yep, yeah. So that, like, computers don't natively know how to do division, but we've got clever algorithms that let the computers do operations that result in a division that are stacks of these logic gates, they're called ANDs, ORs, and  NOTs, and rules about how you apply them.  Jason  44:26   Okay, well, thank you, Brian, do you have any last questions or comments you want to put out? Brian  44:30   I have my one joke about binary. Well, you've probably heard before there are 10 types of people in the world, people who understand binary and people who don't Stephen  44:37   Now, the really fun thing as somebody who came out of laser cooling and trapping, one of the things that people end up doing once you can start to manipulate these atoms in their quantum states, as they start to build quantum computers, where you have qubits, Q, U, B, I, T, S, where they are particles that are in a quantum superposition.  So maybe they're both one, maybe they're both zero, we're not going to know until we actually make the measurement. And all kinds of wacky algorithms are possible once you start to have enough qubits together that you can do in effect, kind of parallel, probabilistic computation. Jason  45:18   I hear about those every now and then, although my understanding is that they're facing the infinite tape problem. In that last I checked like they can get like 15 or 20 qubits, maybe 50. Stephen  45:28   There are systems where you can have more of them, but they're not in sort of the classical superposition. There's this thing called an Ising state, about where you can get atoms in a crystal aligned properly in a ways that let you do some aspects of quantum computing, but not the ones that people are really both interested and afraid in, like breaking cryptographic numbers really, really fast, so that all of your banking accounts can be sucked dry.  Jason  45:55   Yes, that's mostly what I hear. Is that if we manage to get quantum computing to work, all our current encryption goes to pot. Stephen  46:02   Yes, that is the headliner application for it. Jason  46:06   All right, so Brian, you have your nitpick corner. Do you have any nitpicks about this game you want to bring out? Brian  46:11   I mean, it's not a computer. So that's, that's kind of a thing, like, you know, it says it's the punch card computer, but it's not really a computer. I don't know what it is, but it's not that. Jason  46:21   It's a proto computer the rulebook clarifies.  Brian  46:23   What does that mean?  Jason  46:24   I don't know. Stephen  46:27   Yeah, I guess it's using like computer, like storage or encoding of information, but there is no computation going on. It's sort of like the old school version of computers, which were people who did computations. You're the one doing the computation by putting them together. Brian  46:43   That's true. We're, we are the punch card computers. Stephen  46:47    You are your own Turing machine. Congratulations. Jason  46:51   I have two nitpicks, and these are little ones, but one is, it's a four player game, but they only include three sets of the number cards. I assume that's a cost saving thing, because they seem like they're either very nice cardboard or maybe very thin plastic. That's probably just a cost thing, because I assume custom punching out all of these different numbers is kind of expensive. The other one is actually, recently, you talked about the hardest thing about a game is writing the rule book, because by the time you get to that, you know it so well. You're not you don't know how to explain it to a newbie. I think that happened here, because nowhere in the rule book do they actually say, by the way, you're the code you're looking for is the one that satisfies all the conditions on the table. It sort of alludes to that in one or two places. It kind of assumes you get that, but never actually says that outright.  Brian  47:33   I actually got that from watching a YouTube tutorial. It's like, by the way, if you want to play this game, you need all of the condition cards. Jason  47:40   So that's my nit pick. Is, like, that's a fairly important part of the game that I think they left out of the rule book. It probably needs to be corrected.  Stephen  47:47   Gosh, yeah, that's a great point. So my dad was a historian, and his speciality was Civil War, and so he would play the Avalon Hill game Gettysburg with his classes. And so I grew up with this Avalon Hill Gettysburg game, which had all these pages of densely typed rules, and they were all subsections. So you'd like, oh, according to 3.2 point 7.1, point four, when it is muddy, my terrain is modifier is such and such. Jason  48:16   Oh no this is steller Horizons  Brian  48:18   The game ran by an engineer.  Jason  48:20   All right, so let's get on to letter grades. Brian throw this to you. What do you think about gameplay?  Brian  48:25   I dont know this is a weird one, because this isn't the kind of game that we would typically play. But if you just, like, want to play a light game or something this, like, I kind of agree with you. This might be the one game that's worth having in solo mode, where you just set it up every once in a while. I guess I'll just give it a B. I think it's, I think it's kind of its own little unique niche. There's nothing really competing with it.  Jason  48:47   Yeah, apparently there's this whole genre of deduction games I was unaware of, so there might be some others competing with it, but like in our sphere, no, I I'm gonna give it higher, I'm going to give it an A-, and I'm gonna give it that because for what the game sets out to do, I think it does very well. The only reason I'm getting a little lower is because I think there's a barrier to entry that can put off a lot of people. In fact, when I was doing research, I ran across a Reddit thread by someone who's a professional game explainer who is basically asking for help, because no one ever understood Turing machine the first time he explained it to them, and so he's asking for help trying to figure out how to explain it better to people, and usually by the second or third time, they figured it out. But he just had trouble with that. And I wish they'd made that barrier to entry lower, but once you get past it, I think it can be fun. And if this is your jam, then I think it's a great game. It's not my jam, but I can definitely see what the appeal would be. Brian  49:33   Does it have Quick Start rules like, Hey, play this puzzle. These ones. Let us explain how this works. Does it do that, I don't think it does. And that, honestly, just like here, let us walk you through a simple puzzle. Yeah, Jason  49:46   it gives an example round, but it does not walk through an entire game deduction. It gives examples of the components, but it never puts it all together until, like, Oh, here's your this is your first game of Turing machine, so you understand how it works. Brian  49:58   This is the perpetual. Challenge. When you have experts trying to talk to amateurs, right? It's, it's very, very difficult to keep that beginner's mindset. Jason  50:07   But like I said, overall, I think for what the game sets out to do, I think it actually does it very well, especially we talked about the lack of skinning it. It's like, it's a very pure This is a logical deduction game, and there's very few bells and whistles around it. It is trying to be a logical deduction game, and I think it does that great. Steven, do you have thoughts? I mean, you didn't have a chance to play it because we're unfortunately too far apart from each other. Stephen  50:27   Right, I did get to watch some of the aforementioned YouTube videos. I really admire games like this that can pull off an experience without a lot of the sort of what I think of as traditional skinning and other elements of it to add to the experience. You know, if you think about like bluffing games, like Sheriff of Nottingham or something like that, like part of the fun is pretending to be the people smuggling the food in and out around the Nottingham wood. Here, it's just numbers and operations, like you mentioned Sudoku, like you mentioned Wordle, I think when that kind of game is done, well, I really admire it, because I think that feels to me like a much harder lift to come up with something that is that abstract and still interesting, that doesn't feel like I am playing Excel, the spreadsheet as my game tonight, Brian  51:22   or magic the computer game. Stephen  51:24   Yes, magic the computer game. Brian  51:27   It still is a pretty game, but there's no fluff. It just it is what it is.  Jason  51:32   I mean, the punch cards, they did a little bit of fluff there, but not very much. I mean, the randomization is really the only fluff component there, and that's mathematically equivalent to having them not randomized. So you might as well do it.  Stephen  51:43   Yeah,  Brian  51:44   and a hexagon of unnecessary little digital faces Jason  51:47   There we go. That is the one unnecessary aesthetic thing they put in there, the hexagon. Actually, many of the people who play a single player apparently don't use that. They just lay them out straight in a row. So onto science. Brian  51:58   How do you grade this? It's math.  Jason  52:02   I'm going to give the mathematical answer and say that the science grade is undefined.  Stephen  52:06   Nice.  Jason  52:07   This game is not trying to represent any scientific concept, which I don't think we fully realized when we picked it up and put it on the show schedule. It's a game of logic and deduction. There's not a scientific process. It's trying to represent. And so I don't think it's fair to give it a science grade, because it's that's not what it's doing.  Brian  52:24   Yeah, it's like, again, it's in STEM science, technology, engineering, math, it's math. So we can give it a math grade, and it did math. Stephen  52:32   Yeah, it feels like it is touching on some of the tools, the building blocks that you use as part of scientific inquiry. The idea of, like, if I've got a system, how do I query it? What questions should I be asking? How do I get information out of this system that I'm dealing with? And it is very much, in that case, a toy model, but it's an interesting exercise, I think, to go through to force yourself to do that in this constrained environment.  Brian  53:02   That'san interesting way to think about it.  Jason  53:04   Yeah, I hadn't thought about that because I often say that science is the world's biggest game of guess and check. That's that's what we do when we make a hypothesis and we test is we are making a guess and we're checking to see if we're correct, which makes it sound bad, except that the alternative is guess and not check, which is what a lot of other things do. So yeah, I hadn't thought about you're right, because, you know, there's some conditions you don't know which you make a hypothesis of your number. You check it to see if it actually fits or not, but you only get partial data. You have to figure out that's actually really cool. I hadn't thought about that. Brian  53:35   There are some examples of logical deduction in biology. Again, we were talking about it with the grid, right? We figured out by pure principles, that to be able to code for 20 amino acids, that you'd need to have at least three digits to do it, because you can't do it with two. So the smallest number would have to be three, which means we've got more options. And like that was just sitting down and thinking about what made logical sense. Jason  53:57   Well there's another tie back to Turing. So he came up with what's called a Turing pattern, which is basically you have these very simple rules about things that are like making some molecules, usually at least two different types, one of which has a different lifespan than the other, and they diffuse out. And from very simple rules, you can get super complex patterns. Everything from like cheetah spots to fingerprints to the folds of the human brain, are thought to arise from these Turing pattern processes. I'm actually studying one in corn right now, where I think that a Turing pattern is involved in how this certain feature comes out. Stephen  54:29   Oh, that's neat. Brian  54:30   Science is really fun, actually. Like, I was joking about onions, but like, they are interesting too. Corn is interested. Everything is connected,  Jason  54:38   all right. Well, that's where we should probably wrap it up, Stephen. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful having you on. Thank you for teaching us about laser cooling and computational operations and all sorts of stuff like that. And it didn't come up here, but I'm going to link in the show notes what I think is probably your greatest and most lasting contribution to the field, which is the science vs. movies panel at DragonCon, which for those of you who haven't seen this, there's no real science in this panel, except by accident. It's where Stephen makes poor scientists suffer through some of the worst science shown in Hollywood, and then explain why it's right, actually. And it's hilarious. I'll throw some links in the show notes. They are totally worth watching. Brian  54:38   Have you done The Core? Did you subject people to The Core? You must have. Jason  55:15   I have subjected people to The Core. Brian  55:15    so Stephen, if people want to find you, where should they look you up? Stephen  55:18   So you can search for my name, I have won the Google search for Stephen with a pH granade, G, R, A, N, A, D, E, my website is stephen.granades.com because one of the French branches of the family that are out in California got granade.com Before I could but I got my revenge. He ended up having to link to me early on, where he was like, Yeah, you're probably looking for this Stephen granade. Jason  55:53   All right, well, then we'll call it there. Thank you everyone. Thanks for listening. Have a great month and happy gaming. Brian  55:59   Have fun playing dice with the universe, see ya this has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2025 Jason  56:03   listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to game with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.

#Microbiome #GutCheck #SciComm #Dysbiosis #Antibiotics #Probiotics #GameDesign #BoardGames #Science  Overview In this episode we talk with Dr. David Coil, microbiome scientist and the creator of Gut Check. We talk about microbiome health, antibioics, probiotics, prebiotics, game design considerations, and how the game's origin includes cheerleaders and the International Space Station.  Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 1:17 Microbiome body odor & sweat 4:47 Gut Check overview 10:45 Microbiome science 17:02 Antibiotics and phage therapy 23:05 Prebiotics and Probiotics 26:59 Game history & design 41:52 Giving the game away 47:01 Grades & final thoughts Links Gut Check print-and-play website and FAQ (microbe.net), plus  scientific paper (PLoS Biology) Microbes make your body odor (Scientific Reports) The Joy of Sweat (book; Goodreads) Bacteriophage (Wikipedia) Jason's "Mighty Microbes" cards (by Zymo) The Landlord's Game (Wikipedia)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/) Brian  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:12   Today, we'll be talking about gut check published by Qiagen. All right. Welcome back, everyone. This is Jason.  Brian  0:20   This is Brian,  Jason  0:21   and we have another special guest on today, Dr David Coil. David, would you please introduce yourself? David  0:26   Hi. Thank you guys so much for having me on the show. My name is David Coil. Right now. I'm the program manager for a National Science Foundation funded center on pandemic Insights, where we study what we call the pre emergence phase of pandemics, which is viruses circulating in animals that might jump to people and cause problems. Brian  0:45   Very cool. Maybe we should have had you on the other game. We didn't know. Jason  0:48   Hey, we can't have everyone on the pandemic episode. We have to spread them around. I'm sure there will be other disease related games we can go over.  Brian  0:55   Yeah, probably  Jason  0:56   anyway. So David, we wanted to get on here. Because not only is he an avid gamer and scientist, he's actually the chief creator of gut check, which we're going to be going over today.  Brian  1:07   Yay.  Jason  1:08   This is less going to be an interview. We mostly want to talk the science, but we do want to get some insights from you about the making of the game, the things involved in that. But mostly we want to talk about microbiome science before we get to that, though, we would like to start off with some cool science fact. As our guests, we give you the first choice. If you have some cool science fact you've learned lately, you can share it. Otherwise, I'm sure Brian has something to share. David  1:27   It's funny, I actually tried to think of something. But in the spaces I work in, all of my science facts are depressing for a fun I mean, Brian  1:37   we just did a paleontology game. And you know, they always point out that the best Paleontology is founded by tragedy, so  David  1:45   fair enough. Brian  1:46    Uh, well, I did find something. And maybe this is not depressing, but possibly entertaining. I usually try to theme them. So this is the microbiome of underarm odor.  Jason  1:57   This sounds like it's heading for an ignobel Brian  2:00   No, not at all that you would be amazed at how many studies there are. I don't know. I maybe you wouldn't. I'm not sure. Okay, so underarm odor is not produced by your underarm. It is produced by the breakdown of things that come out of your apocrine glands, by the microbes that live in your underarm. There is a dipeptide, so two amino acids stuck onto a thiol alcohol. It has some name that's quite complicated, so I'll stick with thiol alcohol. Thiol means sulfur, so a lot of stinky compounds tend to have sulfur in them. The alcohol, I assume, just means it's very volatile, which means it's going to spread through the air very easily. Jason  2:36   And now I see why you got this, because your whole thing is stinky plant compounds all made os sulfur Brian  2:39   Exactly! There's actually a deeper connection here. So I study onions, garlic and that type of defensive chemistry. There is a very meaningful connection here. The compound itself doesn't smell like anything. It's odorless. Supposedly, I found a couple of things that said it actually is an antimicrobial in and of itself that it can bind to ureases and actually can kill bacteria. So bacteria, particularly Streptococcus hominis, which as you can imagine, it takes this name because it lives on people, will take this compound up. It splits off those little amino acids, presumably uses them as food, turns them into pyruvate, uses in its primary metabolism. And then it's got a specific enzyme, a carbon sulfur lyase, that will split off that sulfur thiol alcohol, so that it's no longer toxic, which then gets exported out of the cell and smells real bad. So this is the same type of enzyme that gets, truly gets used by onions and garlic to produce their defensive compounds. So that's that's how I learned about it. But yeah, same kind of deal. I did see another paper where they figured out things that could inhibit that process, so that you don't stink as badly. Jason  3:42   So this reminds me, I read a book all about sweat a few years ago, and yes, that's a weird book to read, but it's one of those like, let's take a an everyday thing and look into the science of it. It's actually quite fascinating. But the author talked about, believe the author was a woman, she talked with someone who was investigating, essentially, microbiome treatments, like skin microbiome treatments to change your body odor so that you don't have as bad body odor. There's this whole story about this guy who picked up bad body odor from his girlfriend and then trying to treat that so that anyway, there's this whole story. I'll link it in the show notes if you want to look up an entire book about sweat. Brian  4:20   You know, I do remember hearing a couple studies that people tend to share their microbiome that like people in a single household. Yeah. Is that true?  David  4:26   Yeah, no, no, for sure. And if we get into the topic of fecal transplants, which is my favorite topic of conversation, doing it from someone in your household is useful for that reason.  Brian  4:36   We talked a lot about poop in our paleontology episode too. It sounds like this is going to be a common running theme, maybe this year,  David  4:42   Microbiologists just love to talk about poop. Jason  4:47   All right, so let's get on into this game, then gut check. So gut check is a little bit of an unusual game. Most of the games we go over, everyone we have gone over so far is a commercially published game. This one is not quite in that space. This was a game that was designed as almost an educational outreach. You said you had a grant from the was it Sloan Foundation to do communication and outreach?  Brian  5:09   Oh, that's very cool.  Jason  5:11   I like first that you actually have a scientific paper talking about the game. We did a bonus episode on Publish or perish. I like the way of actually being able to turn a game into a publication that you can not perish by anyway. I like how you talked in there the the problem of making a an educational game that is actually fun, because most of them aren't. In fact, we've talked on this podcast before about how the term educational game is almost a dirty word in the gaming industry, because the idea is that if it's educational, it can't be fun. And so this game was essentially your goal to try to hit both of those the same time. So for those of you haven't played it, which is actually going to be quite a lot of you, because it is not commercially available. It is, however, free to print and play. So it is Creative Commons licensed. Go to microbe.net, you can download it, print it off, play whatever you want, which I imagine, is how a lot of like teachers and university classes are getting traction on this. Now, it was briefly published by MoBio and then Qiagen, but they decided not to continue that. Unfortunately, turns out, if you're in the business of extracting DNA from cells, it doesn't make much sense to continue publishing a board game, much to our sadness. Brian  6:16   I was at the ASM micro meeting last year and they had copies of gut check. It's like, Oh, that's really cool.  David  6:21   They still have it. They still have it, and they give it out as prizes at conference and things like that. So it's available through QIAGEN, but you can't order it. You have to earn it or win it, or convince someone to give it to you, Brian  6:33   which I wish I had taken the time to go to the Qiagen booth and convince them to give it to me, because I didn't realize I couldn't go and just buy it. I definitely would have made a point otherwise. Jason  6:42   I'll have to see. I'm going to a conference this next week. I'll have to see if I can sort of extort it out of them, even though I already have a copy. It's just like I need to get more of these out in circulation to people.  Brian  6:52   Well, I need a copy, so you should get it for me,  Jason  6:55   fair enough. All right, so what does this game actually consist of? So typical board game components, there's a large central board where you track points. Points in this game are health, and you each have your own player board where you track the microbes and diseases that you have picked up. There's a deck full of microbes, beneficials, pathogens, so diseases and harmful ones, and also a bunch of opportunistic ones, which can be either beneficial or pathogenic depending on circumstances. And that plays into some of the strategy of Do you want to play a beneficial on yourself or a pathogen on someone else? Player age is 13 plus, although, apparently, David, you mentioned in one article that you had your six year old daughter play, and she quite enjoyed it. David  7:33   The reason it's 13 plus is because of the edibility of the pieces. If you want to make it for younger ages, you have to do toxicity testing on your pieces. This is something I learned. I learned all sorts of weird things through the process of designing a game that, as a gamer, I was unaware of, I would have happily put eight plus on the box, but then you have to test the components. Jason  7:55   How many eight year olds are still eating game pieces? David  7:58   I don't know who came up with these rules anyway.  Jason  8:04   So two to four players, ages 13 plus,  Brian  8:06   legally,  Jason  8:07   legally, yes, you can. You can give it to younger children, just at Brian  8:12   at your own risk Jason  8:13    Well, it's more at their own risk. Don't feed the game to your children. You should be fine. And the goal of the game is just to accumulate health points over the course of it, which happens through a few cards that you can play. Like, if you have microbes that can digest certain foods, you play those foods, you get health. You can lose health by aside from pathogens and diseases, there are certain things that can happen. Like, for example, getting a round of antibiotics can decrease some of your microbes and also slightly decrease your health. There's these gut check cards that basically are a semi random way of checking how your microbiome health is at the moment, and that will determine your score, will make it go up and down. And the goal is basically that whenever the draw deck finally runs out, you have the highest health, or ideally, you get to the maximum, which is like 50. No one's ever done that in any of the games we played. And especially, you don't fall to zero, which is where you die. And no one ever did that in any of our games, either. So Brian  9:05   I got down the health track quite a bit. A few times. I'm actually not very good at these games.  Jason  9:10   didn't you win the last one we played? Brian  9:12    absolutely not Jason  9:13   okay,  Brian  9:14   not even close.  Jason  9:15   Okay. So those are all the components of the game. Playing the game. You draw your cards, you're playing your microbes on yourself, on someone else, you're playing diseases. You're playing treatments like prebiotics, that's microbe food, which basically lets you play more microbes, probiotics, which lets you get a random beneficial microbe, various other things. My favorite card in the entire deck, and maybe we'll talk about this a little bit, is the homeopathy card. So the homeopathic treatment, which literally does nothing.  Brian  9:41   Yeah, it's a pointless card,  Jason  9:43   which I love that, because I think that's an important thing to put in there. If there's any of our listeners who are great devotees of homeopathy, I'm sorry you may enjoy your placebo effect as much as you want, but it's still just a placebo effect.  Brian  9:55   So I only played the we only played the commercial version of the game that was provided to Jason. Thank you. By the way, my favorite thing about the mat in the middle is it's just a depiction of the intestines, and that's it. It's sort of like it's the there's sort of a dead skull on one end, and then there's the other end, where, I guess the maximum health you would go out the whatever. We don't need to talk about it in detail. But I was like, this is this person has no stomach. They have no mouth. This is only a human from the perspective of the microbes, David  10:23   it's a schematic. It's a gut schematic.  Jason  10:27   Well, from the microbes point of view, we are basically just a walking thing of habitat, and most of them are in our gut. So like, what else matters?  Brian  10:33   Yeah, it's just that the bits that are around the gut are of no concern,  Jason  10:37   kind of like how we only care about, like, the 100 yards or so, plus or minus the surface of the earth and maybe a little bit of that atmosphere. Stuff. Anyway, let's get into the science of this. Now this is where I really want to get into things. So I am actually a plant microbiome researcher. That's what my research is on. Even though I don't study the human microbiome, I do kind of keep abreast more or less of major things. And when I was starting graduate school like this was just barely a new thing. We could barely even touch the microbiome. Microbiomes because the technology to to look at these and had just barely been made, but now they're everywhere. I say you can't throw a rock without hitting some new paper saying, No, the microbiome is important in this thing and that thing and all these stuff, things like depression, heart disease, behaviors, obesity. I think we're still trying to sort out how how much of it is. It's a cause versus a symptom. But the fact is that people are finding links all over the place, and it pops up all over the place on YouTube, Tiktok, whatever, which now brings us to our core thing, David, what's a microbiome? David  11:33   You know? And I'm glad you asked that. And as you just mentioned, you know, microbiomes are everywhere. But, you know, I designed this game 10 years ago, and at the time, it was still very much an emerging Wild West sort of, sort of science. I feel like things have settled down a little more. We have a better handle on the tools and what it all means. But a microbiome is just a collection of microbes in a context, and it may or may not be biologically meaningful. We could talk about the microbiome of the planet, which might not be meaningful, but in this case, we're talking about like the human gut microbiome. We're just saying all of the microbes that are typically found in the human gut. But it still gets very difficult on the edges. You know, there's lots of microbes that are transitory because they came off your food. Are those part of your microbiome or not? The microbiome is actually a fuzzy concept. It's clearly really important in a lot of places, but it's, it's fuzzy on the edges. Brian  12:26   It's kind of like an ecosystem, right? What are the edges of an ecosystem? Yeah, it's fuzzy.  David  12:30   It is an ecosystem, actually. And that, that's probably what makes it so important.  Jason  12:34   Next question, then, is like, Okay, we all have microbiome we have many microbiomes. We've got the gut, skin, inside the mouth, like pretty much anything that touches the outside world has a microbiome, I think, is it still thought that all our interior tissue is still pretty sterile. If things are going right? David  12:49   If things are going right. But like we used to say that urine is sterile, and we now know that that's not necessarily the case, even without pathology. Brian  12:58    Oh, interesting. Okay, so humans are a tube, right? So anything on the outside and anything on the inside,  David  13:03   yeah. Jason  13:04   then why is the microbiome important? You have all this gut health and gut microbiome, what's been found about how this actually impacts our health? I rattle off a few things, but I'm sure you have a much better idea of this. David  13:16   Well, just you know, the microbes in your gut, for example, can help you digest any number of things. They make a lot of compounds, you know, more digestible, more absorbable. They also perform what we call niche exclusion, like you have happy, warm places inside you, and if they're full of beneficial microbes and there isn't space or opportunity for pathogens to grow. So I think that's a really important part of the human microbiome. It's just already having something living in all these nice, warm, moist places, which makes it harder for bad actors to come in and play. And so as you say, we're discovering more and more every year about how important the microbiome is and potential effects on the brain and mood and neurological conditions. And it's just fascinating how quickly you know, 20 years ago, to most people, microbes are bad, are bad, and they're something you want to avoid at all costs. And I think now our understanding is much more nuanced. Of course, it's also swung the other way. You know, there's a lot of snake oil and things out there about, you know, pop this pill and magic happens.  Brian  14:26   Do you think that societally, we've kind of shifted to some microbes are bad, some microbes are good, or do you still think it's kind of a mixed bag in terms of how well that, sort of, like, made its way out into society?  David  14:38   It's mixed. But, I mean, if you look at, you know, the yogurt section of the store, and, you know, the active cultures and probiotics and prebiotics and like, you know, there's, there is definitely, I think, an understanding that microbes can be beneficial, the nuances of that, though, I think we still don't really understand all the details, Jason  14:59   yeah, and so. Was one of my follow up questions is, I know there's a bunch of, as you said, snake oil out there. I mean, anything that has even the potential of being something to improve health, people will latch on and they'll slap a label on it, and they'll start selling you at a 10 times markup. How do you find reliable information about microbiome, what actually causes a benefit? What is possibly snake oil. Are there trusted sources or trusted people to check with? Speaker 1  15:23   I mean, that's a really good question. You know, a study will come out saying that this microbe was found in higher abundance in healthy people, as opposed to unhealthy people, for some condition, obesity, for example, and then immediately there's people packaging and selling it. But I think a lot is confusing, you know, correlation and causation, right? We don't know in many cases which direction things go. You know, maybe your microbes are different because you're healthy or because of some underlying confounding factor, right? It's not that having this microbe will make you lose weight or will make you happy or whatever, right? So I think there's, there's a lot of confusion of this idea of correlation and causation. You know, the published scientific literature is not perfect, but it's, it's a lot better place to start than than TikTok, I would say, if you're information on on microbiome health. But to some extent, for me, personally, I put it in the same category as nutrition, in the sense of, there's paper saying coffee is bad, there's papers saying coffee is good. And you know, our feelings about fat and sugar and all these things change over time. But broadly, if you eat a relatively balanced diet that consists of a lot of different things that don't come out of a can, you're probably all right. And I would say that same general approach probably applies to microbes. If you don't hit yourself with antibiotics too often, and you eat a balanced diet, your microbiome will probably be happy. That's probably good enough for most people, in most cases, unless you want a fecal transplant. And that's a different story. Brian  16:59   I hope we get to get into that just a little bit at some point. Jason  17:02   Well, let's head into that, because you mentioned antibiotics. a few times now, and so tying that together, what I know is that one reason why you want to be cautious with antibiotics, and I guess, quick aside, antibiotics are a wonderful invention that have revolutionized health, Brian  17:17    saved lives.  Jason  17:18   Oh, they've saved millions upon millions of lives. But that doesn't mean you should use them anytime you want.  It's like they should be used carefully. And maybe David, you can get into the various reasons, like, why do we want to be careful about using antibiotics as opposed to just using them anytime I start feeling sick? David  17:33    Yeah, no. I mean that. That's an excellent question. I think this is, again, also something that as sort of a society, we're shifting in our understanding of when it's appropriate. So, as you point out, I mean, they're, they're a fantastic invention. I say invention. They're not really invented by us. The vast majority of antibiotics are produced by other microbes, right? And they use them for their own purposes. You know, there's a whole arms race out in soil of antibiotics being produced by some bacteria and then defenses by other bacteria. And there's a whole ecosystem out there, and we just sort of steal from that.  Jason  18:02   I keep saying that nature looks like it's in harmony, just because everything is out to get each other all the time. And so it just looks balanced because we've reached equilibrium, but they're really just all out trying to kill each other. David  18:12   They are. They are, and that's where most of our antibiotics come from. And so if you have strep, you have strep throat to be common you want to take antibiotics. I mean, strep can actually lead to pretty severe complications in some cases, and so you take antibiotics, it knocks those bacteria down, your microbiome, re-equilibrates , and you're doing well. But the problem is, antibiotics are not specific. We had antibiotics that knocked out just a particular bacteria. That would be amazing, because then we could just take that and knock out. But they're not. They're generally, you hear this term broad spectrum antibiotics. And broad spectrum means they kill a lot of different things, and so they kill not only necessarily the pathogen that you're after you hope, but also many of the beneficial microbes in your body. And that's where you start to have a problem, because you disequilibrate the system, and in severe cases, you're in a hospital, you need to be on antibiotics. Maybe you're having surgery, or you had a severe infection, and you you knock out your microbiome so badly that a single bad actor can take over. So this happens in hospitals with Clostridium difficile, C diff, it's a really nasty usually, hospital acquired infection, and it typically appears in people who've had antibiotics and you have a single bacterium that takes over the whole gut, and it can be lethal if it's not treated.  Brian  19:31   Oh, geez, I didn't realize that.  Jason  19:32   And this goes back to what you were saying about beneficial sometimes they are beneficial just because they're occupying space and they're keeping a bad actor from getting in and taking over. It sounds like this is what happens you what happens you do antibiotics or basically a scorched earth on your intestines. And if you're unlucky, then that means that there's a new opportunity for C diff to move in and take over. Is that about right? David  19:52   Yeah, no, that's about right. And this gets to, you know, we have to talk about fecal transplants, and the best use case for fecal transplants is, in fact, in this scenario where you have a single bad actor, and that bad actor, that C diff, is often resistant to numerous antibiotics, so you can't take more antibiotics to solve the problem, but you can give an infusion of beneficial microbes. So you take someone that has a healthy gut microbiome, you take feces from that person, you inject it into the gut, and you sort of give that ecosystem a chance to re establish itself and push out the bad actor. And it actually works really well for that purpose. Brian  20:30   So, just to go back to the ecosystem analogy, I think we've already said it. This is the antibiotics are clear cutting the forest, right? And you've got individuals that are able to, I mean, there's a whole field of disturbance ecology. That's basically what a post antibiotic intestines is, right? Is a disturbed ecosystem where something can come in and take over all of that niche space, but it can still be pushed out by a healthy ecosystem that's reintroduced.  Jason  20:54   Yeah, I was actually just looking this up, and I like how you represented this in the game. C diff is one of the pathogens in the game, and when it's in play, whoever has it, they can't add any beneficials, except through probiotics. So basically, the intentional addition, they can't just be colonized by something. You have to actually intentionally take it or do the fecal transplant card, which I think what gets rid of all the negative ones?  David  21:16   Yeah, fecal transplant knocks down all the pathogens.  Brian  21:20   I noticed there was one card in the game that seemed to have no downside, and that was the phage therapy. Can we talk about that for a bit? David  21:27   Sure, phage therapy is still pretty new. So bacteriophages are viruses that specifically attack and kill bacteria. So phages don't present any risk to human health. They don't impact human cells. They go after bacteria. The idea of using phages to kill bacteria specifically is relatively new, at least in the United States. It's actually something that the Soviet Union has been working on for many, many years. But there was a disconnect for a long time between science that happened behind the Iron Curtain and science that was being published in the West. But I think it's, it's equilibrating a little more now, but the the attraction of that is the specificity of the phages. So this idea that you could have something that's more specifically targeting a particular pathogen, you had a particular phage that went after that, and that might not impact the rest of the microbiome, I'd say we're still in the very early days. But that's, that's the attraction and the the promise of phage therapy. Jason  22:25   And so those of you who don't know what a phage is, you've probably actually seen one. If you've ever seen a little cartoon of some little virus that looks like, like little 20 sided die on a stick with spider legs. That's a phage Brian  22:35   a lunar lander? Jason  22:36   Yeah, they look really cool.  Brian  22:38   So they often get used to depict viruses where, like, unfortunately, human viruses are usually really boring looking. Bacteriophage look real cool, so they tend to get used inappropriately to represent viruses. Because why wouldn't you want something that looks like it's got little legs, like a little weird spider with a gem head,  Jason  22:55   although now I think we're probably getting variations of COVID representing human viruses since that well, Pardon, pardon? The phrase went viral. David  23:01   Yeah, that's what we see now. Is enveloped viruses. Jason  23:05   So we've talked a few times now about like, prebiotics and probiotics, which are both cards in the game that you can play. But can you tell us a little bit what? What are those two things? What's the difference between them? Are either of them worth using?  David  23:17   Sure. So prebiotics, as you mentioned earlier, are basically food for beneficial microbes. The idea is that there are certain compounds, fiber falls in this category, that we don't necessarily digest directly, but that beneficial microbes can use. And so we're sort of nudging our microbiome in a beneficial direction by giving them certain foods that beneficials can use probiotics is just the act of taking live, active bacteria. So if you have active culture yogurt, that's basically a form of probiotics, both of them, scientifically, are very clearly established concepts. The use of them for improving human health, I would say, is murkier. You know, when you take bacteria orally, so active culture yogurt, how much of that is going to survive passage through your digestive system, through the, you know, very inhospitable environment of your stomach and and actually get into your gut and do something useful there. And also, you know, maybe what my gut needs at this moment is different from what your gut needs. So it's hard to say, you know, there's a universal, you know, little, little probiotic that you can drink, that's, that's necessarily useful. I think there is some evidence showing that after antibiotic treatment, so after you've knocked down your your microbiome with antibiotics, there's some benefit in in trying to re establish a healthy gut microbiome with probiotics. So I'd say they're both scientifically useful concepts, but I wouldn't say it's clear exactly how to apply them commercially for health.  Brian  24:48   In the game, some of your beneficials help you digest certain things, like you said, fiber, plants, dairy, there's one more I'm forgetting. What am I forgetting? Jason,  Jason  24:56   vitamins. They don't digest vitamins. They make the vitamins.  Brian  24:58   That's right. It's grains Dairy, plant material, and then vitamins, making the ultimate food, pizza, right? That was that's actually in the game as well. The best card to play is pizza. Which I like that? I think it was lasagna in the print to play.  David  25:11   Well, it's funny, because there's things like that that, you know, it was lasagna in my mind, because I was finding something that had all these different components to it. But when Qiagen printed the game, they insisted it had to be pizza. I don't know why, and there's other weird things like that, where I had these you could go on a bus trip or a plane trip, you know, which is the idea of you're sharing microbes with other people, and that's what happens in the game. But they insisted to add like, a train trip and a boat like I don't know why. Brian  25:43   There's four different types of trips. They all do the same thing. It's just pass microbes to the left or to the right.  David  25:47   I had one was to the left and one was to the right. So I had train trips to the left, plane trips to the right. I don't know why they decided to add boats. Brian  25:55   Were there any other changes that they wanted to make, or that they made that you know of? Jason  25:59   there was a significant art upgrade. That's the most visible change, probably, David  26:03   in the print and play version. The artist who designed the print and play version was very thoughtful about ink usage, so the print and play cards are designed to not destroy your you know, ink cartridge.  Brian  26:15   Oh that's great. That's actually really considerate.  David  26:18   And that's a different consideration when you're printing. Also, every company out there has, you know, a certainaesthetic. They have, you know, fonts that they used or whatever. And so there's actually two printed, commercially printed versions of the game. There's the MoBio version, which has the MoBio color palette and fonts. And then when they got completely absorbed by Qiagen, Qiagen then reprinted the game, and they redid all the art. It's the same pictures, but it's with a Qiagen set of fonts and color palettes. Brian  26:47   Oh, man, I gotta go try to find on eBay the MoBio version somewhere so I can have the whole set.  Jason  26:52   Good luck. I looked up. I couldn't find even to used copy. Brian  26:55    You couldn't find it either? Jason  26:56    I couldn't find a used copy for sale anywhere. So okay,  At one point I want to talk about the weird, the weird history of the game and how it came to be offered as a promotional item by Qiagen  David  27:07   Well, that story of the game, we were doing a project where we sent a bunch of bacteria to the International Space Station to see how they grew in microgravity compared to Earth, actually collected with the help of professional cheerleaders around the country. So you can see why I did a lot of media interviews.  Brian  27:21   This is, this is this is okay, sure,  Jason  27:24   professional cheerleaders, as in, like the people cheering on of like David  27:27   NFL, NFL and NBA cheerleaders  Brian  27:29   collected your microbes to send to the space station. David  27:31    It's a long story. Anyway,  Brian  27:31   it sounds like someone did an like a mad lib of just combining words  David  27:33   It the awesome project, but I created baseball cards for all the bacteria that were going to the space station, little trading cards that had, like, a fun fact. And then so the and we would give these out at promotional events. We were trying to get people engaged in, like, getting excited about these bacteria that were going to space and my boss asked me if we could gamify those cards, like, like pokemon or something like that, turn them into a trading card game. And I thought about it, and I decided, no, I just I couldn't see any hook or any interest. But I said, you know, it would be cool to design a game about the microbiome. And he said, We should absolutely do that. Said, Okay. And then I said, I want you to repeat in front of all these witnesses. It was like at a lab meeting, there were like 20 people there, and I said that you want me to spend my time at work design board game? Yeah, and so I started to think about it, and then off we went. So yes, I got paid to design a board game that was very exciting, Jason  28:29   awesome. That's great. And along those lines, so you decided not to gamify the little collectible cards. But I know a few other people have maybe not a game out of it, but they made them collectible. This conference I'm going to next week. Every year, there's one or two companies that they have the little collectible cards of, like the genomes they've sequenced and stuff. And every year I seek them out, just so I can add to my collection. But my little binder here, of all my little genome cards that have no real value whatsoever, other than I think they're cool Brian  28:57   my chronically disorganized office, I thought I had a little stack of these cards. I have the mulberry genome. I think it's up on my card thing on the wall next to all of my Oddish cards.  David  29:06   Yeah. Well, people were excited to take these cards at a convention or whatever, but as a Magic the Gathering nerd myself, for five years, I couldn't see a way to gamify it. Jason  29:16    All right, so there's one other thing I want to talk about, the mechanics of the game that you represented, because you did take care to try to represent real scientific concepts mechanically, and that's horizontal gene transfer, which I think we may have mentioned in past episodes, but it's not something that you usually hear about, but unless you're actually a microbiologist or in biology. In the game, when you have a bacteria that's gotten Antibiotic resistance because it survived your treatment of antibiotics, then you can play a card that will actually move that resistance to another bacteria, which I assume that the idea is that if you have any harmful resistant ones, you can move that to a beneficial one so that it doesn't get nuked the next time you use that antibiotic. But this represents real biology going on. So David, can you explain a little bit of. Like, what that's representing, how it works in in the wild, so to speak? David  30:03   Sure sure, but, but in game terms, you can also make your opponents pathogens resistant to more microbes with lateral gene transfers so that they have more trouble getting rid of Yeah. So in real terms, so I guess we'll talk really briefly about antibiotic resistance. So microbes, as I said, they're living this battle in the soil, on plants or wherever they're fighting with other microbes. And so they've evolved a lot of defenses to protect them against antibiotics. And so a really common form of antibiotic resistance is a pump, so bacteria have pumps that pump out the antibiotics so they don't damage the cell. And so if you have the right kind of pump, and when you're exposed to that kind of antibiotic, you can just pump it out of your cell and survive. That's a common defense against antibiotics. It's a way that bacteria are resistant to those antibiotics. And there's many different forms of antibiotic resistance. Some of those happen just naturally through mutation. You know, if you expose bacteria in a dish to an antibiotic over and over again, some of them are going to acquire resistance to it, through some mechanism or another, and eventually, all of the microbes in that dish will be resistant to that antibiotic because you've kept them under what we call selective pressure, you've kept attacking them with this antibiotic, and only the ones who are resistant to it survive. This is listeners. Why, anytime you're prescribed antibiotics, you finish the course of antibiotics, even if you feel fine, because otherwise you're doing that exact same thing inside your body. and you're still potentially doing it even if you finish the course of antibiotics. Right? You know it makes sense that when you continually apply some threat, the things that are resistant to that threat survive. And this is a problem, because over time, as a society, when we use antibiotics, we create these multi drug resistant bacteria. And so if you think about MRSA, is a methicillin resistant staph aureus, it's a problem in hospitals. But in the past, you know, it had become resistant to methicillin, which is a kind of antibiotic that is used a lot, and if you had it, then we used something else. We used a different antibiotic, vancomycin, say, to treat it. But now we have these strains, these, they're called XDR these, these multi drug resistant strains, where they're resistant to most, or maybe all of the antibiotics we have. So you have in a single bacterium, they have all these different resistances, and we can't kill them. And some of those bacteria are lethal. And so people die because they've acquired these multi drug resistant strains of bacteria. Where it gets really interesting is that some forms of these resistances can actually be transferred from one bacteria to another, and that's the horizontal gene transfer. So if the resistance is, say, encoded on what we call plasmid, it's a separate piece of DNA. It's not part of the genome of the bacteria. It's a separate free floating piece of DNA that can actually get transferred to another bacteria, and that bacteria can become resistant even though they've never seen the antibiotic. And so one of the concerns with the overuse of antibiotics is that you create resistances, and those resistances can then be passed out to other bacteria. So that's a concept I really wanted to convey in the game, and this is one of the places where the lateral gene transfer card in the game is not very useful from a gameplay perspective. It's the card that gets discarded most of the time. But I really wanted to convey this idea, the resistance that could be transferred between microbes. Brian  33:32    I felt that in the game it's like, this is a really cool mechanic. I appreciate why that's here. It's hard to use, so I didn't end up using it very much, but it's like the homeopathy does nothing, and that still needs to be there for the purposes of being entertaining. David  33:45   There's a balance between education and entertaining. And, you know, I've listened to a lot of your guys' podcasts are really, really interesting. And, you know, the vast majority of those games didn't exist 10 years ago. We now live in the sort of post wingspan era. Of, you know, teaching people cool science with an interesting, beautiful game is is more commonly accepted. And, you know, as we talked about at the beginning of the episode, I was frustrated with the fact that most educational games, the gameplay was very weird. And in particular, I've always been frustrated with this concept where you're faced with a choice in the game, but it's an obvious choice. I should either do this thing which is clearly good or this thing which would be stupid, then I don't feel like you're making real choices. And I really wanted a game where I felt like when you looked at your hand, it wasn't obvious what you should do, like, oh, do I want to play a beneficial on myself? Do I want to hurt someone else? Like I wanted that process where you have to strategize about your choices.  Brian  34:43   Let's get into game design just a little bit. So I had a question, how did you choose which pathogens my wife got the plague a bunch of times when we played there were only 10 different pathogen cards, and I think only four different pathogens in the version that's published by Qiagen. How were those selected? Because they weren't all gut microbes.  David  34:59   So when. I designed the game. Everything just had placeholder names. You know, good bug one, bad bug three. You know, as I was doing the massive amount of play testing that game design requires, because there's a balance, right? If you have too many pathogens in the game, then, you know, everyone dies all the time. And so, you know, I did hundreds of hours of play testing, and most of that was just with placeholders and then once I felt like I had an appropriate balance in terms of number of cards and types of cards and things like that, then I went out and tried to find things that made sense. And I think I actually talked about this in the paper. In the beginning, I had something that digested meat, because that kind of made sense to me. And I went out into the scientific literature, and I couldn't find any evidence anywhere the bacteria that helped you digest meat.  Brian  35:47   I think meat's pretty easy to break down, right?  David  35:49   Yeah, but I couldn't find it. So maybe, you know, the body does all the work, and you don't need the microbes for that. So I had to shift to something else, and I switched to grains, which numerous people have pointed out to me over the years that grains are plants, so it doesn't have grains two separate categories. But yeah, for for choosing the the pathogens, you know, I had to have things like C diff, because it made sense of this concept of resistance. And botulism is another food borne thing. I tried to find things also that people had heard of. So the plague is in there, not a gut microbe, but it's something that people have heard of. So I thought it would be interesting. So it's maybe, maybe not the most scientifically interesting, but, but something that would be familiar to people.  Jason  36:32   And you have to admit, the game appeal of just giving other people botulism and the plague and stuff, there's a certain amount of fun in that.  Brian  36:39   Oh, for sure. No, I was teasing my wife. She needed to stop hanging out with so many prairie dogs, because prairie dogs carry plague. I think one of the hardest things to to deal with, with antibiotic resistance, and I know I even have graduate students who really struggle with this, is that it's the it's an act of selection, the resistance existed. It's just, you've eliminated everything that was sensitive, that's always hard to communicate. It's not that taking antibiotics creates resistance that selects for the resistant individuals.  David  37:07   Yeah no, that's true, and that's a difficult concept to convey. And in the game, it appears that resistance is created, right? Because you treat with antibiotics and then you get rid of half of your beneficials, and then the other half become resistant. But you're right. That's not what's happening. You're selecting for the things that are resistant.  Brian  37:25   Could you let us see behind the curtain? What was a mechanic that sort of got dropped during play testing? David  37:30   Oh see, this is like a memory test. Now, that was a long time ago and and I've kind of blocked it out, I mean, Brian  37:39   so that that might go into my next question is like, would you design another game? Or do you have an idea for another game that you'd like to design? Or is that, are you have you left that part of your life behind?  David  37:47   Well, I think I mentioned this actually in the paper the if you've done enough play testing, you should never want to play your game again. And everyone you know should never want to play you know, I hosted a weekly Friday night board game group, and by the time the game was published, all of my colleagues and all of my friends never wanted to see it again. You know, when we got shrink wrap copies of it, I gave everyone a copy as a thank you, and they're probably mostly still in shrink wrap on everyone's shelves because everyone was traumatized by the iterative play play testing is is really quite painful. And I mean, I spent many, many hours putting my PhD to good use using a paper cutter cutting out cards, because I would print them on card stock, I would cut them, and we'd play, like, two games and be like, this doesn't work at all, or like, this doesn't make any sense. And so I'd go back and I make adjustments, and I'd print them out again. That's why, when people asked about like, could you make an expansion? Like, people have asked, Could you make like, an STD expansion? Brian  38:47   Oh, gosh, Jason  38:48   Gut check after dark. Oh, David  38:50    exactly. I don't. I don't think I want to do that. I don't want to revisit that process.  Brian  38:56   That was people's top requests. Was STDs? David  38:59    I had multiple people request an STD expansion  Brian  39:02   or STI sexually transmitted infection, I guess we call it now, but  David  39:06   I don't think I want to revisit that space. I would consider designing another game, but there's so many things I would do differently. The biggest which I would I would want to understand the publication and distribution process in advance. I mean, I didn't know what I was doing when I made this game. I did all the play testing, I got everything ready, and we were going to spend grant money from the Albert P Sloan Foundation to print it, and then we were just going to sell it to recoup our costs. And that's where I discovered, do you have a problem? Because if I hand you the game and collect $20 I'm obligated by the State of California to collect sales tax on that transaction and then file that sales tax as a business. And I didn't want to do that. I didn't form, I didn't want to form an LLC file business taxes. Or I just wasn't interested in that. And, yeah, I hadn't thought about that in advance. I was like, oh, we'll just spend grant money to make it and then, you know, we'll recoup our costs, but it doesn't work that way. So we could have spent a bunch of grant money and just given it away and not recoup our costs, but that didn't make sense either. So the game sat for like, a year as I tried to figure out what to do. And everybody's like, well, Kickstarter, you know, exploding around that time, and everybody's look good Exploding Kittens, they made, you know, a million dollars in five days. I was like, Well, yeah, this is not going to do that, you know, I'm not the oatmeal, and it's a ton of work, as you pointed out Brian. So I sat on it for a long time, and then I just, I cold called MoBio, and I said, I have a proposal for you guys. I'll give you this game, just everything you need. You put your name all over it. You pay to print it, you give it out as a promotional item, and you give me enough copies to like, you know, give to friends and family, and that's what they did. I didn't realize at the time that I had not thought of this as an educational game in the context of like high school and college classrooms. I was thinking about gamers and biologists. Those were our targets. It became very popular with high school and college teachers, and I started to get a lot of requests for copies of the game to use in the classroom. And I wish I had thought about that use case in advance, because I would have done two things differently. First of all, I would have made sure I had copies of the game to give to people for education purposes, but I would have designed a shorter, simpler game, you know, had a lot of people using a game in a high school classroom. You can't explain this game and play it in a 45 minute class period.  Brian  41:28   Oh, yeah, that is hard.  David  41:31   The game is too complicated for like, non-gamer high school students to pick up quickly, and it takes too long to play. So in that sense, if I had wanted to design a game that would be used in education. I would have designed something like a deck of cards that was more portable, simpler, and just got at those concepts without all the complexity. Jason  41:52   Before we started recording, you were mentioning something about the university actually getting upset with you for giving the game away to MoBio. Can you go into that in a little bit more details and maybe share what you're allowed to share David  42:02   well as a staff member of the University. And this is different for you guys, because you guys are faculty, they have different IP protections. You know, if you invent something, you have some personal stake as a faculty member in you know, when you go through your tech transfer, office, etc, as staff, the university owns you, basically. And so if you create things, the university is supposed to, you know, own the rights to those things, basically. And so by creating the game and releasing it under a Creative Commons license, that was a violation of the spirit of that policy, at least. And so when the discussions about this came up, the university was asking, but who owns the copyright? And it's like, no one, because I released it under an open Creative Commons license. And they're like, but, but who owns it? Like, does MoBio own it? I'm like, No, and Qiagen doesn't understand this either. Qiagen has all the files, and they have everything, and they can make more copies of this game. But this idea that, like, no one owns the rights, I think, is not intuitive to either industry or academia.  Brian  43:07   Yeah, I could see this being a problem, because at that point it's like, well, then how do we make money on it? That's, well, you don't, you don't make money on it.  David  43:14   Someone can take the cards off of gut check, put it on T shirts, sell it, and make money. And, like, that's all allowable because it's an open license. Brian  43:22   Jason I were talking about adding some sort of, like, game upgrade items to our website, which we could totally do, because it's creative commons, right?  David  43:29   You can do whatever you want with it.  Jason  43:30   Yeah, our top choices were a tip card for, like, what you can do in your turn, because we kept having to reference the Rule book for that, and then making little 3d printed antibiotic resistance instead of the cards. I understand why you did the cards, because those are probably much cheaper to print than custom little tokens, but giving people their own 3d print files to just make a few antibiotics seems like it'd be easy enough. David  43:51   That would be really cool, and I really regret the fact that I didn't have a tip card, like a rule summary card. There's any number of regrets. So in preparation for this episode, I sat down with my two teenage daughters, and I played my game again. It's been many years. I relived the trauma, and I found all sorts of things to be critical about. I was like, Oh, I wouldn't do that again, or that was a mistake.  Brian  44:14   Let us know what you what you would change. We have every opportunity here to make the changes. We could say they are. "David Coil approved".  David  44:21   Well, one of the biggest issues is you guys reviewed pandemic. You've played pandemic.  Brian  44:26   We did  David  44:27   The way the epidemics are spread throughout the deck. You know, you make pile.  Brian  44:31   Oh, the gut check system reminds me of the pandemic outbreak system.  David  44:36   It is very similar, except that they're totally random throughout the deck, which is a problem I was trying to avoid the hassle with games like pandemic, we have to create a bunch of piles, and then you have to shuffle a card into each pile, and then you have to stack the piles, right? But the the utility of that is, you get some distribution of these checkpoints. In gut check. You just chuck them into the deck. They're totally random, but that means that the game can be very swingy from like a point perspective, so you're doing really well at this particular moment, and there's three turns in a row where a gut check comes up that's going to massively balloon your score, or whatever, or be really frustrating if you just happen to have a nosocomial infection, and a couple of pathogens when that happens. So I think it's it adds to the randomness in a problematic way, to have the checkpoints be totally random. So I think if I were to do it again, or if I were to make an addendum, I would do something more like pandemic, where they're distributed. Brian  45:32   but then that also is kind of counter to that well, but I want something easy to play in a high school classroom. So it's like, this is the thing. It's always a choice. It's always a balance. It's like, is it the game balance? Is it the educational component? It is a time constraint.  David  45:45   Every game suffers from those choices, which is why there's house rules, right? So many people, you know, I like this game, but there's this one thing, and so, like, we're gonna change this,  Brian  45:53   but that's the joy of a board game, as opposed to a video game. Well, I guess now you can mod a video game, but you want to play a board a board game differently, you just play it differently. If you don't like a rule, you just don't like a rule, you just don't use it. If you want to add a new rule, you just do it.  David  45:53   It's true as long as everybody's on the same page.  Brian  46:06   The number of times I've played a board game, many, many, many times the wrong way, only later to realize, Oh, that's not the rules. This game seems really out of balance. It's because you're playing it wrong, but you were still having fun. Everybody was still playing by the same rules.  Jason  46:19   I'm not convinced that anyone actually plays monopoly by the real rules.  No, nobody does. I mean, monopoly is the classic example of an educational game that is no longer educational, right? Yeah, it's actually, I think it was a plot point in the movie heretic that just came out about how it was originally meant to teach the evils of capitalism. And then someone decided that, hey, this could be a fun game. I'm going to take it, remove the moral lesson, and just sell a bunch of it.  Brian  46:41   There was another game where it was like, I can't remember what it was. It was monopoly. And what was the name of the opposite game on the other side of the board, cooperation, or something. Well, the cooperation part was boring, so nobody wanted to play it David  46:52   You know, monopoly is interesting. If you play with the actual rules, the game is actually much faster than with all the house rules that people typically play with. Jason  47:01   So we're getting near time. So it's probably time to wrap up. Normally, what we do is we give a letter grade to the game in terms of how it did in terms of science and gameplay. I feel really weird doing that with the game creator.  Brian  47:12   Do you want us to grade you? Because it feels weird. Jason  47:15    I wanted to ask David, you said you recently played it. It was obviously wasn't just sparkles and rainbows. Of reliving your game. What would you give the game in terms of, how good was the gameplay? How good was the science? Like, how did it represent the science you wanted to represent?  Brian  47:30   I love this compromise. It basically puts it completely on the Creator.  David  47:34   Yeah, no, this is interesting. After listening to a bunch of your episodes, I was like, I'm gonna be the first game creator. So I'm curious how they're going to do the the grading part, Jason  47:44   simple, we we delegate.  David  47:46   I'm totally comfortable if you grade and criticize the game well, so let me do the science first. So I think the science is is not perfect, Brian  47:54   but it can't be. It never can be, right? David  47:58   I feel like the game did a good job at conveying the scientific concepts that I wanted to convey, especially about this idea about opportunistic microbes that, like everything's not black and white. It's not, you know, the Rebellion and the Empire, the good guys and the bad guys. You know, context matters, and so microbes can be good in some contexts and bad in other contexts. That and the concept of antibiotic resistance and the trade offs of the use of antibiotics and the fact that, you know, beneficial microbes can help you digest things. I feel like those concepts came through in the game. There are important mechanics in the game, and I've gotten a lot of letters over the years, and people reaching out on Twitter and things like that, where people like, hey, my teenager learned something from this game. So I feel like the game was successful from a scientific perspective, even though, of course, there's corners cut about the science the gameplay is where I'm more critical, because I feel like the game is too swingy from a points perspective, like a good game, to me, is someone who's played it a bunch is going to consistently beat someone who hasn't played it until they learn the strategies and nuance. If it's random, who wins, then I feel like you haven't succeeded as a game designer in doing something that requires strategic thought. It's a little harder to sort of pick up and play than I would like. I don't love the instructions. You read through the instructions the first time, you're like, Okay, don't quite get it. And this is something I learned as a game designer. That's because the instruction is the very last thing you do hours of play testing. You got it all figured out. You know the rules by heart. Everyone you play with knows the rules by heart. And then you're like, crap. I gotta write all this down, and then it sort of gets done at the end. That doesn't go through that iterative process to the extent that it should. So I'm gonna give it a b minus for gameplay. Oh, Brian  49:46   Oh that seems unduly harsh. I think you're being too harsh. I really do.  David  49:50   Well, it's like when you talk to an artist though, right? Like everybody criticizes their own work. Brian  49:54   yeah, so we're gonna, we're gonna inflate that a little bit. I think the gameplay, I think it is fun. I'm always worried that the bias of, hey, I'm a card carrying microbiologist, maybe how much this is influencing me. I don't really care. It's a B, let's be honest, not a b minus. That's a fun game. You definitely get the A out of the science. From my perspective. Jason, do you? Do? You agree with me? You agree with me, right?  Jason  50:15   I'm thinking because, again, I was trying to, I was trying to recuse myself from being put in this position, but no, I think like B for gameplay is good A, maybe A- minus territory for the science, just because part of me thinks that if it's a gut check game, they should all be gut bacteria. But that's a that's a little quibble, to be honest. Brian  50:33   That's true. We didn't do our nitpick, did we? I guess my nit pick was that you don't get plague in the gut.  Jason  50:38   That's probably just it. And I think also, we have gotten spoiled by deep science games. There are several that we've gone over that have an amazing, like, very huge amount of science in them where, like, each card has its own little fact and everything. And so it's like, it's hard to compare to get some of those. I think David your your evaluation, is spot on, it does what it set out to do.  Brian  50:58   And it was also, it's a pioneering game. Like you said. This was 10 years ago. This was pre wingspan. This was pre the sort of boom in science and educational games. This was, have you had a chance to play, like cytosis, for instance, or any of the games from genius games, where the sort of hard science concept is at the at the center? David  51:14    I played some of them, yeah. And, I mean, I had one called pathogenesis. Oh, there's a lot of really cool science games out there, and they come much prettier boxes, much more effective, the boxes we don't need to talk about that I tried to explain to them, that gamers have a certain expectation for what a game box looks like, and this they produce is not it at all. on a shelf In a thrift store, you'd be like, that's not a real game because there's an aesthetic to what a game looks like on a shelf, and they did not care. But anyway, yeah, I love many of those games, and I love the fact that science games are popular.  Jason  51:51   all right. Well, I think that's we're going to close down here. I will say, if any of you listening to this, are aspiring game designers and want to cut your teeth on gut check v2 you would now have not only a bunch of ideas to do so, but you have permission, because it's all  Creative Commons. So you can go out and do it and publish it, and publish a paper on it, and there you go. That's how you can get started with that. Just gonna say, Thank you, David for coming on. This was great having you here. I liked doing this as something that's very dear to my heart with the microbiome science, but also something that was made by a scientist to teach science and see that other side. As we said on here before, educational games sometimes get a bad rap. And I'll be honest, your paper did not dissuade me from that. As you mentioned, all these educational games I had never heard of,  Brian  52:32   we haven't found a good game to talk about bacteria. So honestly, for that reason alone, I loved being able to play gut check, and I was excited to get the printed copy to do so. David, where if you wanted anybody to reach you, you said you've gotten letters and things. First of all, do you want people to be able to get in touch with you? And second, where would you like them to be able to do that? David  52:50   The best way to get in touch with me is on social media, either x or blue sky. And it's David A Coil, Jason  52:57    All right. So any of you who want to play gut check to go ahead and look it up at microbe.net we'll put the link in the show notes, and until next time, have a great month and happy gaming. Brian  53:05   Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.  

#Holotype #Programming #GameDesign #Python #BoardGames #Science Summary A follow-up to our last episode, in this episode we interview Brett Harrison, one of the co-creators of Holotype. Specifically, Brett is the one who programmed a computer to play Holotype against itself 10,000 times per minute in order to precisely balance the point values of different parts of the game. In this interview we'll cover a bit of the background behind Holotype, why he did that sort of optimization Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 02:13 - Design of Holotype 03:54 - Playtesting and computer simulation 11:37 - Designing the right AIs 14:50 - What parts got tweaked 18:35 - Game length, Bone Wars, and an app 21:20 - Lost mechanics, accuracy, and personal favorites 25:15 - Closing remarks Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Links Brexwerx Games: https://www.brexwerxgames.com/ This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/  )   Brian  0:06   hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:12   Today, we'll be interviewing Brett Harrison from Brexwerx Games. All right, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason.  Brian  0:22   This is Brian,  Jason  0:23   and today we have another special guest. This is Brett Harrison from Brexwerx Games. Brett, can you introduce yourself? Brett  0:29   Hi, yeah. Brett Harrison, Brexwerx Games, one of the designers on holotype, which is our board game about paleontology, Jason  0:35   yes. And when this episode drops, about two weeks before we will just put out our episode on holotype itself, we we're talking with some paleontologists, but this was because I wanted to ask some more about what you did for the game. So our listeners are already familiar with the game itself, how it plays the science in it, but I wanted to really follow up with an aspect I learned about when I was doing research for that episode about you created a computer simulation to basically play test the game, and we'll get to that in a moment, but I think we need to learn a little bit more about you first. So can you give us, like, what's your background? Like, how did you get into making board games, paleontology, that sort of thing?  Brett  1:13   Yeah. So I've always been into paleontology since I was a little boy. My grandfather brought me a book from the Los Angeles library, which I still have, so it's incredibly overdue, but it was all about dinosaurs, so he would read it to me when I was like six, and that's how I kind of got hooked on it. And then I eventually went to college for computer science and needing to get electives and stuff, I always chose paleontology or geology and stuff like that. So that's where I get that background always been a gamer since really young, started out with like, axis and allies, and went all up to all the Euros and everything else that's out there. So really big into board gaming. I've designed games, computer games and board games in the past, but nothing of this nature until COVID hit, and me and my buddy were like, Let's make a board game. So that's when we started working on holotype. And the theme was dinosaurs from the beginning, because I was so into paleontology, but we also want to make it super scientifically, you know, as accurate as possible within something that's supposed to be a fun game mechanic Brian  2:11    That was really obvious. So we played with a couple of paleontologists for our episode on holotype. They really appreciated the attention to detail, and so do I, because I think it's really important for a science game that, like, accuracy, at least, is you can never have it fully accurate, right? You always have to decide how much you're going to simulate and like, where is the fun point? Where are you going to lose fun for the sake of accuracy, that you guys did a really good job, maybe if you do another game for the Patreon, you can have a stretch goal to pay those overdue library fees. Brett  2:40   All right, yeah, I just, I'm never gonna ask you if it's overdue. Jason  2:44   Well, I think you succeeded as far as, like, the fun and the accuracy, because our listeners will have already heard at the end of our episodes, we basically give a grade for both the fun of the game and the, like, the science in the game. And you got A's on both of them, like, right up there with some of our favorites, like wingspan and cytosis. So y'all did very well,  Brett  3:03   awesome. Yeah, and those kind of, there's so many dinosaur games out there that are, like, you know, the theme park and dinosaurs taking over and all that kind of stuff. It was like, we wanted to make something that was, we called our love letter to paleontology. And we did work with paleontologists to make sure it was accurate. We worked with the Southwest paleontological group to, you know, kind of get those resources of having a PhD, go over and check and there's stuff that got changed in the game because it was not accurate, because ornithophods, like, I guess, stegosaurs and ankylosaurs are not technically ornithopods. So we had to go with a much more inclusive clade that included them and the ceratopsians, which is why there's genasaurs. Those used to be called ornithopods, and that was not correct. Brian  3:44   So yeah, I know I didn't know the term either for sure, that was a surprise, and we actually talked about that a little bit as like, What the heck is a genasaur? But they appreciated the use of the term. They said this is a better term.  Jason  3:54   So I now want to drill down to the whole reason why I wanted to get you on this podcast is because while I was looking up information on this game, I ran across some of your other promos, interviews, and you mentioned the play testing of this. And can you walk us through the play testing process? Like I'm really interested in this computer part, but how did you play test the game in all its aspects? And then we'll focus on the computer.  Brian  4:16   Let me give some context for why Jason is excited about this. He is a programmer. I am not, so I'm gonna sit here and listen politely.  Jason  4:22   Yeah, so I'm a bioinformatician, so I study, I use computer programming to answer biology questions. I have this long running goal of having a little like, a few minisodes about teaching computers to play games, which is kind of what you did. So I'm really curious about this. Brett  4:37   So play testing, I mean, it started very early on in the process of like, okay, these are the mechanics that we want to do, and this is all done with me prototyping ridiculously bad computer programmer graphics on paper and cutting them out and gluing them on cards and all that kind of stuff. And granted, this all took place during the pandemic, so our normal gaming group that would normally get together that wasn't as. Possible, but we'd have a set group of about four people that started play testing it early on in that form, and that's where you learn stuff that's fun, that's not fun, that is completely, you know, seemed like a great idea, but once you get it in practice, it makes the game 20 minutes longer, that kind of stuff. So all that kind of play testing took place within a very small group to break out those, you know, core mechanics and then we went to using a program called Tabletop Simulator on steam to do our virtual play testing, because that way we could get people from all over the country playing it. We didn't have to get people together, because we couldn't with COVID, that kind of thing. So that was basically, there's no real automation in that one. It's just replicate all the components so people can play in a virtual table. And so with that, we again fine tuned more of the mechanics, and then once all the mechanics were kind of solidified and we had our this is fun. It plays fast. The loop's, right. That's when I went into doing the simulation in Python that would actually play the game, so that I could do all the balancing that was necessary to make sure it was really tight for victory points, and there wasn't one strategy or card that threw the balance out. Jason  6:08   Okay? So this sounds like this was the late stage polishing of the game. Basically, you you got the big things done with playing with other people, either in person, online, but then this is when it's like, okay, let's fiddle all the little knobs and tweaks to try to just get it nice and smooth. Is that basically, right? Brett  6:23   Yeah. And the reason behind that is, like, the simulation can't tell you if it's fun. So that would be just like, too early in the process, because there were things it's like, I would have programmed that we just threw out, because it was like, yeah, that's not a fun mechanic or, you know, so it had to be at that stage for it to be useful, and then it becomes incredibly useful for balancing and determining, even to the point of, like, manufacturing the amount of little wooden cubes that are in the thing that increases weight. Each one of those costs a penny. So how many of those do I include of each type? And that's basically I can calculate during a play test. But I want that over, you know, 10,000 play tests to figure out what's the maximum that's ever in use for this thing, because then I can go, okay, that's what we manufacture, and no one will ever run out and we don't over produce.  Jason  7:10   I hadn't even thought about that. I was thinking pure game mechanics, not even game components, and how many cubes do we need? Brett  7:16   And that every penny adds up to five cents, which adds up to weight and shipping it over from the manufacturer and all that kind of stuff. So... Jason  7:23   How hard was it to code the game into a computer? I've tried this once or twice, and quickly realized that even a relatively simple game actually has a lot of moving parts when you get down to computer code, like, how hard was that to actually instantiate it as a digital thing?  Brett  7:37   Let's see. I did it in Python. So coding wise, wasn't too difficult, just because that's fairly easy to code in. The game mechanics being finalized made it a lot easier to replicate what was actually happening in the game. So the main thing was just getting the game states, having all the cards, their values, is basically building that database of what are all the game components, what are their values within the game? And then I could move to actually making the player AI that would play that game, which is basically just manipulate the game state. The other thing is, because it's a simulation, I don't have to worry about player input and all that kind of stuff, you know. So that takes a lot of the UI out of making something like that. Jason  8:12   Yeah. And for listeners not familiar with the term, UI is user interface. It's basically how you interface with the computer. It's the thing that looks pretty and that is meant for you to do. And if the computer is just running with itself, it doesn't need that, because it's just talking to itself with code. Brett  8:27   There was a UI in the sense of, I needed to have a graphical interface that would show what's happening so I could just see how the players were behaving. Was it actually playing correctly? Or had I coded something, you know, wrong, instead of just looking at the data, I wanted to see the visual. You know what was going on, but that's very just crude graphics. And really, you know, nothing you'd want people seeing. But it was basically a sanity check of like, is this actually playing the game correctly? Brian  8:51   We were joking. It seems like Holotype might have been played more times than any other game just because of the simulation time.  Brett  8:58   That's a good that's and interesting point because I ran my basic run of the simulation. Is once everything was working and doing what it was supposed to do, I would turn the graphic part of it off, and it would play basically 50,000 simulations of the game in about a minute. So that would spit out a it took me way longer to deal with getting that data into Excel and making reports that, you know, gave me some interesting info than it did to actually run the simulation once everything was said and done, and any time that something would be shown that was like, Oh, I that should be, you know, modified a little bit. I could just go in, go into the JSON file, change the value of a card, or change the, you know, point value of something, and run that simulation again right away to get another output to be, "Did that change it?  Did that go in the direction we wanted?" that kind of stuff. So yeah, to say it was run 50,000 times. It was run 50,000 x 100 appear. Jason  9:50   So like, now that I've heard this, this sounds like an obvious thing to do for trying to balance and play test the game, but I can't say I've ever heard of another game actually doing this. I hear of open betas, I hear of people doing stuff online, digital versions of the game for people to play, but I haven't heard of someone just having the computer play itself a whole bunch. Was this an original idea? Did you hear about this from somewhere else? Brett  10:11   I didn't hear about it from someone else. I just because of my programming background. And it wasn't, I don't think it was something we set out to do from the beginning. It was just as the design was coming together, and I was like, I want to make sure this is balanced. I went, Oh, I can easily do that myself and play test it way more than asking a bunch of people to play test it to get those, you know, real true averages over a crazy amount of time. And I think it would be useful for other board games and stuff like that. It's because I was the programmer and one of the designers, I knew the game so well that it was probably easier for me to implement that once I explained it, I had other designers that were like, Hey, can you do that for my game? And I was like, uh, you know, I could, but do I want to? So I think it would be useful, because that's one of my frustrations sometimes when playing games, is you'll play it, and then someone will find a strategy just like, Okay, that's all you ever do, and you'll just win, because it's just unbalanced. Through that one thing I've had, I've had games where I was like, Oh, I figured it out, and then it was like, there was no fun for the other people, because someone was just blowing other people away because they played a certain way. And that's something that we really wanted to have holotype be super balanced. And I think a lot of the feedback we've gotten has been that, yeah, it's incredibly balanced, especially point wise at the end. There's been plenty of times where people have, you know, had to go to the tie breaker because they were right in the, you know, same area, point wise and stuff. Brian  11:29   So we talk about a game being solved right, where there's always an obvious choice to make. It sounds like you were working to keep the game from being solved. Brett  11:37   Yeah. And there's, there's an interesting point there that goes to designing the AIs. When I made the AI to play the game, it had to play it the way a human would play it, because sometimes gamers aren't optimal. I didn't want to make the AI figure out like, this is the best way to play this game and optimize it for something players never do. So it was, it was definitely more of like, okay, this is the way the players play. It's weighted to try different strategies and stuff, but it was very much informed by how people would play the board game. If that makes sense.  Jason  12:08   What does that look like? Because that was the thing I was really curious about, is, how did you program an AI to essentially fill the role of a human? Because when I'm playing this game like I'm looking at my cards, I'm looking at my personal goal. I'm looking at the global objectives. I'm looking at other people's stuff. Obviously, a computer can keep track of that pretty easily. But then making, like, integrating that and making the decision of, what should I do next? That even I don't know how I make that decision sometimes. So how did you represent that for an AI to make that decision. Brett  12:34   It's represented in basically the way you would as a player. So you're looking at your cards. You have, I have a, you know, theropod from the Triassic. I have this from the Jurassic. I have this many resources of that, and I have a personal objective that I'm going for. So those actions are all given weights based on what's in your hand and what resources you have, even to the point of like, okay, I have, I have these two Jurassic cards, but this one's worth more, but it also costs less in resources. So all those things are just weighted, and then it's basically making a decision on which one of those actions has the highest value, which eventually really just relates to which of these actions is going to get me more the most points at the end of the game. And then, if I want to test a different strategy, basically you're just changing those weights like this, AI is going to want to publish globals more than the other ones do. That kind of thing. And then at the end, which AI wins more of the time, which actions, that kind of thing. And then that leads to just more the balancing. Brian  13:27   Okay, so your your AIs have some biases in them, built in some preferences. Brett  13:32   Preferences, and you can change those to, you know, investigate other assumptions. Like, one of the things as we were playing was like, certain players were like, I never go for globals, or I always go for global and then so by doing AIs that did different preferences, you could see like, is that a better strategy? Is this strategy not even viable if someone just does this? So that allows you to test that over 1000s and 1000s of plays, which you just can't quite get in the plane with other humans, because people just have their own preferences on how they play. We want to make sure that if they did have those preferences, did that mean they always lost or always won? They'll balance it. Brian  14:05   So, you've got the AI Jason who always wants to play optimally, and the AI Brian who wants to collect the cool dinosaurs, Brett  14:11   yeah, and that, and that was one of the one of the AIS is just like, whatever cards the first in my list is what I do. I call it my eight year old AI, she's just like, what's the first one? I that's what I'm going for. Jason  14:25   Did you try to make it so that that AI could occasionally win? Or was that sort of, like, the control AI of you have to beat this one to be considered a decent AI.  Brett  14:32   There's definitely the control of just like, this is the most simple thing. Does that one ever win out of 50,000 play throughs, maybe a couple times. But you didn't want that one to have, you know, the same odds of winning as someone who's actually, like, paying attention to what's happening, going and looking for certain things, for their personal objective and that kind of thing.  Jason  14:50   And then, as you were using this to polish everything, what aspects of the game did you try to tweak? I mean, I was looking over the box and, like, I can think of dozens of things you could try to do. Places on the board, the number of things on each face of the dice, the how long it takes to get a graduate student, the point values on the cards. Obviously, you already mentioned those. Did you make a list of like, here's everything in the game that can be tweaked. I'm not going to systematically test all of these. Or were there some that he's like, Okay, I need to tweak these. These are not so important. Like, how did you decide what to check? Brett  15:20   So there's certain parts of the game design that are just like, once you've decided it, that's what influences everything else, and that that comes down to, like, what is an action worth in an action economy game, and what is a resource worth? So there was basically before any of this simulation in Python, all that stuff was in Excel, so that it was like, Okay, if I have, if this is how many pips I have on a, you know, purple die, what's the distribution of that and probabilities that all these things happen so that I know when you roll this many dice, this is the average pips you'll get of this type of resource, those things kind of had to be like baseline, and you don't mess with those once you get into the simulation, because that was just core mechanics. And really all that determining is, what are those values on the cards? How does that turn into a victory point? And that's where the simulation so it was all the values on the cards, which comes from the point values on the specimen cards, and the point spreads on the the personal objectives and the global objectives. So those were the main things. It was like balance the point values for all that stuff using these simulations. So that was the big one. And then some of the stuff that got changed is personal objectives. Definitely got changed, because there would be certain personal objectives based on the distribution of those specimens in the in the deck. How often would this person win with this personal objective? How much did that skew? Same thing with global objectives. How often did the game end early, because these global objective cards got filled. So those values were the ones that got the major changes from the simulation, as well as the like. Now we know you only need 35 Triassic cubes out of 50,000 playthroughs. Those only ran out 50 times that kind of thing.  Jason  16:54   All right. and so looking at what you just said, so the global objectives, personal objectives, specimen cards, those are the ones where players have a choice. Basically the like the excavation cards, the dice rolls, those things are outside of player control. So it sounds like you set those as these are just aspects of the game you have to deal with, and it's the ones where players can choose where you were fiddling with things. Is that right? Brett  17:15   Yeah, that's correct. Now, some of the like generation cards, like the field expeditions, those values could be tweaked too to test that kind of stuff. But those things were typically set pretty early on, like the amount of cards of each type in the deck. That kind of stuff was kind of hard coded. That it was going to be the 10 Triassic, 20 Jurassic, 30 Cretaceous that went back to early design, because it was just like there weren't many dinosaur type in the Triassic. Then they started, you know, being more in the Jurassic, and then even more in the Cretaceous, so that that became a constraint of, like, constraint of like, we can't have more than 10 Triassic dinosaur cards because there weren't enough specimens that would be easy for us to import into the game. Brian  17:49   Now I regret that I overlooked that. I really wish I'd noticed that specific pattern and pointed it out, but I guess for our listeners, they found it up now, so no worries.  Brett  17:57   Yeah, and if you notice on the on the pips on the dice, purple Triassic dice only have six the blue Jurassic dice only have eight, and the Cretaceous dice have the green ones have 10. Brian  18:08   The lure of the Triassic was just too strong for me. I knew it was more valuable, and I kept chasing it and would lose. So I was one of those bad AIs, Brett  18:16   and sometimes it worked out. You never know,  Jason  18:18   yeah, but it was funny watching him get so frustrated as the paleontologists we're playing with would just keep tossing these Triassic fossils, Triassic specimens to go after the cool dinosaurs they really like. Brett  18:28   There's the personal preference AI, the one that only wants to publish Triceratops. Yeah, we had one of those. Jason  18:35   Also, there's a question with all of your hundreds ot thousands or millions of playthroughs, you might be able to ask Brian and I, every time we play this game, we have the question, how long does a game last? Like, how many actions does each player get before the game ends? Because we're kind of thinking the metaphor of like, okay, this is the paleontologist's career. Is each one of these actions a month, a semester, a year? It means nothing for the game. But we're curious. So how long does a game usually last? How many actions does each person get?  Brian  19:05   Good question  Brett  19:05   that's interesting. Now, roughly about 40 during a game, and it's going to change depending on there's different variants, right? You can play the longer, shorter game by using the different player tracks. So there's been times where, you know, I'll play a two player game with the five player board, just because I want to publish a ton. But the average amount of publishes for each player is around seven to eight by the time you're done with the things, I'm sure a paleontologist could answer this best, but, but I expect that, you know, maybe that's a decade or more research if you're publishing, you know, eight times. Because when you're going out in the field and discovering stuff, it doesn't definitely takes a while. But then if you go back, you know, way back to the bone War era Marsh, and cope, they were pumping out new ones like you know, Brian  19:41   that makes me think that the best analogy to overlay on a paleontologist's career for 40 rounds is 40 years, because I think there are plenty of paleontologists who are still working into their 70s.  Jason  19:51   yeah, but you hope that they published more than eight times in those forty years Brian  19:54    you would again. No simulation is perfect, right?  Jason  19:57   Yeah, although you mentioned the Bone Wars. That was the number one request from our paleontologist friends, is that they want the Bone Wars expansion to the game. Brian  20:05   Yeah, I want the Bone Wars expansion. I want the traitor mechanics. Brett  20:08   Yeah, that's definitely been asked for, for sure, where that's like, I'm going to steal your fossils, or that, or I'm going to, you know, denounce your spec, your publication, because that's wrong, and now mine becomes the better one.  Brian  20:20   Yeah, you need a fourth type of meeple, the, I don't know,  Jason  20:23   the saboteur? the infiltrator? Brian  20:25   The saboteur is probably the best way to put it. Brett  20:27   I like it  Jason  20:28   someone with like the cloak a fedora and like little spy mask,  Brian  20:32   since they have to be they have to be indicated by the type of hat. Jason  20:36   So Brian, do you have any last questions you want to ask? Brett,  Brian  20:39   I did so one thing I was curious about, so a lot of board games now, wingspan evolution and a lot of other ones root to have these digital components to them. There's an app you can play wingspan on. It's a representation of the game. Lots of games have made their way to steam. It seems like you've done all the work on the back end to do that for holotype. Is there any interest in pushing it to an app?  Brett  20:58   Yeah, I guess so. That just seems like more programming work for me, which I enjoy doing, but I don't have a lot of experience with App Stores and getting and doing stuff like that. Mine's more on just the back end, spitting out all the stuff. But I know there's, you know, companies out there that will take those games and make them look beautiful and nice and playable on a on an app store. So we'd be more than interested in that.  Brian  21:20   I had one other question, and you don't have to answer, but I'm curious, if you want to give a look behind the curtain, what was the mechanic you guys tossed? Brett  21:27   Oh, this is a great one. It was a horrible one. That's why I got tossed. So all the milestones that you get during the game. So adding, you know, extra research or another, every time you hit one of those green stars, you add a milestone to your board to get a little better at something. Those used to be in the game. Now, every player has access to the same set of those in the original game. They didn't Brian  21:49    there was zero sum? Brett  21:50   yeah. So there was the number of players minus one available. Oh, and and our brilliant catch up mechanic was okay, when you hit those green stars, everybody adds up their current points. Whoever's in last place gets to choose first. Brian  22:06   So that's a little bit too close to real life.  Brett  22:09   Yeah. And, and the problem is, while that was cool in the thought of like, Oh, it's a catch up mechanic, someone could snag something that someone else, the leader would get last pick, and usually get something, you know, less good. It made the games take a ridiculous amount of time longer, because that whole scoring process you would have to do four times throughout the game. Then you'd have the picking and someone waiting to be like, do I get this? Do I get this? That indecision? And we wanted a really fast, snappy playing game so that that one had to get thrown out. And I think it got thrown out for the better, because now everybody having their own set, it's easy. You know, when's you know, you can make your choice on your time, and it makes a little more fair. Everybody's got the same thing. You can't complain that someone else snagged this before you. Brian  22:47   I'd be really sad if I didn't get the storage closet for the extra fossils. Jason  22:51   All of us always chose the storage closet first because we're hoarders. Brett  22:56   That's interesting. Yeah, that's that's super interesting because that's one of the ones I it's very subjective to me on whether I choose that one or not, like, how many fossils are currently flooding my storage? Jason  23:04   Was that digitally play tested? Did you change the AI's preference for which one of those it would go for first Brett  23:10   in a couple states? Yeah, because there's only six in the base game, that was a fairly easy thing. I'm going to get four of them throughout the game. I'm just going to randomly pick them. Or this one's picked always first. Does that, you know, skew it too much. So that wasn't too hard to test. And it's funny trying to make those, you know, game things into like, how does this, you know, relate to the field of paleontology? Because, like, I spent a lot of time on making sure, like, all the global objectives had meaningful names within paleontology. And people that play in the game just don't care. Paleontologists, they're, like, systematic what is that? I don't care  we have, like, systematics, cladistics, and phylogeny, and one of the paleontologists broke down the differences between them, and at a certain point I just, I like, yeah, okay, um, sure. We wanted to be true to it, so that someone that was really into it was like, Oh, I really appreciate same thing with, like, the colors of the dice being related to the international stratigraphy chart, that kind of stuff. It's like, that's an unnecessary step, but people sure appreciate it when they learn about it or know about it. Brian  24:05   We were trying to figure out why only one person can publish per turn. Brett  24:09   That's purely game mechanics. We wanted the one spot that was going to force a lot of, you know, bumping mechanic going on.  Brian  24:15   We retconned that there was a departmental copy editor or the press release person. They only had so much time. Brett  24:20   I like it. Yeah, there's, there's there's certain things where it's like when we played with the paleontologist, like we realize research is not as easy as just going to the University library. Please, please take this as a you know, conceit to game mechanics.  Jason  24:33   One last question. This is the million dollar question, what is your favorite dinosaur in the game? Brett  24:40   Oh my gosh. So Well, my favorite dinosaur would be Stegosaurus. My favorite creature from the mesozoic is a marine reptile, which is the Mosasaur,  Brian  24:50   anyone in particular? Brett  24:51    oh my gosh, probably a tylosaurus.  Brian  24:53   I don't know if I have a favorite. I was a sucker for ichthyosaurs personally. But my favorite dinosaur is parasarolophus. Brett  24:59   Those. Are pretty awesome. I'll have to send you one of our Parasaurolophus pins.  Brian  25:03   That would be, yes, you can do that. I will allow it.  Jason  25:08   Oh, yeah, just twist his arm there.  Brian  25:10   Yeah, we'll have to send you stuff too, of course. Thank you awesome. We'll do an exchange.  Jason  25:15   All right, that's a good place to wrap it up. Brett, thanks so much for coming on.  Brett  25:19   My pleasure.  Jason  25:20   We've already told people a lot about holotype, but if people want to look you, to look you up or other than advertising your game, is there anything else you want to talk about, other stuff that may be in the works from brexwerxs, or other things you want to mention? Brett  25:30    Yeah, we've got some stuff in the works, but you can always check us out on brexwerxs games.com we just released our 8-legged Peacock , which is a game about the Maratus peacock spiders from Australia and their mating dance. Brian  25:41   we saw that. I'm excited about that. That might be what something we put into one of our light games, Brett  25:47   light science game.  Jason  25:48   Well thank you so much. This has been great, and it was really nice to have these questions answered that I was telling Brett beforehand, like I was thinking, Man, I wish I could just know the reasoning behind, like, wait a second, I run a podcast? I can just ask him and get him on the air that's content. Brian  26:06   Thanks for being our first creator willing to come on and talk to us about their game. Brett  26:09    no problem anytime. Jason  26:11   All right. Thank you so much. Brett, good luck with everything. And I guess you know, if your current job doesn't work out, you can always start up a new job as a a board game designer, play tester, because you apparently have a skill set in short supply. Brian  26:24   And if there's anything new from brexwerxs, send us an email. We'll make sure that we promote it for you. Brett  26:29   Sounds good. Thank you so much, guys. And for our listeners, Jason  26:31   thank you for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed this first interview we've done, and until next time, have a good week and happy gaming. Have Brian  26:37   fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.  Jason  26:41   This has been the Gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to Gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.  

#Holotype #BrexwerxGames #CommonDescentPodcast #Dinosaurs #Paleontology #BoardGames #Science Summary Break out your pick and hand brush because in this episode we discuss "Holotype" by Brexwerx Games, and are joined by the wonderful Will and David from the Common Descent podcast. This isn't just another game about dinosaurs; it's a game about the people who dig them up, clean them off, hit the library and museum to cross-check them, and finally publish the coveted holotype to ensconce a new dinosaur (or marine reptile or pterosaur) in the annals of science. This was a great game chock full of scientific meat (and bones?), so come with us into the world of paleontology with Holotype. Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction 01:26 - Borealopelta 03:59 - Dinosaur vomit, poo, and pee 07:42 - Game introduction & mechanics 14:47 - What is a holotype? 19:15 - Gameplay & strategic depth 22:27 - Scientific accuracy 32:06 - Public & private goals 36:07 - Dinosaur (& other) groupings 44:06 - Trace fossils 48:09 - Nitpick corner 53:33 - Final grades Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Links Holotype (Brexwerx Games): https://www.brexwerxgames.com/products/holotype-mesozoic-north-america Common Descent Podcast: https://commondescentpodcast.com/ Dinosaur bromolites study (Nature): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03889-y Borealopelta (well-preserved ankylosaur) (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borealopelta This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:00   Brian, hello and welcome to the Gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:11   Today, we're going to discuss Holotype by Brexwerx Games. Hey, this is Brian Jason  0:21   This is Jason, Will  0:22   this is Will. David  0:23   This is David Brian  0:24   Will, and David, David and will. David  0:26   That's us. We're new.  Brian  0:28   Where are you guys from? David  0:29   We are the hosts of Common Descent, a podcast about paleontology, Earth history, evolution. We are also fellow Dragon Con science track folks, yeah, and we do a lot of science communication and stuff. We are both paleontologists.  Brian  0:44   So I asked for the benefit of the listeners, I know who you guys are very well, because I've been a listener of Common Descent, not since the beginning, but for a very long time. Very, very excited to have you here. In fact, when I first saw the game holotype that we're going to be talking about today, it immediately sparked in my mind "I wonder if I can get Will and David to come and guest on our podcast, if I get this game", and it happened, and it's awesome, the stars Jason  1:10   The Starshave aligned. Will  1:11   Yes. David  1:12   we actually played at the at the museum, yeah, which was, which was very fun,  Will  1:16   very fitting. Brian  1:16   No dinosaurs and gray, of course.  David  1:18   No. Well, we have some birds. We've got about a dozen different types of birds. Brian  1:24   But anyway, why don't we do our little science banter? At first, is there some interesting bit of science to learn about, or would like to talk about? Will  1:31    Absolutely, the one that's fresh on my mind, which is a study on the specimen of borealopelta, which is a ridiculously well preserved ankylosaur, or nothosaur, specifically armored dinosaur. It's 3d preserved stomach content, skin pigment, one of the, if not the best preserved dinosaur we've ever found. This study was looking at the fact that the keratin, the horny material on the armor, is also preserved, and we've never gotten that before. So they were looking at what is the actual status and state of this keratin on this armored dinosaur. They took the measurements of like the thickness and the coverage and how it interacts with all of the armor plates. And what they were able to do that had never been able to be done before, is actually say, How does this modify the defensive aspects of this armor? Because we knew they had boney armor, and we knew it probably had a keratin covering, but now we actually have the entire armor, both parts, and so we can actually see what forces it can take. And I don't remember the exact numbers, but the rough equivalents that they gave for the force that this armor combination should be able to take is about that of a high speed car crash, which is ridiculous, and as they noted, way more than what would be required to survive like a predator bite for that time, even the big theropod dinosaurs. So most likely this was when borealopeltas fought each other so that they could not, they could survive the damage that was being dealt by another borealopelta. Jason  3:09   holy cow evolution does not make things that big just for kicks and giggles, you don't get things that overkill without there being a very good reason. Will  3:17   Absolutely.  David  3:18   I'll add a smaller science fact onto that, that the bony armor that Ankyl, that armored dinosaurs have is bones that grow in the skin, which are called osteoderms, which are also present in a bunch of other dinosaurs, in a bunch of modern lizards, in alligators and crocodiles, as well as armadillos and ground sloths. Yeah, have osteoderms Brian  3:40   ground sloths? David  3:41   Not they, most of those could not survive a car crash. Armadillos, very famously, do not survive car crashes. But yeah, ground sloths, they didn't have a full like coat of it, like an armadillo, but they did have like patches of osteoderms, Will  3:54   and they look like pebbles. They look like rocks. It's very irregular in shape. Jason  3:59   Anyway, I'm glad you guys didn't steal my science fact. I looked one up. It was this study that came out only a week or two ago, studying not the dinosaurs themselves, but what they ate in Poland and so finding all these things. So looking at Dinosaur poop, dinosaur vomit and dinosaur intestine contents. Brian  4:16   I'm sorry, what? Will  4:17    Yeah,  David  4:18   it's a very cool study. Will  4:19   It's awesome. Brian  4:20    Is that a regurgite? So regurgitalites? Jason  4:23   I have all the words here. So dinosaur poop is coprolite. Vomit is regurgitalites. Fossilized contents of digestive tracts are colalties. And together, these are classed as bromolites. So all these wonderful names for basically post process dinosaur food Brian  4:42   Yes, for mid process, mid process. Jason  4:46   But basically, there's apparently a very good climatic record around when the dinosaurs came to power, when they really ascended and became the dominant like land vertebrate. They looked at these over time, and they were able to do a lot of really high resolution scanning and such. And find out, here's beetles and fish and fish scales and all sorts of things. And look at how dinosaur diets changed over time as they came to dominate the landscape. And I believe the take home is that dinosaurs diversified their diet and sort of spread out and just started filling out the niches and essentially just pushing everything else out over time.  David  5:22   Yeah, the one of the main takeaways from that paper was actually that it was this complex process that happened over some 30 million years. So there was probably a very a big combination of dinosaurs being better adapted for certain things, but also major environmental changes that left ecosystem spaces open. So it was this, it would have been this combination of them out competing other animals and getting lucky, yeah, and get filling in spaces that had been recently emptied. Will  5:54   And it also happened in this, like, interesting step pattern, yes, you know, wasn't a continuous just blob like it was very these things, you know, these shifts happen, and then these shifts happen, and they slowly, much more like a monopoly forming. Slowly they take on different competitors.  Brian  6:16   That's like a game of Risk, yes, putting it back in Game form, yes. Slowly, something sort of like starts to move out, and they're like, well, we'll just take that Yep, we'll take that niche. Well, we'll take this other niche. Yes, David  6:27   yes. Since you two were so delighted by the different -lites that refer to various dinosaur excrements and internal stuff, I will add one more as a bonus fun fact. there is, I think there's at least two examples of this, but I think the original one was in like Colorado, from a fossil deposit with a lot of dinosaur footprints on it that there were these unusual traces in the sediment that research found can be replicated by pouring liquid from a few feet up in the air onto sand, and they describe them as "urolites" or dinosaur pee traces.  Brian  7:09   That's absolutely fantastic. Oh man.  Jason  7:14   So segue into the game. Of all of those, we do actually have coprolites in the game. You can collect dinosaur poop, not the other ones, those, those will have to wait for an expansion.  Will  7:23   Yes, that would be, Oh man, that would be such a great expansion, yeah, David  7:30   The what comes out of dinosaurs expansion? You get eggs and you can get regurgitatlites, gastroliths, yes, which are stomach stones,  Brian  7:39   yeah, gastroliths are in there already. Okay, I think this is our perfect segue into the game. We should talk about the game, probably, right. Okay, so let's talk about holotype. Holotype is published by Brexwerx games and was designed by Brett Harrison and Lex Terenchin, who are the the namesakes of Brexwerx, Brett and Lex, nice, right? So they not only created the game, but they also formed the company to sell holotype, to produce holotype. They do have a few other games. It's mostly expansions of holotype. So for instance, the game that we played is actually Mesozoic North America. But they also have Mesozoic Europe. They have a mini expansion, which has the pterosaurs which we played. And they have a new expansion, which actually I figured that Will would be excited about because they added a new creature type. Jason  8:24   Crurotarsi Brian  8:25   yes. So that is stem crocodiles and Crocodylomorphs. Yes, yeah. David  8:33   Croc side of the archosaur family tree. Will  8:36   Sarcosuchians and stuff like that, including suchians. Yeah, they include a bunch of, what were the big land predators before dinosaurs stepped in in that role. So a bunch of big, not really very Crocky, but like tall crocs, very tall heads and tall bodies. Yeah. David  8:55   Oh, that's awesome. I demand a lepidosaurs update. Brian  9:00   Well, the funny thing is, is that they have this expansion to add them to North America because they're already in the Mesozoic Europe as a base part of the game. So they had to release, oh, there's this creature type from North America as well. They do have one other game. It is called eight legged peacocks. It is about jumping spiders. It is a card game matching their jumping spider to their mating dance. I haven't played it, but that's pretty much it. That's their entire library of games. David  9:26   That sounds great.  Will  9:27   Cute! Oh, that's adorable. That's such a good name. Brian  9:30   Uh, Brett is the dinosaur nerd. He's been very clear about that. In fact, we I watched an interview that he did where he brought on a dinosaur book, that is, I think, he said his grandfather gave him when he was six from the library that was never returned. He just kept it. David  9:43   They had to make and sell this game so that they could pay for the return for Will  9:47   those those library fees.  Brian  9:49   He actually is a computer scientist, but went to UC Berkeley and took a ton of paleontology electives. So just like always, was a lifelong lover of paleontology, and when he met Lex in Arizona because they basically made friends playing board games, and evidently the name holotype, Brett said, Oh no, we're going to make this game holotype. He had the name before he had the mechanics of the game cool. Both in the interview as well as in the Kickstarter in the description, accuracy, scientific accuracy, was a really important part of this game, but they also wanted it to be balanced and fun to play, and they used a really interesting strategy to do that. In addition to human play testing, they also used board game simulator and a Python program to play the game 10,000 times a minute, to balance the game exactly how they wanted it to be, so that there would always, there was never going to be an imbalance with certain play strategies, which is,  Will  10:39   that's really cool. Jason  10:41   I contacted Brett, and we're going to be interviewing him for a bonus episode about that play testing process and so that so listeners that will go up as a bonus episode, hopefully probably about two weeks after this episode drops. Brian  10:53   This was during COVID, so they were doing all this online testing. What is the game actually itself, right? So there's a little bit of the inspiration and the balancing and all that. So it is a worker placement game. This is one of those classic Euro style board games where you have meeples, you know, little wooden figures that will take your places. You place them on the board at a certain location. Place a worker do, an action, place a worker, do an action, place a worker do an action, but this game, it has dinosaurs in it, but you're not playing as the dinosaurs. You're actually playing as the paleontologists. So you actually have three types of worker. You have your paleontologist, your grad student and your field researcher, or as Jason and I like to call them the PI, the principal investigator, the grad student and the undergraduate. Those three workers on that academic rank like affects their abilities. So the field researcher can't do everything that the paleontologist can do, the graduate student can do almost everything that the paleontologist can do. The paleontologist can still displace them from a position. This is actually a worker displacement game. You could kick out somebody of a lower academic rank than you from wherever they happen to be sitting. Yes, yeah.  Jason  11:58   This is very different from a lot of the other ones I have played where you have turns, like we played cytosis, we played wingspan, where you have a certain number of moves per turn, you do all your moves, and then everyone takes their pieces back. This one, there's no turns. You're continually pushing and you're continually kicking each other off of spaces by essentially pulling rank, because the different pieces can only kick off someone of the same rank or lower. So your poor little field assistant undergraduate can only kick off another undergraduate. They can't kick off a the paleontologist professor or a graduate student. Brian  12:32   Which you know, it sounds really mean, and when you describe it, it sounds like, oh, that's, that's so that's so mean. But actually, the game kind of requires it to happen. You're actually it's helpful to get booted off from where you are, because now you get to do something different. So I don't know it should feel like you're being mean, but actually, when you're playing the game, it's you're hoping that somebody kicks you off of your spot. Let's see. So in terms of where can you go? So the game has a central mat, and that has all the different locations you can go. You can do your field expedition, your field expeditions are to all of these actual geologic formations in North America that are associated with deposits of different ages. So Triassic, Jurassic Cretaceous, the three different ages in the Mesozoic. It's a deck of cards. You flip it over, and it'll tell you, Oh, this is a Cretaceous site. You can roll this many dice to generate your fossils, and you'll roll them to see how many of the little cubes you get of the same color. And those come back to your mat. They take up physical space. You only have so many spaces you can store them. You have the museum where you can go and you can trade your fossils. It's like, well, I've got these Triassic fossils, but I actually really need some Cretaceous. So there's like, an exchange rate with the Triassic being more valuable. There's the University Library where you collect research cubes. There's the specimen lab where you'll get you'll draw for this deck of I guess I can't call them dinosaur cards, because you also have marine reptiles. There's four different groups in the base game, plus pterosaurs. There's sauropods, theropods, marine reptiles, and then another one called genosaurs, which I want to come back to as well, because I had never heard that term until I played holotype. I guess it was originally ornithopods, and that's where that scientific accuracy, like said that. Well, some of these actually don't count. Sorry, I'm getting in the weeds a little bit. David  14:13   For a little spoiler. I actually having reflected on it. I really like that they went with genosaurs. Yeah, I appreciate that choice. We'll come back to why, but that's a little, a little teaser for that discussion.  Brian  14:25   All right, cool. And then, of course, in the middle of the board, there is the most important place, the where you publish. There's one spot that you can publish at, and you can publish one of your holotype so you take your dinosaur cards, it's going to have a certain amount of research cube cost, and associated fossil cube costs you pay that you get to publish the holotype. Guys, what is a holotype? David  14:47   A holotype is the term that's used for the reference specimen for a species. So this happened that we use these in paleontology. We use these in modern biology when a scientist identifies a new species of whatever dinosaur, plant, whatever it is, the naming of that new species must be associated with a detailed description of what characterizes the species, what features make it different from any other similar species, and you have to designate at least one example that shows those features. Yeah, this fossil, this skeleton of this dinosaur, is the specimen that goes along with the original description. So in the future, if somebody wants to compare to this species, this is the reference specimen Will  15:37   You have established that if you need to see what I mean by all these features. This specimen has all of those features.  David  15:45   Yes, a lot of dinosaurs are only holotypes. Yes, there's only one specimen that is known. It is the holotype. Other species. There are tons of fossils, and one of them is the holotype. Will  15:57   And very often, a lot of those are very, still very, a very partial specimen, like a jaw. Yeah, it's enough to know that no one else has a jaw like this that we've ever found before, but this is what we have. But it's enough to say it's a new species David  16:11   Well and like Carnotaurus, the very famous predatory dinosaur with the Bulldog face and the horns above its eyes, is only known from a holotype skeleton. Yeah, there's one skeleton. Never found any more of them Brian  16:23   Really? David  16:24   it's a very well preserved skeleton, yes, but it's just the one Jason  16:27   And I learned while we were there at the museum, so your friend, who is the curator there, back in the specimen lab, was that Sean? David  16:36   Sean is the lab manager and head preparer, yep.  Jason  16:39   So he was going, he was walking me around the mastodon skull that he is slowly reassembling. That is the holotype for, apparently, a mastodon that is a new species discovered there in Gray. And he was explaining, because it's the holotype, he there can't be any guesswork, like he has to be able to match up the bones precisely. This little postage stamp piece goes exactly next to this little postage stamp piece. And if there's any little part that got wore away where it's like, okay, maybe it's off by like, half a millimeter or a millimeter, he can't just stick it on there and say, this is probably where it went, because it has to be absolutely precise. And so just because it has to be that reference that other people have to come and say, we know this for 100% certain was like this. There's no guesswork involved. David  17:22   Yes, yeah. And when you're working with a holotype, it might be the only one you ever get. Yeah, they may never get another Mastodon skull at Gray Will  17:30   Like, there are examples where you'll get later specimens that may be better than your holotype. And then you can kind of upgrade.  David  17:36   And there's all sorts. There are paratypes and lectotypes and neotypes for all, like, the different ways that you can adjust your collection.  Will  17:46   So like, that sometimes happens, but yeah, there's tons of examples where it's like, yeah, we have three. Two of them are enough that we could identify them. And then there's the holotype, and that's all we have David  17:57   at the Gray fossil site, for example, the new species of red panda that was discovered there. The holotype is a single tooth. Yes, there are now three nearly complete skeletons, but the original description was a single tooth. Brian  18:10   There's a couple things I want to talk about there. First of all is the fact that the Gray fossil site is in Tennessee, and we're talking about red pandas. So that's worth pausing and talking about. Is that there were red pandas in Tennessee, 5 million years ago, 6 million years ago. It's about 5 million years ago, not to mention alligators. So that was really cool. Go to Gray if you have the opportunity.  Will  18:31   Yeah, red pandas, gators, rhinos, rhinos, camels, horses, super weird time.  Brian  18:36   Snakes, songbirds, tons of snakes, everything.  Will  18:40   Well, it's a fun thing, because there's a whole bunch of things there, like the turtles and a lot of the birds, that if you only saw those, when you time traveled back to the fossil site, you wouldn't have known you time traveled except that it was too warm, and then a bunch of the other things that if you only saw those, you would have be very hard to convince someone we did not take them to like Africa or something. They're like David  19:03    those rhinos and elephants and stuff. Will  19:04   You can't move me and time travel the same time. That doesn't count. So no, you still are in Tennessee, I promise. Yes. Brian  19:10   I also found out that there was native citrus there, which is crazy. Yeah. So again, because we're kind of plant guys, a little bit right, when you publish, you can publish a holotype, sort of declaring a new species or publishing a new species. But that's not the only thing that you can do. You can also publish towards these common goals, basically a synthesis or a research paper or review where you're publishing based on what other people have done. So for that, you have to pay the research cubes if you haven't published all the corresponding holotypes. It's like a public goal. You'll also have a secret, private goal that you're trying to have people not see what it is. But it's usually not that hard to figure out, presumably, if you played the game a couple more times. So like, I'm pretty sure that Jason's going for a bunch of Triassic stuff on purpose, right? That is the basics of the game. I think. Is there anything that I crucially missed all.  Jason  19:59   Only thing I can think of is the game tracks how many total holotypes are published, and as you go up, it unlocks various things in the game. So we do a reset of the museum, it unlocks little upgrades. And typical thing, you get four upgrades over the course of the game. There are five or six to choose from, so you never get them all, but they're a way of getting more powerful. And I like it because this, this game caught me off guard with how much strategic depth there is, because there's a lot of decision points you can make that have effects on the game. And possibly due to all the 10,000 games per second play testing, none of them is clearly, oh, this is the the one upgrade to rule them all. This is the one path that's definitely it all seems like there's a good argument for any choice you could make.  Brian  20:43   I don't know every one of us chose that extra storage closet for fossils as the first thing. It's so tempting. Jason  20:49    That's just because we're all hoarders Will  20:52   So it's so nice to get that, but I want the backpack David  20:56   The game also, because there are so many different options, it allows you to do something that I always find myself doing when I play board games, which is role playing a little bit getting a little bit into, like, leaning into a schtick. Yeah, I'm not just trying to win. I am sort of trying to embody a character and follow a certain style. What would I want to publish? How would I want to publish? And I do that partially because it's fun and partially because it's an easy way to get over decision paralysis, yes, which I get a lot in games that have a lot of strategic pieces. Jason  21:32   I will say it was really fun watching you guys, because I was here making strategic decisions based off of point values, and just watching you geek out or like, Oh, this is a cool dinosaur, I have to publish this one! David  21:42   Oh yes. We were both like, repeatedly. I was, Brian was very upset with me, both of us I think, because we kept throwing away valuable cards because we liked the other ones better. I was like, Yeah, but this is Triceratops. I gotta do Triceratops. Brian  21:57   I think you had triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Rex. What else did you have?  David  22:00   I had, I managed. I was very proud I didn't win, but I was very proud that I got T Rex, dinonicus. I think Triceratops was the one I didn't you almost, almost managed Triceratops. I got a bunch of the classic Stegosaurus I think. Brian  22:15   Yeah, you got the ones that come in the sets of plastic dinosaurs toys. Will  22:18   Exactly. Yeah, yes, David  22:20   yeah. I almost had a full tube. Unknown Speaker  22:23   You just need a random Dimetrodon in there. Exactly! Jason  22:27   It's like, these dinosaur cards. I mean, they're, they're along the lines of a lot of the good science games. They have random science facts on them that have nothing to do with the game, but that are still really cool. They have a little line of text that explains what the name means. So, Tyrannosaurus Rex, it was like, like, was it tyrant king lizard or something. Gojirosaurus, which is Godzilla lizard. And they also have who first published that particular dinosaur specimen and what year it was in. And some of these are back into the mid 1800s and some of them are just a handful of years ago. So they have a wide spread.  Brian  23:01   Some of them must have been contemporary with the publication of the game, right? 2022, can't be anything newer than that. Yeah, yes. Jason  23:07   High point of the game is when I published a holotype that yout wo didn't recognize. It was like, Wait, what, What's that thing? Brian  23:14   It was fun? David  23:14    They included some, some really recent and well, and I assume that that was part of the necessity of spreading it across time effectively and right. If you, if you need a certain number of Triassic dinosaurs, you're gonna start pulling obscure ones. There's not that many famous Triassic dinosaurs.  Will  23:32   you're gonna run out of recognizable ones, because there's like three. David  23:37   But of course, this is how they become recognizable. Yes, is that the names get used in popular uses like this, yeah,  Brian  23:44   speaking of which, though, there's one thing that I wish the cards did have and they don't, and that's a pronunciation guide  Will  23:49   that would be a really nice feature for people seeing them for the first time, especially like, if this is the first time you've ever seen you know, even ones that aren't are not Uber obscure, but like Coelophysis, where,  Or Deinonychus. yeah, those pronunciations are not intuitive. If you aren't used to those kinds of names a lot Brian  24:09   Yeah, paraceraloloph--  Wait, I screwed it up! David  24:11   Yes, if they had included pronunciation so Brian and Jason the whole time we were playing, were commenting on having fun, watching us react to the cards. Yeah, if they had included pronunciations, you also would have watched us go. That's not how I say it! Will  24:24   Gross. No, uh-uh!  David  24:25   this one's wrong. This one's incorrect.  Will  24:27   Yeah, you, that, I have been part of a number of conversations where pronunciation fights break out of, well, I heard it's technically supposed to be said that way, and everyone else goes, Blah! No, I I refuse.  Brian  24:39   Wait. Does the holotype not require pronunciation guidance?  David  24:44   It does not. Brian  24:44   Oh no,  Jason  24:45   I'm gonna say, I guess if we get technical, they're all in Latin. Anyways, a dead language, so no one's gonna come argue with it, except other people studying dead Latin things Brian  24:53    and all those dead Romans.  David  24:54   To do a little just the littlest of tangents. Taxonomic names are all Latinized versions of roots from various other languages that are then pronunciation modified based on whatever language the person speaking speaks. So not only is there not a correct pronunciation, there also isn't you can't have consistent pronunciation because English speakers are not the only people who talk about dinosaurs and an Italian speaker or a Russian speaker or a Chinese speaker are not going to be expected to pronounce the this list of letters the same way. Brian  25:30   I'm starting to think that the omission of pronunciation was not an oversight, but a purposeful choice.  David  25:36   Had I been consulted on this game, I would have suggested leaving it out.  Will  25:39   Yeah, it definitely simplifies it well, because, yeah, there's a bunch that, like, I've had ones that I've shifted on that came up I was on a friend's podcast, and I said AnKYlosaurus. And they had a moment like, Oh, have I been saying that wrong my whole life? No, I used to say ANKylosaurus. Then I hung out with bunches of paleontologists, and they tend to say anKYlosaurus more often, but it doesn't matter, like we made up the name for this,  David  26:05   long as all the letters are accounted for. You're doing okay, yep.  Brian  26:09   Do I talk about some of the science in the game? Yeah? Jason  26:11   Okay, oh, let's get into there's I. I'm looking forward to this because I think there's some deep dives we can go here. Brian  26:16   Yeah. So do we want to start with the general, or do we want to start with the weird ones?  Jason  26:20   Let's start with the general Brian  26:21   God. I'm trying to think of the right way to say this. How accurate is science in the game? But I'm not really talking about the dinosaurs. I'm talking about the depiction of paleontology, yeah, because this really is a game about being a paleontologist. So, so how is it? I mean, we had our own assumptions, but having not been in an academic paleontology environment, our assumptions may be wrong.  Will  26:43   All in all, I liked it.  David  26:44   Yeah, I think it was very they did a good job.  Will  26:47   Yes, I think it captures a lot of the stuff well, we made a discovery while we were playing that it makes the most sense if you picture that you're all working in the same department, that you're all working at the same museum or same university, and you're having to share space. So that's part. You're not rival universities bumping each other out of spots. You're going, it's my turn in the lab. Get out. I have, I have the, the, you know, electron, the scanning equipment, or the CT machine. Signed this out for this time period, it's my time. Go. Go work on your your paper, like, go work on your writing, which is also a nice way to look at the like. The benefit to getting bumped is the like, listen, you've been in the computer lab for the last five hours. Get out of here. Go do something else. Brian  27:33   Are we encouraging people to touch grass? Or deal with their hyper fixations? Yep,  David  27:39   I do like that. Obviously, it's a simplified because it has to be, because it's a board game, but I like the way that they translated a bunch of different real world aspects of research to the game that you can go excavating, which is a real thing that we do, you can go utilize museum archives and museum collections to get the specimens that you need for your research, you can go to the library and read up on background and all that stuff. But they did a pretty good job accounting for a bunch of the things that are in real life a part of this process. Will  28:17   One of my favorite things they did with that accounting is that they split up getting fossils. So excavating fossils, get you the cubes representing Triassic, Jurassic Cretaceous, but you don't know what those fossils are yet, because they have not been cleaned up and put back together and analyzed. So you don't get a identified dinosaur until you get it from the preparation from the lab that has now cleaned it up and put it back together. So, like, you may have an idea, because that happens all the time, where it's like, yeah, we're, we're, we know it's some kind of sauropod, but we don't know what kind yet, because it's still in the rock and or it's not put together yet, so we haven't confirmed that it's anything that we haven't already seen. So I like this, yeah, you know what age it is, because you know what rock you were digging in, but until it's been worked through, you don't yet know what dinosaur you're dealing with. I thought that was a nice separation.  Brian  29:13   And even if you have the fossils, even if you have the specimen, you still have to go do the research. Is this new? So you need the research cubes too.  Will  29:19   Yep, you have to confirm it David  29:21   And that's a huge part, is because people will often ask, Well, how do you know it's a new species? And the answer is, you do a lot of reading. Yep, you do a lot of reading, and you do a lot of comparisons to cover as many all of the bases that you can. And then you have to write that all down to prove it Yes, so that when another scientist goes, how did they know this was a new species? All of the, you've shown your work, yes, Brian  29:45   one of the weird things in the game is that there's only the one spot to publish. And I don't understand why only one person in the department can publish at a time. We thought maybe there's a copy editor, or something Will  29:56   I was gonna say, that's the biggest reason, for me, it makes sense for it to be one department. It that it's like, listen, we're we announce the papers  David  30:03   Yeah, when the press release. We don't want our press releases to be competing with each other. Will  30:08   That's the only way that one really makes sense. David  30:10   I also the arrangement of what fossil sites and dinosaurs and other creatures were available. I was really impressed. Yeah, I really like that. They used real life fossil deposits, like, these were places you'd pick up a card and we would go, Oh, cool. I've heard of this. Or sometimes you'd be like, Oh, the Morrison formation, yeah, this is a famous one. This is very cool. And the same thing with the dinosaurs, the dinosaurs, we were using the pterosaur expansion, the marine reptiles. I like that it isn't just shortcut generic dinosaur fossil site. It isn't just shortcut generic predatory dinosaur. And it also isn't just all the famous ones. They did a nice spread of different types of animals, different ages of fossil deposits, which I thought was really nice, because that, you know, when you're a kid, this is how you learn about new dinosaurs and different locations where you find fossils is you see them in books or you see them in games and stuff. Yeah, there are. There are absolutely fossil sites that I learned about as a kid because they were in, like, the Magic School Bus computer game. Yes.  Brian  31:20   Oh, really? David  31:21   Yeah, the magic school bus to the time of the dinosaurs computer game was maybe my most played computer game when I was a kid. That was super fun. Brian  31:28   So holotype does, and we didn't mess with this. It has a stripped down, they call it the basal version, where simplified rules to play with kids. Oh, that's great, nice to kind of help deal with that sort of strategic difficulty, because a very deep tactical game. Well, I mean, I say that; I've played games with Jason's daughters, they would easily kick my butt, so I think a lot of it is how early you get them started, and Will  31:53   that that was something I liked from the gameplay side of it is that there's no rocket launcher. That's the if, if you get this, you're you might as well we could call the game here sort of thing,  David  32:04   you don't win if you get T Rex. Will  32:06   Yeah, and I like that, because it also meant that you can be kind of competitive. But also, if I want to just focus on my pet project, or focus on, like, I got really into the group the common goals, because I not, A, I liked that concept. But also that's a fun thing to add, that every now and then you're doing research that's not on a new species, it's on predatory dinosaurs or like the bromolites study of we're looking at coprolites and regurgitalites and this category of things, not specifically one I found. I like that it meant that you can, you can kind of be strategic on your own, even if you're not, like, I didn't have a full grasp of the game because it was my first time, but I could go, Oh, that's interesting. So I'm gonna focus my efforts this way. And it wasn't the only option to be focusing on. It. So I liked that part of the gameplay, David  33:02   and to piggyback off of what you were talking about a little bit, because you brought up the community goals, sort of the Global Goals, which I thought was a really fun part, as Brian you mentioned before, that is a relatively common thing in board games like this, and I think it's so fitting in a science themed game, because science is, by its very nature, a community effort. Yes, I think that if you know to segue a little bit into ways that this game is maybe not as good a representation of real life science, the game is competitive, because that's the kind of game that it is. And I think that, you know, science can be competitive. For sure, there's lots of competitive aspects in science, but that's not the part that we like, celebrate and encourage a whole lot in science. Like ideally, we want to all be working together and cooperative. And I like that this game isn't just a competitive board game, that there is this acknowledgement of the research you're doing is contributing to global understanding of these topics. I think that's a really nice, you know, it's, it's not, not quite a footnote, but it's sort of an aside on top of all of the competitive research stuff in the game, but I like that they included it in there.  Will  34:23   Yes, absolutely.  Brian  34:24   Yeah, it's a nice balance. The competitive is the cooperative, but you're doing the same thing. But even if this person wins the game, look at all the cool science we learned anyway, right? Yes, Will  34:35   well, and unlike on the note of it being competitive, and like the fact that it can be, but that's not the way, you know, it should be, quote, unquote, but there is an argument to be made of well, if we're trying to simulate it, then there should be some. One of the notes that I think falls into that category that I found very charming is your personal goal. Because, yeah, it's like, there's absolutely scientists where it's like, what do you study? You know, crocs, and it's like, why? Because they're neat! Because that's my favorite, because I want to study them, because they're the best, and that like, I'm gonna use any excuse I can to get to go see more crocs. Like, yeah, you have that happens all the time, where researchers have their little personal projects, and it's like, is this what needs to be studied? It's what I want to study.  David  35:19   That a personal goal. I mentioned before, that sort of role playing aspect. For me, the personal goals were like, info on my character sheet where I was like, Oh, I'm a marine reptile researcher. Yes, that's what this personal goal tells me, is that I love marine reptiles. And so I was like, Yeah, I'm gonna scoop up all the marine reptiles. That's right.  Brian  35:37   So we haven't talked about this, but the three different meeples for the three different things. I mean, they're personified, like the paleontologist is a little taller. They're basically, you could tell them apart based on their hats. Yes, yes, David  35:50   the grad student had their graduation cap on. Will  35:52   Yeah. I thought that was very cute,  Brian  35:54   which they used the whole time. And I remember will, when you were doing yours, you were giving them names. Said your grad student was Ian Malcolm, so you had him sitting on his side like he was injured in Jurassic Park, hilarious. But I did want to make sure we come back to this idea of the different groups. So the different cards, I don't just want to call them dinosaurs. What is the proper I guess reptiles? What's the proper term I should use that is encompassing of both marine reptiles and the dinosaurs and the pterosaurs. David  36:22   You can call them reptiles. If you want to be scientific, you could call them taxa, yeah, as they are all individually named species and such. And so they're taxa, Brian  36:35   right? Well, the the taxa, then that we have, they're based on a couple different things, the age right, Triassic, Jurassic or Cretaceous, the diet. So omnivore, carnivore or herbivore, that was pretty much it. And then they have these sort of phylogenetic groupings. So we've got our sauropods, our long necked dinosaurs, our theropods, mostly your T Rex, you're like meat-eating two legged there were a couple, I'm thinking therizinosaur, yes, which was, you know, I think the one herbivore, maybe not the only, but the only one I can think of. And then we had a marine reptiles, which is not one group, right? Yeah, that, I know three are there four? Will  37:17   There's a bunch. There's three big ones, yeah, the three big, famous ones of plesiosaurs and pliosaurs, which are grouped together, the mosasaurs, and then the ichthyosaurs, which are the like dolphin, Shark shaped ones.  David  37:32   But there was at least one, I don't know if it was like a nothasaur, yes. In the game, there are other smaller groups of marine reptiles, okay, Brian  37:40   and then there's the genosaurs, and I had never heard that term before. So what is that? David  37:46   Dinosaurs are cladistically, right? The way that we classify them? There are three major groups of dinosaurs. There are sauropods, the long neck dinosaurs which you mentioned, theropods, the two legged, mostly meat eating dinosaurs which you mentioned. And then there's ornithischians, which is all the rest, mostly herbivores, mostly quadrupeds, that includes your Triceratops and your Stegosaurus and your Ankylosaurus and your parasaurolophus and all of those. Genisauria is a subset of ornithischian dinosaurs, but it's a subset that includes basically all of them. I think the only thing that is an ornithischian, but not within genisauria, are some really basal groups like heterodontosaurids might fall out of it. So genosaur basically is the same thing as ornithischian. It's just that other, third major branch of dinosaurs. And I was thinking, because when we when it came up on the cards, I was like, I don't know what genisauria is. Off the top of my head, that's that's not a very commonly used term. It's a very smooth solution to the problem that the word ornithischia is a really weird word to read and to try to say if you're not familiar with it, and genosaur is an actual taxonomic term that isn't used very much, but basically means the same thing as ornithischian Will  39:10   well. And it's, it's like, I'm familiar with ornithischian, so there's definitely a part of me that's like, genosaur What? But I know that if you if I was introduced to both cold, I would go with genosaur. Genosaurs a better word, that's more fun to say David  39:22   It's much more accessible. I do want to mention one more thing about the because I think this is an important thing. When you mentioned the meeples on the note of the the meeples the characters that you have, one thing that did stand out to me about when we were playing the game, it was really the one thing of the game that I went a little bit like, oh, I don't love this representation, which is that your three characters are the paleontologist, the grad student and the field assistant, and there is a very clear hierarchy of who gets to do what, and who's more important than the other ones. The field assistant doesn't get to publish. the paleontologist gets to kick the other two off of any spots. And I think that that does reflect, you know, some real life hierarchical systems in places like universities. But I do think that it also a little bit reinforces these, this caste system, almost power dynamic that, like no field field assistants absolutely can publish stuff. They're usually working alongside other people. I also this is much more of a personal semantics thing, but separating paleontologist from grad student makes me the hackles are up a little bit because I'm like, Well, if you're a grad student, if you if you published a dinosaur, and you're out doing field work and you're doing the research, yeah, you're a paleontologist, yeah? So, for the sake of the game, I think that that, like hierarchy system mechanically, works very well. I think that it's really an engaging way to play, but it it reflects upon real world paleontology in a way that I think is a little bit overly stereotypical, yeah, and it's a little icky too, but it's a little icky. And, you know, I think that, you know, not to as a slight against the people who made the game. I think they did a great job, but that is a kind of real world aspect of paleontology that is a little bit icky in its gamified form. Yeah, yeah. Jason  41:18   I've got other questions, though, about the science here. One is about the like, the places we get the fossils from. So you get three types of fossils. Your Triassic, your Jurassic, your Cretaceous, and they're different. The older ones are more valuable. But what are these things like? The game is Mesozoic, North America. So all three of these periods are inside the Mesozoic. Like, what is the Mesozoic. What are these little three subdivisions? How do people draw boundaries between them? I assume an asteroid was involved in the last one, but I don't know about any of the other so, like, what? What defines these three periods? What defines the three periods? Will  41:54   Absolutely So, yeah, the Mesozoic is often what we call the age of dinosaurs, and David  41:59   from roughly 250 million to 66 million years ago. Yes, Will  42:04   and like all period, you know, all phases of Earth history, we break it up into subsection like the Triassic Jurassic Cretaceous also have subdivisions that we can that you get into when you're you research is zooming in even further or looking at a very particular time frame. There are names for those. These typically are associated with rock layers and deposits and sediment layers. You will find ages like there are the ancient mammal ages, the large mammal ages, land mammal ages. Had to get my term right in North America that is based off of what fossils are present. But typically we're basing it off of using geologic sediments to distinguish and the borders are often at major shifts,  David  42:56   environmental changes, ecological changes the asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous is not so much. There is a geological layer that you can see. Yeah, that's asteroid dust. But the shift from Cretaceous to what comes next is an ecological shift, because there was a mass extinction, yep, yep.  Will  43:14   And mass extinctions are very commonly the book ends  David  43:17   It's great way to distinguish between before and after, yep, and Will  43:22   so, yeah, we can identify these either based on sediment types that there are certain things that you know, we can age and you know, well, it has to be this, because the, you know, radioactive elements that are in this rock date it to that time period. And then, very often, the fossils that we find of this group is only a Triassic group. They were, they were in the middle of the Triassic. So there's not even a way they could be scooting over the line. So for sure, we're definitely in the Triassic. And so there are fossil sites that are already well known for what age they are. Anything you find here is going to be that age. You just might be finding some new thing from that age that you haven't seen before. Jason  44:06   So I like that there is a part of this game that is the different trace fossils, yeah, and I'd like to actually talk a bit about those. So they have a few different kinds. They've got the eggs, they've got coprolites, so poop, also dinosaur tracks, bugs and Amber, I think, or something like that. I don't remember how many are in the base game and how many are in the expansion. How important are these to paleontology, like what we've already talked about, some of the ones. But what other types of trace fossils are there? What role do they play in terms of paleontology and figuring things out? And the ultimate question is, like, How long until we can actually get DNA out of the fossil mosquito and makeJurassic freaking Park? David  44:44   right, right. So trace fossil, fossils are categorized broadly into two categories, body fossils, which are the remains of the body parts, bones, teeth, leaves, anything that was part of the body of the organism. Trace fossils are indirect evidence of the organism. Footprints are trace fossils, burrows, poop, regurgitalites, colalights, all the things that we were talking about before Amber is technic, is is sort of a plant trace fossil, because Amber is produced by plants. Eggs are a trace fossil. Trace fossils are extraordinarily important, because they can not only tell you what sort of things might have been around if you don't have body fossils, but they also reveal behaviors and lifestyles. You know, footprints tell you how an animal was moving around its environment. Nests with eggs tell you a lot about reproduction. Coprolites, poop. Tell you about diet. You cut open a coprolite, and there's what this animal ate. So you get a lot of really fascinating information that you often can't get, from bones and teeth. to Jason's question about amber in mosquitoes and DNA, I have an answer to that that is a short story The earliest reports of DNA coming out of bugs and Amber was from the early 90s, around the time that Jurassic Park came out. And then throughout the 90s, there were a bunch more reports of DNA from Amber. And then as more and more time went on, those studies were revised as we got better and better at recognizing DNA contamination in our specimens, like what we were talking about before and after a decade or so, general consensus became that those were all accidents, that those were all errors, that there was not DNA in those bugs in amber. More recent research after that tried to estimate how long DNA could potentially last in the environment, and estimated that DNA could not probably last more than a couple million years, which is not nearly enough to get to dinosaurs. And then my favorite this was a 2013 study that sought to see, okay, what does DNA breakdown actually look like in amber. And they tested with all the updated methods, two pieces of Amber from museum specimens, one of which was, I think, 10,000 years old or so, and they found no evidence of preserved DNA in the bug in the amber, and another piece of pre Amber that was about 50 or 60 years old, and they found no evidence of preserved DNA in that bug in amber. Yeah, 50 years old. It seems that DNA is actually extra bad at preserving in amber. The amber is actually an awful place to try to preserve DNA. Will  47:37   It's one of the worst ones you could pick if you were trying to save some DNA. Aside,  David  47:42   Amber does a great job. I know, protecting like tissues and stuff from scavengers and decomposers, but it does a very bad job protecting DNA from heat and moisture, which is what breaks down DNA. So to answer your question, never I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, Jason, bummer. Brian  48:09   So I think we have a little bit of time for nitpicks, and then we should probably wrap up with our with our grades, if that's okay.  David  48:16   I've got a nitpick to come right off of that coprolite discussion. There is a stipulation within this game that the trace fossils, coprolites, cannot be used for marine reptiles, that you can only attach a coprolite, poop, to the dinosaurs and pterosaurs and such. And when we were playing the game, I think it was Brian who, who asked, Do you Do you not get coprolites from marine fossils? And I said, Yeah, you do. You absolutely could get coprolites from marine fossils.  Will  48:48   There's a famous one that has a whole bunch of shark bites on it.  David  48:50   Yeah? It's a, it's a croc poop with shark bite marks in it. Brian  48:55   Oh, lovely, . David  48:56   Yeah, absolutely you can get fossil poops from ocean animals. Brian  49:01   I'm sorry. I'm just, okay. So it pooped, a bunch of sharks nibbled on it, and then it got buried.  David  49:06   Yeah, absolutely, yeah, that is exactly what happened.  Brian  49:08   Paleontology is weird,  David  49:09   yeah, coprolites in the in the water are so fun because you'll see like a shark or a croc coprolite, and you can see the shape of the copper light has a flat surface where it landed, yeah, you can see this is the side that it landed on, yeah, and it got squished into that shape. Oh, man. A lot of fish coprolites are spiral shaped, yeah, because of the shape of their sphincter. Brian  49:33   Like goldfish. Will  49:34   Yeah. Like it's when you watch it happen in an aquarium. It looks like that when it fossilizes, yep.  David  49:40   A lot of coprolites have like, a pinched off end. Yeah, it looks like poop. And that's what it is. It's poop. Brian  49:45   Are there? Are there left handed and right handed fish coprolites then? David  49:49   That is great question. I don't know, off the top my head, but probably,  Brian  49:54   I don't know what would cause a spiral, but I mean, something's making a twist. Yeah? Will  49:59   Yeah, this is a very nitpicky nit pick. Is also with the trace fossils, that the way you get points off of trace fossils is by adding them to a publication when you publish a holotype. Which I get the concept of you're applying of, we, you know, we, I am publishing Triceratops. And here are some Triceratops footprints. But that's not actually how we publish trace fossils. When we publish a trace fossil, we publish a ichnotaxon, which is a taxonomic name for that trace fossil. Because the reality is that usually you cannot match a trace fossil to its owner. You can get close a lot of time, like you almost certainly could go these are ceratopsian feet, because we have the feet of many ceratopsians. David  50:45   Right, and there's a triceratops skeleton, yeah, 30 meters away,  Will  50:49   but we don't have the fleshy pad of that foot, so there's a lot of information in this track that is missing from the bones. Like you know, if you looked at a duck's foot versus a duck's foot bones. That's a lot of webbing and material that you don't actually have, and you may not actually be able to confirm on the bone, like you may be able to say, Yeah, this is definitely a web foot. But how webbed? Did it go all the way to the end of the toes? Did it stop halfway down? And so finding a trace fossil is not actually something you can typically, unless you have a overabundance of evidence attach to a known species. So it gets its own name and suspected, and its own holotype--and its own holotype--trace fossils get their own holotypes. And the one that stands out the most for that is that amber, like amber typically you're describing, like the bugs and stuff that got trapped in that amber, and that's its own fossil. So the amber itself is kind of a trace fossil, but whatever's in it, that's just a fossil. Yeah. And so those you really should be publishing on their own, yes, Brian  51:52   okay, so trace fossils are not bonus points tht get tacked into other fossils. Will  51:57   Yeah, they're, they're their own study, their own separate study, they'll be in association, but you would have had to already publish that holotype, typically, to then be able to connect them.  David  52:08   I think that's a great nitpick. I hadn't thought about but that. But that's a really good point. Brian  52:12   I mean, I would love to nitpick as well that my only nitpick, if this even counts, is that these these people, apparently never have to write grants or teach classes. Yeah, Jason  52:21   that's a great that's not other. It's like, I'm I'm not sad that's missing. Like, I like teaching classes. But if I could ditch the grant writing I would. David  52:29   It would be so cool if you could, if one of the places on the mat was, like, scientific conference, yeah, and you could like, exchange, research cubes, or it Will  52:37   That could be an expansion, adds a little bit to the board, and you go, meet. Brian  52:41   It's like a sidetrack for publication, right? Yes, yes, yeah. You can, like, Will  52:45   you can get almost to publication, but it's not quite publication. David  52:49   You go to the conference and it like, ups all of your resources, and it just, it's just motivation, yes, or you get, like, new personal goals. Yeah, you could acquire a new personal goal, Brian  53:00   We need more opportunities for collaborations. We need joint goals. Public goals, exactly, private goals, between two people. That's making it way too complicated.  David  53:09   Expand the global goals, Brian  53:12   Yeah, that's not a bad idea. Will  53:13   That actually would be pretty cool. Like, switch one out, yeah, yeah, David  53:16   oh, switching one out would be mean. That's like, I don't like that on.  Brian  53:21   It's like, nah we don't want to do this one. This one. This one's not important anymore. No one's funding it. Will  53:24   That makes people go, no! Brian  53:27   that actually would be funny. You go to a conference and you have to chuck one, then you pull it a new one. Anyway, anyway. Let's do our letter grades. Let's start with the fun. How fun is holotype to play? We do typically kind of use a little bit of grade inflation. We often startat a B, you guys don't have to do this if you don't want to.  Jason  53:50   My understanding is that you very specifically chose not to be in academia. David  53:55   I haven't graded a paper in years. I mean, for fun, I would give it an A, yeah, I had a ton of fun playing. No, I really enjoyed it. I named my meeples, yeah, I had Ellie, Rhonda and Darcy, yep, which I was very happy with. They were great. They were kicking butt. Will  54:12   Yeah, no. I mean, at the worst, if you like, like, low A, but yeah, no, I think it's, it's up there. That was a very fun game.  Brian  54:21   So A, A-minus then? yeah, yeah, okay, Jason  54:24   yeah, I'd give this a solid A venturing into A-plus. I mean, I think of the of the games we have played it as part of this podcast, this is one of the most fun. This is, this is right up there with the dreaded Wingspan that we can't get away with mentioning. But I say it's valuable on this one, because, darn it, bird are dinosaurs. Brian  54:41   Yes, that's a very good point. Our top scorers have all had some kind of dinosaurs or dinosaur like thing in them. I guess cytosis didn't. But you know, those dinosaurs had cells, so it's fine. I'm biased because I had a fantastic time playing the game with you guys. It was so much fun doing it. I'm not gonna let that influence me, though, because I don't have to, because it's an A because for me, it's how likely am I to grab it and bring it with us. And, I mean, I took it with us when we went home for Thanksgiving to play with my family, like  Jason  55:11   you took it in a 14 hour car ride. Like that's that's dedication Brian  55:15   so on the science side, why don't I go ahead and start i It's interesting, because the science in terms of the dinosaurs, the formations, all of that clearly accurate. But this really isn't about that. It's about paleontology itself. Now there's always some simplification there has to be, because it's a game. It's not going to be 100% accurate, but I think this deserves an A too. I think there was a clear intention, intentionality in the design of the metaphor of the game to do a good job of representing what it was trying to represent.  Will  55:43   Yeah, no, I think I agree, because like that, you know, there are nitpicks. There are definitely categories that and for our specific field of expertise stand out, but, but none of those were like distracting me, you know, aggressively or anything. So, yeah, I think it's...B feels too low for any of those. So A still feels fitting because it's it was satisfying in the the scientific regard, right?  Brian  56:15   You can go in between. You could give it a B plus or an A minus, if you want. David  56:20   That's true. That's true. I was gonna say I would give it an A minus at the lowest, yes, A maybe an A minus if I'm feeling, you know, critical, if I'm grouchy that day. But I think because of what you guys just said, that there's clearly a great intent here. I think that also I'm grading in comparison to other games. And it is very rare that you see a game put in this level of effort to be accurate, not only to be accurate, but to be thorough, to include a wide range of real life science stuff. There are a couple things in there that made me go, I don't love the implication of you know, you've sort of translated this thing over from the real world, and it's a little bit Ick. But the other thing that I think gets at the A is that stepping aside, stepping back from the hyper specifics of the science, I think this is exactly the kind of game that would make somebody excited about science. Yeah, I think getting to play through the process of it using a lot of the real pieces of science, I don't think that the inaccuracies or the weird sort of parts of it would be enough to counter the fact that this is an extremely fun scientific interaction like this is the kind of game that I could see a future paleontologist saying when I was a kid, I played holotype, yeah, and that's how I got excited about dinosaurs. Yeah. Brian  57:50   I hope that happens. I hope that happens. That's gonna happen sometime, right? It's got to  Jason  57:56   I'm also going to give this a solid A for these same reasons. It's a good representation. It has a lot of details about paleontology and the dinosaurs and the dig sites, everything that don't have to be there. But they made the effort of doing it. They made the effort to get a lot of stuff there and to, I think you said about our other dinosaur game [Wingspan], Brian, you can't play this game without learning something about dinosaurs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I actually think I really like the representation of paleontology, because I think a lot of people, like your sort of casual, like child paleontologists, think that people are all out in the field digging up dinosaurs all the time. And isn't it great, like that scene in Jurassic Park, it's like, well, that's part of it, but this actually shows you have to do a lot of book research, you have to go back to the lab, you have to go to museums. Most of your work is actually not at the field site. And I think that's actually a good way of portraying what the real job is like. Will  58:55   Yeah, no, I agree, because it is so often portrayed as it's digging up a bone and going Aha, Eureka, right? I have found a new species.  David  59:04   I think that one of the nicest things that I can say about this game is that it feels great for one of the main reasons that Jurassic Park the movie feels great, yeah, which is that it is not just about dinosaurs, it is about paleontology. Yes. And that really sets it apart. And that really makes it entrenched in the science--Yeah--behind this field. Brian  59:28   Well, we should probably call it there. Oh, sure, we could keep talking and talking. I would love to do so, but, but I do have to edit this at some point. Will  59:38   I know the feeling. Brian  59:41   Where would you like our listeners, this very small number of people who listen to our podcast Jason  59:48   Hey hey hey, be optimistic! We could have people from five years in the future of our millions and millions of subscribers who are coming back to listen to Holotype. Will  59:55   Yes, absolutely. There you go, Brian  59:58   I'm sorry, dear listeners. I apologize. We're happy to have you here, but really go listen to Common Descent. Okay, I'm going to tell you where to find them. Go listen, join their discord. It's a great community. And come to Dragon Con and see them in person.  David  1:00:13   Absolutely you can find common descent wherever you get your podcasts. We have a discord. We're on some of the social medias. We have a website, commondescentpodcast.com, we release episodes about various topics in paleontology, and at various parts of the year, we also do deep dives into science of movies, and we do speculative evolution projects in October for Halloween. And we do all sorts of fun evolution paleontology type stuff, yeah? Brian  1:00:42   Well, hopefully we have the opportunity to get together again. I mean, this is the Dino, the paleontology game, so I we may have to stretch at some point to make that happen, but  David  1:00:52   we got that nature ecologies, yeah? Game sent to us, and I went through, and I like, looked through all the cards, and I, like, played a little, you know, around with myself, and it's pretty cool, actually, that might be fun to play.  Brian  1:01:06   I'm not kidding. I'll get in the car. I'll be there. Absolutely, come on, absolutely. Well, I think we're just gonna have to call it there. So thanks so much Will, David for taking the time. And now we always come to the part that happens every time, where I never know how to end the episode. So I'm gonna let Jason do it.  Jason  1:01:21   Well thank you Will and David for being here. Thank you everyone for listening, and have a great month and happy gaming. Brian  1:01:26   Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we've talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.  

#Academia #Publications #Satire #PublishOrPerish #BoardGames #Science Introduction Merry early Christmas, as we go through a short bonus episode on Publish or Perish, a satirical card game by Dr. Max Bai. We talk about the nature of academic publishing, including problematic aspects like predatory journals, and how some of the quirkier aspects of the process get reflected in the game. So enjoy this lighter offering, and we'll see you with Season 2 in 2025! Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction 01:53 - The Importance of Publications 05:06 - Gameplay and Mechanics 12:15 - Grades (& more Importance of Publication) 15:52 - Generative AI & Predatory Journals 21:26 - Wrap-up Links Publish or Perish (Kickstarter page)    This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Brian  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. In this bonus episode, we're going to discuss publish or perish by Dr Max Bai Jason  0:20   All right, everyone, welcome back. We're well, Brian says that this one is actually science with gaming instead of gaming with science as we're doing a game about the scientific process itself instead of about a science topic. This is Jason. This is Brian. And welcome technically, we're in our between season break right now, but we like giving y'all bonus episodes, and honestly, this was something we couldn't pass up. So we're just going to dive right into it. Publish or Perish, is a game that is just out by Dr Max Bai. So he is an independent social psychologist. So he got his PhD in social psychology, did a postdoc at Stanford, and now runs an independent research lab, which I don't know exactly how that works. He says on his Kickstarter page he started a few companies, so I assume they provide him enough income he can just do his own research what he wants. And maybe social research is less expensive than biology research. I don't know. I do not have enough money to be an independent researcher and run my own lab. Brian  1:07   Well I mean, research can vary widely in how expensive or inexpensive it is, depending on how you're doing it. Jason  1:13   but whatever the case is, he's running an independent research lab, which means he doesn't have any of the administrative overhead and all the deans and stuff that we spend all our time complaining about, and that's probably a preview for how this episode is going to go, because this episode is about the scientific process itself, not really about any specific scientific discipline. And so you're going to see maybe a peek behind the curtains, if you don't know it already, if you're already in the sciences, then hopefully this is not too traumatizing, as we bring up maybe some of the less fun parts of being a researcher and a scientist. So anyway, what is this game? I don't know if he made this as a graduate student or as a postdoc. It is a light party game meant to kind of poke fun at the scientific publishing enterprise. So we've mentioned this a few times on the episode. We scientists don't have very much. We're generally not in it for the money. Most of us don't get very famous like the one thing we have is our reputation with other scientists, and we establish that by publishing academic research papers. And people look at those papers, and that's how things like promotion and tenure, which is basically job security and being hired by another university or going off into industry is important, like if you're going on the job market either as a freshly minted Master's or PhD student, or as a professor who's been in it for 20 years, people are going to look at your publication record to see, are you actually a good scientist? Are you actually putting out a lot of work, and hopefully good quality work. But as what happens with any field, anytime you reward people for something, then there's ways to sort of abuse the system, and things go wrong, and the publish or perish of the title is talking about how, as a researcher, especially a university researcher, you have to publish or you'll perish, like if you don't get the publications out, you're going to lose your job.  Yeah it's kind of one of the unfortunate realities that, like science can be thought of as this very pure thing, the pursuit of knowledge, the generation, the advancement of human knowledge and humankind. It's also a job that's kind of difficult. And the unit of scientific information that your typical scientist cares about is publishing a paper. We did a study. This is what we found. You take that paper, you write it all up, you submit it to a journal. It'll go through a process called peer review, which is where three anonymous colleagues typically will look at it and say, like, is this good science or not? And that process kind of works. It's, I think it's like democracy. It's the worst political system except for all the other ones. Churchill's famous quote,  Brian  3:26   yeah.  Jason  3:26   So this system has evolved over a century or two of time as the scientific enterprise kind of started building as we recognize it now. And no, it's not perfect by any means, and people are looking at ways of changing it. So there's like, open peer review, where you publish and then people just comment on it, which has all the pros and cons of everything else on the internet that's just open for people to comment on,  Brian  3:47   just like Wikipedia, right?  Jason  3:49   Yeah, peer review, as currently, as it currently stands, also has the same pros and cons, because peer reviewers are usually anonymous. And one thing the Internet has taught us is that sometimes when you have anonymity, you get permission to be nasty, and some people do that. And that is actually the infamous reviewer two that the game talks about a few times is that it's usually it's reviewer number two is that nasty person who just hates your work and didn't read it, and is just saying how much horrible stuff is in there, and you have to change all this stuff and so on and so forth. Brian  4:16   Being on the other side of this, you know, being someone who does publish papers in almost everything that we do as scientists, you have to justify what you're saying. You either did the experiment or you can cite someone else who did the experiment. You can cite something that's passed peer review, that's out in common knowledge. When you are an anonymous reviewer, people will just say random stuff that's not justified. They don't provide their sources. They don't have to explain anything. And that's one of the only times that scientists get away with this crap.  Jason  4:43   And I will say this is not like this isn't every time,  Brian  4:46   no, no, no,  Jason  4:47   but it's not rare enough that it's a weird thing. Like most people have had an experience with THAT reviewer who just didn't get their thing,  Brian  4:54   and then you usually have an editor who's kind of acting like a referee. They will read the paper, they will. Also look at the reviewers comments and say, like, hey, is this person out of line? They're the, pretty much the only people that get to say that. Jason  5:06   But we don't have any of that in the game. In the game, all you have to do is you get enough cards to get to publish. So let's actually talk about this game before we dig into the nitty gritty of scientific publishing. The game has a few different types of cards. You've got your action cards, or what you draw into your hand and you used to play the game. There are publication cards, manuscript cards, which are what you collect to try to win the game. Each one's worth a certain number of citation points, because that's how we grade papers in science. Is how many times do other people cite the paper? And then there's some trivia cards, actually, that get used in a few cases, where they have random trivia from all sorts of different fields of science. And the experience there is, if you are in that field, then they're easy, and if you're not, they're super hard. Brian  5:46   We experienced this. It's like, oh, these biology questions are way too easy. I don't even know what these terms are in the economics question,  Jason  5:53   yeah, which is probably exactly what it's meant to be. They're meant to be high level stuff, so that if you're not in the field, it's basically just random guessing. And the idea is that you go through, you're drawing your hand, you're collecting cards. And if you get certain numbers of the right resources that you can then get a manuscript. And there are five resources which are basically there just to have five different things you have to collect. There's writing, theory, references, data and ideas, and so different papers require different numbers of each of those. Usually they just require, like, two or three of some of them. Honestly, the manuscript cards, I think are the best part of this game, because they're all fully fleshed out with a journal and an article and a title and an abstract, which is like a brief summary of it, and they're just ridiculous. So I'm just going to flip through here. We've got the economics of Santa Claus, an analysis of infinite resource management procrastination patterns among academics, a case study of myself unpacking the aerodynamics of flying pigs. And then there's a whole paragraph describing what this article is about, and he does say he used a little bit of generative AI to help with that, because I know there's like, 50 or 60 of these cards. I don't know how someone would come up with all that for all of them. So they're actually quite fun to read, because they're just totally ridiculous. They've all got punny author names as well. So I'm just picking the top of the stack here. Got a myth busting microwave minutes is defrost, just a placebo, and the author is luke warm. SCD from the University of convenient conclusions. Brian  7:12   You can also hit your opponent with maladies, budget cuts, which will affect things, or a citation error, which will remove some of the citation values. And those all have funny little quips on them too. Jason  7:22   Yes, they actually the the flavor text on the card. So not the mechanics. The mechanics are pretty standard across a lot of the card types, but the flavor text of what exactly went wrong is actually quite entertaining. So there are mishap cards which you play on other people to reduce their citation counts. Just grab one here. As it turns out, a critical citation for your paper was hallucinated by chat GTP, that's your thing, and then you have to spend resource cards to fix that error so you can get your citations back.  Brian  7:47   Have you ever experienced this? Because I know that this was the thing in the news where chat GPT will fully manufacture scientific articles, the authors, the title, the date, everything. It'll even give you fake Digital Object Identifier URLs for papers that do not exist. Jason  8:02   Yes, I tried that early on. It's like, okay, let's see how this is. Write me a short scientific literature with citations for whatever topic I was looking at the time. And it did it. It wrote a very nice paragraph, and it had citations. And I looked them up, and they were all completely non existent.  Brian  8:17   They sounded real. Jason  8:18    I've noticed they've started adjusting that now where they'll actually have, like, footnotes, maybe not on chat GPT, just different AIs I've used, they'll put footnotes as where this information came from, so you can actually look up your sources. And there's a few where they very specifically were making it for scientific research, where they would have, like, this sentence came from this paper that you can then look up. So they're trying to fix that problem  Brian  8:39   anyway. This is a different conversation.  Jason  8:40   Yeah, different one. So game, back to the game. So, and your goal is just to get the first one to five citations ends the game and you finish out the round. But they don't necessarily win, because you have to get your citation count. And then we didn't do this part because it was late and we were tired.  Brian  8:55   Well, it's also only two of us. This game says it's got a player count of three, because it's a party game. We, I mean, we just did it because we've got the game for a week and we wanted to play. Wanted to play it right. Jason  9:03   Yeah, so we had to review an early review copy that we have to send back in a few days. But whenever someone publishes, everyone else is supposed to clap and then congratulate them or give snarky comments and reviews phrased in the form of a question, like you were a reviewer trying to tear apart their publication, and at the end of the game, there's actually a vote for whoever was the snarkiest reviewer, and they get extra points. You also take all the publications you managed to collect and put together basically a fake dissertation defense, where you're defending your line of research with these random papers you've cobbled together. And that goes on for supposedly one minute, although usually longer, and then you get a vote, and whoever did that the best also gets additional points. And then there's the "almost there" award, which is for the person who tried to get those previous two and failed. And so they get, instead of three extra citations, they get 2.9 extra citations. So it's, it's, this is definitely a party game. It's a light fluff game. This is not deep gameplay. There's not deep strategies. To explore here. It's just you gather some people around the table, you sit down, you play, you have fun. Obviously, hit strongest if you're in academia, so like, if you've been through a graduate program or stuff, but you don't have to do that to play. Like, you can kind of get it, and the cards are funny enough that you can kind of get what's going on without that. But I think its original target audience was definitely academics.  Brian  10:19   Didn't Didn't you say that this kind of started making the rounds because it got some attention in Nature magazine.  Jason  10:23   I think it got some attention on social media, and then it got picked up by Nature, which is one of the big scientific journals, and so lots of people see that. And so, yeah, it got within at least the scientific community. It got a lot of traction.  Brian  10:36   I mean, I had two people send it to me. They're like, Hey, you should talk about this. Did you have that as well? Jason  10:40   I did not. Maybe I short circuited, because as soon as I found it, I sent it out to other people, so maybe  Brian  10:46   they didn't have the opportunity.  Jason  10:47   Yeah,  Brian  10:48   well, by the time they were sending it to me, you had already done that as well. So actually, I think I got it from three or four different people, you included. I think the best player count for this game. Party games are always better with more people. What's the max suggested player count? Jason  10:59   Let's see. So the game says it is for somewhere. I think it's three to six, yeah, three to six players. Says it lasts anywhere from half an hour to two hours.  Brian  11:09   Two hours? That seems crazy.  Jason  11:11   If it's really cutthroat, maybe, I don't know.  Brian  11:13   I mean, we played two rounds in an hour. There were only two of us, though,  Jason  11:16   yeah, and it was fun, like it was a nice, quick little fluff game. I'm gonna be playing it with my lab over lunch today, so we'll see how that goes, and I'm going to try to get them to do the improv and the sillier parts that you were not on board for Brian  11:26   improv is more fun when it's not just one person across the table from you. So  Jason  11:30   that is fair.  Brian  11:31   Yeah, I think five to six is going to be a lot more fun than three.  Jason  11:34   Yeah, Isuspect because you have more people to riff off of, there's more chance to be snarky because you're not like you're not always snarky. I can't come up with a snarky comment for every paper, but the more people there are, the more likely that is to happen. I've already pre ordered a copy of this that I'm gonna have in the lab just to blow off some steam or do over lunch or take to department retreats or something. And on the Kickstarter, not only do they have the core game, typical, they already have the first three expansions made. One just adds extra action cards. One sets extra trivia cards, and one adds extra manuscript cards, including predatory journals that will basically publish anything you give them. And in fact, one of them, the abstract is lorem ipsum, which is this Latin text that is basically a fill in for editors. They just use to fill space. I think that the title of that one was scientific evidence that predatory journals will publish anything you give them. Speaker 1  12:18   which believe it or not, that has been an actual thing, like, there have been a couple studies on that very topic for real in real life. Maybe I'll find a link for one of those. Jason  12:25   Yeah, so that's really the game. I mean, it's a light game. It's a fun game. Looks like when it goes live, probably by the time we get this edited, Kickstarter is going to be done. Sorry about that. There were some delays in getting us our review copy, but it is going to be available commercially after that. Looks like the retail price is going to be about $40 for the base game, and somewhere around 20 for each expansion you look out for that either online. I'm sure he'll have it available online somewhere, maybe managed to get into some big box stores or local game stores or something.  Brian  12:51   What do you wanna do for this one? So this is a is this getting a science grade or just a fun grade? Jason  12:55   I think mostly it's getting a fun grade because, I mean, if we were trying to grade on what is this like according to actual scientific publishing, actual scientific publishing is a grind and is generally not fun. Brian  13:07   Yeah, stretch this out, where each round you submit, and then you wait for about four months to hear something back. Jason  13:13    And the thing is, like, we're making this sound bad, and part of it's because most of us do not go into science because we love writing papers. We go into science because we love doing the science, and we love doing experiments and solving problems and writing the paper has to happen, but it's kind of like doing your taxes or otherwise filing forms. It's like, it's not necessarily the fun part of what we do, Brian  13:33   but super critical. It's the whole thing, right? I mean, you bring in money to produce science, and this is how we do it. You gotta publish it. You gotta get it out there. Or what was the point of doing it? Jason  13:42   Yeah, unpublished sciences. I mean, technically, it is science, but doesn't it's not part, Brian  13:46    it's not useful. Jason  13:47    Science that doesn't make it into the public consciousness, that doesn't make it out there for other people to use, is, I wouldn't say useless, because that's companies do that all the time. It's proprietary, but we're in the public sector. Our job is to create knowledge for the public good, which is why people in industry publish less, not zero. So industry researchers can actually publish papers on what they are doing. They usually have to go through some hoops to lock down intellectual property first, because a company's goal is to get a competitive advantage, but if they can do that, then they can put it out, and it does actually boost their reputation some too, especially if there's like a tool they've developed that lots of people would be really interested in using they want people to know about it so that they can license to them and make money off of it that way. So he even has a role in the private sector, just not as much a role in the public sector. Brian  14:29   OK, so we're probably gonna skip giving it a science accuracy grade, maybe just to protect my own mental health. But in terms of fun, I probably think for the right audience, this would be an A, but if you're thinking about a general public thing where their lives are not touched by the scientific publishing endeavor, I don't really know if this is gonna hit. So am I allowed to give a split grade? Jason  14:51   This is a bonus episode. You give whatever you want,  Brian  14:53   all right, if you have had science publication, or know someone who has in your life, I think this will probably be an A. And if you don't, I think it's probably a B-. I don't think the jokes are going to hit all that well. Jason  15:04   yeah, hopefully they'd enjoy the manuscript pages, though, the abstracts and the titles are actually quite fun. The names are funny. Being one who's in academia, I'd probably give it like A-, B+. But I like crunchier games. So there's very few party games that I just enjoy sitting around and playing with people, because I prefer more ones where there's tactics and there's some rules I can try to figure out how to master, and my advantage comes from being able to master those rules better than other people, rather than just doing goofy stuff with my friends, which there's a place for that. My family loves Cards Against Humanity, which is definitely just a light, fluffy party game. But most of the time I prefer something with more meat to it, but that's my personal preference. Brian  15:36   all right. Well, I mean, we're gonna skip the science again, just because it hurts my heart too much to have to get into the details here.  Jason  15:42   It almost feels like we did this episode backwards. We talked about the actual stuff before we talked about the game.  Brian  15:47   Well, I mean, but it is a backwards episode. It's the science with gaming. Jason  15:52   Here's something else I want to talk about, though, and that's actually the use of generative AI to make these things and the thing is, there's a big conversation now, my wife and I have argued back and forth about what's acceptable use of AI and not we have very different opinions on that. We're not going to get into that more, just the fact that the genie is out of the bottle its going to happen. So you mentioned that generative AI can create an entire fake scientific paper, and the game actually gets a little bit into like the predatory Journal, the ones that basically make money off of people paying to publish in them, because they need publication counts to let anything through. And my concern is like, where are we gonna go with generative AI, for this in the future? Because it used to be that writing a paper was really hard, even if you're a bad actor and you lied about your results, it took a lot of work to put a paper together and get it through the publication process. But now generative AI, makes that easy, and you combine that with predatory journals, and I just worry that the scientific literature is gonna get pollutedwith a bunch of crap papers, that's a big problem, especially when people try to reproduce what you do, which is a key part of science, one publication means nothing.  Brian  16:47   It's a body of work.  Jason  16:49   Yes, like one publication is like, okay, that's an indication, but until other people also repeat it and get the same result, then it's just, it's a data point. It's not actually considered real unless it can be replicated. Brian  17:00   Although I would say that there's a problem with that idea, though, because you're right. It is supposed to be part of the process, but replication studies often don't happen because there's this unfortunate human rationale of like, well, that's already been done. I'm not going to waste my time doing it. So the problems come when someone tries to build on previous work and then it doesn't work. Like, oh, wait, something's gone wrong here. That also faces the publication filter. People are less likely to publish the results that don't, quote, unquote, work. So it should be a self-correcting process, but the sort of messy human sociology, this is my jobness of it very much, can get in the way of that process.  Jason  17:32   That's true, and that's kind of where I'm concerned here, just like with everything else, with generative AI, it's possible that the noise will start swamping out the signal, because there are definitely people who are motivated just get a publication count out there, because that's what will be used to boost up their citation count. It might get them a bonus at their job. There are some countries that very specifically tie publications to your salary and to your promotion. And anytime you get that sort of perverse incentive, then you start encouraging people to cheat. Hopefully most people won't, but there will always be some number of people who will. Scientists are still human, and that means there's a whole bunch of different types of scientists, and some of them are going to game the system because it helps them get ahead, unfortunately.  Brian  18:13   So predatory journals. Why do those exist?  Jason  18:15   Ah, so we have to go into a little bit of background of publication for this. So it used to be that you would send your manuscript to a big publishing area, they'd go review it, assuming it passed all that and got published. They then made their money off of selling subscriptions to universities and companies and such. Well, starting probably 20 years ago, maybe more is this open access movement, because lots of people can't afford to pay for that. And the idea is, if we're making this the common domain of knowledge for humanity, then humanity as a whole should be able to access it. So people started making results open access, where you could just you could access them no matter who you are. You didn't have to pay for them or anything like that, and that's good. But the fact is, it still costs money to to have a copy editor to make things look nice, and so the money has to come from somewhere. And so now, when you have an open access publication, the person publishing it is paying the cost of that. They're paying essentially the cost of making it look nice, of running the peer review process and all that sort of thing. And once that happened, there are some malicious people figured, hey, we can turn this into a business of having people pay us to publish their work. And good open access publications still keep a high quality standard, and they still make sure it gets filtered. And bad ones who are out just to make a buck don't. They're just using it as a way of getting money from researchers, many of them who don't know better, because they don't realize the publication is predatory, because, like with all scams and phishing attempts and such, they're very good at hiding and looking like something legit, and so we have this whole issue going on. Maybe this is a different topic, but the same thing happens with conferences. The other way we get our work out is not just papers, but we talk about them at conferences. And there are predatory conferences out there.  Brian  19:46   They're 100% are predatory conferences. I get invitations for "conferences" all over the world all the time, Jason  19:52   and so this is, maybe, I hesitate to call it, the seedy underbelly of science. It's more just the unfortunate reality of, as Brian said, science is. A job. Science is a human endeavor that costs time and energy and money, and there are rewards attached to it. And anytime you have that, there can be some people gaming the system. And the reason for talking about this is not to like doom and gloom and Oh, science is horrible. It's like, no, no. It's like, most people involved are good actors most of the time. It's okay, but it's imperfect. And some people have pointed out that there's an idea of scientism nowadays. Of like, oh, science is great. We must follow everything. It's like, recognize it's still a human endeavor. It's imperfect.  Brian  20:27   Look at the history of science, it will show you how much humans can put their fingerprint on data. Jason  20:33   Yeah. And the thing is, I think on the whole, it still is one of the better systems we have for knowledge discovery, and betterment like you compare how we are now to 500 years ago? A lot of that is due to scientific advancements. Just before this, we talked about Pandemic and our lifespan, infectious disease control. All of that is due to scientific stuff, where people have taken things, some of it from indigenous knowledge that got tested in more extensive ways. Some of it from pure Western scientific research from all over the place. But it got tested, it got validated. It went through the system. And so yes, the system makes mistakes. The system is imperfect, but it does more good than it does harm by and large. And so we don't want to under cut it, but we do want to make it more realistic. The game pokes fun at science, but it does in a way that is based in truth. I mean, all the best satire is based in truth. And so while we may be talking a bit of a downer in terms of like, Oh, these are some of the flaws in the system, this is also a good safety valve. Yeah, we know things are imperfect, so this is a good way of like being able to laugh at the imperfections and then maybe move on and try to make them better.  Yeah, best not to ignore that there's a problem that was a lot of deep philosophy for a game that is primarily based on puns, puns in a fluff party game. All right? Well, this is just a quick bonus episode, so I think we're gonna call it then. So look up publish or perish by Dr max by hope you can have some fun if you decide to go for it, and until then, have a good break. Happy gaming, and we'll see you next time. Brian  21:48   Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.  Jason  21:52   This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with the support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. You.  

#Pandemic #Epidemiology #PublicHealth #Disease #COVID #BoardGames #ZManGames #Science #SciComm Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Overview In this month's episode we're covering "Pandemic" by Z-Man Games, where you play public health workers trying to save the world from four diseases at the same time. We're joined by Drs. Yann Boucher and Anna Szuecs to help us talk about what a pandemic is, how diseases spread, how COVID-19 compares to both historical pandemics and the ones in the game, whether masks and vaccinations actually work, and a host of other topics. So grab your mask, sit six feet apart, and join us to learn how you, too, can help save the world from microbial apocalypse! Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 00:55 - Fun science facts 04:57 - Game overview 09:47 - Real-world pandemics 13:52 - Epidemiology and spread of diseases 25:56 - Historical pandemics and lessons learned 30:52 - COVID-19 and mental health 33:36 - Future pandemics and disease surveillance 40:37 - Final grades Links Pandemic (Z-Man Games) Climate change makes diseases worse (full article and summary article) Scientist interview from The Last of Us (YouTube) What if Fungi Win? (book) This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Anna  0:00   Music. Brian  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Today Jason  0:12   we'll be talking about pandemic by z Man games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason, Brian  0:20   this is Brian. Anna  0:21   This is Anna.  Yann  0:22   and Yann.  Jason  0:23   So not only do we have a special guest, we have two special guests this time today. Anna swetsu, actually, I don't know that I can pronounce your last name, so I'll just let you two introduce yourselves. Anna  0:34   Okay, so I'm Doctor Anna Szuecs, my last name is Hungarian too. I'm a Swiss Hungarian doctor. I'm doing research in mental health currently at the National University of Singapore, Yann  0:45   and I'm Yann Boucher. I'm a French Canadian originally, and I'm a microbiologist by training. I work on microbial evolution, infectious diseases, environmental surveillance and whatnot.  Jason  0:55   And so you can probably guess why we have Anna and Jan on here is because this is a game about medicine and epidemiology and the spread of disease.  Before we jump into the game though, we like to do fun science facts. We always offer our guests the first opportunity something interesting. You've learned about science lately. You want to share? Yann  1:10   Okay, I've got a scary one for you. Have you ever watched the TV show? The Last of Us?  Jason  1:15   I've heard of it. I haven't watched it. Brian  1:16    I know it exists. I know it's based on the video game.  Yann  1:19   Yeah, yeah. So the first scene of the show is the best because they it's a fake interview, like in the 1960s of two microbiologists, one's a mycologist, you know, one's a virologist, and they're asking them what's most dangerous. And of course, the virologist says, Okay, it's the virus that's gonna kill us. There's gonna be a pandemic. And the other guy, that mycologist is not afraid of that at all, and he says it's gonna be the fungi. But the virologist says, not a fungi. They don't grow at body temperature. This only do skin infection. It's not a problem. The mycologist says, Yes, but what if the world was going to get a little warmer? What would happen? The fungi would evolve to be temperature tolerant, and then what happened? We lose this is the best scene You should watch it. I played in every every one of my classes.  Jason  2:01   Okay, so basically, "the last of us" came about because climate change induced adaptation of parasitic fungi. That is, you're right, that is kind of scary,  Yann  2:08   Which is actually happening for real. The new Candida Auris in hospitals is actually the hypothesis, is that it evolved tolerance to higher temperatures in marshes and then got transferred to cities in the hospital. So there's an hypothesis, but it probably has started to happen. I don't want you to lose sleep over it, or maybe you should.  Anna  2:25   Maybe that's a good inspiration for a next edition of pandemic as well  climate change as a factor.  Yann  2:31   Yes, Anna  2:32    the special fungi edition,  Yann  2:34   at least 50% of infectious disease are aggravated by climate change. So there you go. Brian  2:38   Yeah, I think we're lucky as vertebrates that fungi are not that much of a problem for us. For every other living thing, plants any arthropod like fungi are a major, major, major issue,  Yann  2:49   For now, not a problem for us. Yeah. Anna  2:53   But there was a recent study where they have given fungi, like some like robotic legs, or like, a little way to, like, move forward, and then, like, it grew inside and actually managed to move so, you know, just to add a little bit into the scare, Yann  3:08   Anna's married to a robotics engineer. Brian  3:10   Very cool. We'll have to get your husband out at some point when we have the right game for that too. Anna  3:13   Yeah, oh yeah, of course, with pleasure, he's also a big board game fan, so I'm sure there will be occasions. Jason  3:19   Alas, we already did Robo rally. Otherwise, that would have been perfect.  Brian  3:22   So I had one too. I found out I was looking at a study from 2022 that showed the impact of the black plague on human evolution. Yann  3:28   Oh, this is so amazing.  Brian  3:30   You know the study? Yann  3:31   I don't know that one in particular, but I have other example with cholera. Basically, the selection is so strong that the ratio of different blood groups and the Ganges Delta is completely different in other countries, because having a certain blood group gives you resistance to cholera. So that's just how much you know infectious disease shape human population. I'm sure the plague is similar, right? Brian  3:47   Yeah, it was similar. Yeah. They actually so they used ancient DNA. They actually sequenced the genomes of human remains from different places in Europe, both before and after the plagues had come through, found enrichments in certain genes in the post-plague population, a very strong signature in a small number of immune genes. Were then able to test those immune genes in macrophages in a test tube, and showed that those were associated with effective clearing of the Yersinia bacteria, and those same genes are also associated with increased risk for rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease and other autoimmune diseases.  Jason  4:18   So they basically, they put it in a white blood cell in a test tube, and found was better able to get rid of the bacteria. That causes bubonic plague. Yeah, it's better to get rid of the disease, but it also is more like to go haywire and attack ourselves. Is that right, Brian  4:30   basically. So it's always kind of, we're probably getting too far afield, but the parts of your immune system that would fight off parasites are often associated with allergies. This idea the immune system is in and of itself, can be hazardous to you when it gets out of control. Anna  4:43   Yeah? And then things that were evolutionary advantageous a few centuries ago may not be so anymore in the current situation,  Jason  4:51   yeah, we talked about this with evolution. How evolution is not forward thinking. It reacts to what's good now, Yann  4:55   just about surviving today, right? Yeah, yep. Jason  4:57   All right, let's start talking about pandemic. So pandemic is designed by Matt Leacock. It's published by z Man games. It's probably, as far as I can tell, it was the first big cooperative game to really go big, at least here in the US. And if you're not familiar with that, a co op game is one where all the players are actually working together to try to beat the game before it beats you. And so you usually either all win together or all lose together. Not surprisingly, there's usually many ways to lose and only one way to win. But pandemic has held out pretty well. It's been out since 2008 so 16 years the time of recording. It's number 149, on Board Game Geek, so pretty well ranked. But it's also had a bunch of spin offs, so it's had its at least three legacy games which these are ones you play over a long period of time, and the game changes the more you play it. This is actually how Brian and I got together for gaming. Is that we played Season One of Pandemic Legacy, which has been holding steady at number two on Board Game Geek for years.  Brian  5:51   That's crazy. Anna  5:53   I played also the that first edition of Pandemic Legacy, and, yeah, with some other physician friends, and we got traumatized because we lost so badly, like in one of the one of the, like, later chapters, at one point we had, like a strike of unlucky roles and card flips, and everybody just died. Oh no, that was our experience. Jason  6:15   So aside from the legacy ones, it also has other spin offs. There's a Cthulhu version, because there's a Cthulhu version of everything. There's one about water in Norway, not Norway, Netherlands, Brian  6:25   the Netherlands. I've played that one.  Jason  6:26   You can tell they've got the pandemic engine at the core, but they're different enough that they're different games. But for this one, we are talking about just core pandemic, the original one. And the idea of pandemic is you've got a global map. There are 48 cities around the world divided into four sectors, each of which is suffering from some sort of disease. They're just four colors. They're not named. You've got blue, red, yellow and black. And the idea is that you are people that work for the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control. So you start in Atlanta, Georgia, which is nice and close to home to us, and then you're going around the world trying to cure these diseases before they basically trigger a global meltdown. And so you've got to go around collecting research cards, removing diseases and treating them, trying to keep things from happening. And everyone is working together, but you have limited moves, so you've got to try to plan out how it goes well. And each player gets one of in the core game, seven different roles, each of which lets you do things a little bit better. So like the scientist card lets you cure a disease with one fewer card the dispatcher lets you move other people at a better ratio so that you've got more mobility. My personal favorite is the quarantine specialist who just stops disease from happening near her. That's just because I like a proactive play style. I like being rewarded for looking ahead and saying that's where the problem is going to be. I'm going to set myself there. And when Brian and I played this in preparation for this, that worked out like I sat myself down and we prevented a few of these outbreaks, which are some of the loose conditions. So that's really it in a nutshell, like at its basic it's a relatively simple game. You go around the board, you collect stuff, diseases get worse. Every now and then, these outbreaks that make things get worse. And one thing that we've always noticed is they did a really good job of balancing the game. It always seems that when we win the game. It's because we're only about, like, two turns from losing the game. Yeah. In fact, the very first time I played this, we were on our last turn. We were going to lose at the end of that person's turn, and we just happened to get the right card. We needed to win. But it was a real narrow biter there. Yeah, Anna  8:15   it's always very dramatic. It's like, it keeps your adrenaline level very high, because you were always on the brink of disaster during the whole game? Brian  8:25   I honestly don't know how they have balanced this so expertly. I have never won a game that wasn't at least two turns from losing. It almost seems like it's mathematically calculated, so that the number of actions that you can take, the number of cards that you have, you will always either win or lose within inches of each other, or centimeters, I suppose.  Jason  8:43   As far as gameplay, this is one of my favorite games, like this and Robo rally are top two games. I love this because I love the Co Op, I love the challenge, I love the puzzle. I know some people don't like cooperative games because it's easy to get what's called an alpha gamer, where there's basically one person who tells everyone else what to do. And I know people where that's happened to them, so yeah, that's true of all Co Op games, though. The solution to that is you still play with that person, yeah, Anna  9:04   but I guess that person would also be just unpleasant to play with if it wasn't a co op game, right? If you have an alpha player who is a sore loser and, like, just wants to win at all costs, then that would not be a very pleasant playmate either way. Jason  9:18   Yeah. So advice, if you are that alpha gamer out there, just step back, maybe give advice. But the rule we always have at our table is that other people can advise, but ultimately, whoever's turn it is, they get final decision.  Brian  9:28   Pandemic is interesting because it kind of predates escape room culture, but fundamentally, you're kind of doing the same thing. This idea of a cooperative puzzle solving, this is probably the game I've played the most, if we're counting the legacy games, and I think we should, particularly if we count all of the spin offs, maybe I've played Catan more, but it's gotta be pretty close, Jason  9:47   all right. So I think that's enough about the game. The transition here, as we go from Board Game to science behind the board game is that this is one that all of us have real world experience. We've all actually lived through. A real pandemic. And my take home from that is the pandemic the board game is easy mode. It is actually so much easier to fix things in the board game than it was in real life, because the diseases stay put. They're not jumping borders, so apparently, only the players are actually using airplanes. Everyone else has shut down all air and sea travel. And like the diseases, you got four of them, but we can take care of them. And like, the outbreak in this city, but some cities never get touched. And it's like, no, no COVID showed us, once it gets going, if it's communicable, it goes everywhere. And so this is where I'd want to hand it off to our experts and ask, like, how good a job does this go of showing like, how do we compare pandemic, the board game, to pandemic, the horrible situation we live through a few years? Yann  10:41    It is a bit difficult. But one of the things, for example, in pandemic, there's also, it's easier to eradicate a disease than it is in real life. We only have ever eradicated one disease, smallpox. We came close to measles. But, you know, because of anti vaccine sentiment, and also because of COVID, because vaccination campaigns stppped, we didn't manage to could we do it in the future? Probably. But we haven't eradicated many diseases, right? So that that's one thing that's harder in real life than in the game. But it's true, the containment aspect is easier in the game than in the real life. But then again, right? You look at COVID, and it was one of the most transmissible virus we've ever seen, right? We'd even, we didn't see that coming at all. If you take SARS one, for example, the first one that happened in 2000 that was less transmissible, and we managed to contain it, right? It just only went to a few countries, Canada, Singapore, China, but it didn't spread everywhere in the world. MERS is the same, right? It was extremely lethal, but not as transmissible. So it varies a lot. I think, I think SARS-CoV-2, too, was an extreme in that, in that terms of transmissibility, because it's more like the common cold, right? Or flu, very, very transmissible and spreads around the world, but just a bit more lethal, right? The really lethal disease don't tend to be as transmissible, like Ebola, for example, it's nowhere nearly as transmissible as that. So, I mean, I think they do a good job, right? But they don't cover that sort of SARS, COVID, two pandemic that is not as lethal, but, like, really spreads like wildfire.  Anna  11:54   Yeah, I think it's also, you know what you mentioned, Jason, that this game was created way, way before we had pandemics with these type of viruses. So probably that's also why it's a bit more optimistic, maybe about, like, how a pandemic looks like. And it's very satisfactory in the game, because you really feel like you are eradicating diseases. But also the, you know, the other part of that is that you have these, like handful of scientists, like everybody has a different role. They can get just go to any country. They have no problem, like, there is no no competition between countries. They can just do whatever they want, whatever is needed to be done to eradicate the diseases. So that's another part that's like, probably overly optimistic based on what we've seen with COVID, Yann  12:34   yeah. I mean, the eradication is based on 1000s and 1000s of peoples and experts working together, different countries collaborating with each other, right? So that, of course, in the game, that wouldn't work, right? So that's why you play a character. But, yeah, that's one big difference. Like, Anna is saying with the real world,  Anna  12:48   yeah, like in the real world, it was politicians thinking about maybe attacking other countries, vaccine supplies, or, you know, I don't think that nastier part is reflected in the game. Yann  13:00   Maybe they should add a politician card or something like that.  Jason  13:04   There is an expansion that introduces a bioterrorist so that is no longer fully cooperative, Brian  13:09    the traitor.  Jason  13:10   Yeah, the traitor. Maybe that's part of the nature. It is a cooperative game, and COVID showed us that on the global scale, not everyone's cooperating. There's a lot of competition, a lot of other motivations there, and some of them have good reasons behind them. It's just there's a lot of things people have to balance in the game. You have one goal, stop the disease. In reality, there's stop the disease, there's keep the economy going, there's don't open yourself up to your hostile neighbor and keep a good face on the public forum and get re elected, and all these other things that are competing with that one goal. Yann  13:43   And it's also not putting that much weight on individual action. They all relying on the experts in the game, when, in real life, actually, the person that plays the biggest role is you, your behavior.  Jason  13:52   Yeah. And that brings us to, so if I had to pick a specific field that this game represents, probably epidemiology, so the spread of disease. And Can y'all give us a feel like, what? What does epidemiology cover? Like, what is the nature of the field? What does it look at? What do epidemiologists do? Yann  14:07   Okay, I can take that one. I'm not an epidemiologist per se, but I work with other epidemiologists. I mean, basically, epidemiology is gathering data on multiple factors like population size, behavior of people, prevalence and incidence of diseases, and then trying to to model the spread. I know how fast it spreads, how far is likely to spread, and model that into the future. So the epidemiology is tracking a disease, but there's also a boots on the ground epidemiology, which is maybe a bit more like in pandemic like, for example, I worked with the CDC on the cholera outbreak in Haiti, 2010 I don't know if you've heard about it, but in 2010 there was a massive earthquake in Haiti that destroyed most of the infrastructure, right, uh, National Palace crumbled. There was millions of homeless people at that time, living in tents, right, at basically a tinderbox for any infectious disease, like lots of people close together, no no facilities, nothing. And then six months later, a cholera outbreak started, which was very strange, because they had not been cholera i n Haiti for hundreds of years. The bacteria wasn't there. And a real epidemiologist, Renault Piero, is a French epidemiologist, actually went there. He flew there, and he gathered real data on the ground, right? He talked to people, he looked at the cases, he looked at the timing, and what he figured out is that it was this UN Peacekeeper battalion that had basically arrived from Nepal a couple of weeks before the outbreak started, and there had been a cholera outbreak in Nepal. Now, normally you have medical screening for the army before deployment and how that managed to escape. And somebody from Nepal brought cholera up to Haiti, you know, moving with the battalion, and then it spread outside the camp, and then they later figured out that it wasn't good waste management, and it went in the river. That guy put all that together by talking to people on the ground, gathering data about the timing of when the infection started, and then where are the first cases happen, and gathering all that data to put together the puzzle, right, like a detective, basically. So so some epidemiology is just working the computer at the hospital, looking at the numbers for the disease in different communities, and then the different risk factors and all that to predict who's more susceptible, how long it's going to last, how many people are getting infected. But there's also the person on the ground that she gathering fact and doing detective work as to where it came from and how it got transmitted. So there's a range in epidemiology in terms of infectious disease.  Anna  16:13   And also, maybe one other point here is that it's very variable how much data is available by country, and some countries report their data very openly and can gather data, data very, very fast. Scandinavian countries, for example, you have national databases that will record everyone's diagnosis, like every medication that people will get from the pharmacy. So it's very easy to kind of keep track of diseases there. But then there are some countries where you get barely no data, and it's not always because they don't want to disclose it. Sometimes it's just because it's so hard to gather, because they don't have the infrastructure to get fast efficient epidemiological surveys. That's also part of what poses problems. Sometimes, when you need to eradicate the disease at the global scale, is that sometimes you don't even know where the disease is.  Yann  16:58   Yeah, I've got a good example, actually this. This is just some work I've done recently, so I work a lot with the CDC in the US you were mentioning. I've got some some good collaborators and friends there, and we look at the disease vibriosis. So this is the disease when you can eat oysters or seafood, get gastroenteritis, or you swim and you have a wound and then get an infection, and you can get necrotizing fasciitis. For those that not know what it is, it's pretty disgusting.  Anna  17:20   That sounds disgusting  Brian  17:22   is that flesh eating bacteria?  Yann  17:24   Yeah, basically, basically Vibrio vulnificus. So they're all under the umbrella of this Vibrio is because it's similar species of bacteria that cause it. And in the US, there's the best reporting system in the world. No equal it's a reportable illness. Every hospital is gonna send their data to the CDC. They have beautiful data, like very detailed. There's even one case where a guy was doing windsurfing and he got struck by lightning, and his hands were burned. He fell in the water, and then he got an infection of Vibrio vulnificus, that flesh eating disease in his hand. So it goes into that detail.  Jason  17:52   Oh, that poor guy. Brian  17:53   He rolled multiple ones, multiple crit fails. Anna  17:57   Guy's story could be a one hour discussion he would tell  Yann  17:59   so they have other ones that I can't talk about on radio, other cases of infections. But here in Singapore, for example, where Anna and I are, nobody cares about vibriosis. So I was very curious, because usually these diseases are more frequent. The warmer the water temperature is, the more cases there are. And in the US, it's climbing and climbing because of climate change. So I was like, why isn't everybody dying of this? Here the water is always like, 28-32 degrees. Everybody should be getting infections.  Jason  18:22   That's 28 to 32 degrees Celsius for our American listeners, Yann  18:26   yeah, yeah, sorry, I don't mean Fahrenheit.  Jason  18:28   That's like 90 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly.  Anna  18:31   Yeah, thanks for translating.  Yann  18:32   Basically, it's like a warm bath. You don't get refreshed going in the ocean here. So I went knocking on the doors of every single hospital in Singapore and gathered the data one by one, sign an agreement with each hospital. It was a lot of work, and then we figured out, actually, nobody talks about it, but it's three times the incidence in Singapore that there is in the US, which makes sense to me. And Hawaii is the state in the US where it's the highest. And it makes sense because the water is warmer, right? So, so data availability, for example, in Southeast Asia, where we are, it's appalling. I mean, Singapore is one of the richest countries, so they add the data, but they don't always collect it. But a lot of our neighbors actually don't have the money to collect that data, so it could be a huge problem. We just wouldn't know about it, right?  Brian  19:09   I remembered hearing something so one of the symptoms of COVID 19 infection was loss of sense of smell. So one of the data points that people realized you could use to correlate with outbreaks was the number of one star reviews for Yankee Candles. These very strongly scented candles, just like "this candle doesn't smell like anything". No, you just don't have a sense of smell right now.  Yann  19:28   Oh, that's hilarious. So cool. It's so funny. What you can extrapolate from data, if that type of data,  Anna  19:33   even though I'm sure there are few confounders, like your mental health statements like that, this candle is not relaxing at all, not working. Brian  19:43   So one of the simplifications in pandemic is, of course, you've got this global map with all these nodes connecting the different cities. I've actually argued to Jason before that this might be, almost be a geography game, as much as this is anything else I can tell you, it was helpful for me to learn where certain cities and places were. But I suppose another. Real simplification is every one of those cities is treated identically. Every one of those cities, when they hit the same thing the same infection point, that's when they'll outbreak the surrounding one. So there are a ton of nodes on the map, but there's no differences between them, in population, in infrastructure and anything like that. Obviously, that's not true, yeah, Anna  20:16   for sure. And also, you know, like it's we saw with COVID, that people travel around way more than the way these cities are connected. Though it's not like, you know, Ho Chi, Minh is only connected. I don't know, Taiwan, whatever. I guess that you know the when you you design this type of game, you also have to make some compromises. Because, you know, even though widespread air travel was already a thing 15 years ago, yeah, there are some things that you just cannot capture in the dynamic, because there it's always a trade off between having it hyper realistic and having it like enjoyable and well balanced. And Jason  20:46   I'd always say I'd rather take a fun game that makes some compromises on reality than an accurate game that compromises the fun.  Brian  20:52   Yeah, you want to kind of like tune that metaphor appropriately based on what you're trying to achieve. And you can go up and down that scale like a lot. Jason  20:59   Now epidemiology is studying how diseases spread. How do diseases spread? So in pandemic, all you do is, you draw a card and there's suddenly a cube appearing on the board. But in reality, like, I think people are familiar with COVID, like it goes through the air and through dopplets. But what are the what are the vectors we have? What are the methods that diseases spread among human populations that we have to watch out for when we're trying to control diseases?  Yann  21:19   So I would say is, there's a few main categories, right? The airborne transmission is one, right, crowded spaces travel, but another one. For example, it could be the diseases are carried by mosquitoes, right? Talking about dengue, malaria. So all these, these diseases that are viruses that are inside mosquitoes, and then you get infected when they bite you, right? So these, how they transmit is the mosquito populace, be a specific species of mosquitoes that can carry that particular parasite or virus. And when the climate changes, let's say it gets warmer, the mosquito expands its own where it can live that particular species, and then the disease spreads with it. Sometimes people can carry them in their blood, travel, get bitten by a local mosquito, and then that can be transmitted to someone else. But usually the disease doesn't stay, because it's not super compatible with local mosquito population, but sometimes it can take hold. If the local mosquito population is compatible with that disease, then it can take hold, but it's much harder transmit that way, so it's mostly through change in climate. These, these type of vector borne disease. Then there's the waterborne disease, and that's probably one of those that we know the least about how it's transmitted. Cholera, for example, how does it move? Most of the cholera strains originate from the Ganges Delta, and it circulate there. It's endemic and then regularly gets exported to other countries in Africa and Southeast Asia and other places when they don't necessarily have a great sanitation. So it can take on the population because the waterborne disease and how they get carried over there, we don't know, probably an individual carrying it that's asymptomatic, and then that introduces in the new place. But there's also hypothesis that ocean current can carry it. There's some evidence that some strains, you know, of these, of these, Vibrio cholera, could travel from Asia to North American and South American coast through ocean currents. Hasn't been proven yet, but is it possibly or to ship ballasts or through also seafood that get transferred to the seafood industry? Let's say you have a muscle farm or oyster farm. You bring some oysters on Japan, you could bring the disease that way. So, so there's lots of ways like that. So it depends on what it how the disease is transmitted, where it's airborne, water born, or vector born, right? How the outbreak is  Anna  23:12   another factor I read about is that how much time the pathogen can survive outside of any organism. So if it can survive a very long time, there is a much higher likelihood it will reach the next organism and get back.  Yann  23:24   yeah, like Clostridium tetanii, like this is a very old disease, right? tetanus, but we're all vaccinated against it. But actually, it's a spore forming bacteria, right? So the spores are really hard to kill. You can boil them. They're in dead bird carcasses everywhere. That's how they spread. They float in the air. There's very little you can do, right? And the only way is to vaccinate us so we don't keep dying of getting infected by tetanus. So yeah, there's some, there's some that are tougher than others, that's for sure.  Brian  23:47   Yeah, these, uh, these Endospores that you get from Clostridium, that you can get from some Bacillus, they are the most resilient biological structures that we are aware of. They can survive massive insults of radiation, chemistry, heat, actually, the entire process of sterilizing, the discovery of how to sterilize things with an autoclave, for instance, is based on being able to kill these spores from these specific groups of organisms. They're really important in the history of microbiology.  Jason  24:14   Yes, these are right up there with the tardigrads for the most resilient organisms. So these are the type of bacteria I studied in my PhD. Were these spore forming bacilli. And I still love them because, like, they form these little spores, and they're just little tanks. They can survive anything. And Brian, I'm gonna say this is why they beat the gram negatives. They can form these spores.  Brian  24:32   Well,okay, sure.  Anna  24:33   Is this going to be a bacteria battle now?  Jason  24:36   Brian and I have a rivalry. Yann  24:38   I'm gonna root for the gram negatives here. They got an outer membrane. They're tough too. Anna  24:42   Yeah, Brian  24:43   I'm definitely a Proteobacteria guy myself. Jason  24:45   Okay, so before we completely lose our audience on this little tangent among the microbiologists. So, okay, so you got a few ways diseases spread. How about where do new diseases come from? So some diseases, like, have been around forever, and then some of them just kind of like, pop in. Like. COVID kind of popped in out of nowhere. And so where do we pick up new diseases from?  Yann  25:05   Most of them come from animals because the disease that can survive in humans is because they are adapted to living at 37 degrees and being happy inside the body. So we usually they get transfered from other animals, especially mammals, but but also some others. So for example, the SARS-CoV-2 you're mentioning, this comes from bat populations that carry viruses. So it's not from nowhere, right? That's these viruses circulating for hundreds of years, right? It's just, how does it get to human? That's called a zoonosis what makes a transfer, when it becomes able to reproduce in the human, that's when you get in trouble. And sometimes it's just temporarily, you know, and then it affects some humans and it goes away. But sometimes it's maybe for good, like SARS, COVID, too, right? Maybe it's here's to stay, or the common cold, right? Then you become adapted to humans. And now they do human human to human transition. But usually they always originate from other animals. In first place, the AIDS virus is the same thing. It used to be chimpanzees, gorilla. Now it's very well adapted. Just spread human to human, right? But they all start somewhere else. Anna  25:55   Something that kind of important to realize is that we always hear that, oh, the virus mutate, and now it got adapted to humans. And, you know, when you don't know much about epidemiology, sometimes you just imagine this virus like, you know, being a very mean little organism who is like, Hmm, I'm going to mutate and I will infect humans. But it's not really targeted to anything. It's like viruses and like microbes always mutate like they are, just like they keep on mutating, and most of the mutations don't make them viable, or don't give them any advantage. And then sometimes, in some specific circumstances, there can be a mutation that actually confers some advantage to that specimen, like, for example, if something is in a bat, a virus and mutates, and that bat is in close contact with humans, and that specific mutation makes it just more compatible with humans, then all the circumstances are aligned for that thing to just cross the barrier between the species.  Yann  26:46   If we were all vegetarian, we didn't use animal poop to fertilize our crops, it would be a lot fewer infectious disease because most of them come from animals, the plant bacteria, they don't do anything to us. We're too different from plants.  Jason  26:56   We're going to be talking about COVID a lot this episode, because that is the pandemic we've all lived in. But I am curious, there have been other pandemics, ones that have gone through human populations, and how bad was COVID 19 relative to historical pandemics, like it sucks for all of us going through it, but like in perspective, how bad was  Yann  27:13   so I recommend this book by Carl Harper. He's an historian of infectious disease, and he talks about the different plaguesof history. And this book is just shocking. It's called plagues upon the earth. And you look at smallpox and the plague you were mentioning earlier, how many people it was killing, it's completely insane. You know, sometimes 50% 60% of population dying from the disease year after year, decade after decade. I mean, compared to this, SARS, COVID two, is not that serious, the small box and the plague, horrendous, horrendous and lethal disease. And now, the only reason why we don't have them around anymore is because smallpox we're able to vaccinate against it and eradicate it. The plague, while it's easily treated with antibiotics, but that's not the reason we went away. We don't actually really know why it went away. Oh, it's reassuring. It's linked to fleas and rodents, right? The rodents are some of the care and the fleas that bite you transmit the plague. But we don't really know exactly why, right? There's still a little bit of playing around, but Anna  28:05   not but even the, you know, the Spanish flu was terrible, like, it was a bit overshadowed by World War One, but still, like, the number of victims there was this horredous,  Jason  28:15   I remember hearing that the flu killed more people than the war did, actually? Is that right?  Anna  28:19   Yeah, I think so. That's also what I read. It's just that, you know, the two things are, you know, when people are already like, they already are weakened by war and the starvation and whatever, then, yeah, maybe it's also they're not in the best of states to resist any infection.  Brian  28:32   And wasn't it actually called the Spanish flu, because Spain was not participating in the war, so they were bothering to report and record like it was happening everywhere. It didn't come from Spain. They just got blamed because they were talking about it.  Jason  28:43   If I remember right, the first report was actually on an American military base, but yeah, it got named the Spanish flu, which is why we don't name diseases after locations anymore, because people use them to cast blame. Anna  28:54   Yeah, I think there were things that were like considered PC back in the early 20th century, and are not anymore.  Jason  29:01   Well, I want to know is, what did we learn from COVID 19? I've been figuring that people are gonna be crawling over all the data from COVID 19, because this is the first pandemic where we had a ton of information. We're in the information age. There was tons of websites and data gathering genome sequences. People are gonna be crawling over this for decades. What did we learn, like, what actually worked to slow the disease, and what was maybe a good attempt, but it turned out not to be very important. There's Yann  29:26   two main things that come to my mind. First of all, masks can work really well. And I think people in Asia knew that already, because where we live here in Asia, when you're sick, you wear a mask because you don't want to infect other people. You know, I remember, I was after the pandemic. I was at a bus stop, and it was three French guys. There's a lot of French people in Singapore. I don't know why, three French guys talking to each other. "Oh yeah, the mask. They didn't do anything, right? You know, we don't really know if that works." I'm like, "Dude, how many times did you get sick in the last three years? For me, it was a big fat zero." And usually I get, like, the flu three or four times. So that's one of the big one. I mean, that might not be the case for all different, you know, illnesses, but certainly the airborne ones is going to help. We learned that. Without a doubt. And the other thing is vaccine technology like mRNA, vaccine is going to change the landscape massively, and that works, and it's much quicker to make vaccines using mRNA, you're going to see a lot of vaccine coming out. So do my money. These are the two biggest things.  Anna  30:12   Yeah, I think there are also an increasing awareness of certain epidemiological concepts that can be helpful for future pandemics, such as like the flattening the curve theory that if people protect themselves and don't infect others, then hospitals don't get overwhelmed. And actually you can just use your healthcare resources better, even it means that you will need to use them over a longer time. And Yann  30:34   also looking at wastewater, that is a really good way to look at what diseases circling in population. We've actually been doing that in a lot of countries portfolio for a very long time, but didn't get that much attention. But now it's very clear, if you want to see, you know, a disease, that you're not necessarily picking it up, or it's coming back from, from having a very low level looking at wastewater is amazing way to track and Anna  30:52   I think that you know something that's close to my heart. I think there was a really huge increase in the awareness about mental health needs of people, both children and adults. And the number of publications about mental health in all kinds of populations really skyrocketed during COVID, and even in countries where mental health was not really something they were doing research on previously.  Jason  31:14   Yeah, and I wanted to talk more about that cause of it being your specialty, because people obviously got a lot of that. In fact, our fun science fact last episode was about how video games boosted people's mental health during the pandemic. So what did we get on the mental side of COVID 19 then?  Anna  31:27   well, several things. There were good things and bad things. For some of the good things, for example, they it has been shown that people could be sometimes more effective if they were working from home and they were undergoing less stress. For example, pregnant women had less miscarriages during COVID Because they could work from home, which kind of shows that, you know, sometimes people are really overworking themselves, and being able to maybe manage your time more flexibly, can help with that. Something that was not as good is that they also showed that it was important for children to have social interactions for their development. And then some of the generations that started their school life during COVID, then had some adjustment issues, because it was really difficult then to come back to, like, real life socialization after having everything virtually, yeah. And also, you know, there were lots of things about social isolation and then how to overcome that, and I think, with COVID, and, like, the booming industry of online connection opportunities, right, like social media, but also several platforms to connect to others, and online games you can play with people remotely and things like that. You know, first we realized that people were so social beings and needed socialization. But then also, now we have more solutions to that, and I think that will also benefit some layers of the populations of the population that are more vulnerable, for example, mental health patients who sometimes have a hard time socializing in environments where most people would socialize because they are very subconscious or they feel stigmatized, and now they have also more options thanks to the developments that happened during COVID.  Brian  32:58   Jason, do you remember we used to we switched our monthly family gamings to online gaming. During lockdown, we were playing Jack box games and did some online role playing games. We opened a Minecraft server for the kids play on so that they could get to like, you know, be kids. Jason  33:13   I definitely agree with the kids in the socialization, because that happened with all of my kids. Like my oldest daughter, was a freshman in high school, and her freshman year was all online, and I mean, that just had downstream impacts for years, my youngest was in pre-K, and trying to do trying to sit a four or five year old down in front of a computer to do virtual school did not work.  Yann  33:32   15 minute tops. You know, my daughter was the same, Jason  33:36   yeah. But on the other hand, at least, like it's young enough, it doesn't matter at that point, it's like, you can just skip a year. Okay, so getting point where we need to wrap up, but there's one last thing I want to get to which, okay, I'm actually gonna sneak in two things. One is that the news always seems to be talking about new potential things floating around. I've heard about bird flu for I don't know how long, monkey pox, cow flu now going around like, how many of these do we actually need to be worried about? And how many of them are just the news media trying to dig up something and then related to that kind of tying it back to the game. Would it be possible to have more than one pandemic going on at the same time? Yann  34:09   You got a lot of good questions in here. So, I mean, I'm just gonna take the example of the H5N1 virus. So this related to the flu virus. It's a different types of flu virus, right? They there was lots of articles and newspapers. I don't know if you saw them. Oh, it's in the cows and they Oh, it's in sea animals, as well as sea mammals and everything. We're finding it everywhere around the world. So it was spreading, but was it actually jumping to humans? I think they had a handful of cases of farm workers. Maybe that had been affected. They're often the first people to be affected because they live, they work closely to animals. Doesn't seem to have really made the transition, but it could. It's good to keep an eye on. And I think we're seeing a lot more because of COVID 19. We're more aware of it. There's wastewater surveillance program. People are more on the lookout, right? M pox is the same thing, right? It's been there before. It's not the first time this come. And there's two different groups of M pox, one more serious, the second one, the second place. Is more widespread, but not as serious. So it's all about whether these diseases are going to make a transition to humans, and how likely it is to do that. It's very hard to predict that. This is why surveillance is important, to be able to pick it up early, but at the same time, you know, it can cause a lot of worry, but when it's not necessarily warranted, right? The chances that actually going to jump is probably not that high for for most disease. Anna  35:19   Yeah, I think the worry needs to be constructive in the way that these diseases are addressed early. So the few cases that emerge are really addressed early. We help also from some countries to other countries where they are first detected, then we are really just, you know, decreasing the likelihood that this will be the next pandemic. But so they, you know, the worry needs to be there to some level so that governments still take these diseases seriously. Because we cannot just say that, Oh, okay, you know, the last five ones didn't transition to humans in any significant way. So now we are good any one of them can potentially do that, and the more cases there are, the higher the likelihood that they will eventually do it. Yann  35:57   And sometimes it's silent, like, for example, AIDS is a great example, because I remember, I was really upset that they were blaming this one guy from, where I'm from, from Quebec, and he was a flight attendant, right? It was called Patient Zero. If you ever see the movie The Band Played On that's, that's a great depiction of the early history of AIDS. They were blaming it as having brought the disease to the entirety of North America, right? A lot of weight to carry for one person's 1000s of people dead and sick, right? But actually they found that later on, the disease had been in North America for at least 10 years before that circulating around, you know, silently in the population, before we picked it up. So we have to, also have to be careful about this. Sometimes the disease starts. COVID two was same, right? It had come from China on day one. I mean, people were flying for Wuhan trade to the United States. It had been there a long time closing the border was futile at that point, because the virus had already been there for weeks. So sometimes it goes on undetected for a while, right? And silently spread. So that's another issue with these types of diseases. Anna  36:51   and I think that brings me to a more social point as well, that it's not like with these pandemics or infectious diseases. It's not really worth it to point the finger to other nations or other groups of people, because it can be almost anybody, anywhere. And we saw that with COVID where, you know, in the US, some people were changing side of the side of the road, where they were like encountering someone who looked Asian. And then here in Singapore, actually, some of the Asian mothers were taking their kids away from Caucasian looking kids because the Caucasians were not wearing masks that  early and were not were like at higher risk of infecting their kids. So, you know, there were, there are all these misconceptions as well. And I think for future pandemics, it will be really important to look at the facts and address the disease without pointing fingers.  Yann  37:37   Yeah the funny thing that happened to me, related to this is when we moved in Singapore, basically when the pandemic was starting, like, January 2020, and I went to the doctor because we had a really bad case of flu, and the family weren't recovering well. And my wife tells the doctor, she's like, could this be this COVID, this new virus. He's like, Oh, you're not Asian. You don't have COVID. And I'm like,  Brian  37:54   oh, gosh,  Yann  37:55   how would you how would you ever know if you only test Asian people? Brian  37:59   the doctors? said this?  Yann  38:00   Yes, literally. Brian  38:04   Confirmation bias, institutionalized confirmation bias, Yann  38:07   absolutely, yeah, Jason  38:08   because I think this is yet another place where the game makes some simplifications. So going back, like, what about the part of the game where we've got four different diseases spreading all well, not all around the world. They're each kind of geographically isolated. But could we have multiple pandemics going on, multiple global pandemics all happening at the same time. Or would the countermeasures against one just shut down all the other ones?  Anna  38:29   Well I think there are several points here. First, that, can an individual have several infectious diseases? Yes, of course they can. They and also, if you know your immune system is already fighting one, actually, you are at a higher risk of also getting another one. And the immune system maybe cannot be on so many fronts same time. So that's one point. But then also, like for diseases that are transmitted in the same way, like, for example, airborne diseases, like during the COVID pandemic, I think there are incidents decreased, like  Yann  38:54   oh 100% Anna  38:55   because the Yeah, because of the protection measures that were in place for COVID, and then those measures actually also work for these other diseases, like regular flu or some of these others that we usually get. But then it doesn't, you know, it would, those measures would not necessarily work for a disease that would be transmitted in a very different way, like if, for example, there would have been one that was transmitted by mosquitoes that would have caused the global pandemic, that would have been completely separate from the airborne one? Yann  39:21   Yeah I mean, this is what I was talking about earlier. It comes back to transmission modes, right? The mosquito borne diseases. I mean, I don't know if you knew that, but malaria used to be over Europe and the United States, and it's only when we drained the swamps for farming that it went away. So it's based on the environment and how where the mosquito can breed water borne disease. If you build a plant to clean up the water, you're going to eliminate almost all of them all at once, but if you don't have it, I can tell you, I work in some villages in Bangladesh, and we look at the infectious disease, gastrointestinal illnesses. Some people are carrying three or four at the same time, but if you provide them with clean water, that would all go away, right? So hitting every single different mode of transmission at the same time is hard, but if you hit one, you're going to hit all the diseases that transmit that way. But you can definitely have multiple pandemics at once. We actually have multiple dynamics you want on the world. At one, we had a SARSCoV2 pandemic going on at the same time as a Cholera pandemic. And, you know, other not quite pandemic, but like Dengue spreading more and things like this. There's a lot going on at one, it's absolutely possible.  Anna  40:15   I think that's also reflected in the game to make sense, because one city can have huge from different colors, right?  Jason  40:20   Yeah, you have to have the right play of outbreaks happening. But yeah, it can happen.  Brian  40:23   Things have probably gone pretty bad for you, if that's happening, though, Yann  40:27   yes, well, if you read these books, yeah, yeah. Historically, like in Europe, for example, when they had the plague, they didn't have just the plague. They had the smallpox going on at once. They had the malaria, they had everything going on at once. Jason  40:37   all right, so we need to wrap this up, and the way we finish this up is because we're university professors. We like giving grades to things, so we like to give the game a grade in terms of the gameplay and in terms of the science. So Brian, I'll kick this to you first. I mean, I've already made my opinion pretty much known in terms of where this ranks in my gameplay. What do you think about the gameplay?  Brian  40:54   Oh, gameplay is a clear A, I enjoy pandemic a lot. I like playing cooperative games with Jason, in particular because it means I'm not playing against him, which means it's more likely I'm going to win the game. It's fun to work as a team on these I've noticed there's been sort of a dearth of good co-op games lately, but pandemic's always there, and Pandemic always fun to play. So gameplay, it's an A  Jason  41:14   Anna, Jan, what's your opinion? And you can abstain if you want.  Anna  41:17   No I think I would like easily give it an A+ Yann  41:19   Yeah, for playing for sure. Anna  41:20   Yeah for gameplay. Jason  41:21   Same here one of my top games, if not the top game, and holding steady in the top 200 of Board Game Geek so a lot of people agree. So solid gameplay. Now, what about the science? Brian and I have had conversations about what constitutes a hard science game, and I think it's fair to say that pandemic does not exist to teach us science. No, it's using it to sort of wrap the mechanics of the game in but not teach it. But I'm going to throw this to Anna and Jan. Where do you think pandemic breaks in terms of the science content or what people might be able to learn from this? Brian  41:49   We do kind of use great inflation scales too. Here. We usually set things at a B as our starting point, and we go from there. Yeah, Anna  41:56   I think I would give it to B. I was going to say B-, but then you said, do things about the inflation scale. So now I don't really, let's, let's say a B to B+, because there are definitely elements there. I think that you know, that can make people think about pandemics and disease transmission, and that's already such a good start. But then the way that these pandemics and transmissions are solved, that's not very realistic.  Yann  42:20   Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. It gives an inflated role, a sense of importance of the individual when it's really coming to I think that's probably the biggest thing it makes, right? And also, how easy this react a disease probably exaggerates that a bit. And you're not going to learn about diseases because they're colors, right? So, Brian  42:38   yeah, I think, I think I'm gonna give it a B -. And I do love pandemic. But I think even when you look at the fact that you can take that basic pandemic engine, that idea of sort of panicking to keep ahead of a disaster, and that's really what you can apply to a lot of different scenarios, to the dykes in Netherlands, to Cthulhu, it's just it's got a thin veneer of science over what is a really fun engine. It's not really a science game. There's some things about this that, like the connectivity of the cities. It might be a little bit too far down the simplification scale to get, like, a solid science grade. Jason  43:10   OK, so basically, very fun game, maybe not the best to try to teach people's science I will say, I'll give it a B plus, for many of the reasons I already said, like, it's not meant to be a science game. So it's not surprising. We don't get a lot. But I like how one person described this, and I heard this years ago, is that basically pandemic, you're playing the role of a bunch of public servants who are working together to save the world. And if there's any message I want, like, teach my kids about like, Hey, these are who the real heroes are. That's the one I want it to be. These are not like, superheroes going beat around bad guys. These are some guy in a lab trying to help save people's lives, or a doctor going out and treating people, or someone who's just like managing the phones and saying, hey, you need to go over here, and you need to go over that way. I agree. Yann, it emphasizes the role of the individual more, but ultimately, communities are made up of a bunch of individuals, and a lot of the real heroes are these nameless, faceless people behind the scenes that are making this stuff work. Brian  43:59   I guess it also emphasizes cooperation. Anna  44:02   One point to consider also is that this has been made in like 15 years ago, and I think science games boom after pandemic. We are getting more and more realistic science games that also gamification has become a thing now that was not necessarily something people were really looking into 15 years ago. So I think we also have to keep that in mind when evaluating pandemic and fitting it against some of the more modern games. Yann  44:25   Yeah, because now, after the pandemic, everybody knows a lot more than before the pandemic about infectious diseases. It makes my job easier as a teacher, for sure.  Jason  44:33   Yeah, and this may be a preview for some future season, but I know you two have actually made a game called Lockdown, which I assume has a lot more of the stuff we talked about in terms of actual pandemic response in it. Yann  44:44   Very scientifically accurate. Anna  44:45   Oh yeah, I was going to say that we're great at criticizing other games when it comes to ours. It was also, you know, it was not the most accurate game. It was also meant for a much younger, or like, more inclusive population. The way that already seven years old, could play our game. And the whole goal was to bring families or group of friends together during the pandemic, so that they can say something, you know, even like lockdowns or other periods.  Yann  45:11   Yeah, I think the best game work on multiple levels, right? So you've got an easy baseline where you play, and then some people can get more information from it, and you can put so these, the best ones, will have multiple levels. I think, Anna  45:21   yeah, but I think that, you know, our game lockdown, it was still designed with like, an educational component in mind, and that component can be adapted to different groups of people, so you will use it differently when seven years old than with university students like Yann uses our game in his class and also something that can just generate some material for the lecture that he's giving the game as an icebreaker, Yann  45:42   and even just generating curiosity, right? Like I'm sure pandemic generates curiosity about it. People gonna go look it up on the internet, right, and try to find more information that is very useful. Jason  45:51   One more thing along these lines, which actually has nothing to do with the nature of the gameplay or the science, but researching for this episode, I found out that apparently, Matt Leacock, who designed the game, 5% of his royalties from this game, he donates to Doctors Without Borders, which, I mean, how more appropriate Can you give than that? Because for those who don't know, Doctors Without Borders is an NGO, non governmental organization, nonprofit, who are their job is they send doctors around the world to treat diseases all these outbreaks. And I'm sure they were involved in that Haitian cholera outbreak, and I'm sure they were involved in COVID all over the place. Anna  46:23   Yeah. Now you made me wonder, Where are the you know, where is our Arkahm Hororr's developers, money like, where do they give Jason  46:32   sanitariums and mental health? Anna  46:35   Hopefully, I would like to think that.  Jason  46:39   All right, well, we gotta wrap it up there. So Anna Yann, thank you very much. Are there any socials, or any places where you want people to look you up  Brian  46:46   or find lockdown? Anna  46:47   Yeah, I guess if you can find lockdown, that would be good. And then you can find us through lockdown.  So you have to, you have to google lockdown an educational card game, and we don't. We're not on Amazon yet. We're only in Singapore on shopee, but you can, if you find the game, it can be shipped to the US. So maybe I can share the link to our distributors website, and you can order it actually from anywhere in the world, from the distributor's website.  Jason  47:07   Yeah I'll put the link in the show notes.  Yann  47:09   Okay, that's great. All our profits go to charity as well. 100% we're doing even better than pandemic. Anna  47:16   Yeah, it's going to a mental health related charity called the red pencil that's doing art therapy with people, all kinds of people from the general population. And they did a great job during the pandemic, and adapted a lot of their workshops to like online where, you know, there were things like painting with coffee and other forms of expressions that probably helped lots of people to get out some of the negative emotions they may have dealing in COVID. Brian  47:39   Oh that's that's so heartwarming for talking about a game about horrible pandemics. All right. Anna, Yann, Thanks for joining us. Thanks for talking to us about pandemic. Thanks for talking to us about lockdown and the science behind it. We're gonna wrap it up here. So everybody have a good month, good games and good fun, Jason  47:55   and have fun playing dice with the universe.  Brian  47:57   See ya  Jason  48:00   this has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with a support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. You.  

#Earth #Biome #Biodiversity #Terrain #Flora #Tableau #BoardGames #Science #SciComm #InsideUpGames Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Overview Welcome to the wonderful (and complicated) world of Earth, a tableau- and engine-building game by Maxime Tardif and Inside-Up Games. In this episode we talk with Dr. Alex Strauss about ecology, ecosystems, biomes, and just how complicated things can get with a handful of cards. Timestamps 0:00 - Introduction and Guest Introduction 0:58 - Initial Game Experience and Strategy 1:52 - Science Topic: Biodiversity and Biomass 8:35 - Discussion on Game Complexity and Rules 9:53 - Game Mechanics and Strategy 15:09 - Development and Theming of the Game 22:34 - Biome Concept and Ecosystem Interactions 32:55 - Nitpick Corner and Gameplay Experience 45:00 - Final Grades and Closing Remarks Links Earth, by Inside Up Games Earth Designer's Diary IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology Köppen Climate Classification OneEarth.org Navigator (Bioregions) This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Jason  0:00   Music. Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:11   Today, we're going to discuss Earth, by Inside-Up Games. All right, hey, welcome back to Gaming with Science. This is Brian, Jason  0:26   this is Jason, Alex  0:27   and this is Alex.  Brian  0:28   Hey, Alex, how's it going? We've got another guest host today. Alex Strauss, why don't you introduce yourself? Alex  0:34   Yeah, I'm happy to be here. So my name is Alex Strauss, I am an assistant professor in the ecology school at UGA, and I'm a card carrying ecologist, so I was happy to play the ecology themed game. Brian  0:49   Yeah, we appreciate it. It's nice to get somebody who really knows their stuff.  Jason  0:53   And this is a milestone. This is the first time we've actually been able to meet one of our guests in person and actually play the game with them, like this is history now. Alex  1:02   Oh my gosh, I can't, I can't imagine having to do this without having played the game. You know, that seems like such a fundamental part of having this all work. Brian  1:10   Not only that, you kicked both of our butts on your first time playing. Alex  1:15   I had no idea what the score was, and I wasn't as surprised as either of you. So maybe that card carrying ecologist thing actually, like, actually paid off for you.  Well, I don't know if my ecologist skills translated at all to this particular game. I was struggling to keep up with, with all the rules and ways to score and just kind of playing cards that seemed fun to me. So maybe that's a strategy for anyone out there who's listening is, don't overthink it and just play some cards. And who knows what'll happen? Jason  1:44   Yeah, we'll get into the complexity later. Brian  1:46   Before we get into the game, why don't we do our science topic? Alex, I don't know if you had anything to talk about today.  Alex  1:52   Sure. I, so I looked up some statistics. These aren't necessarily things that all ecologists sort of walk around knowing, but, this game made me want to do a little bit of research. So the two things I was trying to look up were, how many species are there in the world? What proportion of those are plants? And if, instead of just counting species, like one for each species, what if we count how much carbon or biomass is locked in those different things, like, how important are plants in the big picture? This being a plant themed game, that's sort of where, where my mind went. So okay, so here's here's the numbers, here's the statistics. And the thing that was pretty surprising to me: how much uncertainty there is in our estimates of pretty much all those things. So estimates for total number of species in the world ranges on the lower end from 2 million, just like a big number, but that's the lower end, and the upper end is 3 trillion. Oh, goodness, I was hoping we would be at least within two orders of magnitude, yeah. So we're three orders of magnitude apart. So really, what that means is nobody has any idea, we're all sort of throwing darts at the board. So that was the first thing that was sort of surprising to me. The second thing is that consensus seems to be that plants, we have about 300,000 to 400,000 plants. So that's including ones that have been identified, and estimates of the number of plants that have not been discovered or are not yet known to science. That's a relatively small fraction of the total species of things, so somewhere between like 1% and 15%, and that's somewhat at odds with... So the other thing I was looking up was, how much just biomass is there in the world? There's about 550 gigatons of carbon in the biosphere.  Jason  3:55   That's 550 billion tons.  Alex  3:57   Yes. And if you don't know what a gigaton, if you can't conceptualize a gigaton, I can't either. But Google told me that one gigaton of carbon is about equal to 200 million elephants. Brian  4:12   which is also hard to picture, I suppose. Alex  4:14   I'm not sure if we're getting any closer to the truth here. Okay, so anyway, so 550 gigatons of carbon in the biosphere, and about 450 gigatons of carbon are in plants. So plants are about 80% of the living biomass of the world, so big fraction of that, but only between, like 1% and 15% of the unique species  Brian  4:42   That's crazy Alex  4:44   In the world. Jason  4:45   Yeah, now I'm gonna say I'm not too surprised about the species part, because if the person making those numbers did it right, they're counting all the microbes. Brian and I both have extensive experience in microbes and those things, I mean, there's. 1000s or 10s of 1000s of them in one scoop of soil. So, like, there's a bunch of those. And also, we don't actually know how to define a species for most of them, so that's why we have the three orders of magnitude.  Speaker 1  5:11   That's exactly what I was gonna say. I think a lot of that uncertainty in those orders of magnitude are disagreement about, like, what even counts as a species, and probably advances and detection methods for the microbes in particular.  Brian  5:25   One of the interesting things when you think about plants is that at its core, every plant is trying to do the same thing. They're all trying to capture the same resources, the same way. They're all funda... like so it's it's a little different than animals, where there's all this opportunity perspective for to specialize to different behaviors, Speaker 1  5:44   yeah, and I know I was actually, I was thinking about that in the context of this game, in the sense, like, we'll get into that later, I guess. But like, the way you grow all plants in this game is with soil. Like that there's one resource that all plants need. And I guess as an ecologist, I took a little bit of an issue with that, this would really get into the weeds. No pun intended, but, but really, plants need water and sunlight and nutrients, and if you want to break down the nutrients into nitrogen and phosphorus and other micronutrients, you know, plants have lots of special needs. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily put soil at the top of that list, or even, like, in the list. Jason  6:28   Last episode was Terraforming Mars and hydroponics was top of the list of things to do there. So, Alex  6:33   yeah, there you go. And like, there's plants in the in the desert, there's, yeah, there's, there's orchids that don't even need soil Brian  6:42   interesting. So we should definitely, well, we'll come back to that in the nitpick corner, because I think we're all going to be picking at this one a little bit. Jason  6:50   I've got one fun science fact I wanted to throw out, just because this was really cool. A study came out in nature human behavior that shows that video games are actually good for your mental health. Brian  7:02   I agree. Unknown Speaker  7:03   Yeah, that's a huge relief to me, personally. That's great. Jason  7:06   Well, the thing is, this is actually a really cool study, because the problem with studying human behavior, it's so hard to make good experiments, especially something like this. But they took advantage of the fact that during the COVID lockdown, that there was a shortage of video game consoles that were in high demand, like the Nintendo Switch and the PlayStation 5. And in Japan, stores implemented a random lottery. People would enter to get a system. They would randomly draw when they got some in, and people whose name came up would get the system. And so some scientists looked at the people who entered and got the system, and the people who entered and did not get the system, and compared their mental health over the several months after they got the game system, and found that, yeah, for the people who got it, their mental health generally went up, up to about, like, one to three hours of gameplay per day. More than that, it sort of leveled off. Presumably, there are limits. I mean, there's caveats, like this was in the middle of COVID, like pretty much anything would get people's mental health going up from that point, because lots of people were in bad spots. But it's really cool to actually see this sort of data. I now want to see the same thing with board games, but I don't know how we're going to get that. Brian  8:15   I mean, I guess we have to find the right natural experiment to occur, sociological experiment. No, Animal Crossing was a lifesaver during early lockdown, Speaker 1  8:24   I logged so many hours of Splatoon 2, which is, yeah, we can probably cut that. Brian  8:35   Probably not. Jason  8:35   We are not cutting that! Brian  8:41   Okay, so you guys want to talk about Earth? Jason  8:43   Sure. Brian  8:44   So let's get into it. Earth is a game by Maxime Tardif. He's a Canadian board game designer, and it's published by Inside-Up Games. It is for one to five players. We've seen a lot of games now, having a solo mode almost seems to be a prerequisite for a modern game that's coming out in 2024. It's for players 14 and up, takes about 45 to 90 minutes. What do you think about that time, Jason and Alex, Is that about right? Jason  9:09   Yeah. I guess if you got two people who knew the game and were playing pretty rapidly, you can get down to 45 minutes. Brian  9:15   Earth is an engine builder game. So what's a good description of an engine builder game? I suppose it's when the abilities on individual components of the game start to stack up and reinforce each other in interesting ways. Does that seem like a reasonable definition of an engine builder? Jason  9:32   That works for me. Brian  9:33   The idea of engines and interactions as a metaphor for ecology, I think this is relatively common in the board game sphere. It's something we've seen before. Notably, I would say that Wingspan does this. Yes, we're talking about wingspan already. I apologize. I would say that Earth definitely is pulling from a similar overall playbook to Wingspan. But I would also say it's substantially more complex and fiddly. It is a victory point driven card game. There's 429 unique cards in earth, and your goal ultimately is to create a four by four grid of terrain and flora cards. Flora is including plants and fungi. All of these cards use photographs rather than illustrations, and every card has its own little factoid flavor text at the bottom, which I know Alex said he didn't even notice when we were playing. Alex  10:21   I was so focused on just understanding, remembering all the rules and all the way to score points that I like, I didn't even notice that all the cards had little factoids, like Wingspan, since you already brought it up, Brian  10:34   How do you play the game? There is a common central play mat, and on that mat you've got four fauna cards for animals, basically, as well as two ecosystem cards that these are going to comprise public victory point goals that anybody can get if they've met certain conditions. But each player has their own player  mat, and that player mat's going to have a little island card that represents a real island out there in the world, as well as a climate card and their own ecosystem card that represents a private goal. Every one of these cards is double sided. So when you get an island card, there's actually two different islands. You get to choose which one you want. There's a place on your player mat to keep event cards. These are different types of ecological disturbances like fire or tsunamis or there's some kind of unexpected ones. I think rainbow is on there? Jason  11:22   Yeah, the rainbow that makes the plants grow. Still don't get that one.  Brian  11:26   Sure. I mean, they're not all, they're not all ecological disturbances, but a lot of them are. These are things that have sort of a cost, but also a benefit of some kind the disturbance. So like, why would you play a forest fire on yourself? Because you're going to get some resources for do that. You'll lose some things, which will gain some other. There's also a place to put compost whicih are just face down cards. Each of those cards are going to be worth one victory point, and they can power certain abilities. The rest of the 282 cards are single sided. They're shuffled into these big draw decks that have 178 flora and 104 combined terrain and event cards. Every card for those flora is going to have a common name and a scientific name, and again, one of these little factoids. The flora cards, they all have like a soil cost to play. Soil is your main currency in the game, which is kind of a fun thing. They have a face victory point value. And then they're going to have all these other things. Again, this is a fiddly game, right? So your cards are going to have these little places for sprouts, which are your little green cubes and spots for growth, where you stack up a number of sort of trunk sections and canopies. They also have some kind of color coded ability, so your sprouts and your trunks are worth victory points. And then they've divided up the flora into these four big categories of trees, herbs, bushes and mushrooms. They can affect other abilities in scoring. There's a habitat code signal that goes for sunny, cold, wet and rocky those can affect abilities in scoring. Your terrain cards also have a soil cost and victory point value and habitat code. They also have color coded abilities that can affect scoring or influence other things. These are the ways that you're building your engines, like one card will affect something else based on its characteristic, its climate, its column or row in the grid, things like that. On your turn, you get to choose one of four actions. Green, planting lets you play cards into your grid. Red, composting gets you soil. Blue, watering lets you place the little sprout cubes. And yellow growth lets you draw cards and place the little trunk sections, and then the other players will do some kind of similar but reduced versions of those actions when they're chosen. And then choosing that action also activates all of the same colored abilities on all the cards in your tableau or on your player mat. And the game ends once one player has finished their four by four grid.  Jason  13:41   That makes it sound so much simpler than it actually is. That's it. Brian  13:45   Did it sound simple? Because it doesn't sound simple when I'm reading it. It sounds like a lot to manage. Alex  13:51   It was a lot to manage. Okay.  Jason  13:54   Well, the main thing for me is that there are, like, eight different ways of scoring points, and my, I'm an optimizer. I try to optimize. And so I try to keep all eight of those things in my head at the same time so I can do all of them as much as I can and make trade offs. And it's just hard. Brian  14:10   And this, this game would take a lot of practice to play optimally. Jason  14:14   Yeah, I think basically my way of improving at this game is learning which things to just ignore and triage away. Say, I'm not going to bother with that, and I'm just going to focus on these things instead. Brian  14:23    If you plan on playing like Alex and I and just kind of pick a thing and go for it, it's not too bad. Alex  14:28   I mean, the other thing that I think makes it more interesting but harder to optimize is that there's, there's more sort of feedbacks based off of what the other players do than I necessarily would have anticipated before playing. So when one of the other players chooses the color type, you benefit from whatever they choose. Being able to modify your strategy based off of the way other people's boards are developing is important too. Brian  14:57   it's a lot more sort of player to player interactions. Then again, I really need to stop just comparing everything to Wingspan. It's just hard not to. Jason, how did you describe this? Is this wingspan?  Jason  15:08   Well, this is, this is the game you get when someone plays Wingspan and says, This isn't complicated enough. Alex  15:14   And also, I hate birds, but I kind of like plants and fungi. Brian  15:21   Yes, it's wingspan for people who hate birds and also hate simplicity. Jason  15:24   Now we're being unfair to it, like, I mean, it is top 200 on Board Game Geek. There are people who love this game. Brian  15:30   Yeah, for sure Jason  15:31   It's too complicated for my taste. There are too many things I was trying to keep going in my head. But there are obviously a lot of other people who really love this, so we shouldn't be too hard on it.  Alex  15:39   Yeah, and I feel very guilty of that too. And like the reason, the reason I started with those fun facts about plants, is because plants are critically important to global biodiversity and just the way the earth functions. And yet, when people think about nature, they think about birds or other animals. You know, plants don't get a lot of attention, and so it's nice to see a game that shines a light on all this amazing plant biodiversity that's out there. Brian  16:08   Agreed, yeah, and just because it's not our taste doesn't mean that you know that you wouldn't enjoy it. We like to be able to play a couple games in a day, right?  Jason  16:17   We should talk about one of the best things about this game is that it's beautiful. They have stunning actually, it's not illustrations, it's actual photographs of everything, and they very definitely chose beautiful photographs for all of it. I wouldn't be surprised. There's a subreddit called Earth porn, which is basically absolutely gorgeous, stunning vistas from around the planet. And I almost suspect that they mined that for finding some of these shots, because they are really beautiful. Brian  16:46   They chose a lot of beautiful imagery and very charismatic species and places, for sure.  Alex  16:52   Yeah, I totally agree, and again, not to keep complaining too much, but I think that just sort of at odds with the fact that there's so many rules that as a player of the game, I didn't get to enjoy the beauty and the pictures as much as I could have if I had a little time to sort of let my mind, let my mind wander instead of, you know, obsessing over all the things I was trying to keep track of.  Jason  17:18   Yeah, there is that. There is no downtime in this game. Every player acts every turn. It's just the active player chooses what everyone gets to do, but there is no downtime. I'm used to spending other people's turns figuring out what I will do on my next, my next turn. And I didn't have that option. It was like, Okay, I've done my turn, okay, now you're doing your turn, okay, I've got to react. Now you're doing your turn, okay, I've got to react. It, it keeps it moving there. Like, there's no time to get bored, but it's also there's not that much time to think.  Brian  17:43   Yeah. That's really true. Again, that's, again, very different from something like some of these other games where  Jason  17:49   Evolution! I'm going to say Evolution instead of Wingspan. Brian  17:53   I want to get in a little bit to the development of this game. How is the science represented? What's the sort of origins of Earth, the board game? There's a very detailed designer diary for Earth, from the designer Maxime up on Board Game Geek, which is amazing. It provides a lot of detail about, sort of, all of the choices that went into this, or, well, not all, but a lot of them. So why did he decide to make a game about plants? Because his girlfriend Isabel asked him to make a game about plants. That was the inspiration. Basically.  Jason  18:24   Well, that's sweet. Brian  18:25   Yes, it is sweet. This literally, she said, Could you make a game about plants? And that, that was the fundamental inspiration. This game really does give plants and fungi, and fungi their due. We do focus on animals. We really do. And in games like Evolution, the plants are just food. We even talked about that. Like, plants are just the green thing that the interesting things go and eat. So no, I that it's great to have plants at the center, plants and fungi at the center. And I actually really liked soil being the main currency of the game. There's some nitpicks, I suppose, associated with that, but that's another thing that completely gets overlooked. All of modern society is sort of dependent upon the soil. Right? In this extensive detail of the game design and the designer diary, there's really no designer notes in the game on how, or to what degree the function of the cards was influenced by either biology or ecology. So I kind of had to do a lot of reverse engineering and guesswork to try to sort of infer how much that influenced the design of the game. So it was very clear that balance and gameplay choices were the top priority. The theming of the game? There's a list of like 20 things that were considered in designing this game. Theming was like 13th or something, but there was extremely detailed effort at card balancing with a whole Excel sheet and an entire formula to calculate how the victory point value was balanced by the power of the card. So they even, he even specifically says, this is a game, not an encyclopedia, so the balance and gameplay were definitely always going to be prioritized over the accuracy of the metaphor or the science. Jason  20:04   Didn't you say this is the first game we've had that actually has a scientific disclaimer in the rulebook? Brian  20:09    Yes, it is. We've had some games where we've actually said, Oh, they're citing their sources. That's wonderful. This actually had a, has a safety note disclaimer. They said to not use the cards as a field manual or identification guide. They said we're not botanists. I mean, essentially, this is a cover their butts. Please don't poison yourself, because you've paid too much attention to our board game. Alex  20:31   Yeah, it's about the mushrooms. Jason  20:33   It's about the mushrooms, yeah.  Brian  20:34   It's 100% about the mushrooms. But, I mean, there are poisonous plants too, right? I'm glad they put mushrooms in the game, but it also meant they had to include a safety note. So the specifically the flora. So how were they chosen? Again, I think I already mentioned this. These are charismatic. They are things that photograph well, and they do. There's a distinct effort to combine some well known and some lesser known plants and fungi. So for instance, there are a ton of crop plants included. It's also a European game. So it just said soya bean instead of soy. But I saw onions, wheat, most of the major crops and vegetables, I think, are in there. Lots of trees. There weren't really a lot of designs on how the individual Flora was influencing the way that the card functioned. So there were a few nods, I would say. So tall plants would often have the ability to add more trunk sections. Parasitic plants often had some kind of an ability that involved removing sprouts or growth to fuel their abilities. So, so there was some there. It's just you kind of have to, you kind of have to go looking for it. Did any stick out to you guys? Whereas, like, Oh, this is a clever way to incorporate the biology of this organism. I was, I was looking for it, and was a little disappointed. There were some interactions with the compost pile that seemed like decomposers were using compost in ways that seemed clever.  Jason  21:54   So that's something I noticed, where several of the mushrooms had abilities where you'd pay some sort of resource, usually like they're sprouts, or they're something's sprouts, or something's trunks, and you would get compost out of it, so they're decomposing it back down to soil, basically. The one individual card I remember was the strangler fig, which you could pay its cost instead of in dirt, you could pay it in the growth of another plant.  Brian  22:17   So you would take growth away from something else. That's what I'm saying, like the parasites. So I guess even then, oh, not every plant needs soil, and that is kind of reflected in the way that the game is designed. Not every plant does require soil. Some are stealing from other other sources. Alex  22:33   Yeah, that's fair. Brian  22:34   I wanted to come into sort of the deeper concept here of the idea of biomes and ecosystems, and this is where I'm hoping Alex can kind of fill in some of my weaknesses. Biome is a very old concept dating back to, I think I saw the first sort of use of it was 1916. It's this idea of trying to develop categories based on the observation that the temperature and precipitation of a region determine the community of plants and animals that live there and their adaptations. I mean, biome is definitely part of even elementary school biology at this point. I mean, it's in the video game Minecraft, the areas with different plants and creatures, they call them biomes. Alex  23:15   Yeah. Brian  23:15   The term's been around since 1916 and there have been a ton of attempts to develop biome definitions and classification schemes.  Alex  23:23   Can I, can I tell you, like a quick story example of where the biome concept really like, hit home for me? Brian  23:29   Please. Alex  23:23   So okay, so I mostly work in aquatic ecosystems, but I do some work in terrestrial grasslands. I was a postdoc at University of Minnesota working on this grassland project. And then when I started my faculty job here in Georgia, I tried to set up, well, successfully set up, but with some challenges, the same version of this grassland experiment, but in a very different biome. In Minnesota, where it is substantially drier, more temperate. At this big, famous field station, they try really, really hard to do tree biodiversity experiments, and they have to water these trees, just huge amounts of water every single day, and most of the trees still die. On the flip side, there are several really famous grassland like grasses and forbes biodiversity experiments, and the native ecosystem is tall grass prairie, and they do great. Down here in Georgia, I tried to set up this grassland experiment, and it keeps on getting invaded by blackberry and sweet gum and other trees, and it's really hard to maintain a grassland down here because we're in a different biome. We're in a biome here that's conducive to trees, whereas up in Minnesota, the biome was much more conducive to grasses. So my point is just that, yeah, these, these sort of big scale gradients and temperature, precipitation have a huge impact on the types of plants that are going to thrive under those conditions. So there have been all of these efforts to try to develop and categorize, basically categorize nature, find these natural, try to define what these natural divisions are, but it's biology, right? These things never fit perfectly. There's always these exceptions, these places where it doesn't quite work. That doesn't mean it's not useful. It doesn't mean it's not important. So why do we bother with this? I think that, as near as I can tell, one of the ways that this is important is it's really helpful for focusing conservation efforts. Yeah, I think so. I mean, also, we're just as humans, we like to categorize things. It helps us make sense of the world. But, yeah, you're totally right that, that nature is messy and complex, and sometimes things don't fit neatly into categories. But Brian, you mentioned that, like, the biome concept is really old, that that's absolutely right. And it's, I mean, I think it's pretty consistent, like the edges, like the boundary between, you know, two particular biomes. Maybe people could disagree about a specific definition, but yeah, the general idea that different abiotic constraints affect the the plant communities that thrive under those different conditions. Like ecologists aren't going to argue with that.  Jason  26:28   Yeah. So quick definition: abiotic constraints. Can you tell us what that is? Alex  26:34   Yeah? So like, not enough rain, gets too hot, something, something in the environment that affects the ability of an organism to reproduce and grow. Probably the main ones that I think about are temperature, precipitation Jason  26:52   rain, snow Alex  26:52   Seasonality, nutrients. Yeah. Brian  26:57   So why am I bringing this up? I mean, if you remember how we play Earth, effectively, while they don't sort of point it out, you're kind of building a biome because you're choosing plants that work with your climate and the terrain of your island. That is kind of at that level. That is kind of what a biome concept is, the climate and the terrain defining the plants that can be there and well, and to some degree, the animals. Again, Earth is not that focused on animals, which I don't hate, right? It's really about the plants. I actually found a very cool and informative recent effort to sort of organize and classify all the biomes and ecosystems across the planet, and including the human made, anthropogenic ecosystems like cropland, from the International Unit for Conservation of Nature. I am, I would like to drop that into the into the show notes, because I really enjoyed reading it. It's in parts, very technical, but they also have a great glossary and really beautiful photography as well. It's a hierarchical organization, so a series of nested terms. They defined five realms, terrestrial, subterranean, freshwater, marine and atmospheric. They then divide that into 25 biomes and 108 ecosystem functional groups. And this is based on assembly theory, so the idea that it's the abundances and limitations and other features drive how an ecosystem assembles. So things like, in a rainforest, you've got an excess of water, high temperature but limited nutrients, or other things, like in in marine ecosystems, the limited availability of light or energy, or in some ecosystems, how fire, it drives the assembly of what can and can't live there. It was really cool, actually, Alex  28:47    Can I piggyback off the biome idea? Brian  28:49   Yeah, please. Alex  28:50   So great. So in the game you have this island. You randomly get an island. At the beginning. I had, like, Jamaica. I think? I had some tropical Caribbean island. One of the cards that we flipped over at the beginning, one of the things that we were competing for the first to get, you know, whatever fulfill whatever conditions got 15 points. That condition was having eight or more tundra species. So I just like put all these tundra plants on my tropical Caribbean island and got lots of points for it. And that was cool, I guess, to get lots of points. But the ecologist in me was kind of screaming out, but, but, but that doesn't actually work. And so, okay, this is just me complaining again, while I I do really like this theme of, like building the biome, I guess, I wish that there were a little more sort of biology behind the decisions about which plants can thrive under which conditions.  Brian  29:53   Yeah Alex  29:53   Instead of, and maybe I'm missing something, but I think, like any any card can get played on any Island, right?  Brian  29:59   Oh, yeah. For sure, you can build just a bad ecosystem, I guess, that doesn't get you a lot of points.  Alex  30:05   And I'm not, to be clear, I'm not suggesting that the game needs to be any more complicated, but it was just, it was just something that that was dragging to me as you know, as I'm building up my my island plant community. Brian  30:20   Do you happen to remember what climate card you got when you played Alex to go with your tropical Jamaican Island?  Alex  30:27   Oh gosh, I might have. So I had one card that gave me extra points for fungi. So I kind of went to town on the fungi like any fungus I tried to play. I was, I was going for Arctic plants and fungi. And there was, there was surprising overlap there. I thought it was going to have to be either or, but there were a bunch of, a bunch of fungal cards that had that little frost sign on it. That meant that they counted for the counted towards cold, towards cold. That what so was, that was the fungal one? Was that? What you just asked me? Brian  30:58   I think so. I mean, I assume that if you had something on your player mat that influenced fungi, that was probably your climate card.  Alex  31:05   Okay, yeah Brian  31:06   Okay. But again, this is just one of these places where I wish that there was just a few more notes on how these rules were designed, right? How these choices were made. So interestingly, the climate cards themselves were selected directly from something called the Köppen climate classification scheme. There's like 20 of the 32 climate codes are right there, or sometimes there are simplifications of those. So in that case, they've literally just lifted a real world climate classification scheme and just pulled it into the game. How they translated those climate codes to the function of the game, that I'm not really sure about. What keyed me on to this was, some of these seem really like, oh, tropical wet, or monsoon, something like that, or hot desert. But then some of them were kind of weird. It was like, what was the the Mediterranean warm summer? It's like, well, that's awfully specific. So when I Googled it, pointed me back towards the Köppen climate classification scheme. So that's the only reason I even found that, because, again, that's not really in the designer notes or anything. Alex  32:05   So for listeners who maybe haven't had a ecology class in a while, ecology is the study of how organisms interact with each other and how they interact with the environment. So before I mentioned abiotic constraints, that that's an example of organisms interacting with their environment. And then, you know, earlier in the conversation, we talked about plants just being food for animals in Evolution, in the other game, you know, that's, that's a example of organisms interacting with each other. Of course, I'm biased here as as the ecologist, but I feel like just the fundamental nature of ecology that's built on these interactions, ought to lend itself really well to board game play, just because of the nature of things interacting with each other in a, in a way that works with the engine building type of framework. Brian  32:59   So like, fundamentally, conceptually, it works well, right? It's just the devil's in the details, right? Alex  33:05   Exactly. Yeah, well, the devil's in the details if you're an ecologist, and maybe, maybe if you don't spend, you know, 40 hours a week thinking about ecology, maybe, maybe it wouldn't bother you as much. Brian  33:17   I was wondering if anybody would be okay if we kind of move on to our nitpick corner, because I think there's going to be some nits to pick here. Is that all right? Is there anything else we wanted to talk about? Jason  33:26   Well, I do want to say we were talking about how close the decision was for how the the thing the card represents inspires or is related to its mechanics. And I've got to figure some of them have to been directly inspired. It can't just be that they built this engine game and then pasted other stuff on top, because some of them seem pretty specific, like when we played, I got a card that was like a mountain range, and I got points for how many cards in a row I could draw a line through that had the rocky terrain symbol without doubling back, which is basically tracing out a mountain range across my little tableau that I was building. And that seems like something that would not just come out of nowhere while building a game. So it seems like they maybe there must have been some feedback in terms of like, oh, let's come up with some interesting terrains. How can we represent that mechanically? And yes, I'm sure there was a lot of tweaking and massaging it to make it fit and be balanced, but there does definitely seem to be at least some level of inspiration from what the card is showing down to the mechanics. Brian  34:32   I think you're right. I think that that's definitely true. I just wish that it just given just a little bit more information about how those choices were made so I didn't have to guess all the time.  Jason  34:41   I was gonna say, so they made your job easier, basically. Brian  34:44   Well, yeah.  Jason  34:44   Yeah. I do wish they would explain side of, sort of the themes. It's like you said, the tall plants tend to be able to make a bunch of trunks. That I can kind of get. I don't really understand what makes a bunch of sprouts. Like, when some plants have small and some big, maybe they make clumps, or they make little thickets or something. I don't quite know how the mechanics of the game are supposed to reflect general properties. Or the colors. So there's, there's probably, like, six or seven different colors, but really there's only like, three main ones and then a bunch of minor ones. And I'd like to know if there was some theming for that. Like, oh, all the cards that have blue abilities they relate to this. All the ones with yellow abilities have, relate to this. And I wish there was some sort of key for that. I'd really like that first, because, I mean, there's a bunch of cards I'd like to know, oh, this tells me something about the thing I'm looking at, more than just mechanics. And I agree. Like, we don't have that. And I wish they did, because I think it would enrich my experience of the game. Alex  35:45   Yeah, I was gonna mention that we had one of those categories where, if you had for each column or row, I can't remember, in your tableau, that had, you know, unique versions of each type of card. And there were, there's trees, the grasses, fungi, there are different categories. So clearly they put a lot of effort into, you know, doing those, that categorization. But yeah, it was, there was a little it was unclear whether, in general, trees had some defining characteristic that made playing them more valuable in a certain situation, or, you know, if there was a grass strategy or things like that. I guess I've got another one I can add in, which is, you know, back to the the definition of ecology and how important interactions among species are for, for what ecology is and for the most part, when you play a new plant in your tableau, it doesn't interact with the other ones. Like, there are special cards that create interactions, like the mountain range one that, that Jason mentioned, and, you know, the getting things lined up in columns or rows. But you know, I could imagine a way where the soil cost, for example, might be higher if you're trying to plant something next to something that's also a strong competitor or something. But like, there are ways I could imagine layering in more interactions among the plants, in ways that I think could also relate to more of the biology that we were kind of looking for.  Brian  35:56   You know, they didn't show their work. Jason  37:19   So you wish they'd peel back the curtain a little bit and just let you in on the, the behind the scenes. Basically, you want the behind the scenes tour of the game. Brian  37:37   A little bit because it's what ties the game to the underlying biology and ecology. I think they did it. But as a player, I don't get to experience that part as much. I can't see why the choices were made, just that they were, right? So and from the perspective of kind of to learn about the natural world from a game, knowing why the choices were made would be really helpful. My nitpick, okay, I hope this doesn't come out as too much of a nitpick, because I really don't think it is. I think it's really worth mentioning. Fungi are not plants.  Jason  38:16   Well, that's why they call them flora.  Brian  38:18   Which is an old term. Again, it's a nitpick, because I think most, I would assume, most of the people listening to this are fully aware of that, that plants and animals and fungi, are the three different kingdoms of macroscopic life, and that fungi definitely are not plants. So some people don't realize that. I think most people probably do.  Jason  38:36   And yet, we have several fungal colleagues in the Department of Plant Biology, so... Brian  38:42   And we have several fungal colleagues in plant pathology, because they're plant pathogens. My other nitpick, the ecosystem cards are not ecosystems. Jason  38:49   So, examples? Brian  38:50   They're eco regions. So for instance, things like the Himalayas, the Serengeti, the Nile Delta, these are not ecosystems. These are interesting regions in the world. I think that there was a lot of choice of these. They're very charismatic places. There was an active effort to select them all over the globe, including well known places and maybe places that are less known to your average North American board game player, like the Sudd swamp or the Yagishiri island. But these are definitely not ecosystems. They're eco regions, and a lot of them actually come from this effort by the World Wildlife Foundation to divide up global eco regions, again, for conservation concern. Another thing I want to drop into the show notes is really cool, OneEarth.org navigator, where you can look at eco regions all over the planet, see which ones are in your area, or, really, anywhere. It's very cool. Also, there's this kind of extreme squishiness to what is a terrain card, right? Because most of the, I don't know what to call them, features terrain that are on the terrain cards? Really would be under traditional categories of biomes or more ecosystems. For that matter. These are where the actual biomes and ecosystems would be found. You've got a rainforest card, plains, savanna, taiga, classic biome divisions, or ecosystems like a bamboo forest or a redwood forest. Actually, it's interesting. There is a terrain card for redwood forest and an ecosystem card for Redwood National Park. So it's actually both. I think there, there's sort of a, an inconsistency in the application of terminology here. Jason  40:23   I think my only one involved some of the event cards, because some of them make sense. You have a forest fire, you lose a lot of growth, you get a lot of compost, great. But a rainbow doesn't make plants grow. I'm sorry. I mean, maybe it's supposed to be the rain is making the plants grow. Maybe that's it. But then we also have, like, comets and meteors. And I swear one of them was, like, a really bad thing, so maybe it's supposed to be a, an impactor, like, oh, the comet hit your island and it's causing all sorts of stuff. Like, I guess that's my thing. I liked a lot of them, but I wish that they all just made sense, because I just, my tree seeing the rainbow doesn't make it grow taller, but yet it does. That's mine, I guess. Brian  41:03   I think we're sort of running out of time here. So maybe we should go ahead and give this our grades, if that's okay. So we grade our games on a letter grade scale, and we'll grade on two things, the science content and then the fun content of the game. Alex, would you be willing to go first and give it your science rating? How good is the science in earth?  Alex  41:21   Okay, so at, since we're all professors here, is this like a normal, like, grade inflation thing where if we give less than a B, the game's gonna have its feelings hurt?  Brian  41:31   Like, a little bit, yeah, actually.  Alex  41:34   Okay, well, I mean, an F sounds harsh, so I'm not going to give it an F. I don't know. I'd give it, I'll give the science a B-minus. I really did appreciate that it's highlighting this amazing plant biodiversity, showing it with these beautiful pictures, and maybe just educating some people about the plant life that's out there. So I like that. And then, you know, all the, all the nitpicks that, that I've brought up and that we've been discussing, there are places where I felt like the connection to the underlying biology could have been stronger or more integrated within the gameplay.  And then the fun factor, that's that's a tough one for me, because I really like playing games, but these days, the only game I'm really playing is Candyland with my five year old.  Brian  42:32   We gotta get you some better games for kids, because we know some Alex  42:36   I mean this, and this is like the opposite of Candyland, terms of of brain power required, I quite enjoyed it, but I probably would have enjoyed playing any game. So A-minus. Jason  42:50   So science side, I'm probably gonna go with Alex here and be in the B to B minus range. There's definitely some there, like there's definitely some inspiration. They've got the little science facts at the bottom of it, presumably the photos are right. So there's something there, and don't use it as a field identification guide, but it's probably about equivalent to, like, Google lens or something, if you just want to, like, oh, that I recognize that plant. So it's there. It, we've talked about how it's not, it's not super deep through there. It's like, there's not the multiple layers of like, oh, there's all these different ways that the science actually informed the way the game comes together, comes together. Or maybe, if there is, they just didn't tell us about it, so we're not recognizing it, I don't know. But so I put it in there because there's the little things that seem off, like, I don't understand why this plant makes a bunch of sprouts, and this one doesn't I don't understand why the rainbow grows trees and other things like that. So there's-- Brian  43:41   Man, that one really bothers you, huh?  Jason  43:43   It's, it's just weird. It's like, it's like, it's an event, it's a rain, the rainbow does not affect the ecosystem. I'm sorry. It's just a bit of light. I don't know. Yes, that, it, that one was just really weird when I played that one. Okay? It apparently made a deep impression on me. Yes, you people can come on Discord. Just tell me that Jason hates rainbows, so on and so forth, but whatever. So I'd put science there that the B, B minus range. For me, and when we get into gameplay, it's definitely very subjective. I've also put this into the B, B range, just because, for me, there was so much stuff I was trying to keep track of that it, it wasn't fun for me. Like it, there's that little, they talk about how getting a flow state is that being like just hard enough to challenge you, but not so hard that it becomes frustrating. I feel it edged a little bit too far. I was trying to keep track of too many things that I eventually felt like I kind of had to give up and just start putting cards out and hope it worked. And that just went a little too far for me in terms of complexity. So on my personal scale, I'd put it about a B. I mean, you say, Brian, would I pull this off the shelf and play with it? Probably not. It's not my cup of tea. But obviously, a lot of other people, like it Brian  45:00   Well, if the game's too complicated for Jason Wallace, I don't know what hope the rest of us have. But anyway, for for science, I'm also giving it a B minus, or maybe even a C plus. And here's my concern, I think it kind of presents this veneer of scientific accuracy, including the scientific names, and that's heightened by the use of photographs, but the problem is that they kind of apply that accuracy inconsistently across different parts of the game. So I just worry, if someone took the classifications to heart, that they'd end up learning it wrong. And if you're going to come away from a game learning the science wrong, that's definitely how I'm going to lose points on things. But Like Alex said, if you're not going to pay that much attention to the scientific content, and you definitely, the game's not set up to do that while playing. The game's themed around science, but it's not built around it. So I'm probably being too harsh. I would probably at some point somebody would come to me and say, like, hey, I want to get this grade re, I want regrading, right. For fun, this is a level of complexity that's just beyond what I'm typically going to go for. So it's, it's a B. I know this is definitely somebody out there's cup of tea. It's just not mine. Jason  46:14    I'm also just thinking, I'm thinking about why we do these, and part of it is, I hope that maybe there's some educators out there that can use this for deciding, oh, if I want to teach this in my class, what are my good options? And I hope that this helps them make that decision, basically, like, this is not a game you should bring to your middle school to teach them about ecology. Oh, actually, maybe in middle school you might be able to work, you might have, you might be able to get it to work. Definitely not an elementary school one, though. So all right, well, that's probably where we should wrap it up. Thank you, Alex, for coming on. Thank you for being our resident ecologist. I'm sure we'll find other games where we can bring you in that have this sort of theme. Alex  46:50   Thanks for the invitation. It was a lot of fun. Jason  46:52   Oh, is there anywhere you want people to be able to look you up on social media or anything like that? Speaker 1  46:56   I have a lab website, Strauss lab, at okay, yeah, Strausslab.ecology.uga.edu. Jason  47:04   Well, that's where we'll call it. So everyone have a great week and happy gaming.  Brian  47:07   Yep, have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya! This has been the Gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. Listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. Jason  47:37    Do-do-doo, do-da-do-do Okay, we're done! Alex  47:39   Is that like your catch phrase, sign off phrase Brian  47:42   That's our sign off phrase. Sign off phrase!    

#Science #BoardGames #SciComm #Terraforming #Mars #Exobiology #Astrobiology #Regolith  Introduction Today we talk about Terraforming Mars, with special guest Dr. Laura Fackrell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We cover how Mars lost its atmosphere, whether you really can survive off just potatoes, what makes regolith different from soil, the ethics of terraforming, reality TV, and why you should probably read Elon Musk's End-User License Agreement. Many thanks to Dr. Fackrell, and we hope you have fun journeying with us to the red planet! Timestamps 00:35 - Introductions 01:40 - Martian potatoes 02:52 - Game background 10:06 - Martian atmosphere 16:42 - How to grow stuff on Mars 23:06 - Regolith versus Soil 27:44 - Terraforming priorities & ethics 39:08 - Final grades Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Links Terraforming Mars official website (Fryx Games) Mars One (Wikipedia) Stars on Mars (IMDB) Terraforming Mars in Science Fiction (Wikipedia)   This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.   Full Transcript Brian  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:12   Today we'll be talking about Terraforming Mars by FryxGames. Hey everyone. Jason here with a quick heads up about today's episode, we notice there's a few little audio hiccups and hangs throughout the episode, nothing huge, but it seems that the server we were using to record the audio was lagging a little bit in the process. We're sorry about that, and we're going to work to try to make sure it doesn't happen again. So with that, thank you, and on with the show.  Brian  0:35   Hey, I'm Brian.  Jason  0:36   This is Jason.  Laura  0:37   This is Laura,  Jason  0:38   and welcome back to gaming with science. We have another special guest star today. This is Dr Laura Fackrell from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Laura, can you give us a quick introduction to yourself? Please?  Laura  0:48   Sure! I am Dr Laura Fakhrill, I am a geologist by training. So a lot of what I do, I'm familiar with a lot of things about rock and geology and place, tectonics and all sorts of things, but what I apply that to is really niche area called geomicrobiology, which looks at the interactions with microbes and rocks and also plants. Is something else. I've applied it to you. So my current work, I focus a lot on, how do you take the materials that are available on the moon, or that would be available on the moon if humans were there, and trying to turn that into something that can support agriculture. Brian  1:20   That's super cool.  Jason  1:21   Yeah. And the reason why I asked Laura to be on this episode is because I knew her when she was a graduate student, when she was doing basically the same things, but for Martian soil, right, correct? Yes, or Martian regolith, I guess it's technically not soil. We can get into the difference of that a little bit later. So first off, the fun science fact, Brian, what fun science have you learned recently? Brian  1:40   Oh, well, I usually try to find something that I think is themed. So this was making the rounds a couple years ago, right around the release of The Martian. Maybe you saw this about, can you survive on a diet of nothing but potatoes? Did you see this making the rounds? I'm sure everybody did.  Jason  1:54   I didn't actually, no. Brian  1:56    Oh, you didn't? So the short answer is, sort of, you actually can't get vitamin B12 from potatoes. You need to, at least not in the current form. Of course, in the movie The Martian, he get plenty of vitamins to take that presumably would have provided B12. The meme was that you could survive on a diet of potatoes and butter, the butter providing the vitamin B12. Can you survive for a long time on that diet? Yes. Would you be healthy on that diet? Almost certainly not. So those are different things. I suppose. I also saw a study recently where somebody tried to simulate, can you grow potatoes in simulated Martian regolith? And they said, sort of. So maybe it's not completely out of the question.  Jason  2:36   Yeah, and I assume when you're marooned, if you're marooned an entire planetary orbit away from Earth. Survival is number one. You can worry about quality of life after that,  Brian  2:44   Yeah, but you're not gonna get scurvy. Potatoes actually have a good amount of vitamin C in them. They provide a lot of calories. They are a good plant for that purpose. Jason  2:52   Okay, so everyone probably got from the show title we're talking today about Terraforming Mars by FryxGames. So little background about the game itself. First, FryxGames is a Swedish company. It's distributed by Stronghold games here in the US, FryxGames is actually a family business. You look on their website, they're all members of the Fryxelius family, which is just an awesome surname. It's like, I'm jealous of their surname. And Jacob Fryxelius is listed as the designer of the game with his I think his brothers, Isaac and Daniel, being given artist credit. It's a fairly standard strategy game, one to five players. So it does have a single player mode, hour and a half to two hour run time. It lists when Brian and I played. It took about two and a half hours for us to go through it ages 12 plus, which I definitely get. I mean, I think you can play it younger than that. But there's a lot of strategy and planning and stuff in this that probably make that age appropriate and well, MSRP is about $70 US, although I saw that even the company itself had it on like a 10 or $15 off sale. So you can probably get on sale somewhere. Big thing with this is that it is number seven among all board games on Board Game Geek, wow, which means that nearly 100,000 people rate this as one of the best games of at least the last 20 years, possibly ever. Brian  4:06   And Board Game Geek people are notoriously fussy,  Jason  4:09   yes, so like this. This is a little bit intimidating. This will actually be very intimidating when it comes time to give our grades at the end, because if we start disagreeing with Board Game Geek on this, uh, there, may be some flak headed our way. What's the game consist of? So physical components. You have the board  itself, which is a giant map of Mars that has a whole bunch of hexes on it, each representing about 1% of the Martian surface. And it's where you track your terraforming progress, where you put down ocean tiles and forests and cities. You also track the Martian temperature and air pressure, slash oxygen. And there's a few other things, like the victory point track and a few other minor bits, but it's got most of it right there. You've got your player boards where you track your resources. There's a deck of project cards, which are the things you're doing to try to terraform Mars, little bits that you put on the board to mark when something has been terraformed. And then tons and tons of tiny little acrylic cubes, which I'm inordinately fond of. I don't know what it is about a clear, slightly colored acrylic cube I just love but any game that has that just goes up a few points in my mind. This one's especially fun because it has two types. It has the little colored ones to mark the players, and then it has resource cubes, which are actually opaque and metallic in copper, silver and gold, and the gold ones are even a larger size. And there's just something really satisfying about having to pile of these little solid gold metallic cubes on your player board. It's just really fun. Brian  5:29   I'm curious if you could go to Etsy and get actual upgraded metallic, truly metallic ones, so that they clink when you put them down.  Oh, I'm sure you can. It's like every game out there has some sort of upgrade and something like this, I'm certain of it, and I would be highly tempted to do that if I owned the game instead of you. You can get it for me as a present. Jason  5:49   So how do you play the game? Well, the goal of the game is to terraform Mars, and you represent one of several companies that are trying to do this. And I must admit, when I first read that, I thought this was like, Oh, great, we're now in a corporate dystopia. And then you read the background, and it's actually not it's actually surprisingly optimistic. The game starts 200 years in the future. Earth is running out of resources, fine, but there's no talk about like, a climate crisis, no talk about wars or anything. There's a benevolent world, unified government that is funding this through a universal tax. The companies are subsidized to go out make Mars terraformed. Brian  6:24   Yeah, it's a corporate utopia, not a corporate dystopia.  Jason  6:27    Yes. I mean, I'm sure you could get into the details there and have some fun, like role playing or fiction there, but the way it's set up, yeah, it's actually more of a corporate utopia. And then Brian pointed this out as we were playing, the game is competitive, because you're all trying to be the best Terraformer and ultimately win. But at the end of the day, it's also cooperative, because no matter what happens, Mars gets Terraformed, there's pretty much no way for someone to, like, Screw Mars over and really mess things up.  Brian  6:51   Other than the one thing that I did where you can actually explode some nuclear bombs to increase the temperature, which does create, you know, a little fallout zone in one tile, so whatever. Jason  7:02   1% of the Martian surface, it's fine. The way the game plays out. You take turns. You draw your cards. You have to pay resources in order to keep cards. You take turns playing your projects. You gather resources at the end of each turn. I don't know why you gather at the end ins tead of at the beginning. I assume it has something to do with the way they wanted the game to play out. But most of it has to do with playing your project cards, which are things that will like increase temperature or increase oxygen or start building up engines that you can do, or you buy milestones or sponsor rewards that give people victory points, just all sorts of things. And this is where I think the deep gameplay comes in, and why it's number seven on Board Game Geek is because since you're drawing relatively few cards, and you can only keep a small subset of them, unless you're super rich, then you can never really guarantee what you're going to get. And there's a lot of different strategies you can pursue to try to get victory points. You can try to build a whole bunch of plants and forests to get stuff. You can try to build cities. You can get extra bonus points on one thing. You can just try to terraform the heck out of Mars and get the most victory points that way. There's a bunch of different ways to try to pursue victory, and it's not always obvious who is winning because of that. So I think that's where the deep gameplay comes in. Brian  8:14   Would you consider this to be a Euro game? Jason  8:17   I'll be honest, I don't have a good definition of a Euro game. There probably is one out there. I just sort of have a it feels Euro ish, but my feel of a Euro game, is kind of it's always, there's 10 things you want to do, and you can only do three of them. And I didn't quite feel like that or, Brian  8:32   no, it doesn't. It doesn't really feel like that. Is it? There's always something fun that you can do. There's just different things to do.  Jason  8:38   Yeah. So I could be very wrong about that. Like I said, I said, I didn't have a good working definition of a Euro game anyway. That's the game itself. We'll talk about fun later, but 100,000 people can be wrong, but probably aren't so but let's get down to the science. Brian  8:53   Well, wait, Laura, did you get a chance to play this game? Have you played this before? Did you get a chance to look over it? Laura  8:58   I have not. When you guys introduced it to me, that was the first time I'd actually seen it. It was really intriguing. It looks like there's a lot of startup that takes a while to kind of like figure out all the pieces. It looks like it's a very well thought out, very, very fun, lots of really cool things there.  Brian  9:12   I think a lot of games like this always look really intimidating, but honestly, like 15 minutes around the table, you've got it, and I hope we get to play it with you at some point.  Laura  9:21   Yeah, sounds like more of a business side of the aspect of terraforming Mars,  Jason  9:25   Yeah, and in fact, so the version that Brian has has, I think it's a first expansion or something. It has a bunch of corporate cards that we did not play with, which actually get more into the economics and the business side of it, as opposed to just the basic terraforming. But they recommended not starting with that, and I can see why they had a lot more complexity and time to it. So we just played the basic all you're doing is funding projects to terraform the planet. We have this bad habit. We need to find a host that we can actually play a game with before we get them on here, because so far we're 0 for 3. Oh, well, we provide game knowledge. You provide. Science knowledge, we're good.  Laura  10:01   I definitely enjoy a lot of games, though. So this is just another example. I'll definitely add it to my repertoire.  Jason  10:06   Well, now let's get down to the science. And this is what we really needed Laura for because, I mean, Brian, I were both plant scientists. Terraforming Mars involves plants, but none of them can live there right now, and we don't know that much about how to make that happen. Laura, I guess maybe for background. Can you give us some of the basic stats of Mars? I mean, I think most people know Mars is our fourth planet. It looks red. But can you give us some background so people understand, like, why is it that we're fascinated with Mars? Why is it people even think it's possible to terraform it, that sort of thing?  Laura  10:37   Sure. Well, Mars is pretty cool. A lot of people talk about, like, the planets. They talk about, Venus is Earth's twin because of the same size, but Venus and Earth are actually very different in a lot of their characteristics. But Mars and Earth are kind of another sort of twin. They're different sizes, but at one point, Mars is actually, we think, a lot more similar to Earth in its character, and that had like liquid water on the surface. It may have been slightly warmer with a more generous atmosphere. So there's a lot of things that have changed about Mars over that time. But because Mars is smaller, it cooled off very quickly, and it wasn't able to sustain that atmosphere during the early solar system, when there's a lot of bombardment and things are being stripped away. And so it lost its ability to keep that atmosphere, and now it's very dry, very cold. It does have seasonality to it, but they're pretty cold, so it ranges from probably like negative Celsius a little bit. So it does overlap with temperatures we see here, but it gets way colder than anywhere on Earth ever does during different times of the scope, and it's definitely extremely dry. The driest places on Earth, like the Atacama Desert, or certain areas of Antarctica, are wet for Mars. Brian  11:41   So is there any water in the atmosphere, or is it all gone? Laura  11:45   There's not much in the atmosphere, except for temporarily. The atmosphere is actually very thin, so margin about 1/3 of the gravity and like extremely thin atmosphere, mostly carbon dioxide, with a little bit of nitrogen and argon. But there's not a lot of water in the atmosphere. Most of the water is frozen in ice, and it can sublimate directly to gas, but it doesn't stick around for very long.  Brian  12:05   It just vents off into space, or it gets destroyed? Laura  12:07    A lot of it escapes with spaced and then there's a lot of different things that happen with it. But yeah, it doesn't stick around. It never stays around in liquid form. So we don't get a lot of liquid water in the air. So like, it'll escape into the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is so thin. It just the escape rate and the rate at which water is input into it, that balance just leaves it to be pretty dry. Brian  12:25   We didn't really talk about this. We talked about in Compounded I think we intended to talk a little bit about the phases of matter and how you can go straight from solid to gas, and then didn't actually talk about it and how that's affected by pressure, right? So in this case there, there's just not enough pressure or temperature to maintain liquid water?  Laura  12:41   Yeah, pressure comes from the atmosphere. So atmospheric pressure, there's not enough there to keep water in its liquid states, but it's so cold that it does stay solid pretty well.  Jason  12:49   Yeah, I was reading somewhere that apparently the stats are, if you were to actually take all the water ice that is frozen in the Martian polar caps and melt it, apparently it would cover the entire martian surface to, like, 11 meters deep for a little bit, and then, like Laura said, it would be lost. Laura  13:05   Yeah, there's a lot we don't know about how much water is actually on Mars. Their estimates come with a large range of error, because there's a lot that we still don't know. But we are learning a lot every day. Brian  13:13   So this idea of the of the atmosphere being so thin because the planet is so small, I mean, could you have a thicker atmosphere on Mars? Is it possible? Laura  13:21   So that's one of the big questions in terraforming. I should clarify that I'm not an atmospheric scientist, but if I get something wrong, I apologize. But I was talking to a lot of people who are atmospheric scientists recently at a conference just a few days ago, and there's actually a lot of talk right now. For those who are looking at terraforming, they look at nanotechnology. And so if you take like because it's not only water ice, but there's also dry acid Mars. And if you kind of evaporate the things that are frozen in the ice, and use nanotechnology to kind of help you with that, I didn't look into the details of how that would work, but they're able to they they were looking at the current escape rate of molecules, and like, the current rate at which the sun strips away the atmosphere, and the technology that would be helpful for like seeding the atmosphere. They think that there's a way that they could do that, not with current technology, but that that's a path forward to looking at actually creating a new atmosphere on Mars, then it could sustain it in the current solar system dynamics. Brian  14:10   And I guess there's also this, can you maintain it over a geologic time scale, or just the time scale that humans care about? Jason  14:17   One thing I found while doing research is that one issue with Mars maintaining its atmosphere under current conditions is that it doesn't have a magnetic field that apparently died about 4 billion years ago. And so the solar wind just basically is constantly stripping stuff off of Mars, anything that's light. And so anything you put up there, if it's a light element, then it gets stripped away, which I'm guessing, is why Mars has so little nitrogen in its atmosphere compared to Earth, but I don't actually know that.  Laura  14:45   Yeah, that's a really good question. I do a lot with nitrogen. That's a big part of what I look at is how nitrogen is available and how you can do that in the soil. But yeah, there's a lot of pondering on whether nitrogen is in the atmosphere or whether, in the past, Mars had a lot of nitrogen, and they assume that. Probably did, and that if it just escaped, they're like, where is it? Now, that's a big question we don't have a good answer to yet.  So what we need to do is, you know, based on the documentary, The Core, we need to go restart the core, right? The Core is like, the worst geology, Jason  15:14   Yeah. However, that actually does relate a little bit to the game, because one of the projects you can build is equatorial magnetic fields, or something to essentially create an artificial magnetic field for Mars. That is still like very science fiction. But someone did point out that if you were to put a very powerful magnetic field at let's see, it was one of the Legrange points which we talked about in a previous episode. So one of these stable points in between Mars and the Sun.  Brian  15:41   Oh, a magnetic shield.  Jason  15:43   Yes, if you put a powerful enough shield there, it would actually deflect the wind enough to maintain Mars's atmosphere. We don't currently have the technology to build a powerful enough field, but apparently it's only, like, 10 times higher than we can currently build, which, like, is a lot, but that's not insurmountable. Is like that could actually be feasible sometime in the next century. Brian  16:04   How do you power something like that? Laura  16:06   Well, the person I was talking with a few days ago, who is an atmospheric person, was saying that the current escape rate, you might not even need a magnetosphere or the ionosphere to protect it, that the magnetic shield at the current loss rate might not be necessary. But at the past last week, when someone was a little more active in its younger states, when it was very active, very active, it's it's very hard to predict, and that solar wind is a lot more chaotic. It would have stripped away anything, and then Mars didn't have enough volcanic activity to replenish its own atmosphere. That's part of the story too. Is also the current dynamics of the sun, and what we understand about that would play into it a lot.  Brian  16:37   I guess we should get away from the atmosphere and let you focus on the stuff that you actually want. Jason  16:42   Yes, the geology. There are three aspects the game has as key terraforming metrics. One is the atmosphere, which we talked about already. They use, specifically oxygen. And I've got to say, I'm impressed at the research done in this, because they didn't just pull numbers out of the air. No pun intended. They actually did research on where do people live at the extremes on Earth? Okay, if we can get Mars to that, we're probably okay. So a common one coming up was like La Paz Bolivia, which is something like 5000 meters above sea level. It's very thin atmosphere. It's about 14% atmospheric pressure, oxygen, which is the goal in the game. Also its annual temperature. Average annual temperature is about eight degrees C, which is your goal in the game. Once you reach eight degrees C average temperature on Mars, you have terraformed it temperature wise. And then the last one is water, so air temperature, and then water, which I don't know where this one came from. They said if you get specifically, 9% covered, that's enough to have a stable hydrologic cycle, so stable, like evaporation, clouds, rain and it kind of being self sustaining, as opposed to constantly having to feed stuff into it. So those are your three goals. Brian  17:51   Some of these metrics also create positive feedback loops, right? Yeah. You reach a certain temperature, you get to add water, you reach a certain atmospheric pressure, you get to add heat.  Laura  18:00   And the atmospheric pressure would also play into how stable that hydrologic cycle is. I feel like there's a lot of things that would overlap. So that's a really complicated model.  Jason  18:08   Yeah. But now let's get down to the part, because one part of the game, a very important part, is basically planting trees on Mars. It's greening the planet. And this sounds like it's right in your wheelhouse. What do we need to do to terraform Mars like that. What do we need to actually get things growing, assuming we can get, like, atmosphere and heat and stuff more or less under control? Well, on a large scale. So this is Laura  18:29   a really great balance, because there's like, the small scale. Can you just take a small amount of Mars materials and do like, a garden inside of a closed habitat, versus Are you trying to plant forests on Mars? That's a huge difference. And I think the technology you did for either would be different, but a couple of things. So one of the biggest things about Mars that makes it difficult to grow things is that salinity. So if you take, like, a evaporative environment, you have a lot of salts being left behind. So if you look at a lot of deserts on Earth, or even just really dry air, like Antarctica would be a polar desert, and there's, like, a lot of salts that get left behind as the water evaporates, and you just build those up over time. And Mars has had 1000s of years to be dry, and so there's a lot of salt that's been left behind, and a lot of those salts are very soluble, so you could potentially rinse them out of the soil, but that takes a lot of water. And so how you do that in a way that's actually feasible, and how you take the materials that are there and transform them into something that could support an entire forest would be a quite a challenge. There are benefits, in the sense that all the minerals, the nutrients are there to Mars has a lot of phosphorus, more than Earth, actually. So there's a lot of phosphorus on Mars. There's not a lot of nitrogen. But potentially you could produce nitrogen through waste, or if you put that back into the atmosphere, in some way, there are trace nitrates, but like, parts per billion is the most we found so far. But there's probably enough potassium if you harvest it from the right places. So these are NPK and nitrogen phosphate, potassium are some of the biggest nutrients that you need for plants, but everything else is there in sufficient amount, calcium, magnesium, plenty of that. Sulfates are a very common thing on Mars. Is probably too much sulfate, in fact, but those are easy to dissolve out. And so finding ways to balance that would probably be a big factor, and doing that and having enough water to actually do that would be a challenge. Brian  20:11   So what's the best way to address the nitrogen limitation issue? Then, Laura  20:14   I think one way is through just if you're taking people to Mars or taking nitrogen waste, and so the human waste, any gardens are growing within a closed habitat, all that plant waste, there's quite a bit of nitrogen in that. And so we can figure out how to recover that and use things like denitrification. The nitrogen cycle is really complex and very biologically driven kind of cycle on Earth. And so you have the denitrification takes nitrates and returns it to N2O, probably the easiest way to say that turns it to the atmosphere. And so that will give you an atmospheric nitrogen. And you also have nitrogen fixation, which some plants can partner with certain bacteria to do, and that can kind of bring it out of the atmosphere into a form that's bioavailable. So there's this whole cycle of nitrogen that would go along with the hydrologic cycle to kind of understand how that might be a function, Jason  21:02   okay And here we have where the Martian is accurate, because the was reusing recycled human waste in order to grow his potatoes, because they needed them as a source of nutrients. I remember I read years ago. It was one of the Martian rovers was testing the soil, and they kept talking about how, if you add water to it, it would get very caustic. Is that because of all these salts? Laura  21:23   That's part of it, that's also because of there's other things. So there's a specific type of salt called perchlorates, and chlorates that are in the soil of Mars, and a lot of other magnesium chlorides and things that are exothermic when they react with water. So there is a lot of stuff in this well that has been dry for a long time to be added water. So you can have quite a lot of exothermic reactions. You can have a lot of peroxide reactions, and a lot of different things that could potentially do things to the soil. You also have a lot of pH ranges. And so depending on where you are in Mars, the minerals that are there indicate that it was acidic or alkaline or somewhere in the middle, so circumneutral. There's a lot of pH ranges. So depending on what particular minerals that you put that water in, you might get a lot of pH reactions Jason  22:07   And what's bad about exothermic and peroxide reactions like EXO I'm trying to remember my chemistry, exothermic gives off heat, or Okay, and what's bad about those, as far as life is concerned.  Laura  22:08   Well with exothermic reactions that give off a lot of heat, well, I guess if you're holding it in your hand, and you drop water on it, and you have a lot of heat release, it could burn you. But for like, life, it's more of a challenge in that for any kind of microorganism like a bacteria that's living there, they have to know how to manage that heat in a way that doesn't, like, kill them. There are things that can figure that out and use that to their advantage. They can actually use that heat to, like, help it out with a lot of life has figured things out like that on Earth in these crazy environments, but that would be really difficult to get energy out of that system in the right way for it to be supportive of life. Brian  22:48   Also sounds like one of these opportunities for a feedback loop. If you have liquid water, and it's mixing with perchlorates and then releasing heat, then you're heating the soil.  Laura  22:55   Potentially, I'm not sure how much heat, how much would be there to heat it up and like, if there's other things that are going to counteract that chemically, that would absorb the heat. That's hard to know. I don't think we know enough to really predict that accurately.  Brian  23:07   Oh, also, I said the soil word. So maybe we should talk about the difference between soil and regolith.  Laura  23:11   This is one of my favorite discussions about Mars, Regolith and soil. I think it depends on how you're defining soil, so if from a geochemist's perspective, so as a geologist, I would call regolith soil, and the same way that I would call like the much like in Antarctica where you have like, this very, very rocky material that is basically it's soil. That could be the same argument for regolith versus soil. And so as a geochemist, I think of soil as something that, over time, has developed and weathered and kind of stores the history of that area. And so I don't think of it necessarily for specifically for growing plants. So that's one feature a soil can do, but it's also that it just stores the chemical history, and, like the geological history, the weathering history. So how the rocks have weathered over time can be stored in that package of material. And so I feel like in that sense, it is a soil, and that's what we can we can tell a lot about the history of that area and how things have weathered, and the behavior of different things in that system, from that package of soil, but from an agricultural perspective, it's very much not really a soil and this says it's not to develop into these, like really nice horizons and layers. There are organics on Mars, but not enough to be like this rich organic layer and the O horizon, or like an A horizon. So there's all these different things that go into soil science that we think that we think of from a crop and soil science perspective for like, agriculture, that it's missing. And so in that sense, it's kind of good to differentiate that it's not really a soil, it's more like a regolith so it depends on what context you're using the word. Jason  24:33    okay. So like, regolith is usually like, it's the ground up rocks on the surface of a planet. And then most of the time when we talk about soil, it's like, okay, it's then been altered by life into be something else, but you're saying you can also have a wider definition. Laura  24:47   Yeah, soil is part of regolith on Earth. So Earth has regolith too, and it includes, like, the soil down into like slightly weathered bedrock. And it's kind of like a hazy line where one starts and the other ends. But. Once you, like, reach past, like the weathering front and there's no longer weathering, that would be like the bedrock, but above that, where you have active weathering going on, you have different types of stages. Soil is included in that package.  Brian  25:10   Ooh, now I've got another thing I want to add to my mineral collection. I need some earth regolith. So how do we get started? I mean, what? What are the first things you would put into an enclosed environment on Mars to start turning that regolith into soil?  Laura  25:25   That's a sorry, that's a complicated question to think about. So it depends on what you're doing. So it also depends on your approach. There's lots of different ways you can grow plants. There's hydroponic system, or aeroponics and aquaponics and all sorts of product variations. That basically means growing with water, or like, Aeroponics is spraying the plants a little bit to support them, but it's like in the air. Essentially, aquaponics involves fish. And so you have, you create your own, like mini cycle, or mini system, where the fish kind of provide some nutrients to and then you kind of, like have that recycling system. So there's a lot of different approaches you could use that don't even involve regolith directly, you still have to extract any fertilizers or water or other necessary resources or even kind of rooting mediums that are common in hydroponics. You'd still have to obtain that from regolith or from ice mixed with regolith. And so it doesn't take regolith out of the picture. But there's a lot of approaches you could do that don't even directly grow it in the regolith by itself. But there are also plants that benefit from having that kind of soil, like environments, that could use regolith as a component into how you develop growing mediums for or like a potting mix and so you just gotta think of it like if you're making up anyone as a gardener, if you're making a potting mix on Earth, you add those different ingredients together, maybe you have some peat or some coconut coir with some perlite and some sand, and that makes a really great potting mix. And so what are equivalent ingredients that you would need on Mars to do something like that? And so I feel like that's a great place to start thinking about, what are we growing? And so the organic material the early systems will probably largely rely on hydroponics, because there's a lot of processing we have to do to the soil before it can be used to actually grow plants. And so in order to have that support there while that processing is happening, and that processing has to happen with other things too, like biomining or even just getting water out as well. So you're doing these processes either way. And so you're doing this processes on the side, you have to start with something. And so you might start with a more of a hydroponic system, and have mostly lettuce and things that provide nutrients that are hard to keep stable over that long trip to Mars. So that's one of the reasons to grow a garden on Mars. It's not just for food, but for specifically, for nutrients and minerals, for vitamins that are very unstable, and so it would degrade by the time we got there that humans need to survive. So that's what you kind of start with, and then you expand from there and kind of diversify from that.  Brian  27:38   Gotcha. So again, we want to avoid the space scurvy,  Laura  27:40   Yes, correct.  Brian  27:42   Okay, that's very cool. Jason  27:44   So here's a question, Laura, if you were in charge of this benevolent world government that wants to terraform Mars, what would be your top priorities? It's like if you had to look at the planet from where we are right now and say, Okay, our end goal 500 years from now is to be able to have people walking around on the surface of Mars, breathing and not dying. What would you do? What would you start that process with? Laura  28:07   That's a really tough question, because, and that gets really nuanced in the sense of, do we even want to terraform Mars? Is one of the big questions. Is there a benefit into preserving Mars as it is? And perhaps in this, in this particular the way that the game was framed it, we've kind of reached a point where we have to, because we need those resources, and so we don't have much option. That's a whole nother ethics question there. And get into the lot of that, but there's a lot we can learn from Mars in its current state, about about Earth and about how it's evolved, and about prebiotic chemistry. And so like, what is the chemistry you need to make life, or even early life, if Mars managed to get life in the end, if Mars had enough time with enough with those good conditions for life to develop, what does that life look like? And what are the what the can that teache us about life on Earth and like how it's developed, what it takes to for life to start. And so there's a lot of questions that are preserved right now on Mars, that plate tectonics have recycled. On Earth, we have very, very few physical places to test that. And all those physical places have been greatly altered by weathering and plate tectonics and things like that. So it's not really preserved very well. So if you head over to Mars, you have that preserved. There is no plate tectonics recycling the crust, and so we can study that there. And so how do you preserve that science that we're trying to learn about now? And maybe 200 years in the future, they've already gathered all the samples they need to do that, and so they can kind of set that aside. But then also, how do you do it sustainably over time? And so I feel like we tend to alter things in a way that's for the current generation, but you want to do it for hundreds of generations. Like, how you balance that? And so prior to know, things that aren't just like the flashbang, let's do it right now, and it works. But like, will it work for a long time?  Jason  28:07   Agreed, and that is one thing that I've seen come up in the conversations, because there are people who are talking about Terraforming Mars right now, or starting colonies on Mars or whatever. And that's one thing I've come up is the ethics of it, and should we be trying to terraform this other planet which is really hostile to Earth life at the moment when we have. Have another perfectly good planet that maybe we should just fix up and make a bit nicer.  Laura  30:04   Honestly, if we have the technology to hear it from Mars, and we have the technology terraform Earth, or if we get to that level where we can terraform an entire planet, we can fix Earth. And so why aren't we doing that's kind of one of the things I bring up.  Jason  30:14   Yeah, it was interesting reading the groups that are currently involved in this. So one has gone defunct. There was the Mars one colony mission I read about, oh, no, Brian  30:24   wait, is that the Is this the reality show? Jason  30:28   Maybe their funding model was that they were going to be selling documentaries of the selection process. But the really interesting thing is that their goal stated was a one way ticket to Mars of their final people, which I think were going to be 40 people, they were going to send, and they were not going to have a way to come back. Not surprisingly, many people thought that this was a suicide mission, and they had trouble getting funding. I don't blame them for trying. I mean, as far as a dream goes, that's really cool. And they had nearly 3000 people apply for one of these spots, but their group, unfortunately went bankrupt in 2019 so that is no longer on the table.  Brian  31:05   Oh, they didn't even get taken out by covid.  Jason  31:09   No, and then the other one, the one that most people hear about, is Elon Musk, who has his goal of using SpaceX to start a Martian colony. I think their current plans are like a first mission in 2029 or thereabouts, and then some sort of base by 2050s there's lots of discussion about how feasible that is, but they apparently think it's feasible enough that actually there is a clause in the Starlink satellite system that if you use that satellite, you are agreeing that Mars is basically A politically distinct entity and not subject to Earth's meddling. Brian  31:42   I'm sure that'll hold up in international courts.  Jason  31:45   Yes, it's one thing that means nothing right now. It's just an ideological thing. But I thought that was cool. It's like, oh, that's one of the things they sneak into the End User License Agreement. You have to agree that Mars is independent. Laura  31:56   That's crazy. Well, that's another huge area of like, work that needs to be done that I am not an expert in, is the government and the policies that go into how you ethically build a society on another planet or even another moon. Like how, even how we're going to do that for the moon. There's a lot of things that we need to establish, ethics wise and legal wise to make that fair. The ethics are a huge part of it.  Brian  32:17   Like, can you have children on Mars? Yeah, because if you can't, that's not going to work, particularly without a magnetosphere and with low gravity and with nutritional it's just there's a bunch of really fundamental questions that maybe need to be discussed before you start sending people to Mars. Jason  32:35   And I gotta say, like science fiction is a rich mine here. People have been doing this for decades, and I know there have been specific stories I've read that have talked about each one of these things. So one that talked about the issues of bearing children on the moon with low gravity and the genetic engineering that had to be that. I'm sorry I don't remember which story it was 20 years ago. I did grow up on classic science fiction, so things like the Martian Chronicles from Ray Bradbury. I think Bradbury kind of knew that Mars was a dead planet, but he still maintained that little older mystique of like, there could be civilizations there and stuff. And if you haven't read them, I strongly recommend it. They're great stories. Laura  33:10   Yeah, there's quite a rich history of science fiction for terraforming Mars.  Brian  33:14   Yeah, and the game designers specifically cite Stanley Kim Robinson's Mars trilogy as inspiration for this game, three books, red Mars, green Mars and blue Mars, detailing the 200 year terraforming of Mars. Yes, rich mine here people have explored all sorts of like political organizations and the physics and the chemistry, the biology, the ethics. So, yeah, that's a great thing about science fiction. It lets us ask, what if, about things that haven't happened yet.  Looking a little bit more modern. Of course, we've got The Expanse series, which takes that idea, sort of and like, applies the science and the culture and the politics, and takes all that very seriously.  Laura  33:50   Yeah, I have watched that one pretty recently. And there's a lot I love how it dives into the human health aspects and the politics a little bit. And I mean, there's a lot we don't understand about how human health is going to respond to partial gravities. We have two endpoints. We have Earth gravity and we have microgravity. That's where we have most of our data from, and a lot of that data comes from very athletic astronauts. Those kind of a very narrow data point to this draw from. There is definitely effects. And so it's interesting to see how that might play out in kind of like that world, at least.  Jason  34:16   Although, I think we can all agree the height of science fiction for this was the Stars on Mars, reality TV show that came out last year on Fox, where they crammed 16 celebrities into the Australian desert in a simulated Martian colony and had them perform survivor-like tasks like erecting comm tower, getting water, destroying alien fungus. And it was all hosted by William Shatner. Of course, I've not seen it. I never heard of it until I started doing research for this. But it's like that sounds. It sounds like it could either be awesome or a train wreck or possibly both at the same time. And the few reviews I read indicated that, yes, it was actually a bit of both of those, depending on your taste. Brian  34:56   I don't know if we'll have a chance to drop this back into earlier. The conversation. But when we were talking about this idea of preserving the current Martian environment and looking for life, the game deals with both of those to some degree. There is a project to make sort of a Martian preserve, where you sort of try to keep a part of Mars as it was before, although to do that, you have to do it below certain temperature pressure thresholds, or you lose the opportunity to do it. And searching for life is a routine. It's just something you can do, right? Jason, you did that when you played, right?  Jason  35:28   Yeah, there were certain cards I could do where I could search for life, and if I got lucky on the draw, then I would get some sort of bonus points at the end of the game, presumably finding some evidence of past life. I don't think the game has any intention of there being present life on Mars that we are essentially  Brian  35:45   wiping out? Jason  35:46    Yes. Basically, I think it's all like, oh, it's fossil stuff there.  Brian  35:50   Yeah. I think obviously, as microbiologists losing the opportunity to study a second example of life, it would be beyond tragic. Laura  36:00   Yes. So this is a really big part of the ethical end of the scientific challenge. Of it, you have astrobiology, which is like the study of extraterrestrial life or the potential for it, and you have space biology, which is how Earth life responds to the space environment. And so as we do space biology, are we destroying our ability to do astrobiology? And as soon as you bring people to Mars, you bring bacteria to Mars. So yeah. Brian  36:20    I mean, we, we may have already, right? They try not to.  Laura  36:23   Potentially in small amounts, but it's pretty harsh condition, so it's unlikely that it's like, spread far and wide or anything like that. But yeah, they have very, very strict bio burden requirements for any spacecraft that goes to Mars. So you have to get it extremely clean and you and to send it. That's, that's the planetary protection. Is what that's called. Yeah, super clean. And then whatever manages to survive inside a NASA clean room probably is not adapted to survive that well in outer space and then on Mars itself. So like, again, probability of infection being low, but humans are walking bags of microbes. Like, literally, there's some arguments that part of the role of your intestine is basically to be a microbial incubator because of the partnerships we have there. And so, yeah, we could never go to Mars without bringing a whole bunch of contamination with us. And I mean, most of it would just die on Mars. But to quote the great Ian Malcolm, Life finds a way Brian  37:13   that documentary Jurassic Park, yes.  Laura  37:15   So that's like a really big part of, like, sending humans to Mars. A lot of scientists who study astrobiology are like, how about we wait a little longer? Because they really want to dig into being able to understand if there was ever a life on Mars, and is it that life distinct enough that we could differentiate? Because part of the problem is, as soon as you put a person there and you contaminated it, can you ever declare that life came from Mars? Or are they always going to go back to like, oh, but that could have been from a person,  Brian  37:17   Particularly if it ends up having DNA with the same code?  Laura  37:20   Yes, although there's a lot of chemistry on Mars, that maybe they just have a slightly different variation on DNA, I don't know. There's a lot to think about how that could work, and about life as we know it, and life as we don't know it. Brian  37:51   Unfortunately, I think we're starting to run a little short on time, so we should probably look into sort of wrapping things up.  Jason  37:56   Is there any last stuff you want to get out science wise?  Laura  37:59   There's a lot that we could talk about with astrobiology, but I won't dive into that. That's a wholewhole another podcast I feel like. So I think I can leave it at that.  Brian  37:59   When we find a good game, we'll have you back on to talk about that. Okay,  Jason  38:09   okay, before I wrap up, there's one cool science fact. So Mars has lots of cool science facts. There's one I wanted to give, which is Mars has the record for the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons. And I wanted to put in context, how big Olympus Mons is, so I looked up the stats. So this is a single volcano that is the size of Italy, and two and a half times taller than Mount Everest. That is one volcano we are talking about, and that's why it holds the record. And that's just awesome. Laura  38:36   They've recently discovered some volcanoes in the deep ocean that approach that size really, yes, the reason that I get that big on Mars is because it doesn't have plate tectonics. The plate isn't moving until it all builds in one spot. And so on Earth, that has to happen. It's hard to get that to happen on earth, but there is one volcano they have found under the deep sea that approaches the size of Olympus Mons  But, yeah, it's crazy. Mars has the biggest volcano and the biggest Canyon and the biggest of everything, and yet it's like so it's at the quarter of the size of Earth, Brian  39:02   and the this slope of Olympus mods is so gentle that I heard, if you walked on it, you wouldn't realize  Jason  39:08   All right, so let's, let's start pulling this to a close. So the way we wrap this up, Laura, is that we're professors. We're used to grading things, so we give grades. Brian, I'm going to throw to you first about the gameplay. So this is your game. You're the one that actually owns the copy we played. What do you think of the gameplay on this? Where do you rate it?  Brian  39:25   Okay, so for gameplay, I this is such a fun game to play. This is and actually, this is one of my wife's favorite games. Let me think I usually rate gameplay based on how likely I am to throw in the car or pull it off the shelf. And basically, there are plenty of games that we have that never come off the shelf. They just sit there. They look pretty and that's pretty much the end of their involvement in my gaming hobby life, Terraforming Mars. In that regard, I'm going to give it an A minus. I think it's a little complex, and it takes a little bit of time to refresh yourself, but I could easily see a gaming group, or even my own group, where it's like, this is just, oh, let's play gaming Mars, and it's just part of your. Normal rotation. Jason  40:01   I put it in that same area of A, A minus. It's just my experience that it it does take a while. So our favorite games take about an hour, hour and a bit to play. And this is definitely more the two hours, two hours plus game. And that's just personal taste. I think there's a lot of depth to it. And there's like six or eight expansions of these, although my postdoc in the lab says that only one or two of them are actually worth playing. So take that for whatever it's worth. I have not touched any of the expansions. I don't know myself. Part of me feels bad saying that. I'd give it like a minus a range. But number seven on Board Game Geek I mean, it's like, this is one of those places where I think maybe I'm wrong about this.  Brian  40:37   I think that the Board Game Geek community is just a different level of player. Do you know what I mean? Like, yeah, those are committed people. Jason  40:45   Okay, time to grade the science. So I'm gonna give the science an A, and I'm gonna give it specifically, because this game is not meant to be a science education game, and yet, they did really good research into it. Like, if this was meant to teach you about Mars and Mars science facts and stuff, I'd probably put a little lower, because it's not because it's not like as obvious, but they did their research in terms of, like, how much atmospheric oxygen do humans actually need, what sort of temperature will be worthwhile? There are little science facts scattered throughout the rule book about Mars and just random factoids. When you place tiles on the board, you get resources. You get trees more near the equator, because that's where plants would do better. You get minerals near the mountains, because that's where those are more likely to be. There's all these little touches that don't have to be there. And yet show that even if this is not meant to be science education, it is strongly grounded in actual Martian science. And so I'm going to give that an A. I would frame Terraforming Mars as a scientific game. I think the science is in the center of it. And I give my science rating based on how much science you're going to learn, intentional or unintentional. And again, I think this is an A based on that. I think that you don't come away from Terraforming Mars not knowing more about what that process can look like and what it would entail. Laura, did you want to give a science grade? I know you didn't get a chance to play the game.  Laura  42:03   So it seems like it focuses mostly on the atmospheric side of the terraforming, although there is a certain soil part of it. So it's hard for me to grade it because I'm not an atmospheric scientist.  Jason  42:13   Fair enough. That's we're going to wrap it up. I'm going to give a big shout out, and thanks to Laura for being on here. Laura, if people want to look you up, like, how do they best find you?  Laura  42:21   I would think the easiest way is probably on LinkedIn. My last name is not very common, so if you just look up Laura Fackrell, you'll probably find me, especially if you put anything with Mars or geology with that.  Jason  42:30   And then you said, so you're currently at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And then you told me that you're moving to some place in Texas, to a commercial company? Laura  42:38   Yes, I'm finishing up a postdoc right now, so I'll finish that up, and then I'll relocate to Houston, and I'm going to be working in the space industry, still down in Texas, in Houston. Brian  42:46   that's so cool.  Jason  42:47   Well, thank you so much, Laura. Thank you everyone for listening, and that's what we're going to call it. Have a good week and happy gaming. Brian  42:53   Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.  Jason  42:57   This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you, and have fun Playing dice with The Universe.    

Today we cover Cytosis, a worker-placement game about cell biology from Genius Games. This is one of our all-time high scorers, with both excellent science and excellent gameplay. Join us for a tour de cell as we go through the nucleus, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi, mitochondria, and cell membrane, plus gush over how cute kinesins are and argue about whether bacteria have organelles. Find our socials at GamingWithScience.net  #BoardGames #Science #CellBiology #GeniusGames #Cytosis #Protein #RNA #DNA #Hormones Timestamps: 00:51 - Protein sequencing 03:54 - Intro to Genius Games 06:50 - Intro to Cytosis 12:48 - Cells & their parts 16:06 - RNA & ribosomes 20:22 - Endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi, & hormones 24:48 - Mitochondria & glucose transport 27:11 - Learning from the game 28:40 - Bacteria 30:58 - Inconsequential nitpicks 36:11 - Final grades Links: Official Website (Genius Games) Reverse Translation (preprint) Video of John Conveyou Organelles of a Euakaryotic cell (Wikipedia) Kinsesin motor proteins This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript: Jason  0:00   Music. Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:12   Today, we're going to discuss Cytosis by Genius Games. Hey, I'm Brian. Jason  0:21   This is Jason. Brian  0:23   Welcome back to Gaming with Science. Today, we're going to talk about Cytosis, a cell biology game. It was a game designed by John Coveyou by Genius Games. I don't know why it's taken us this long to do a Genius Games game, considering they are specialists in hard science games, and they seem to share the exact same core values as gaming with Science. I know this is our first. I'm sure it won't be our last. But anyway, before we get into that game, Jason, do you have anything for us to banter about? Jason  0:51   Well, I like the science topics, and you actually pointed me out to one that's related to this, which is a preprint. So you've got publications in final journals, but you also these things called Preprints, which is where you post your paper up before it's been peer-reviewed, so you can get the results out. You can kind of stake a claim to it. But according to their preprint, they've developed a way to do not quite reverse translation, but something similar. So we're going to talk about this more later today, where translation is where you take the genetic information from a cell and turn it into protein, and it's generally a one way street. You can't go back, but this group has developed a method to, not so much go backwards, but at least to take the proteins apart in such a way that it's encoded in DNA that they can then sequence and get back out. And this is really cool, because we're really good, like we as a field, science is very good at sequencing DNA right now. DNA sequencing in some form, has been around for 40, 50, years, but high throughput sequencing has been around for at least 20 years now. Ee're very, very good at it now. In fact, we're astonishingly good at how much DNA we can sequence. We suck at sequencing proteins. It can be done. It's like, don't get me wrong, there are methods to do it, but compared to what we can do with DNA, it's slow, it's expensive, it's hard, and I don't know that this method really solves all of those problems, but it potentially gets rid of some of them. And if we can find a way of turning proteins, protein information, into DNA information, and just hooking into the existing DNA sequencing infrastructure, that could open up whole new ways of looking at biology, looking at things, because most of the time, it's the protein that matters. We look at the DNA because the DNA is easy, but most of that, one way or another, ends up in a protein, either directly or by changing which proteins are around. And so being able to look at the proteins more directly gives us a lot more information about diseases, about things that in plant science we care about, like crop production or disease resistance. It's like there's a really cool thing that could open up there. And so even if this group doesn't work out, I hope someone manages to, like, build off of this and make it work.  Brian  3:00   This is the first time I've seen a preprint, and be like, someone's going to get a Nobel Prize for this idea. Maybe not this group, but somebody's going to get this to work, and somebody's going to have a Nobel Prize for this. I mean, the whole idea about DNA. Why are we so good at doing DNA? Because DNA is set up to make copies of itself, right? You can take a very small amount of nucleic acid and using a process called the polymerase chain reaction, generate massive amounts of DNA. You can go from one molecule to a billion in a couple of hours. So you could start from a low amount of material and work up to a huge amount of material. But proteins don't do that right? It's one direction. So the only way to read the proteins out is you just make more and more and more sensitive instruments. It's neat to see something that could change the field so drastically in such a short period of time.  Jason  3:45   Yeah, so will this one pan out? Don't know, but it's really cool in the meantime.  Brian  3:49   Yeah, for sure. All right, so do you want to talk about cytosis?  Jason  3:52   Yeah, let's dig into this. Brian  3:54   You know, when I do these, I usually try to do a little bit on the designer of the games. So again, the designer of such. Well, what is cytosis? Cytosis? What does it actually mean? Cytosis isn't actually a word that you typically see on its own. It's the Greek root that means cell. So cytosis would just mean "of the cell," so exocytosis "out of the cell." Anyway. You'll see cytosis a lot, of a lot of places, but that's not typically a word you'll find out on its own. But this is a game about cells. I mean, that is the the proxy of this. It's cytosis, a cell biology game. So the designer, John Conveyou, he seems like a really interesting guy. In fact, in the show notes, I'm going to point to an interview that he did that kind of gives a little bit of his history in his past and like, what brought him to this place. But the short version of it is, is that he has a master's degree in engineering, that he was a science teacher for a while, teaching biology, teaching chemistry, teaching all these core things. Had an engineering position and left it to found Genius Games, is he a CEO and founder, and is as near as I can tell, the lead designer on pretty much every one of their products. They may have co designers, but his name is on basically every one of them, and a lot of these were his ideas. He  also has these games that are like partner games. So he has chemistry games, Ionic and Covalent, that are a pair of games that talk about ionic bonds and covalent bonds. He's been working on a series of games that will go from transcription, making a RNA to making a peptide to and again, all the way building up, just like cytosis. Anyway. So what is Genius Games? Genius Games is this company that again, like I'm surprised that we haven't dealt with them yet. They have a great tagline: "credible science, incredible games." They do have a mission statement. And if I was to boil it down, I'm going to paraphrase a little bit, basically, they just believe in the power of scientific literacy to solve societal problems, and they also believe in the democratization of science literacy, and that games are a good way to do that. So they make games that are hard science themes, games where the science and the science concepts are in the center of the game. You know, if we consider wingspan our A, I mean, hopefully a good Genius Games should be like an A+ in terms of like, that's the whole point, is learning the science as you play the game.  Jason  6:01   You've complained in the past about games where the science is there, but not, like, super integrated into the game. And it sounds like the whole modus operandi of this company is that, no, the science is going to be at the center, and we're going to have a partnership between the science and the game. So it's not just painted on top of it.  Brian  6:17   Education games has kind of a dirty word in the gaming industry. Education Games is a way of, like, just putting something on your games that's like, well, is the game fun to play? Well, no, but it's educational. So that is also counter to their design principles. Here, the game needs to be fun and awesome to play. And also, by the way, you're going to learn a lot of good science at the same time. That's a lot more than we would usually talk about the creator and the company, but it, this company needed a little bit of time to talk about. And like I said, there are definitely other Genius Games, games from this company that we're going to talk about in the future. In fact, we have some planned already for season two. But what is cytosis itself? The game is a worker placement game. If you've ever seen a model of a cell, which I think we all have at some point, you lay this out, and you have the player mat that looks like a diagram of a generic human cell. We've all probably had to take a test where you had to label the little parts of the cell. It's like, oh, where's the nucleus? Where's the endoplasmic reticulum? Well, it's that in game form. So you've got this mat in front of you with all the, not all, but a lot of the little organelles. And at each of these there's going to be a little place where you do worker placement, where you're going to do different actions. You're going to have four different types of research cubes, black for mRNA, red for protein, yellow for lipids, and green for carbohydrates. I think maybe there's a little bit of a color choice there. I mean, I imagine red for protein kind of makes sense. We think about like meat. Fats are often yellow. I don't know why carbohydrates are green, but they are. Jason  7:44   They come from plants? Brian  7:45   Oh yeah, that makes sense to me. Why do you think mRNA is black?  Jason  7:49   That I don't know. Maybe because the nucleus is usually dark and that's where it's generated?  Brian  7:53   That seems as good a reason as any. You also have these little tokens that are ATP. They're kind of shaped like a little ATP molecule. I don't know why those aren't a token or something. Probably just to distinguish them from the other cellular resources, which functions as the sort of currency in the game, just like it is in the cell, which I'm sorry I'm kind of jumping around. We're going to come back and talk about the science stuff more. So if this is unfamiliar, don't worry. We're going to come back and talk about it. In addition to that, you have cards at the top that are sort of like public goal cards that you can claim. You get bonus points around the cell. You got your point tracker. I would say that ultimately worker placement games kind of all have a relatively common language in terms of how this stuff works there. If you're familiar with one worker placement game, you kind of get the idea you can see how this is going to work. Jason  8:39   And in case anyone isn't, the basic idea is you have a set number of actions every turn, and you have something to represent those. And so you, you put your little worker, which could be a meeple of some sort, usually. In this case, they're little beakers, and you just, you put it on a spot, and you say, Okay, I'm going to do this action. And usually there's only so many spots to do that action. So if I claim the ability to make mRNA, then Brian cannot also claim that one, or at least he doesn't get as good a one as I did. So there's a strategy in terms of you can't just pick what's best all the time, because if someone else blocks your path, then suddenly you're out and you have to wait until next turn to do it. So that's some of the tension of it. There's finite places to go, and everyone's competing for whatever they need. Brian  9:21   There's a best spot and a second best spot. And then if you're playing with a lot of people, it's like, well, I just can't do that this turn, right? You'll also have a deck of event cards that you play in between rounds that may do things like, oh, there's going to be extra ATP available this turn. Or some of the cards are bad. If you've been hoarding your resource cubes now you've experienced toxicity, so you'll suffer from that. And then the other type of card is a cell component card. These are the things that you're going to be building in your cell and that are going to be earning you points. Other than that, the each individual player, like Jason said, has different colors of little flasks that, in this case, are our little meeples, let us do our actions, and as well as some little vesicles. Some little circle disks that you'll use to build some of your cell components. So that is what the game looks like. So as you play the game, you will take turns placing your little flasks to choose what you want to do. It'll allow you to collect the different resources, protein, mRNA and you're trying to build these little cell components that you'll then also have to pay an energy costs to score points, which they call health points. Which I don't know, what would be better than that? Homeostasis points or something? I'll have my little nitpick session at the end of the game. I think I do like to have my little nit picks. I think Jason's more forgiving than I am. But, I mean, I don't have a problem with this game at all. It's a great game, but there's a few little things always that are, yeah, maybe this could be a little different. At the end of each round, you'll flip over an event card that will change the cell in some way, add new resources or toxicity, and that's it. You just go until all of the event cards are used up, and then you count up how many points you have. Is that a fair summary? Jason  10:55   There's a few little surprises in terms of points at the end because of the bonus cards and everything. But mostly  it's pretty straightforward. You, you buy your little goal cards that, that are your little cell component cards, so you can build them, and you can score points off of them, and there's a few interactions. I wouldn't say it's a linear game, but there, it's very clear what you're trying to do. You're trying to build things in such a way to get more points than your opponents.  Brian  11:15   Do you worry that the reason it feels linear to us is because these are familiar concepts? Jason  11:20   No, I don't think so. I think, I mean, the game is linear in that you're, you have this chain of resources you have to move down in order to make it happen. And I don't mean that as a complaint about it, where saying, Oh no, it's like you want lots of things. No, it's, it's more just that the goals are very clear. It's not like there's some hidden way where once you've played this five or six time, you suddenly realize, like, Oh, this is the secret way to actually get lots of points out. Which I have seen some games do that, where the things that seem obvious at first are actually not the best choices. This is not one of them. Like the goals cards are pretty clear. There may be some nuances of interaction that open up a bit more complexity as you, as you mature and you get good at it, but mostly like you open this up to a new player, you see some basic rules. They'll know what they're supposed to do in order to try to win. Brian  12:05   Particularly if you've played work replacement games before, right? Like, if you're in the hobby, this is gonna, you'll get this immediately. And it's got good board design to kind of lead you through it, like most modern games do, right? You're not having to memorize everything. It's right there on the board.  Jason  12:20   Yes Brian  12:20   Let's talk about the science here a little bit and like, how is the game representing the science? So I gotta say, we've had games that have done this before, but at Genius Games, they've done all my work for me. There is a four page pamphlet included with cytosis called "cytosis, the science behind the game," that breaks down the science and how the game represents the science, which usually is most of the work that I have, that we have to do when we're doing planning out an episode of Gaming with Science. Jason  12:45   Well, then the big question is, do they cite their sources? Brian  12:48   They do not cite their sources, but they do provide, but they do provide a list of all of the people that provided their sources. They crowdsource the science of this game, but they don't have a references cited list. That's true. I think at this point, the only one where we've said, where they were explicit about the sources, was wingspan. Let me, let me think about how the best way. So, okay, what is a cell? The cell is the basic unit of life, and all life is made of cells. In fact, most life is unicellular. Is just a single cell. But any living thing that you can see from you to every plant to your pets, is made up of cells, individual cells working together and coordinating to build this larger body. So and all cells have and have certain things in common. They all have a membrane that is comprised of lipids, a lipid bilayer, um, kind of like a soap bubble with two walls. Again, lipids are one of the resources in the game. I'm kind of going to be bouncing back and forth between the science and how the game represents it, because it just, it's so intrinsic. It just makes sense to do that. Jason  13:50    And lipid is the the fancy science word for a fat or an oil or something. Brian  13:54   Fat, oil. Uh, let's see. So and then every cell is going to store its genetic information in DNA. Every cell is going to have proteins that are actually doing most of the work, providing most of the structure, and then every cell uses the same way of translating DNA, using RNA as an intermediate, into those proteins. That is every cell, and every cell basically uses the exact same code. There are so few exceptions to that rule that, like we make a very specific point about them when something is different. So you're going to notice I haven't talked about carbohydrates, which is the other thing that provides the energy for the cell. So these all make up the macromolecules we've got mRNA, protein, lipids, carbohydrates. Jason  14:35   And again, science term: "macro molecule" just means big molecule, because cells have big molecules, which are these very complicated things that are joined together, especially like the proteins and the, and the nucleic acids, like DNA and RNA, yeah, as opposed to simple molecules, which are small things. Water is one. Individual sugars are not macromolecules, but if you start joining them together into long things like starch, then they become macro molecules, because you start joining these small units together into much larger ones.  Brian  15:02   Yeah, I think, like, you can find small individual compounds, like in lots of different contexts, but then to find macromolecules, those are pretty much you're going to find those in cells or made by living cells. Like you can find little individual molecules inside of meteorites, but you're not going to find macromolecules like giant proteins, strains of DNA. In cytosis, we're playing as a human cell. What kind of cell? I don't know, some kind of generic human cell, but you can take all cells and you can split them into two big camps. There are eukaryotic cells, that's like our cells, that is a cell with a nucleus, that is a cell where the DNA is stored in a separate little compartment within the cell. That's the defining characteristic. So fungi, plants, humans and other animals, we are all eukaryotes. We all have these big, complicated cells with nuclei, and then in that they have other little compartments called organelles scattered around the cell that do different jobs. Usually those are also bound up in their own sort of separate little membrane bound compartment. And cytosis is kind of giving us a tour through the cell and how the cell works, right? I think I am also going to do that basic tour, and let's talk about the different things in the game. So again, I already mentioned DNA, where all the genetic information is stored. In a eukaryotic cell that is inside the nucleus. So if we want to express one of those genes from the DNA, we will turn a small portion of that DNA and copy it into a strand of mRNA messenger RNA. It's a single stranded RNA copy of the gene. How does the game represent that? In our nucleus is where we're going to get our RNA. That's one of the first steps, right? So one of your action, you place your action marker there, you can get some mRNA. Jason  16:41   Yeah, and this is the act of getting the information out of it. Think of a DNA as like, it's the long term storage of information in the cell, and it protects it. Your cells don't want to be accessing the DNA more than they have to, because every time you do, you open up the chance of getting damage. And if you damage your DNA, well, that damage gets copied, it gets saved. And basically you increase the chance that things are going to break down the line. So they don't actually want to access DNA much. So they will access it just a little bit to make an mRNA copy. This is like going to your big, fancy encyclopedia and just running off a quick photocopy of a few pages that you need access to. Then you put the encyclopedia back. You can take the pages out, you can mark them up, you can draw them on. You can put them through the shredder. Doesn't matter, because the original copy is still fine. Brian  17:26   It's funny how we keep having to update our analogies for these things too, because when was last time you made a photocopy of something? Jason  17:32   Okay, point Brian  17:35   But the principle is, is good and the principle is still there. DNA gets a lot of credit. We spend a lot of time talking about DNA, but the funny thing about DNA is DNA really does almost nothing, right? DNA is just the repository of information. The work is done by typically, by proteins, by enzymes that are doing the chemical react, doing most of the things in the cell are done by proteins. So the information stored in DNA, we got to turn it into proteins. That RNA copy carries the information for each protein. So we got to take that and then we got to load it onto another incredibly cool RNA molecule called a ribosome that can take that like an assembly line and read off the message in the RNA and convert that into a sequence of amino acids, the little, tiny bits and pieces, the 20 letter alphabet that makes up all the proteins in the cell. Jason  18:26   And this is so incredible. So this is like the core of life as we understand it, really, is this change going from nucleic acid to protein, going from RNA to protein. It is ancient. It is the thing that we use to basically tie all life on the planet together. As far as people can tell, it's thought that it basically predates DNA. So there's this thing called the RNA world hypothesis, because people are trying to figure out, How did life get started? Life is such a complicated, Rube-Goldberg contraption that it's like everything depends on everything else. How on earth could we have something simple enough to get going when we've just got a chemical soup going around? And the answer to that is still not known, but one hypothesis is that we once had a world of much simpler, of short RNAs and short peptides, small proteins working together, and the ribosome is one of the last and most robust artifacts from that time of turning RNA into protein. It's a ribozyme. It is an RNA enzyme, like the RNA does the work, which is really cool, because RNA usually doesn't do chemistry. It usually just stores information. Brian  19:30   Yeah, it is. It is the RNA is doing all the work. The proteins are there just to, you know, kind of provide support. Jason  19:36   It's a great big ball of RNA that has a few proteins stuck on the outside for decoration, but it is an RNA molecule. It is not a protein molecule. The protein is basically just providing stability.  Brian  19:47   So it's funny, we say DNA gets a lot of credit. Nobody pays attention to proteins. No, really, nobody pays attention to RNA. RNA is like the forgotten molecule.  Jason  19:56   Yes, I know my PhD work was in an RNA chemistry lab, and so we thought that all the time. And there's some really cool stuff that RNA can do that is probably outside the scope of this, this particular episode. But yes, RNA is the plants of the molecular biology. It's like, it just doesn't get all that much credit. People pay attention to the proteins and the DNA, and RNA just kind of overlooked. Brian  20:18   So, so we all have RNA blindness, is what you're saying? Jason  20:21   A lot, Yeah. Brian  20:22   Anyway, where were we? We got to turn our RNA into a protein, and the ribosomes are how we do that. So in Cytosis, you have two different places where you can do that. You've got our free ribosomes. These are floating in the cytosol, that liquidy, whatever that is full of all the stuff inside the cell, the inside bit, the goop. The free ribosome is where the cell is going to be making most of the proteins that the cell itself will use. But you've got another place that you're making proteins, and that is the rough endoplasmic reticulum. Oh, I really should have looked up the origin of these names. Do you know the origin of endoplasmic reticulum? Jason  20:57   So let's pick it apart. "Endoplasmic", so inside the plasm. So inside the cell. "Reticulum", reticulated is all sorts like folds and, yeah, complicated. So it's probably the really complicated folded thing inside the cell.  Brian  21:11   Yeah. So it's basically just totally based on the observation of what the shape is. Jason  21:16   And it has rough persons and smooth, rough has all these little dots on it. Smooth does not. Brian  21:21   And the rough one actually is rough, now we know, because it is studded with ribosomes. It is coated with the ribosomes. So the mRNA that is going to go into the endoplasmic reticulum will do so by accessing those ribosomes, and it gets stuck. The protein is stuck into the endoplasmic reticulum itself. So this is where all of the proteins that are going to get shipped outside of the cell will have to go or the proteins that are going to stay in the plasma membrane have to go into the endoplasmic reticulum first. Let's keep moving down this protein assembly line. So the next thing we're going to have is the Golgi apparatus. Do you know what the origin of that is? Because I also didn't look that up. Jason  21:58   I assume it's Mr. Golgi. That's all I've got. Brian  22:00   Probably Doctor Golgi Jason  22:02   Yes, probably Doctor Golgi. Brian  22:05   So our little proteins that are now in the endoplasmic reticulum will kind of get blebbed off in these little vesicles and then sent off to the Golgi apparatus, which is, again, just this kind of like, like hamburger stack of little membrane things. And this is a processing and shipping center. It's going to say, Oh, this protein needs to go here. This protein needs to go here. It's also a place where proteins can be modified. So a protein is made up of 20 amino acids, but sometimes you have to put some other bits on it, right. For instance, if it's going to be outside the cell and survive, sometimes you want to put some like sugar armor on it, basically to protect it. Carbohydrates, glycan, sugar. These are all similar terms. A lot of proteins that are going to stay outside the cell, you'll want to kind of decorate them. So you'll want to stick a carbohydrate on that. So in Cytosis, this is where, hey, you got to stick a, you got to add your carbohydrate to your little thing, showing that you're assembling this glycoprotein.  Jason  22:57   Oh, and probably the place that our listeners are most familiar with this is going to be the blood type. So the ABO blood types, or the positive, negative Rh factor, pretty sure those are protein modifications that are hooked onto the outside of the red blood cells.  Brian  23:11   And then at that point, once that protein is all done, it's been through the ER, it's been through the Golgi. Now we're going to ship it out of the cell, so it'll go through a process called, here we go, exocytosis. So there's our cytosis there. In the game, this is when you would collect your points, you actually have to pay your energy costs. In Cytosis, you play that energy cost when you're done, obviously, in a real cell, you're paying energy all the time. You can have a couple different things. You can create hormones that are used for cell-cell communication. This is why it's obviously a human cell, because they have to talk to each other, and hormones are how they do that. Jason  23:42   This'd be something like insulin.  Brian  23:44   Exactly. You can make receptors, which are the things that basically bind to and say, Hey, there's a hormone here. And will do signaling. Those are typically going to stay in the cell wall, and that's everything that is going to go out through the endoplasmic reticulum. Is two different types of receptor and the protein hormones. Jason  24:00   There's the steroid hormones, the fat based ones that get exported, right? Brian  24:04   Yes, there are so, and that's where we go back to, so we got the rough ER, so we also have smooth ER, what the heck is that? Smooth ER is where the cell makes its lipids and it will also make steroid hormones, which the fact that this cell is making so many hormones, I think, gives us some clue about what kind of cell this is. I'm pretty sure it's an endocrine cell for making all these different types of hormones. Your endocrine system produces all the hormones that your body uses to regulate all these cell functions. As you can imagine as a giant metropolis of cells, getting all those cells to talk to each other and coordinate is not necessarily easy. Hormones are one of the ways that your body does that. So the smooth ER is going to be make lipids, or lipid hormones. This is where you get your lipid resources. Testosterone is a steroid hormone, I believe. Jason  24:45   Yeah. The sex hormones are steroid hormones. Brian  24:47   Yeah. And those are going to start in this, in the smooth ER, go to the Golgi, and then get shipped out as well. Other than that, we have a couple other things that we haven't talked about. We have the mitochondria, which is very cool, the mitochondria, used to be a bacteria, that is the best way to put it. Jason  25:03   Probably best....Let's start with where it's at. So the mitochondria is called the powerhouse of the cell. It's what takes the food you take in, especially the sugars and such, and turns it into energy. That ATP molecule that is the energy currency of the game and the energy currency of the cell.  Brian  25:17   How do we know that it used to be a bacteria? It has its own DNA. It has its own tiny genome. It has its own ribosomes, and those ribosomes are the same shape and size as bacterial ribosomes. The genome itself is circular, like a bacterial genome. The "endosymbiosis hypothesis" is that this was a bacteria that was captured by some ancient precursor of eukaryotic cells and sort of domesticated into an organelle. They even have their own replication period. An individual cell can have hundreds of mitochondria in it. I think, for instance, muscle cells that need a lot of energy can have hundreds and hundreds of mitochondria inside of them. And the last little bit where we haven't really dealt with yet is the glucose transporter. So now we're at the plasma membrane. It's right. The plasma membrane defines the inside and the inside and the outside of the cell, which is great. You need that right? You need to keep what's in in. You need to keep what's out out, but you do need to move things back and forth. So in a process that typically costs energy, you have a whole series of specialized transporters on the outside of the cell that will take things in, like, for instance, glucose or other types of carbohydrates. Again, this is very simplified in cytosis, as it would be in any cell diagram. But here you pay a little bit of energy, and you get to bring in glucose. Now that actually couples very nicely with the mitochondria, because if you take one of your carbohydrate green cubes, you can burn it at the mitochondria, and you get, like, a massive influx of ATP. In the game it's six. In real life, it would be like 32 for one glucose molecule.  Jason  26:46   But it does nicely play up the fact that burning glucose in the mitochondria aerobically so with oxygen present gets you a huge amount of ATP. It's also possible to do it anaerobically without oxygen, and that gets you much less, which is maybe what those other spots are representing, Brian  27:05   I would assume. I mean, I'm not sure. Again, I think to a certain degree, some of this is just like game balance issues, right?  Jason  27:11   As you said, genius games wants the science to be central while making fun games. And how they made it so the way you do all of these components mirrors the way biology actually does it. You have to start by making your RNA. When you're making your little things to export out of the cell, you actually have little circular vesicles, which are a limited resource, that you put the cubes on, and they move down the chain as you are first filling them with protein and then filling them with lipids and, and carbohydrates and then pumping them out of the cell at the end. And so will you necessarily learn cell biology off of this? Maybe not, if you're just playing it just as a game, but if you did this and then you took a course on Cell Biology, would it suddenly make a lot more sense and be easy to learn? Heck, yeah, Brian  27:54   Yeah. I think that's and that's kind of what I think is the point here, is like the cell is a little factory, right? And you are making, doing the little factory, and you're right, if you played Cytosis, and then you come to the class, it's like, Oh, I already know all of this, right? I learned all of this from that great game. What was that called? Yeah, I think that that covers most of the points. There's this very minor thing where, if you've made a receptor, and somebody else makes the matching hormone, you get, like, bonus points for that, and you get more points if someone else does it, which, again, is this idea that hormones are for, mostly for communication between cells. But yeah, cytosis basically is this wonderful tour through the cell, and they really do a good job of representing, in a very simple way, the basic processes of of a eukaryotic cell doing its eukaryotic cell things. Jason  28:40   Yeah. And that said, we never actually defined the other type of cell, which is the prokaryotic cell. Which is everything else. And frankly, they outnumber us by probably, like, a billion to one or something. These are the bacteria, and technically, also the archaea, but they basically, they look the same under the microscope. These are your tiny, little, single cell things, they're much, much tinier than eukaryotic cells by and large, and they're much simpler. They don't have a nucleus. Their  DNA is mostly just free floating as large circles. They do have ribosomes, but they don't generally have any other organelles. It's only been about 30 years that we have what's called the three domain model of life, which is the you have, the bacteria, the archaea, and then the eukaryotes. And that was developed in the 1990s when people started looking at these ribosomal RNAs and putting together and realizing, like, oh, wait, the Archaea aren't some like, weird little branch of bacteria. They're their entire other domain that have been evolving separately for three or 4 billion years from bacteria Brian  29:40   Like you and an elephant and a mushroom have way more in common with each other than a bacteria has with an archaea. Jason  29:47   Oh yeah. I mean, these things are separated by billions of years of evolution. Brian  29:51   I want to pop in a little hot take on bacteria and organelles, if I could. So again, the defining trait for prokaryotes or bacteria is that they don't have organelles. Right? They've got all of their stuff just free in their cytoplasm. Except one of the major classes of bacteria have two sets of membranes. They've got an inner membrane and an outer membrane, and they have a defined space in between those two membranes with different functions, different enzymes, different targeting. Sounds an awful lot like an organelle to me.  Jason  30:21   I mean, when you're wrapping the entire cell in a second one, it's not really an organelle. It's a it's an interstitial space. Brian  30:29   Just going to point out that we all learned that our skin is our largest organ, and I'm going to say that the periplasm is the  organelle of bacteria. But again... Jason  30:37   Okay, touche, touche. This is just a thing. Brian was trained on this type of bacteria. I was trained on the other type of bacteria, and so I like them better, and he likes this type better. And we're not going to get into all the differences there. Brian  30:53   We haven't found a good game to talk about bacteria yet, so we're going to have to look for that. So let's get into the nitpick corner. Jason  30:59   You're more nitpicky than I am, so you start  Brian  31:02   Okay. So first of all, I don't mean this as a criticism. I mean this is just a sort of a fun exercise. So one of the things about cytosis is that it's a worker placement game. You're in a cell. What are you as the player, exactly? Competing inside of this human cell to get health points? Like, you got five people competing in one cell to use the factory of the cell to do what? Like, it's hard when you're not sure what you're personifying. Do you know what I mean?  Jason  31:28   So I'm going to posit that since in Evolution, we were apparently playing nature spirits and nature gods. I'm going to posit that we are playing cell spirits and cell gods. They're very, very tiny ones. Brian  31:39   So I have a, I have a different interpretation. I think that we're playing transcription factors, the programs in the cell that will control expression of different types of cell parts, right? The things that turn different sections of DNA on and off. I feel like maybe that makes sense. What you have is multiple competing transcription factors, sort of competing for control of a single cell.  Jason  32:04   You know, I could see that with everyone have their own agenda, like this one's trying to turn on the protein export synthesis. This one's trying to turn on the enzymology here, and you're all going around, there's not a finite pool of resources we're all competing for. So technically, all the resource cubes are infinite. If you run out, you just find something else to fill them in. So I guess that's the one thing where that doesn't quite hold up. But no, I can see that.  Brian  32:29   But I guess you're competing for access to the cell machinery, right?  Jason  32:32   True, true. Brian  32:33   Okay, so the other thing is a little bit of the mixed metaphor of we're using flasks inside the cell, and that's just weird. We're like, using these little chemistry flasks. So it's like, are we humans controlling an individual cell? It's like, because the cell doesn't have little flasks. This is totally pointless, but I want to put, I'm going to point people towards this in the show notes, there are these wonderful little motor proteins. They look like they walk on the cytoskeleton, are these like filaments of protein that move and connect all the different parts of the cell. They look like tiny little sorcerer's apprentice brooms that carry vesicles from place to place. So I wish, instead of having little flasks, we had little kinesin meeples. They're really cute. Please look at it if you're if you're listening to this, please go to the show notes and check it out. They are goofy. And they haul around like, you know, like, oh, ants can carry 10 times their weight. These things are carrying things that seem like they're 100 times their size, just dragging them around the cell. Jason  33:29   And they have a cute little walk too. So if you actually look at videos of them walking, it's like they're just kind of like moseying around, like some little, like, 1950s cartoon character just kind of loping down its pathway. They're actually they are very cute. Brian  33:42   They literally walk like I'm not, that's not a joke. That is, they actually walk. It's crazy. And would that be perfect for Cytosis? No, because it's not for every part, but better than flasks, maybe. Jason  33:54   I guess you could put like little cell meeple, but a flask is easy,  Brian  33:57   But, but a kinesin is cuter. Jason  34:02   Then how would you have third party groups selling upgrades to the game?  Brian  34:06   All right, if there are legitimately third party groups selling little kineeples, I want a kineeple. Jason  34:12   Well, if there aren't, you could probably start 3d printing them and put them on Etsy, because they, I mean, if I've looked at some of the games we've played, there are so many awesome upgrades that it's like, unfortunately, they usually cost almost as much as the game itself in order to do the upgrade, but they look very cool. Brian  34:27   We're in a weird hobby. Do you ever think about that? Yeah, do you have any little nitpicks about the game? Yeah, any little Do you have any little nitpicks? Jason  34:36   I guess? I mean, you know me, I like player interaction, and I kind of wish there were a way to interact with other players that was not so much, I just steal your spot half by accident. But if there's something I could do that would just make your life just a little bit more difficult or cost a few resources to get rid of, and maybe that's what the viral expansion is. There's, there's an expansion this game that introduces viruses. You have what? You have the flu, you've got Ebola, yeah, a cold and Ebola. And one of these viruses is not like the others. Yes, it's like, people do die from the flu every year. Yes, the cold can kill people, but then you have Ebola, yeah? It's like, okay, we have escalated the scale of the virus. Anyway, that's a side tangent, but maybe that's a bit more that happens there, because skimming over those rules, there may be more ways of mucking with other players based on what viruses show up and what you do with them. Brian  35:33   So we should. We're running a little short on time. We haven't talked about when we played the game yet, so we had a special thing happen this time for me in particular, I haven't beaten Jason in a game since... Jason  35:44   Not for this podcast, You've beaten me in some games we've played just in our family game day. Brian  35:48   Sure, occasionally, but in this game, we tied on points. We used completely different strategies. We tied on points, and then we checked the book to see, Okay, what about the tie breaker? Oh, the tie breaker is, well, how many cell component cards have you made? We tied again on that, so we double tied on this game. Jason  36:05   Yeah, I think at that point we invoke the Evolution rules of ordering pizza and playing again. Brian  36:10   I think there was something else where it just said, you just choose a random winner. Basically, it's like, no, we're not going to do that. So let's do our report card. Let's start with the Science report card. So we've talked about how we have our skills set a little differently for the science, for me, it is, how much science are you going to learn, whether purposeful or non purposeful, by playing this game? With sort of B is our starting point. With wingspan as our A, Cytosis, for me is an A plus. I don't know how you could do better. I really don't. We have, obviously have curved grades, but like, this is, this is more that this is an A plus. For me Jason  36:46   I'd also put it solidly in the A, A plus range. I mean, this is right up setting the standard for how you have a game that is fun, which we'll get to in a bit, but also a game that is, that teaches you things about science while you're doing it. It's not just a skin painted on top of it. It is actually an integral part of the game. And you learn things even if you don't know you're learning them by playing it. So, yeah, I think this is totally A territory. Brian  37:10   Why don't you list out on how much did you enjoy the game? Jason  37:14   I'm gonna put gameplay also up in A territory. This is, I think, a very well balanced work replacement game. I think they're multiple strategies you can pursue. You can adjust your strategies based on the other people. There's enough spaces to have options, but they're scarce enough that you that you always want to try to grab the best ones first. I felt like it was making me think and making me plan and try to react to what you were doing a lot, and that's my metric for a good work replacement game. So I put this also in A territory. Brian  37:44   And for me, my fun is, how likely am I to grab it off the shelf, you know, throw it in the car, bring it to game night, or just whatever? And cytosis is one of these games. We don't play it all the time, but I have pulled it off the shelf and wanted to play it routinely, which is, I've got plenty of games that that's not the case for. I was excited to play cytosis again. We still haven't played the virus wxpansion. We'll actually have to do that at some point.  Jason  38:05   Yeah, that may or may not be enough to make another episode off of, but, yeah, we'll do that at some point. Brian  38:09   This is an A this is, I think this might be our highest scoring game. Is that true? Jason  38:13   I don't remember what we gave wingspan on the, I mean, I think it also got A's on both. I mean, it's it, it's A for science and... Brian  38:21   yeah, wingspan and cytosis, I think, have been our highest scoring at this point.  Jason  38:24   Huzzah, we now have two games we can compare everything to, instead of always having to talk about wingspan! If anyone out there really hates wingspan, I'm sorry that you have to hear about us talk about it so much,  Brian  38:37   Although I gotta be honest, I have yet to to meet someone who doesn't like wingspan. Much like Catan was that starter game for a lot of people, you would be amazed how many people have played wingspan, just people who don't play games play wingspan. Jason  38:51   Now we need to get cytosis into more people's hands. So that is probably time to wrap it up. Thank you all for listening. Hope you had fun. Have a good week and happy gaming.  Brian  39:01   Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.  Today, we're going to discuss cytosis both the heck was that.  

#Evolution #NaturalSelection #Darwin #Competition #BoardGames #Science Today we get down and dirty with Evolution, which is both a board game and that wonderful emergent property that happens when you have species competing for finite resources (including little food tokens on a game board). Joining us is a special evolutionary biologist guest, Dr. Thiago da Silva Moreira, who will help us walk through evolution, mutation, natural selection, sex, and other fun topics. Find our socials at www.GamingWithScience.net  Timestamps 00:24 - Special guest host Thiago 01:26 - Spider milk! 03:34 - Basics of Evolution 13:37 - Evolutionary science 18:35 - Mutation 24:24 - Competition and the Red Queen's Race 29:38 - What is sex for? 33:30 - Final Grades 39:27 - Fun species names Links: Evolution website (North Star Games) Original game (Right Games RGB)  Spider milk! Red Queen Hypothesis Lamarck This episode of Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Brian  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.  Jason  0:11   Today, we will be talking about Evolution by North Star games. All right. Welcome back out everyone. This is Jason.  Brian  0:22   This is Brian.  Tiago  0:22   I am Thiago.  Jason  0:24   Yes, we have another special guest star. So this is Thiago. Moreira Thiago, can you please introduce yourself to our audience?  Tiago  0:29   Sure. I'm a, what I like to say, Brazilian by birth, American by choice. I'm a evolutionary biologist. I'm a professor here at the George Washington University. I have my graduation was back in Brazil in Rio. I got like a bachelor's in biology, a master's in zoology, and I have a PhD in evolutionary biology for the George Washington University too. Jason   0:49    All right. And then we met last year at Fear the Con, which is a gaming convention in St Louis, for a different podcast that we both listen to Fear the Boot if anyone is also a fellow Booter out there. We want to get Thiago on here, because he is an actual evolutionary biologist. And although Brian and I, we work with evolution a lot, you can't work in biology without learning a lot about evolution. It is the glue that holds our discipline together. But it's nice to have someone who actually studies evolution for their career to come on and talk to us about Evolution, which is a great game, by the way. I do really enjoy Evolution, the board game. So, but before we get into that, now, Thiago, you told us that you had a fun science fact to share for today,  Tiago  1:26   Right! So the science fact that I found out, it was very interesting for me. So my specialty, what I do, my model organism, I use spiders to do my work on biology and evolution. One of the papers that I found recently that was not, it's not that recent, but was pretty stunning for me was one of 2018 when we found out, like Apparently, some spiders feed their younglings with milk.  Jason  1:50   Oh the spider milk story! I remember that. Brian  1:54   That's awful.  Jason  1:56   What do you mean that's awful? That's what humans do. Brian  2:00   No, no, actually, I pigeons use milk. Milk is more common than you'd think  Tiago  2:04   It is, actually, though, when I was reading about it and I was telling this in class to my students, I was making the case. It's not exactly like mammalian milk, which is kind of something very unique for mammalians, but they use milk in and as a very like liberal in a very liberal way. It's not that uncommon, if you think of like, a lot of like different invertebrates do that. But the finding out this, and using this, the way was used, was pretty stunning to see. I never heard about that in spiders. Spiders are mainly predators, so I mean, they hunt, and even the young spiders, they hunt since pretty often. So that was a particular Jumping Spider, we actually mimics an ant and like to find out this was really I wasn't expecting, Jason  2:46   okay, so is the milk. I assume it's just some sort of liquid that's secreted from some gland on the spider that it feeds to its young. Is that right?  Tiago  2:53   Right, so spiders, they have, like the structure in their in the the abdomen, called like the the big gastric fur, which is a cup here that has the openings, and like, in that particular spot, they have some glandular they'll actually secrete some, like a liquid which is apparently highly nutritious. And the young, the first things that they eat is that liquid. And at some point they have, like, an alternation between eating that and start to hunt. And then when they're weaned off. They only do hunting,  Brian  3:22   Yeah, I guess it kind of makes sense. You think, like spiders are very good at secreting proteins. That is something they do. It's the raw material for evolution to then adapt into a new function,  Tiago  3:33   yeah.  Jason  3:34   And I think that gives us the perfect segueway to actually talk about this game Evolution. So quick, basics about the game, for those who are not familiar. So evolution by North Star games, we're specifically going to be talking about Evolution: Climate, which is sort of a an expansion, but also it's sold as a standalone. The primary reason is because that's the one we had access to without having to buy it, and so that's what we went with. But also, looking around, that also seems to be what many people consider to be one of the better versions. It's the one that usually see in stores. It has the highest rating and Board Game Geek so it's the one that people generally recommend if you're going to get a copy of it now. Now that said bidding for a game about evolution. This game has evolved into many different versions. It actually started as evolution, The Origin of Species, which was a card game made by a Russian scientist, a Russian teacher to teach his class about the process of evolution, and it got an expansion called random mutations, where you edit and stuff. Then North Star games got the rights for it in America. They got a professional Magic the Gathering player to help turn it into the American evolution game. And the illustrator, her mother was a rocket scientist at NASA, and her father was a neuroscientist. It's like the pedigree on this game is amazing. Anyway, that's how they made evolution. And then it got expansions for flight and climate, and then it also got a spin off, a kids version, and then a video game. And then it had a spin off about the oceans, and then next year, they're coming out with nature, which is, like the next version of it, which is supposed to be taking all their stuff. So the evolutionary tree of evolution is itself, kind of like, bifurcating and moving along down the way, Tiago  5:02   has its own phylogeny, apparently.  Jason  5:05   Yes, it does. You can make the phylogenetic tree of evolution and show it's all family tree where everything comes from. Anyway, so evolution, climate, which is all we're gonna be talking about from now on, two to six players. It doesn't actually list time or age, but Board Game Geek puts it at about an hour to play, and probably ages 10 plus, which fits what my experience is. Currently. It retails for about $65 on North Star game's website, but there is actually a print and play version, so you can get the entire game as a PDF to print off yourself for $15 Brian  5:35    Wow.  Jason  5:35   This is the first major game I've seen actually do that. They also have the print and play conversion. So if you have the base evolution game, you can pay $5 just to get the climate expansion and print that off for yourself. So as far as physical components of the game, you have the watering hole, which is this board that goes in the middle, and that's where all the food goes. And then you have species cards, which track your little species that you are managing. And then the bulk of it are these beautifully illustrated trait cards, with things like horns or a hard shell or climbing or being a carnivore, and the watercolors on these are just gorgeous. So when you play the game, you get a bunch of these cards at the beginning of each turn, and then you spend them to get species. You spend them to grow your species, either size or population, or you put them down as actual traits on your species. And there's limits for how you can do those various things, and the idea is you're trying to eat as much as possible. Basically it's a victory point game. So you get victory points by eating food, which the game outright states is a proxy for evolutionary fitness that people use if you it's thought that if you eat more food, you are probably more evolutionary fit, because you're probably going to have more offspring. So the amount of food you eat over the course of the game is one way to earn points. Another is the size of your populations, basically just having a lot of animals around. And then the last one is the number of traits you have out at the end of the game, basically rewarding more diverse species that have more evolutionary traits on them. There is also a completely unnecessary and yet utterly fun dinosaur, meeple, that is the first player marker. And it's actually kind of at scale. So it's, it's about three and a half inches tall, nine centimeters on the metric side, which means, if you put it next to your normal meeple, like you get in like Carcassonne or other board games, a normal meeple only comes up to about its ankles or its knees. So it's actually like a scale dinosaur meeple, which I think is just awesome.  Brian  7:15   Yeah. What a great unnecessary detail  Jason  7:17   It is. And I love those little details anyway, as you play the game, you get the cards. You spend the cards in order to get these traits and things. And you're just trying to eat more food than everyone else. As your species start, they can't do much. They can maybe just take one food. Sometimes there's more food, sometimes there are less. You have a little bit of control over that. What climate adds over the base one is that it adds a climate track that will move every turn based on the cards you put down. And if it gets too hot or too cold, bad things happen to certain species. And there's other like random events that can trigger based off of that that have usually minor effects, although if you manage to hit the meteor event, that just makes it so no food gets generated the rest of the game. That's a pretty major effect. I've never yet managed to do that. I want to at some point, just to see how it plays out. But so far no.  Brian  8:00   The trait cards. Some of them seem to be based on real animals. Some of them seem like artistic interpretation. Did you find out anything about the trait cards themselves and their design, their artistic design?  Jason  8:10   I did not look into the artistic design. Most of them look like they're close to real animals. They're not quite real, but they're close enough you can see, okay, this is like the artist took this animal and this animal and this animal kind of squished them together to get this animal like pack hunting is one of my favorite cards to use. And it has these like dire calico, weasel bores. They're attacking a bunch of stuff.  Tiago  8:32   At least for me, they seem familiar, just the colors are all over the place, right? Jason  8:37   They look like animals you could actually evolve  Tiago  8:39   Exactly. I love the the long neck one like a brontosaurus, but like, with the colors, completely different from what we're used to see in artistic definitions. Overall, I thought, I thought like the artwork for the board game is really remarkable.  Jason  8:51   I agree. And that's one of those things where, ultimately, the art is not necessary for a game, but it can really enhance the game. And I really like the art on this. I mean, it's the sort of thing I can see getting a print of one of these for a wall somewhere.  Tiago  8:57   This is a game that I would like advise you to buy, because it's very well made. Like it, like all the things, is very well designed, and, like the game itself is very beautiful. For some reason I think like five print is not going to be the same. Well, that's me, but Jason  9:14   yeah, it's definitely not going to be the same if you do the print and play. But that's kind of on the cheap, although I was thinking like, okay, by the time I print full color copies of all of these, and I'd probably want to put the cards in sleeves so that they actually have some substance to them. By that point, I'm probably spending 30 or 40 bucks to make it playable how I wanted anyway, so I might as well buy the full game. So that's the basics of the game. And the way the game plays out is that each turn, everyone makes their species and puts their traits, and you're competing for food. And this is where evolution actually comes into play. It's a little bit of ecology, little bit of evolution, because you are then responding to things over time. Since you're competing with other people, you're trying to put the traits down that make it better for you to get food. By default, each species can only grab one piece of food on each turn, and so it takes a long time to eat, but there are traits that will let it so, oh, when I take this piece of food, I get to get another one or. If a carnivore attacks, then they get food, obviously. But if you have the scavenging trait, then you also get another piece of food. And so the goal of the game is to try to build this up. You have a set of competition on the herbivore side of how can I eat food better? But then, of course, you have carnivores, and carnivores eat the herbivores. Every time your species gets eaten, you lose population, and it can go extinct. You can also go extinct if you just don't get enough food that turn. And so there's this constant give and flux of like, people trying to keep defenses so they don't get eaten, but also trying to eat the food better than their neighbor, and trying to get more species out so that you can get more victory points. But a new species is vulnerable because it usually doesn't have as many traits. And so it actually plays this whole evolutionary game a bit. And you get the sense of like, yes, as people play this thing, other people play things in response. Brian  10:45   And with the climate edition, there's an extra element to it, right, not just competition with other species, but responding to the climate.  Jason  10:53   Yes, we found that out the hard way when our friend who likes messing with people even more than I do, managed to send us into an ice age and kill most of the species on the board and then ate the remaining ones.  Brian  11:04   Yeah, basically set himself up to tank the climate into the most coldest state, and have a perfect setup to exploit that. Let's talk a little bit about the idea of how you spend your cards for all the things you want to do to increase your population or your body size or get new species, or stuff like that. Like, cards are, are the currency that you use. Jason  11:23    Yeah, and I like that. They are basically the core part of it. They're the one currency. Like, everything comes down to your trait cards. They're the one thing you have to spend. You don't have, like, three different pools you have to manage. You just you have cards. And you just have to choose, do I get a new species? Do I make my species bigger so it's harder to eat? Do I make my species more populous so it can eat more food? Or do I give it some sort of trait that will help me one way or another?  Brian  11:44   Or do you I need to keep some cards in my hand because I have to spend them to use certain abilities. Tiago  11:49   And the cards itself, the ones that you choose to use as like, for the food pool, it might have like the similar card, but like with different food yields that you're going to give, and some of them add the complication of like, they're going to make the climate hotter or colder. So all of those play makes the game very complex in terms of, like, strategizing.  Jason  12:08   Yes, this has some deep gameplay. I mean, the rules are on the surface, very simple, but it can get very deep. There are also some interesting trade offs I noticed. So one thing you use these cards for is they help determine how much food goes in the watering hole at the beginning of each round, everyone puts a card down, face down, and then you later, you reveal them, and you tally it up. And that's also how the climate's determined. Noticeably, the cards that are generally best at getting you food are also the ones that put the most food in the watering hole. And so you have to choose, do I want there to be a lot of food to eat, or do I want to be better at getting it? Or one of the carnivore cards is the one that our friend used to slam us into the ice age because it has four points for going cold. But carnivores usually do better in cold temperatures because they need to be bigger anyway, which helps resist cold, and because other things are having to spend traits just to survive the climate, rather than to defend against the carnivore. And so you have to spend your carnivore card to get it in the place that is good for carnivores. So there's these trade offs you have to make, which I think is not think is nice.  Brian  13:03   So you're always making some kind of difficult choice,  Jason  13:06   Yes, which is what the best Eurogames do. There's no one single thing that is always best. You always have to make your choice,  Tiago  13:11   Which helps a lot of replayability and the different strategies and everything. So every game is very unique, which makes it very fun.  Jason  13:17   Yeah. So now, in terms of the actual science represented in the game. There's a lot of things here. I mean, obviously there is evolution happening. That's why the game was created originally. But we also have competition among species, which gets a little bit into ecology, randomness and mutation, which is not so much present in this version of the game, but the original game did actually have a specific expansion to do that. And then Tiago hasn't heard this, and I don't know if Brian remembers this, but one of our interviewees from the maze meeting, which is the episode that will drop just before this, one of her professors had hacked the game to make it more random. Some people she played with don't like that, because it does take away your choices a little bit,  Tiago  13:52   Right? This game, like one of like the, I guess probably the most famous concepts, like in when everybody thinks about evolution, is probably adaptation, which is one of the core concepts of like this game works. But like, as you mentioned, Brian, like one of the things that is kind of like, not accurate, is the randomness of it. So you basically choose what adaptations to give to each one of the species. And in nature, that's not how it happens. Just is a crapshoot, right? So what you have at, and if you're lucky enough, you're going to get the right traits at the right time. I understand that's might be a choice in terms of, like, gameplay, which takes a little bit of the science.  Jason  14:29   Yeah, it's mostly, it's not fun to not be able to choose. I mean, there's a reason why Candy Land and shoots and ladders are not top tier Board Game Geek rankings Tiago  14:38   or the Russian one for I don't know.  Brian  14:39   I think that there are multiple video games and everything that try to do evolution in some format, and to be honest, they're all plagued with the same problem. It's always the player is making choices. Spore, the classic video game Spore, does this where you, your little creature, will go out and collect DNA traits that they then get to put onto their creature. It's fun. It's not very accurate, and to some degree, I haven't seen an evolution game that doesn't sort of have this intrinsic problem.  Jason  15:06   Yeah, well, that's because evolution is not a random process. Mutation is a random process. Evolution does follow patterns, because it's mutation plus selection, and that selection is very much directional, yeah, you do have a little bit of the randomness, though. In the cards you get, there have definitely been entire games where I've never drawn a carnivore card. And so no matter how badly I want to make a carnivore, it just can't happen. Tiago  15:27   Yeah, evolution is actually just change over time. The processes we have different processes. One of them is natural selection, which is not random at all. We have others who are very random mutations. Is the one of the random ones we have, like genetic drift, we have migration and so on and so forth. But I guess when you're trying to make a game take off like the agency of the player might not be, might not be that fun. So I guess are the choices that you make in terms of gameplay, I guess. Jason  15:27   Yeah. Now I want to talk a little bit more about these other parts of evolution, because most people, when they think about evolution, you think Darwin, you think natural selection, and that's what evolution is. But no, they usually cover this on like one paragraph on high school biology. I'm like, no, no, there's other ways evolution can happen, and some of these are actually represented in the game. So the designers have actually gone on record saying that when you create a new species in the game, it's not just appearing from nowhere. The idea is that the world is actually much bigger. And this is the new species that is just wandered into this particular valley that has the watering hole. So that's migration going on, right there, right talk about some of these other mechanisms that go on that cause evolution to happen. Tiago  16:32    Apart from natural selection, which is the most famous, there was a period that was proposed by Darwin and , which is like one of the guys who actually it's, it's been now brought on, like was often forgot, but the other processes that we could there are responsible for, like change over time in populations, which is what evolution is, or what we call genetic drift, which is really just the random assortment of like allele is what I usually call like the Powerball of nature, right? Sometimes random things happen, and sometimes those random things might be very significant, just the fluctuation of the different alleles of like, the genes who are in the population, not sometimes they change just base of random luck.  Jason  17:11   Yeah. So an allele is just a variation on a gene, and so different alleles are what give like some people blue eyes and some people brown eyes, or what makes some snakes green and others yellow. It's just, it's a variation on a gene that changed it. And, yeah, it's a crapshoot. Sometimes you'll have a group that just happens to have all of one allele, or sometimes just by random nature of one just rises to prominence. It's not helping any it just happens to do so.  So like, if half of your group gets killed by a landslide, that was not a selective event, that just means half your genes are gone. And if your fittest individual, individuals were in that landslide, well, those genes are also gone. Tough luck.  Tiago  17:46   Precisely. That happens a lot. Basically, we're here because of my major genetic drift event, which was the meteorite extinct all the dinosaurs, or that, or animals in fact were, just like some burrowers, that looks a lot like the card burrowing for sort of saying because of like the extinction of dinosaurs, lot of different niches open to mammals to dominate Earth. But if wasn't for this drift event, this random event, who kills the dominate species on planet Earth at a time, we probably wouldn't be here.  Brian  18:15   I think we need a better term than genetic drift for a meteor smashing into the earth. Genetic Smash. Tiago  18:21    Yeah.  Jason  18:22   All right. So look, we've covered migration, which is where just things move in. We've covered natural selection, which is where you respond to, well, basically things that are less good at doing stuff die, and so you're only left with the things that are better at it. We've got drift, which is randomness. Tiago  18:35   We have mutation, which is the only one of like those processes who actually can create something new. Out of the blue is something like, actually, is the major driving of variety in shape and form and physiology. And this is really random, so we don't know what kind of mutation we're going to have or like, and probably, if we have one, we're probably not going to be as good as it is.  Jason  18:57   Yeah, most mutations are really a lot of them don't really do anything. Most of the rest are bad, and then a very small number of them are actually good.  Tiago  19:05   What I usually try to use as a explanation for my students, it's a sports metaphor. Imagine that you have a football team, right? And your team is winning. It has, like, I don't know, 10 victories in a row, but suddenly your quarterback got injured and you have to replace it with a random quarterback that you take out of the pool. What are the odds of like this actually being as good as or a better quarterback? Probably not that big. But hey, this guy might be, I don't know, Tom Brady, which you just drafted and put in it. It just might just work. Chances are, and in this case, you're going to have an even better team and they're going to keep winning. So that's more or less the logic of mutation, again, is a random chance of like something happens, probably most of the time, not going to be good for you, but when it does, natural selection takes care of like this being on for the next generation. Jason  19:51   Yeah. And that's an important part about mutation being a force there, because one way you can get evolution is you can actually just get rid of natural selection. So if there is a trait that is important, and then suddenly the environment changes and it's no longer important, mutation will start eroding that trait away. Because what natural selection does is it basically kills the organisms that have worse versions of it. But if a worse version doesn't matter, suddenly that goes away. Good example in humans of this is wisdom teeth. So wisdom teeth were very important for our ancestors, as teeth were grinding down and they needed to come in and be there to help grind these very tough foods we had. But in populations that have historically been working with agriculture, more softer foods that didn't become as necessary, and so a lot of these human populations, that's why, if you have wonky wisdom teeth that came in sideways or didn't come in at all. You can thank the fact that your ancestors changed the evolutionary landscape, and now mutations are just slowly eroding those away, so that something that used to be very important to keep now, isn't it, so if it goes wrong, it's not a big deal, and the mutations are winning. This is why, also why things in caves tend to lose their eyesight. I mean, there may be some minor selective advantage, but mostly it's just that the mutations are just slowly destroying the ability to make an eye, but because there's no benefit to having an eye in a cave, doesn't matter, the mutations start winning.  Brian  21:07   So in the game, this is chucking a trait card,  Jason  21:10   Basically, yeah.  Tiago  21:11   One of the things that I found interesting about sometimes, uh, mutations and adaptations is, as you said, Jason, like sometimes they might just not be make a difference, but sometimes, some of those mutations can start to bite you. We, as humans, we evolve as like an injurious run, and because we have, like, big brains, we need food all the time. Having adipose tissue actually help us to actually have this preserve energy. Jason  21:34    And adipose tissue is the fancy term for fat.  Tiago  21:36   Exactly and accumulating fat. It was good for us in those times because we didn't have that much food around the savannas. Hunter and gatherer, life was hard. So if we can accumulate food, which is, actually is one of the traits that we have in this game, fat tissue was a good thing for you, but nowadays we have, we live in a society where, like, food is easy to get, and like, we have highly processed food. So the capacity we have to accumulate fat, actually it's taking it so it's biting in the neck, because nowadays the accumulation of fat might actually bring us problems. So one thing that, like was was advantageous for us now is not in biology. Sometimes we call that. We call this, what we call an evolutionary trap or evolutionary mismatch. Jason  22:14   Yeah, essentially, we have Neolithic genes, like our genes were evolved to the situation as it was 10, 20,000 years ago by and large, there are exceptions, but they have not evolved as fast as culture has, and so our modern society is out of sync with what our bodies are evolutionarily designed to do. Which actually brings up the next thing I want to bring, which is, is one of those scientists where I've got to feel sorry for him, because he's mostly known for getting it wrong. Which is Lamarck. Whenever you learn about evolution in grade school, you learn about Lamarck, who had the other idea, which is where trying to be a certain way, like the giraffe, stretching their necks made their offspring have longer necks. And that was passed along that way. And you know, we look at it now, and we have 200 years of evidence of natural selection, so now it seems a little silly, but at the time, it was a legit thing. It's like people didn't know how inheritance work. It seems as good a reason as any, and so I feel sorry for the guy for being wrong, but the fact is, that's actually more how the board game plays. Traits are evolved because you think it will help you, and so you play this, the trait down, and you alter your species in a way that will help you in the future. This is one of the great breaks with natural selection of the game. Is that defensive traits tend to evolve before carnivores do, because everyone knows if a carnivore shows up. No defense. Yes, yes. Like so you get hard shells and warning calls and horns all to defend if it's against the carnivore that is nowhere in the ecosystem, just in case it shows up.  Brian  23:37   Yeah, that doesn't. That doesn't really match up with what we've seen from like island ecosystems, it's typically the opposite. Tiago  23:43   Basically, if you don't have the pressure for something, there's no reason for this to be adaptive, because it's an extra trait that has no reason to be it might be maintained just by random chance. Keep maintained, but like, there's no actual pressure to keep it. But most of the time, the traits that we have evolved because of pressure, especially the defensive one. Brian  24:02    I do like trying to picture what some of these creatures look like, with the long neck and the shell and the climbing and burrowing. It's like, what is this thing exactly? I know we had some fun conversations about trying to make these traits fit together in some way that could possibly make sense, and sometimes they just don't.  Tiago  24:20   If those animals exist, it will probably be in Australia, because all the weird ones are there. Jason  24:24   That is true. So talking about this game, there was one thing I wanted to bring up, which is, I do think this game is really valuable for teaching people the idea of evolution and natural selection, especially in response to competition, because basically, you're competing for limited resources, in this case, food, and so you keep evolving new traits to try to help you get that resource better. And the thing is, maybe this is because I'm a biologist. Once you understand how evolution works, you see evolution everywhere. I see evolution in everything I see I see it in YouTube channels as they're competing for our attention. I see them in companies as they're competing for our money, politicians as they're competing for energy and dedication and votes. You start seeing that, oh, all these things are competing, and what wins out is whatever is the best at getting that resource, not necessarily what is the best for what I want to happen.  Tiago  25:13   Yeah, so one of the things I like, I like to distinguish is, like the idea of evolution, which is just change over time, but like the competition selection is very driven and is really understanding was not random at all, as we mentioned. And yeah, we can see this happening in basically all aspects of society. Actually, one of the criticisms that Darwin made, Darwin was very focused on on the part of, like a sexual selection, which was the part of, like, the best ones who can attract best mates. Actually, is going to be more successful. One of the criticisms that he had was like, Oh, this guy's just bringing Victorian England to the animal kingdom. Because he was basically talking much about, like, sexual selection. The idea of competition is really strong, like in this game, it is basically the, the strongest point in terms of, like, teachable teachability, if that's a word I don't know  Brian  26:01   It is now. Tiago  26:02   but it is really helpful to teach anybody about, like how competition natural world works, like we have a limited set of resources, which is here, simplified to food, and you need to be better at acquiring it. The natural selection algorithm is simple. If it works, you stay. If something works better, this replaces you. That actually was a theory in the 1970s called the Red Queen hypothesis. You guys heard about this before? Brian  26:29   Yes, yeah, the one that originally comes from Alice in Wonderland, right?  Tiago  26:32   Yes. So there was this ecologist called Leigh Van Valen, and he postulated that, like all species, especially the ones who are competing for resources, they must keep adapting to the environment and to adapt to themselves just in order to keep alive. And I probably was inspired by the political situation of time. He basically proposed, like, natural wars. Natural wars, and all the speakers are basically in a constant arms race just in order to survive.  Jason  26:56   Yeah, and the name Red Queen's race. So the Red Queen hypothesis comes from, I think it's through the looking glass, where Alice is talking to the Red Queen, who tells her that she has to run as fast as you can just to stay where she is. And that's the thing here. You have to keep evolving, because if you stop evolving, then everything else that's competing against you that has not stopped will overtake you. And this is, again, you see this in companies. You see this in politics. You see this everywhere. Once you once you start thinking this way, you see how it manifests all over the place.  Brian  26:56   We use the arms race analogy routinely when we're talking about the interactions between pathogens and their hosts. Tiago  27:32   Yes, those relationships, host and pathogen, predator and prey. All of those relationships pretty much follow this logic same way, like symbiotic relationships too, and they drive what we also call co-evolution. Sometimes those relationships are so intertwined they basically drive the evolution of the other so the pathogen drives the evolution of the host and vice versa. The predator drives the evolution of the prey and vice versa. So those phenomena goes hand-in-hand, and I think that is the strongest point in this game, in terms of, like, how what they teach to actually to students like this dynamic is really well done in this game.  Jason  28:09   Yeah, because once you actually do have a predator show up, suddenly the defensive traits go way up, and then suddenly the predator has to get additional predatory traits in order to overcome those defensive traits. And you have the arms race going on, and the game controls it by saying you can only have so many traits on a species, which does limit it, because then suddenly, if you're super buff, Tanked Up, mega defensive, herding turtle that nothing can touch, you're still only going to be eating like one food a turn, you're going to lose. So it's, it's trade offs, which is another great thing about actual evolution, is there are trade offs. You cannot evolve infinitely in a direction, because eventually it will start impacting other things. Living organisms don't do one thing. We have to do a lot of things. And if you get so good at one that it impacts your ability to other stuff, evolution usually dings you, because you need to do a lot of things well in order to survive and leave offspring.  Tiago  28:56   Right,  So there is this thing of like, you can't you cannot be a jack of all trade perfectly. At some point, something gotta give. The idea of like trade off is also like one is very persistent in evolutionary studies. It is very well represented here by like, what you just said, the idea that like, something gotta give. We just have a limited amount of resources that we have to allocate to different functions of the body. We have to maintain ourselves. We have, like to think about reproduction, to acquire food, to defend ourselves. All of those have some energy costs that we had to allocate. I guess, the idea of, like you can only have four traits or three traits depending on how many players are in the game, is that it represents, well, this idea we cannot have a super, Uber animal or pretator or so.  Jason  29:38   There's one thing I want to talk about before we move on to grades, though, and I want to get back to what we were talking about, the red Queen's race and evolving. Because one thing people don't think about a lot is that we evolve a lot slower than our pathogens. So the diseases and the parasites that prey on humans, they're usually single cells or very small they have shorter lifespans. They actually evolve faster than us. And so a hypothesis. Thiago, can you vet, this? The hypothesis I've heard, is that sexual reproduction. So sex exists, in part, to help us evolve fast enough to keep up with the things that are trying to kill us.  Tiago  30:13   So well in part. So the idea of like sex, which is in biology, again, is the exchange of genetic material between two organisms. That's what sex means. Sex is not necessarily connected to sexual reproduction. We do have exchange of genetics between two organisms without necessarily resulting more organisms. For instance, that's very common in ciliate. They can do conjugation.  Jason  30:37   They're bacteria. Basically?  Tiago  30:38   No, they're not bacteria. Ciliates are like protists. Oh, so, so very simple, single cell, single cell organisms, but like a eukaryotic one, but and we have in some humans, we have evidence what, what we call HGT, or horizontal gene transfer, which means the the transfer between genes between in the same generation. We have evidence that we have some genes like they were transmitted by us, and like was passed through vector, but without getting too much into that, the idea of like sex as an evolutionary mechanism, actually, it's quite not well understood, as far as I know, why we have sex. Obviously, most of the living things that we know of don't, at least it's not obligated, right? But we do know that like sex helps in some in some things. For instance, let's say that I have a mutation that is really good, and, like Brian, has a mutation that is really good. Technically, if or lineages at some point cross and we reproduce sexually, technically, the genes that code my for my mutation can meet the genes that he had for his mutation, find out both of the good mutations in our offspring. So in theory, with sexual reproduction, you can have more good mutations getting away for the next generation faster than just by random chance. The same two good mutations happen in a organism that reproduces asexually which generates clone in the same pace, we can get rid of bad mutations easily, because to reproduction, maybe if I get a bad mutation, my my offensive not doesn't necessarily has to, because it can be purged off when my gametes were sent off again. All those processes are random, but like, it makes it easier. So felt since I called this the Mueller ratchet. Uh, Ratchet is like that kind of engine that, like, goes but like, it has like a system that cannot goes back. Speaker 1  32:19   It's like a gear with a little Locky mechanism, so it can only go in one direction.  Tiago  32:23   Exactly. He mentioned the like asexual reproduction, the reproduction without genetic exchange. If you get a mutation that is deleterious, it can get you in a Mueller's ratchet, because you cannot purge it away. You necessarily obligated to stay with it. That's a theory that that was proposed by this guy, Joseph Felsenstein, and the other hand, sexual reproduction can help you take this away from but again, there's lot of caveats with that. So obviously there's advantages and disadvantages of having sexual selection. And in the end, all the mutations and things that happen to us probably work for us, and that's why we stick with it, right? It's not about optimality. Sometimes it's just about what we get, and just we stick with it because it was working, and we don't mess much with what is winning.  Brian  33:05   Yeah, obligate sexual reproduction is pretty restricted in the tree of life.  Tiago  33:09   It is. It's pretty much restricted to like metazoans, which means the multicelluar organisms that have tissues, true tissues, and so on and so forth, Jason  33:18   Animals, essentially.  Tiago  33:19   Yeah,  Jason  33:19   I can just imagine what our listeners are thinking. So these scientists just spent five or 10 minutes talking about why we have sex like they are completely out of touch. Obviously,  Brian  33:29   we're gonna be canceled.  Jason  33:30   All right, let's move on to grades. So Tiago, we try to grade the games, both on gameplay and on science. We figured this is a part game review, part science education podcast, so we try to lean more towards the science education. I'll start with Brian here. So Brian, what do you think about the gameplay? Where would you put this?  Brian  33:46   In just in terms of gameplay, this is an A. Tons of replay value. I think we played this one preparing for this episode more than almost any game that we've played. We played it with multiple game groups, and I would play it right now if we were together. Tiago  33:58   In terms of gameplay. I don't know if I can say much, because I did not play the game. I didn't have the chance of playing the tabletop game. I played the mobile version. It feels really good. It feels like a fun game to play. So I prefer to abstain in terms of the gameplay, I'll leave to you guys, because you guys actually play the real deal. Jason  34:15   I'd go for A or maybe adding a little bit to A- territory. There's a few things I wish were a little better, and it's mostly because my experience as a beginning player was a bit negative, and maybe it's because I was going in a group where other people played it a lot, so I just got trounced. But it seems like a lot of the fun of this comes from the interactions and knowing which combinations go well together. But the first few times you play, you don't know that. And so if you're playing with people who know that, you don't, well, you're new to the evolutionary party, you don't have the good alleles, and you get eaten. So I wish that were a little bit better. But overall, I think, yes, this is solid. I would happily own this game. It's going on our list. I would happily play it again. Brian  34:53   One of us is going to have to pull the trigger and just buy this game.  Jason  34:56   I may hold out for nature. I put myself on the list to be notified when the kickstarter begins.  Brian  35:00   Okay, that's fair. Jason  35:02    All right. Now, how about science? So this is where we can also talk about some of the things we wish might be tweaked a little bit. Tiago  35:07   I think, in terms of solid science, I'll give it an A-, A solid a mine, I think is really good, like, the dynamics of adaptation and competition, and when you're talking about, even about the population dynamics, it was something that we didn't talk much about, it, like, when you have to play around, like the population size, body size, and like those ideas of like, how predation works, I think it plays really well. I think is a good tool. And it's easy to use this game to explain those concepts to somebody who don't know much about evolution or evolutionary processes. But there's some things though I would like to see maybe a little tweak. One of the things that like I would like to see was a list an optional mechanics about, like, having, like, the random adaptations to have it randomized. And one of the things that I was talking to Brian a little before you arrived, Jason was like, I felt a little offended that was very vertebrate-centric. It would be fun to try to have something kind of like a an invertebrate route, or even a plant route to see. Like, how would you do? How would you play if you were, like, I have a plant organism or a photosynthetic organism, right? So I don't know how feasible be in terms of gameplay, of how much complexity will add to it, but like, it'll be fun to see  Brian  35:07   Jason and I are both plant biologists. Look, plants are not just here to be food. Plants don't like being eaten. They have their own adaptations and defenses against being eaten. Most plants are really noxious or poisonous and have lots of ways of not being eaten.  Jason  36:27   You know that could be a really fun like asymmetric variation of this is if you sort of mash photosynthesis and this together, so you have the plants versus animals. And so the plants are evolving to try to capture as much sunlight and resources and making these seeds as they can while defending themselves against the animals who are evolving to eat them and each other and everything has to deal with climate. Yeah, that'd be a very complicated game, but I think it'd be fun.  Brian  36:50   Is that what nature's gonna be? Is that what this new game, is it gonna actually give plants their due? Jason  36:55   I don't know. It talks about having modules, though, so it's apparently, like you pick which modules you're going to play with, and that determines the nature of the game. And I don't know much more of that, so I really hope that there's some sort of plant module in there. But if not, maybe we'll have to house rule it.  Brian  37:09   Let's do just plants and arthropods. These vertebrates get too much attention. Let's see. So I think I'm on a B, maybe a B+, because as the player, you are playing a nature God, there's really no other way to look at this. You are controlling the climate. You are creating species and adding traits that you think will be beneficial, saying when they exist and when they maybe not when they get killed. But you're the one who gets to bring new things to the valley to experience competition, just from that perspective of the directionality of it. I don't I don't love that. I think the climate track should be random. I don't think that's something you should get to decide as the player. I think that that could just be a dice roll, which it's probably just going to end up towards the mean. And maybe that's the problem with that. But to be honest, that tends to happen anyway, because whenever the climate would get pushed in one direction, one nature God would push it back the other way,  Jason  37:59   Unless you have our friend Kyle who just wanted to destroy everything, Brian  38:03   Who just wants to see things burn or freeze,  Tiago  38:06   Seems like a lovely person.  Brian  38:08   He really is, though. Jason  38:10   So you basically, I'm going to call say that you have the Richard Dawkins nitpick. So those who don't know, Richard Dawkins is a famous and very brilliant evolutionary biologist who is equally famous for being brilliant evolutionary biologist and radical atheist, so he would probably not approve of the implied like nature deities going on here. And we're not going to get into that, because this is not a show about religion.  Tiago  38:31   but a fun fact. He created the word meme. Brian  38:33   He did so a lot of that stuff that Jason was talking about, about natural selection in culture, that is a concept that was originated by Richard Dawkins. Of course, memes, like all elements of culture, have now vastly changed their meaning from their original intention.  Jason  38:47   All right, we need to wrap this up. So I'm just gonna say, I'll put mine in the A, A- range, kind of same as Thiago and for basically the same reasons. I think overall, there are some things that are not quite evolution by natural selection, which is, in theory, what it's supposed to be representing, on the other hand, as an introductory board game to understanding the nuts and bolts of how evolution works, and especially how you react to other species and such. I think it does a decent job of that basic level. So I would call this, like the middle school, high school level evolution introduction. And for that, I think it does a really good job if you're going to go up to, like undergraduate or anything else, that's when it starts breaking from reality. But for the middle school, high school level of evolutionary knowledge, I think it works just fine. Brian  39:27   There's one more thing I want to give a shout out to that I didn't even know about. I saw it when we came to play, and that is the Latin names for your different could you? Could you talk on that for a second? I just don't want that to go unmentioned, because it's such a fun little easter egg to drop into the game. Tiago  39:42   Oh, yeah. So they have a list they have kind of like, how to give the scientific names to the species. And as a taxonomist, which is somebody whose primary work is to describe species, I like it a lot. And nitpicking thing was, like, was not in italics. It's supposed to but like, it's not, Jason   39:58   Oh, come on! Give 'em a break.  Tiago  40:03   I think was really great. I think was a good effort.  Jason  40:06   And I mean, the names for these are really fun. So you have a genus and a species option. You're supposed to pick one from each but like the ambush one, the genus name is ninja or hibernation. The species name is Van Winkle, long neck. You have Extendo stretcher. It's like, these are fun names for the traits. They had a lot of fun with this. And I've got to say, the designers obviously had fun, because there's a few little things. There's a few science facts scattered among stuff, which is nice. There's also just a few little nods that they had fun, like they called the little dinosaur Meeple is the and I quote, "incredibly awesome first player token". Oh, another fun thing, the official method for determining ties, so you count up the victory points, and if that is a tie, then there's something else. And if that is still a tie, the official way of solving it is to order pizza and play again.  Tiago  40:52   I like that.  Jason  40:53   All right, so we need to wrap this up. These are too much fun to talk about, though. Thank you very much, Tiago for coming on like this has been really fun. It was fun playing with you at Fear the Con last year. It's fun having you on. Tiago  41:03   My pleasure. And if you dare call me again, I'll probably show up. Brian  41:08   Do you? Do you have socials, or any way that you'd like someone to be able to reach you?  Tiago  41:12   I do have Facebook, but like, usually, basically, to to rant about my soccer team back in Brazil. And I don't use X and I don't like Not, not really don't have that much social media presence.  Jason  41:23   Okay, so many of us scientists are soo bad at social media, really? Yeah, all right, with that, we're gonna wrap it up. Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you Tiago for joining us, and everyone, have a good week and happy gaming.  Brian  41:33   Have fun playing dice with the universe.  Tiago  41:35   Goodbye.  Jason  41:38   This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those with the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.   

#Interview #Maize #Corn #Genetics #Scientists It's our mid-season break, so we've got a bonus episode talking to a handful of game-loving scientists at the 2024 Maize Genetics Meeting. We talk about science, games, perseverence, the winding path of becoming a scientist, and plenty more.  Timestamps 01:35 - Introductions 02:25 - How did you get into science? 06:28 - What do you research? 09:38 - Favorite games? 12:29 - Turning your work into a game? 14:24 - Advice to aspiring scientists 17:44 - Closing remarks Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Links 2024 Maize Genetics Meeting Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Brian  0:06   Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:14   Welcome back to Gaming with Science. This is Jason and it's just me today. So right now we're technically in our mid season break. But to make sure y'all have something, I want to introduce you to a bunch of scientists I met at the Maize Genetics Meeting back in March. And that's maize as in corn, not maze as in puzzles. Although of course, you may have been to a corn maze, which is actually a maze maze. And yeah, anyway, one of my goals with this podcast was trying to show the human side of scientists, we see a bunch of things in Hollywood where scientists are all uber-nerdy or geeky or have no social life. And I want to show that scientists are human, we have interests, we play games, we have fun. And so when I was back at this conference, I wanted to show off what real scientists are like and so I grabbed a microphone and started grabbing some people and just talking with them and ask them questions about how they got into science, what games they like, how we could turn their research into a game, that sort of thing. So, many thanks to the people who let me interview them: Briana, Chip, Jacob, Kate, Kyle, Lauren, and Mohammed; I'll let them all introduce themselves in a little bit. To keep things from getting repetitive, I spliced all the interviews together. So you'll hear me asking one question, but then you'll hear a bunch of them in turn, even though they were recorded at different times in different places, you'll have different amounts of background noises depending on where we were and how much stuff was going on at the time. Also, you probably guessed that being a maize genetics conference, corn genetics, everyone here works on corn. If you'd like this, we'll try to do a few more we'll maybe get some other ones. So without further ado, I'm just gonna let everyone introduce themselves and I hope you enjoy this.  Okay, so first off, can you please introduce yourself? Brianna  1:37   My name is Brianna Griffin. I'm originally from Florida, but I'm actually at Iowa State University where I study molecular plant pathology. Chip  1:44   Yeah, I'm Chip Hunter. I work for the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Gainesville, Florida. Jacob  1:51   I am Jacob Kelly. I am a PhD student at the University of Missouri. Kate  1:56   I'm Kate Eastman, and I'm a graduate student at Purdue and Jen Wisecavers lab. Kyle  2:01   Hi, my name is Kyle Swentowski. I'm a postdoctoral fellow in David Jackson's lab at Cold Spring Harbor. Lauren  2:07   I'm Lauren Whitt. I'm a postdoc at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, just recently graduated and I'm a plant genetic researcher. Mohammed  2:17   My name is Mohammed El-Walid. I'm a fourth year PhD candidate at Cornell University working in Ed Buckler's lab. Jason  2:25   So what got you into science in the first place? Brianna  2:27   I've always been interested in science but it was it's a kind of an interesting path though. I actually went to an art school for middle and high school, like science was definitely not the focus at our school, but I just always really enjoyed it. And as I continued to advance it, I actually started to see science as a type of art form. I just thought it was very interesting and very creative, but in a completely different way than like I was used to seeing with like the dancers and the painters and stuff like that. And so actually, when I started in undergrad, I actually thought I was gonna go to med school and I luckily joined a program called Women in math, science and engineering at Florida State University. And they're really big on getting people more involved in research like earlier on. So my sophomore year, I actually started working in a maize genetics lab. So corn corn lab, as I was doing that, at the same time as doing everything for pre med and working at the hospital and stuff, I realized that I really enjoyed science, a lot more than healthcare, nothing wrong with doctors, you know, we definitely need them. But at least for me, science just seems so much more interesting. It was a lot more creative a field, there was a lot more options like to do kind of what you wanted to and each day is very different. And so that was something that was really appealing to me. Chip  3:36   I was on track to become a dentist like my father, I was studying for the DAT exam in college and I took a course and it was called "the seeds of change". And it was taught by an agronomic professor. But it was all about genetic engineering in crops and plants. That one course changed my trajectory because I was so impressed by the possibility of plant genetic engineering to improve agriculture. But really to improve the world. I think that still holds such great promise. We've seen cool successes. Some of the examples that I was impressed by were, you know, turf grass that can be watered irrigated with saltwater, roses that never wilt, fruit that doesn't spoil, those kinds of sorts of things. Lauren  4:13   So, let's see, I wanted to be a vet growing up. Where I was from science, scientist wasn't really a thing you could be, it was you could be a science teacher, or you could be a vet, or you could be a nurse, and I'm not good with blood. I'm very queasy, unfortunately, as much as I loved animals. So I was like, Oh, I'm gonna be a science teacher. And so that's what I went to do. And I took a genetics class, and I really liked it. And I just went and talked to the professor, hey, do you have room in your lab? Can you just teach me how to do this stuff? Like how do I extract DNA? How do I isolate a gene, you know, doing PCR, that kind of stuff. And she had a really cool project for me to extract DNA from ancient permafrost up in Alaska, like 50,000 year old soil samples and like, you know, get to try to characterize what the plant population looked like across Alaska as it changed during the Pleistocene. So you know, the unknown aspect that I was like, Wait, we don't really know what that is. And she's like, well, you know, we have theories. But we don't have like, you know, the DNA, we don't have like the proof yet. And it's like, Oh, I get to do something that no one else has known about, like, I get to contribute something new. Mohammed  5:17   Actually, initially, during high school, I studied more computer science, I always had like an interest in science, but I didn't really think I'd be good at it necessarily, or really think that I, I didn't really know what a scientist looked like. And so it never really occurred to me that that's something I could actually do. But my elder sister was taking this genetics class during her, during her undergrad at the University of Missouri and the genetics professor that she was with requested some like field help from some students. And my sister agreed, and asked if she could bring me along. And this was like, the summer right after I graduated high school. So I went with her. And we were talking about like, heterosis, and things like that. And it was just, it was kind of captivating the genetics and starting to like, understand it a little bit more, and understand what kind of questions you can ask and what it looks like, what it really looks like to be a scientist and to do science. And so instead of going to computer science, I switched to biochemistry. And I found this nice avenue where I can do a lot of computational things for genetics, and now I do. Jason  6:29   Okay, and what's your research on? Brianna  6:30   So generally, I would say that I do crop improvement. So I work on diseases and working on plant immunity. So you know, how you have an immune system. And with humans, like there's also one in plants too, but it's a lot less defined at this point. And so I'm trying to help figure out that so that we can make stronger plants so that we just have better crops for the future. Mohammed  6:49   I do a lot of genomics work, we're trying to map a freezing tolerance in this wild relative of corn called Trispacum dactyloides, a lot of what I've been doing is, is is trying to figure out how we parse through all this genomics data, this genetic data that we have, and try to identify causal genes related to Tripsacum's freezing tolerance, so that we can introduce it into maize. Chip  7:13   I study maize genetics, and especially focused on defense chemistry, the regulation of defenses against insects, and pathogens by plant hormones. Lauren  7:24   We look for places in the genome that are different across populations. So just genetic variants, and then we can link that to changes in what we see in the plant. So changes in their traits. And my research is to try to narrow that down to the genes that are actually responsible for that. So just because there's a change at a certain part of the genome, doesn't mean specifically that we know which gene that that's telling us is the causal gene that's actually changing, like, making the plant taller, making plant shorter. And I guess the reason I got into it is because I found out that we actually don't know what all the genes do. So I actually might be able to discover something new. And that's exciting to me. Kate  8:02   So I study primarily two different projects. The first is a sea slug that steals chloroplasts from the algae it eats and uses its chloroplasts to photosynthesize. And then the next project is actually maize insect interactions, as well as a wild grass called Setaria viridis. And investigating the impacts of different caterpillar on plant defense responses. Jacob  8:30   I use molecular machines to move large segments of DNA from one location on a chromosome to another location on a different chromosome. It's proof of concept research to show that it can be done. One of the major problems that plant breeders run into is having different genes of interest located on different chromosomes. If we're able to insert a large segment of DNA into a plant, and that large segment of DNA has lots of genes of interest, and then we're able to move that to a specific target site, then, not only can we partially control the expression of the large segment of DNA, like the genes located in it, but because it's all incorporated in the same spot, it inherits together. Kyle  9:18   In my research, I'm interested in the differences between annual and perennial plants. Annuals are really good at growing and taking everything they've produced in their life and putting it into what's going to be harvested. Whereas perennials have to be able to recycle their nutrients and keep growing year after year. So I'm trying to figure out how that process actually works. Jason  9:38   So what are some of your favorite games? Jacob  9:40   So my favorite game is actually chess. I got into chess when I was a little boy, my dad taught me how to play chess, and he and I would stay up in the evenings. And we would play a game or two of chess, sometimes three before bed, and it was a fun way for my dad and I to bond with each other. Jason  9:57   How long was it until he stopped letting you win and you legitimately, just legitimately just beating him. Jacob  10:03   So I don't think my dad actually ever let me win. He would kick my butt, he would absolutely wreck me. When I was like four or five years old, he could beat me in just a few moves. And then as I got older and more experienced, it got to where I would win about a third of the games. And then after I left for college, I kept playing with other people that I met that also loved chess, and I got better. And my dad, he kind of stopped playing because he didn't have anyone to play with. And so now whenever my dad and I play, I return the favor from when I was four or five. Chip  10:37   My favorite game of all really is Magic the Gathering, I think the strategy and you know, constantly evolving game type that it is, is is the most fun for me. So I've played that game for quite a long time now, about 20 years, I think. Kate  10:53   I primarily love a game called Spirit Island. Other than that, classic board games, things like Monopoly, Risk and thinking of more modern ones. I really like Ecos lately and Mariposas. They're both kind of the same board game producers kind of animal interactions and things like that. Mohammed  11:16   I think right now I mostly it's a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, mainly because there's not a whole lot of prep time for me, at least that has to go into it. So Jason  11:25   You're obviously not the GM. Mohammed  11:26   No, I am not the GM. I've got, so I'm in two campaigns, and one of them started in like 2020 and is still going on right now. And it's a bunch of actually other graduate students and former graduate students. Some of them are real faculty now and join remotely. But we've been playing for a few years now, it's really, a really good, good way to kind of take the edge off, enjoy some time with friends and think about, honestly think about science actually in like a different context really a lot of the time because I feel like, especially with something like Dungeons and Dragons, you have a lot of creative freewill. And sometimes you can use the things that you know to help you. Kyle  12:08   So, I'm into both board games and video games video game wise. Some of my all time favorites are Age of Empires, Civilization, some first person shooter games, and then as far as board games go, I've lately been into this plant base board, plant molecular biology game called Cellulose. But I also I love pretty much any board game you could throw at me. Jason  12:29   And so if we were to take your research and turn it into a game, what would it be like? Brianna  12:35   I probably would say that it would be an open world adventure, where it's kind of a choose your own adventure, there's an overarching goal. But at the same time, there's a lot of different pathways you can take to like reach the end goal. And there's also a lot of side quests you can do that maybe distract you from the main mission, but still may be interesting, and still may get you some cool results along the way also. Jason  12:53   So is that one about your research itself, or is that about being a graduate student? Brianna  12:57   Probably both, honestly Lauren  12:59   It'd honestly be probably pretty similar to the Evolution board game, where you get to evolve your species to out compete with the people at the table for limited resources and give them certain traits and kind of like play with the population size and like the animal size and how much resources they need. So I really liked that aspect of it. But trying to make it more like evolution and actually adding the random part into it actually had a teacher in undergrad who taught us a lab that way where he added in random aspects to it. So maybe adding a little bit more of the plants back into it? And so like, you know, animals are always fun, like maybe more of like, you know, growing like your plant population and competing for maybe underground resources. Kate  13:35   I've worked a lot with horizontal gene transfer, which is non-hereditary passing of genetic information. So I've looked into these fungi that live in trees and pass genes between the trees that they live in, or other plants. And I also studied this sea slug that we expected had stolen some genes from the algae and eats so that it can support these chloroplasts. So it'd probably be different organisms stealing components of other organisms. Jason  14:06   Sounds like you'd be stealing bits and pieces from other players creatures and trying to make the best one. Kate  14:10   Yes, yeah, kind of like Spore. If you ever played that game on the computer, you're making this organism and slowly evolving it and adapting it to its environment. Yeah, that, that would probably be my inspiration. Jason  14:24   I assume we have some aspiring scientists among our listeners. So what sort of advice would you give to them? Jacob  14:30   I would say focus on what you love. And then as you focus on the science that you enjoy learning about the most, you will come across people that can point you in the right direction for not just learning more, but actually getting involved in the science and being able to push the perimeter of what is known and ultimately make discoveries and discover things related to what it is that you are interested in. Kate  14:56   Just stay passionate about things. I have always loved science. Science. But when it becomes your job, you have to remember to separate your love for something from your hatred of a nine to five, or your dislike for school or things like that. So just kind of looking back at what got me passionate about science. And what I really love helps me to stay committed and stay driven. Mohammed  15:23   It's much more doable than you think. There are a lot of challenges along the way. And then also, you do get paid for your PhD, you don't have to pay for that. So I think that was, that was something that really, I didn't realize until I started working in a laboratory and didn't know that was a thing. And then also, I think that the most important thing is really to make sure that you can maintain good relationships with your advisor, and with your colleagues, and then that you also have like a good balance outside of work, because it really is just like more of a marathon than anything. And I think that transition from from undergrad where everything did feel like a race to kind of slowing it down and just trying to keep taking slow steps forward was a challenge for me initially. Chip  16:10   Yeah, dive in early as you can and try to find a place that you can have freedom to play, to learn and to do experiments. My personal philosophy is with students is to really let them take a stab at leading experiments and design experiments. Kyle  16:26   If you really love what you're doing, keep going with it. I know it's gonna be a lot of hard work, but the dedication you put into it with anything in life will really pay off later. Lauren  16:35   Definitely talk to your professors. I didn't know that that was the thing that you could do until one of my friends told me that she was working in someone's lab. And so it's like, yeah, just go up and talk to a professor. They're normal people, they have first names, a lot of professors I know like to go by their first names, actually. You know, a lot of them are going to be really down to earth and also want to pass on, like, I'm sure every scientist had a previous scientist that inspired them when they were a student. At least for me, and a lot of people I know, it's like wanting to pass that forward. And just showing that you're interested is like all we need, it's like you don't have to know all this stuff. You don't have to know how to do DNA extraction, you don't need to know how to use R or Python, I can teach you that. But if you have the desire to do it, then you know, that's really all we're looking for. And we're all just a bunch of nerds really. So we love sharing common interests. And you know, what makes us passionate. So, you know, don't be afraid to I guess show that side either. You know that I guess there's a stereotype about scientists being a certain way and being, you know, only concerned about their research and very serious and very analytical, but a lot of us are really fun. We have other outside hobbies, we have fandoms that we like to do sports that we like to do. And so just talk to a scientist and figure out if it's for you. Jason  17:46   And I can't really top that so thank you very much to Brianna, Chip, Jacob, Kate, Kyle, Lauren, and Mohamed for letting me interview them. Thank you for sharing a little bit about themselves. And thank you to you all for listening. This episode was a bit of an experiment. So if you have strong opinions about whether we should do this again or not do it again, go ahead and jump on the Discord and let us know. Link is at www.gamingwithscience.net. You can get the invite there, jump on, talk to us. We really friendly people. Get on & let us know if there's something you want us to do more of. And with that, we'll go ahead and wrap it up for now. Y'all have a great week, happy gaming and have fun playing dice with the universe. This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. Listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to Gaming with Science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.

#Chemistry #Bonds #Scientists #LabWork #ScienceGames It's time to grab some atoms and make some bonds! In this episode we cover Compounded: The Peer-Reviewed Edition by Greater Than Games. We'll cover chemistry basics, how bonds work, a bit of what it's like in an actual research lab, and why sabotaging others is fun in games but not so much in real life. Timestamps 00:53 - Corn diversity for humans 05:05 - Basics of the game 11:30 - Basics of atoms & electrons 17:00 - Making bonds 22:17 - What makes things explode? 27:59 - Depiction of scientists 37:48 - Final grades Find our socials at GamingWithScience.net  Game Results [Not recorded, but apparently Jason won by a lot] Links Compounded: The Peer-Reviewed Edition Crash Course Chemistry  Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Jason  0:06   Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of the favorite games. Brian  0:13   In today's episode we're going to discuss compounded by Greater than Games. Hey, I'm Brian, this is Jason. And welcome back to the fifth episode of Gaming with Science. Today we're going to talk about Compounded: the Peer-Reviewed Edition, which is an interesting chemistry game created by Darrell Louder. But before we get into that, Jason, do you have any science topics for us to talk about today? Jason  0:39   So I do have one and this one is close to my heart. It has nothing to do with chemistry. Sorry. So I was again at a conference recently, actually, we're gonna have a bonus episode out probably next month, the maize genetics meeting. So the big meeting for all the corn geneticists, a lot of us based in the US, also some outside. But I was talking to one of the USDA researchers there, Sherry Flint-Garcia, who I've known for a few years. And I love her work, because she's got these projects that are looking at corn from a human consumption point of view. So basically, corn that people eat. This is one thing that comes up a lot, we grow a lot of corn here in the US, and almost none of it goes to humans. Most of it goes to animal feed, and a small amount goes to ethanol. And then some of it, a little tiny bit, gets made into like tortillas and chips and sweet corn and stuff. But she has all these projects that are looking at corn from the human perspective. So she's been working with local groups to do tortilla-making quality on corn for a while. I believe she's working with one group now on whiskey, and how to make that. And then the one that I'm really cool that she's doing a big evaluation of like 1000 traditional varieties of corn from the US just to evaluate, like how they perform, because people haven't looked at this information in decades. But there's things they're like, they have different flavor profiles, they have different use profiles. You know, for being one of the largest producers of corn in the world, the US, just, we don't appreciate it at all. I mean, you go down to Mexico, they appreciate their corn, I mean, corn is a big deal in Mexico, you don't mess with their corn, but here in the US, it's like we don't care. And that's kind of sad. So I'm glad that there's someone doing that now. And I hope they come up with some really cool stuff out of there. I hope they get some good evaluations, they can find some varieties that work well and that people can use for actual eating varieties. Brian  2:22   I really was hoping you were gonna say she was doing a big study of popcorn varieties.  Jason  2:26   No, she doesn't do popcorn, although I think she has a collaborator who's actually specifically looking at all the popcorn varieties in there. Yeah, we, we're both plant people. We could go off on this for a full hour in terms of all the varieties and their adaptations and stuff. And I mean, I love genetic diversity among plants. And we could talk about that all day long. And that's not what this podcast is about. Brian  2:48   No, well, not this particular podcast, maybe we'll find a game that will give us a better excuse to talk about that. But for now, I think. Yeah, let's get back to talking about board games.  Jason  2:56   Yeah, let's see. Is there any science in Agricolae? I actually haven't played it.  Brian  3:00   I don't know. I know you put it on the list. I guess we could find out. Probably not. But we'll find out someday. So you want to talk about this game? Jason  3:08   Sure. Brian  3:09   Okay, so we're going to talk about Compounded, specifically Compounded: The Peer-Reviewed Edition. And this was released last year in 2023. Designer is Darrell Louder, at Greater Than Games, the original version of compounded was released 2013. So it was a 10 year span, there were a couple expansions in there, including like a radioactivity expansion, I didn't get a chance to look at those. Now, one of the things that I was trying to figure out that I have tried to figure out in the past, is what inspires a board game designer to want to make a science based game? So for instance, the creator of Wingspan was an avid birder. And the creator of stellar Horizons was an MIT...what was his, what was his major? Jason  3:48   He was, his graduate degree was in like human space exploration. And then he went off to work at SpaceX. So yeah. Brian  3:56   So the connection is obvious, right? Well, I actually had to do some digging on Darrell Louder, who unfortunately didn't have a Wikipedia page. So it made it a little challenging. I listened to an interview that he gave and like, eventually, I was able to find in a blog on the Greater than Games website, that he has a theatre, a theatre degree. And, like, went back to get in graphic design and do that. So like to be honest, after all my digging, I don't know what inspired Darrell Louder to design a chemistry game. It's really unclear to me. Maybe that comes through a little bit in the design of the game a little bit. I don't like being critical of games, but there's got to be some criticism of this one, I think. Jason  4:30   Yeah, we'll see. You talked a little bit about it. I may have some pushback on that. But we'll see. But if there's enough in here that either he talked a lot with people who actually do chemistry, or he had some background, even if it was just an undergrad, undergraduate laboratory. Actually, that would explain why fire plays such a big role in this game. Brian  4:48   I absolutely agree. And I do want to talk about that. I, I can tell that a lot of careful choice went into balancing and selection and how this game was designed. But almost unfortunately, almost none of that is in the metaphor of the game. So that's where we're kind of got to talk about things later. But okay, so what is this game? What does it look like? If you want to play compounded, what are you going to do? It is a game for two to five players, plays in 45 to 70 minutes. That sounds about right to me. The suggested ages 14 and up. Now, this is not an overly complicated game. So that age seems high. But I think that maybe the sabotage/traitor mechanics might just be something that maybe a child maturity level could be the suggestion for 14 and up, as opposed to the complexity of the game, there's a lot of ways to mess with other players. Jason  5:34   I gotta say that, as someone who likes messing with other players, there's not that many ways of messing with other players, there's a few. Brian  5:42   We just didn't do as much of it. That's all, like, I think that there's a whole, you could play this game as a, as a pure troll if you wanted to, and just play it to be disruptive and just destructive. You wouldn't win the game. But maybe, I don't know, maybe there's a balancing issue there, potentially. So what does this game look like? So you, you'll open this up, you have a full copy of the periodic table. So the periodic table is basically just your score tracker. It also has some places where you could do some actions like activate various sciency tools like Bunsen burners or lab notebooks and stuff like this. There's a lot of like science theming in this game, the players are going to have these little player mats, they've got four little tracks on them. And then you're going to have a grid of chemical cards, compound cards. And each of these cards has between two and six different atoms on it, two to four different types of atom. You lay these out in a grid of four by four if you're in a three player game, or more. And then you've got this little bag of these beautiful little crystalline little plastic things that are supposed to represent different types of elements like hydrogen, and oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, which we'll come back and talk about that, and sulfur. And your little track, you've got four of them, and it gets to decide like, Okay, how many of the little elements do you get to pull out of the bag? How many can you keep? How many can you place out onto the cards, and then your last track is how many actions you get a turn. And this is a victory point game, you just collect points from the face value on the cards, you get some points for advancing your track. I think that was it. Seem right to you? Jason  7:14   Yeah, that's it there. Yeah, if there's other ways of getting points, we didn't play with them, but I don't think there are. Brian  7:19   Okay, so the other mechanic is after you complete a compound, that you get to score the points, you take a new card out of the deck and you place it down and it's either going to be a different compound, or it's going to be a fire. And if you have a fire, it can catch fire to the surrounding cards. If they run out of places for fire to be, they will explode and scatter the elements to the surrounding card. All of the players have a fire extinguisher, it's everybody's responsibility to put out the fires when they happen. Because you know, if you don't, then you're gonna have things blow up. Jason  7:51   I got to say this is one of my favorite little mechanics of the game. It doesn't have to be there. But it's a fun bit that sometimes you're doing organic chemistry, things just blow up. Yep, that happens, which is why everyone has a fire extinguisher and why half the compounds catch on fire. I do like that when they catch on fire their point values go down, because there's a real reason why you want to put out the fire. And then of course, you can use this a little maliciously, because there are some tools that let you set fire to other people's compounds that are in the middle of building and possibly blow them up. Brian  8:21   There are some compounds where when you score them, they just catch fire no matter what, because they're just that flammable. And like it says "as if a fire had occurred". There is one of the tools, the Bunsen burner, where you can literally set fire to any compound you want of somebody else. You can set fire to water. Jason  8:37   Which I think mechanically is just you're boiling it off. Brian  8:39   I think they said the mechanic is that you've contaminated their sample in some way. Okay, to you know what you've put something into it that allows it to catch on fire, just like the rivers in Cleveland, right? Those are the basics of the game. Another interesting element to this is that this is the only game we've played so far, where as the players you are supposed to be taking on the role of a scientist, of a researcher. And the original conceit was you are all scientists in the same lab competing to be the lead scientist, which Jason and I are in labs. That's not how that works. But okay. Jason  9:13   Competing to be the lead postdoc, let's call it that, like the lead scientist doesn't actually do research anymore. They're up managing and writing grants and supervising people. All the people doing the fun stuff in the lab. They're the postdocs and the grad students and the research scientists. Yeah. Brian  9:27   I think it's somebody who does research. In my head, I was like, Oh, I'm the lead researcher and I'm collaborating with other labs, not individuals in one lab. But anyway, Jason  9:36   I think one thing in there, so the, one thing to point out is the tracks, the four tracks that the player board has. So as you go up in the tracks, they not only get you points, but they get you resources you need. So there's a limited number of little atoms, you can draw turn, how many you can keep, how many you can play, that sort of thing. And as you move up in the tracks, you're get access to more. So there's a little bit this tension because if you go out after high value compounds, then you get a lot of points, but you don't move your tracks very much. And so you have limited ability to do more. Whereas if you go after a bunch of cheap compounds, you're not getting many points, but you're improving your ability to do other things later. And there's a little bit where the compounds are like solids or liquids or gases, and that determines which track you can move up. And it's a nice little touch. I like that. Brian  10:19   Yeah, the game really did have a lot of care and design that was put into it. There's a lot of strategy, there's a lot of different ways to play. You can work together, you can work against each other. I mean, it's a good game. Jason  10:29   Yeah, you even have the expansion or the component where there's the mega compounds that are designed for two players to work together on them. Brian  10:35   Oh, yes, very good point. Thank you. That is the key mechanic of the peer reviewed edition, that you have these double sized cards that two people could work on together. Those can range up to 20 atoms and be worth up to 38 points Jason  10:48   Which is like half a victory condition right there.  Brian  10:50   Yeah, pretty much. Now one thing about those large cards, the little cards all have, they're real chemicals, real chemical names, they have little facts about each of the chemicals. The giant size cards have some really interesting compounds on them. But they're missing the little facts. I don't know if the assumption is oh, that people will just Google it or something. But, like, nitroglycerin is a very charismatic compound. I think everybody knows what nitroglycerin is, it's extremely explosive, dimethyl trisulfide, which I know personally, because it's the stinky compound that's made when garlic breaks down, which is something I study. Trimethylamine, which is the odor that we would associate with fish, these are interesting chemicals. But there's there's no little like kind of fact about what these do. Anyway. Jason  11:29   Well, that's a missed opportunity. Brian  11:30   Yeah, I think so a little bit. That's the basics of the game. Let's, let's try to talk about the science here. And this, I am going to consider this a little challenging because basically what I'm going to try to do right now is speed-run chemistry. Okay. As I see the things to talk about here, this sort of science, the core science concepts that are in compounded at least tangentially are atoms, elements in the periodic table, compounds, what is a compound, and what is a chemical bond. And then I also spent a little bit of time like, what makes something flammable? Or more specifically combustible, since it is such an important part of the game, and maybe a little bit on phase of matter, I don't know how much we want to get into that. I also thought it would be worth talking a little bit about the depiction of research and scientists in this game, because again, this is one of the only games we've had where scientists are part of the game. So we can talk a little bit about, like some of the depictions, what we think they got right, and what maybe we think, maybe not so much. Let's get started with this. Again, this is my crazy, "here's chemistry in a nutshell". So what is an atom? An atom is made up of three different particles, you've got a proton with a positive charge, a neutron, that pretty much is just there to kind of help the protons stick together, and an electron. So the protons and the neutrons are in the nucleus. They don't really do very much. They're not really that interesting. All of the action is happening with the electrons that kind of orbit around that. Not really an orbit more of like a shell. It's all quantum II stuff. And I don't really want to get into it. Jason  13:05   Yeah, this is the sort of thing where you could spend an entire  undergraduate degree really understanding what's going on here and still not be deep into it. Now that said, the nucleus, the protons, and the neutrons are extremely interesting for nuclear chemistry, which is where radiation and nuclear bombs and all that stuff happens. Stellar fusion, that's what powers the sun. But ordinary everyday chemistry like we do in Compounded. That's all with the electrons. Brian  13:29   Yeah, for sure. Like all of the interesting stuff that happens with chemistry in our day to day lives. So that's all it's all about the electrons, right?  Jason  13:36   So with atoms and trying to build an atom, there's kind of two forces at play that we really want to care about, at least for today's episode. One is charge. So protons are positively charged, electrons are negatively charged. So the first thing you want is you need basically the same number of protons and electrons, so the atom itself is not charged. That makes things happy, the atom doesn't want to be charged. Usually. There's a second thing that modifies that though, it has to do with just the electrons. This is quantum stuff, it has to do with how they form groups and the electron shells and stuff. And we're not going to go into that because that's like, that's very complicated. But basically, if you have certain numbers of electrons, and they fill these little shells they're in, a full shell is more stable than a partially full shell. And so sometimes that will overcome it. So there are some atoms where they actually want to gain an additional electron or lose an electron because that leaves them with completely full shells instead of partially full shells. And that sort of trading of electrons is actually what forms all sorts of chemicals and bonds as the, essentially the nuclei are either sharing or donating or stealing electrons from each other, to make sure they're all happy and have the right number of electrons in their shells.  Brian  14:45   Yeah, for sure. So the analogy that I liked for this is the I think it's usually called the bus seat analogy, but I actually kind of like the train car analogy. If you imagine when people are sitting on the bus, the electrons don't want to sit with each other. They'll sit in the open seats first until there are no are more open seats, and then they start pairing up and sitting in twos. As the atoms get bigger, you kind of hitch new train cars onto the back of the train that have more seats, but they're still kind of going to fill up in that basic way. An atom is an element based on having the number of protons, so like hydrogen is got one, helium has got two, and you just keep going up this list. As you make the bigger atoms, you're adding more places for electrons to go, and how many unpaired electrons are sitting in those outermost seats, that's kind of determining what kind of chemistry this is going to be able to do. And that's actually the basis of the periodic table, is as you're filling up these electrons, you kind of come back around and you do the circle again. And now you're repeating the same pattern of unpaired electrons. So everything in a column of a periodic table sort of has similar chemical properties to it. In fact, like it's a table, but really, it should be like a ring, where they kind of like connect back around together as like a spiral. I was watching a video by Hank Green, that was one of the original proposals, they didn't publish it because the publisher couldn't figure out how to publish a spiral periodic table. So Mendeleev's became more popular. So actually, this is the thing, like the periodic table is based on every time you go up one proton, that's a new element, and you just keep going all the way. So unfortunately, for science fiction authors, like, if you want to discover a new element, there's nowhere for it to go but at the end. Like we know all of the elements, you know, ever, it's just adding protons until eventually you get to the end. And the ones at the end are so big and so heavy that they can't hold together. They're all radioactive, and they just decay. So we're, we may find new compounds, but we're probably not going to find any new elements at this point. Jason  16:35   Yeah, I like the way Mass Effects got out of that they found Element Zero. I don't know how that works. But that's what they found. And that's what makes all the science magic in that, in that video game series work Brian  16:47   Something less than hydrogen. Okay. That's funny, as you pointed out, though, so that is the basics of an atom, an element, the elements are just gonna have a set number of protons. And how many electrons they have that want to have partners is based on how we're going to get our bonds. So let's talk about bonds. So what does that go? So you said it's about sharing or trading electrons, right? Electrons want to be in pairs. An ionic bond is something like sodium chloride. In that case, there's no sharing happening. Jason  17:17   Table salt. Brian  17:17   Yes, table salt, sorry, the electrons get stolen by one atom from the other. And that's the preference and those ends up when, you get charged. That's where you get like ions, and stuff like that. Jason  17:28   Yeah. And that usually only happens with the ones that are on the far left and the far right of the periodic table, because they're the ones that are closest to that stability point. So it's easier for them to just get rid of one or gain one. And suddenly, they're perfectly happy. Brian  17:42   And those are the, so in a board game context, that's the, that's the competitive elements. They don't then then we've got our organic compounds are ones that will form covalent bonds they'd like to share, those are our collaborative board gamers. In that case, instead of, they actually don't trade, they kind of will use the same ones together. And that's where a lot of the really interesting chemistry happens because they're, they're very stable, they're very happy to just kind of sit right next to each other and share those electrons. It kind of keeps them into a tight connection with each other. So this is, so things like carbon have four unpaired electrons, so they can bind to four different things. So actually, a lot of our actually, let's talk about this. What is organic, what is an organic compound? Jason  18:25   From a chemistry perspective it's something that involves carbon. This is completely different from organic produce, which is something that irked me for many years. It's like all produces organic it's all carbon-based stop using that. And that's a personal pet peeve. I have gotten over it and accepted the fact that the label means two different things in two different contexts. Brian  18:46   So for instance, water is not an organic compound, water does not have carbon in it. So carbon can bind with four things, nitrogen can bind with three things, oxygen can bind with two, hydrogen can bind with one, sulfur can also bind with one, and then we've got our weirdo in this game, which is calcium, right? So I was looking at these and the way that they're colored and the balance and everything. And I'm pretty sure I know part of the inspiration for why Compounded uses these. I did ask, I think this might only be something at the college level. But Jason, you've I assume played with a ball and stick chemistry model in college. Jason  19:20   Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can get them at bookstores or get them online or whatever.  Brian  19:23   So these are the little balls, they've got little sticks, they've got the right number of holes, like carbon, you can shove four things into it, hydrogen you can only do one. The distribution of elements that you have in Compounded is very, very close to the distribution that you would have in one of those chemistry kits. And actually, the colors are the same too for the most part. There's sort of this mnemonic thing where like hydrogen is a clear gas, so it's always white, and oxygen's in our blood, so it's red. And nitrogen is in the atmosphere so it's blue. Carbon is coal, so it's black. And sulfur. Why is sulfur yellow? I mean, sulfur makes various yellow compounds. Jason  19:57   I mean, elemental sulfur is yellow. Why is calcium green?  Brian  20:02   Well, that's a good question. Because actually, in your typical chemistry kit, it wouldn't be calcium, it would be chlorine, or something like that, or fluorine or something like that. I did check this as well, there are versions of this sort of scheme of sort of color mnemonics where calcium would be green. So organic compounds, like you said, is carbon, anything with carbon in it. The origin of the term comes from, Oh, these are the compounds that we find in living things, right? I mean, that's kind of where it originally came from. Jason  20:35   Back when they thought that only living things could make it, there's some special life force that that allowed it. And then people figured out organic chemistry and was like Oh, no, we can make these too. Yeah, one can be really annoying to make sometimes, but yes, we can make them. Brian  20:47   Yeah, living things are really good chemists. It's really hard to do in a test tube what can be done easily in a body. Well, maybe "easy" isn't giving them enough credit. Jason  20:55   I mean, given the Rube-Goldberg like contraction that is a living cell, I'm not sure "easy" applies here. They're very good at it, because they've had 4 billion years to get good at it.  If you actually figure out everything that's involved in making even simple compounds, it's like, oh, no, no, no, this is just a, this is a highly tuned system. But easy is not it. Brian  21:16   Okay, that's fair, that's fair. So calcium is the oddball. Calcium is not something that can make, it's not one of the ones that shares, calcium is actually a metal. It's like way off to the side, and it doesn't participate in covalent bonds. Now I was thinking about this. And I'm, what you would typically see in a chemistry kit would have been phosphorus, not calcium. Or chlorine or something like that. A lot of the compounds in compounded are these sort of nice organic chemicals with carbon in them, phosphorus would have been typical, but phosphorus typically doesn't hang out by itself, it usually has a bunch of extra oxygens in there. Because usually a phosphate, it's like a phosphorus and a couple of oxygens, usually three, and then that's what gets stuck on to other compounds. So I imagine it was literally a game balancing choice. If you don't want to use phosphorus, because, well, you're never going to have it on its own, the compounds are going to be too big. And there was this clear choice of making it between two and six atoms on each compound card. So phosphorus just didn't make sense. So okay, so here's where I actually spent a little bit of time trying to figure out, now what makes something flammable? Because this was a big part of Compounded. And that as I don't know, that's more complicated than you would think. In a sense, it's not. So "combustible" is a much more easy thing to understand. Something is combustible when it can react with oxygen, and release energy in the form of heat or light. So anything that can react with oxygen would be considered combustible. Now what makes something combustible in that sense, is so for instance, wood is combustible. Once you get the reaction going, it produces more heat and light and then creates a more heat and creates a chain reaction, sort of reacting with more compounds. And that's what causes things to burn. Jason  23:03   And going back to the reason behind this is because oxygen is very good at taking electrons from other things, it wants to share electrons, but it's very good at grabbing onto them and holding them tightly, arguably one of the best atoms at doing that, which is why it's essentially the chemical dead end of so many things. Once you react with oxygen you have to pour energy into it to get it back out.  Brian  23:27   So okay, that's what makes something combustible, something that can react with oxygen release energy, which if you're releasing energy, it means it's like a preferable state for the chemical to be in. It's like, things are always wanting to go towards the lowest energy state. Flammable is a little weird, flammable, is just like how volatile something is. And that's very dependent upon pressure and temperature and everything else. Something's flammable, where you put an ignition source in it, and it just goes "fwooph", like that's flammable. So you can be combustible and not flammable. It gets really complicated, like vapor pressure and all this stuff that we don't really need to get into, I think. And then there's also like "explosive", which is about producing gas, it's, it's too much, it's too much to get into. Jason  24:07   Okay, but basically for flammable, it has to be able to evaporate yes to get into the air and then essentially be pre mixed with oxygen. So all you need is a spark or a heat source to do it. Whereas wood is not going to evaporate. It's just going to sit there. Brian  24:20   But interestingly, to get wood to catch fire, you do have to go through a process of called pyrolysis where basically you are releasing flammable gases from the solid, like it has to be able to mix with the oxygen, so it has to be able to vaporize in some way to be able to be flammable. That is the basics of the science. Hopefully we did a good job of that. I think we did the best we can considering we did it in, what 15 minutes? 20 minutes? Jason  24:43   There are plenty of YouTube videos about basic chemistry, but there's a lot of ground to cover here because this is how chemicals, how atoms form bonds. Yeah. Which is chemistry. Yeah, basically. That's the entire field of chemistry, right there, atoms forming bonds. Brian  24:58   There is legitimately a great short crash course on chemistry. It's a series by Hank Green. If you're curious, I would say just watching it, it's got really good production values. It's a lot of fun. It's Hank Green, he's a great science communicator. Yes, let's talk about how that science is represented and compounded. Um, it's, it's not really. Jason  25:20   But I'm going to push back. I'm gonna say it's subtle. Like, and that's the point, you talk about the science and game, this game is not meant to be a science communication game. It has the science skin painted on it, but there are little nods, like the one I noticed the first time we played, when you get the little plastic bits of the atoms, so half of them are clear, and half of them are opaque. And it turns out the clear ones are all the gases, and the opaque ones are all the solids, at least at normal room temperature. There are the fact that like, things are flammable. Well, only some of them are flammable. And they are presumably the ones that are actually flammable. You have this solid-liquid-gas phase, which determines which of your tracks you're able to move up. It's like, they're there. But they're subtle. This is, this is not wingspan, this is not trying to teach you all sorts of chemistry facts. They're there if you go digging, but they're not there if you don't care about them. Brian  26:12   Which I guess is kind of, I don't know, maybe that's kind of my point. You don't accidentally learn things playing Compounded. Maybe you do Maybe I'm being too harsh. Again, I think that there, there's a way to do it. Where okay, like, again, I hate to constantly be comparing to Wingspan, it's going to be hard not to I apologize if this is already going to get old. for people who are listening to this. You can't play Wingspan and not learn something, you just can't. It's impossible. But no, you're right. There was a lot of nods here. So for instance, the color array, right, that consistent elemental coloring, now that is something where you could start to intuitively, if you had played compound is like, oh, it's carbon, right? Because it's consistent. You've gotten used to it, it's always depicted. They are real chemicals, right?  But nothing about like how you play the chemicals onto the cards.... In the terms of designing this game, I, I am certain a lot of care went into this selection of the appropriate chemicals, with the right balance of elements, the correct structures, balancing the point values, the flammability, the phases of matter, all of that. I'm sure there was a ton of effort. The specific choice of calcium over phosphorus or chlorine or something like that, so that you could have smaller ionic compounds, instead of just these large organic compounds. All of that was behind the scenes. The problem is I don't know how much of it is in the in the front for the player to kind of absorb. So that's that's really where my criticism lies.  Jason  27:41   Yeah, and that's probably a design choice. I mean, that's one of the knobs you get to tune as a designer is you choose how upfront am I going to make this? How behind the scenes? Like what do I want to focus on to be. And the game designer here just chose to have there be science in there, but have it be a subtle, it's a background thing, it's not in the foreground? Brian  27:59   So another aspect of this that I think we should talk about is the depiction of scientists in a game, which we haven't really had a chance to do yet. I mean, Stellar Horizons arguably had more to do about politicians. This you actually have like, scientist, you are playing a scientist trying to discover chemistry, chemicals, compounds, and competing with one another or cooperating with one another in the process of doing that. So a lot of these are just like, the way that the terms are applied, don't always make a ton of sense. Your four little tracks on your board are called your "experiments." But then they're labeled discover-study-research-lab, which I'm not really sure. Like, there is sort of that standard process of the scientific method of like Hypothesis Testing research, and then I guess we would consider "publish" to be an important part of the process. You got to tell people what you found. So you know, that's fine. I mean, the player markers are just random pieces of glassware. I mean, that's fine. It's fun to play as a little beaker. This is your monopoly dog for, for playing compounded is getting to play a little Bunsen burner. There are some other weird stuff, I suppose. One thing that that caught my attention was one of the tools is, one of the things you can get as a research grant. In this game, the research grant just benefits the person who's doing the worst. I can tell you from experience, that's not how research grants work. They do not go to the lab and most need. Jason  29:19   Yes, and there are specific funding mechanisms for that. But by and large, like the successful labs get most of the big successful grants, which lets them be successful and get most of the big successful grants. I mean, as in many other things, the rich tend to get richer. Brian  29:32   So another big mechanic, a fundamental mechanic of the game is this ability to claim a compound. You said I am working on this one. And that's it. You say you're working on this one and your other people then, they could work on it if they want to, but they won't derive the benefit. It's still is your compound. Now, it kind of works like that. A little bit like, but that's really casual. Like, there are definitely people who will... okay So, in science, we have this process called "getting scooped", which I imagine that also happens in like news and anytime where you're in a truth-based field, I am studying something, I am working on this really hard. And then I find out just as we're about to finish up our work that someone else has published the exact same observations. Oh, no, now they get all the credit and none of our stuff counts. So I can tell you that from a career perspective, getting scooped does suck, because of the way we sort of apply credit. And it's like, oh, now that's their discovery, it doesn't matter that we were working on it. But really scooping is the sign that science is working the way that it's supposed to. It means that you can have people on different sides of the planet not talking to each other. Unaware of what the other one is doing, making observations about the world and finding the exact same thing. Scooping is a good thing. It means that the process is working. Okay.  Jason  30:55   That said, I prefer...much as I joke about how much I like messing with other people in games, in real life, I like cooperation. And so if I realize I'm working on something similar to someone else, I'll usually try to cooperate with them, or at least see how we can carve out our own niches. Now part of that is because the fields I work in tend to be relatively small, there's not enough space for us to compete with each other. If we compete against each other, everyone loses. There's just not enough grant money flowing around. I've gathered that's not the case with the big money areas, like human cancer research I've gathered is pretty cutthroat because there's so much money going around, you can have five or six labs all studying the same thing, all racing to get the same new research, the same new discovery out there. Brian  31:35   Yeah, that's and you're right. I mean, obviously, cooperation people will work together, you reinforce each other's work. That is the that is the path. It is not the path that has always taken though, there are definitely people who want the credit. Jason  31:49   Yeah, now I was gonna say, the whole way where that you can claim one and then other people can work on it, that seems to be sort of like first authorship. So the, the way we scientists boosts our reputation is we publish papers. And although there's different standards in different fields for exactly what the order of who goes on that paper matters, generally speaking, whoever is the first author gets the most credit, they did the most work, it was their idea, whatever. And so there's actually the thing that when we go to publish, you have kind of negotiate what order people go in, in order to make sure everyone gets the right amount of credit. And so that claiming seems to me like, Oh, this is the first author on this. Other people can help if they want, but they're the one that's going to get the most credit, I think, it'd be nice if there were some mechanics to represent that where like, Oh, if you assist on this, you get some small amount of points, like, oh, you get one point or two points for everything you put on there, while the main person gets most of it, but that would require other things to track it. And so it's not really an easy fix to add to add to it. But that's how I see that particular aspect of the game.  Brian  32:51   We need, like, Compounded the Collaborative Edition. Jason  32:56   Yes, or unfortunately, the competition part does happen. It's like, although it's not good, I have actually heard of scientists sabotaging others' research. This is thankfully very rare. And when it's found out, it is like, that is your way of getting blacklisted in science, like you do not sabotage other people. You can collaborate, you can compete, you can try to scoop them, but you do not undermine other people's work. And I have heard of some people where, this was years ago, I read like there was some postdoc where he was just feeling very stressed and pressured. And for reasons I still don't understand, he poured ethanol on his labmate's cell cultures. So this is basically, this is how to kill cells. And he like added it to some of her growing media, so it would kill them. Like I still don't understand the reasoning why, because as far as I can tell, he was not competing with her. It happens. Now, he got found out pretty quickly, because ethanol smells very different from normal cell growth media. And they put a camera and they saw it happening, he got confronted, fired, et cetera, et cetera. So like, action was taken, like justice was served, but still up that wasted weeks at the very least of one person's work, sometimes months. And so this is why...we scientists don't have very much when you get down to it. We don't have much money, we don't have that much prestige. Most of us pretty much all we've got is our reputation and our results. And so we protect those pretty fiercely. And basically, number one way of getting blacklisted as a scientist is to do something to actively harm someone else's research Brian  34:24   Well I think that sort of covers the basics of the science that is behind compounded, how compounded addresses it, and kind of like a little bit about being a scientist in a board game like setting and how that's represented. But let's talk about the game itself. Did you, did you enjoy the game? What did you, how did you like playing the game? Or what were things you liked? Or didn't like? Jason  34:45   I did. I found it enjoyable. I think it's a fairly straightforward game. At least, maybe if we played it more I'd realized there were like deeper depths in terms of how you can interact with others. But mostly, it seems pretty straightforward. Like okay, I need to move my research tracks up so I get more resources. I need to acquire compounds as fast as I can so that I get victory points. And I need to do that faster and better than everyone else. It seems pretty straightforward to me. But that's my impression so far like, there's not an obvious way for there being a bunch of depth to it. It's pretty straightforward. It's a nice light game. Brian  35:16   I'm sure there's an optimal way to play it. Well, clearly there is because, I think again, as has become tradition, I think you completely annihilated everybody on points. So clearly, there is an optimal way to play. And one of the things that I noticed is not a single time in all the times that we play did we actually have a fire get out of control, which is a huge part of the game that just doesn't seem to come up very much.  Jason  35:39   Yeah, I noticed that when we were playing together as families, we just, someone always had a fire extinguisher ready. In part, I think we were so paranoid about a fire happening that if we all ran out, someone would refresh their fire extinguisher to make sure we could handle a fire. And then when you and I played individually, they just, by the way the deck was shuffled, they just never came up.  Brian  35:58   Yeah it's a fun game. You know, there's sort of the Catan style trading mechanic, which we didn't get into. It's like, hey, I'll trade you two hydrogen for an oxygen or something like that, to try to get on what you're working on. There's plenty of opportunities to sabotage, but I don't know, I guess it just didn't come up that much. Were you sabotaging anybody? Or were you focused on just scoring your own points? Jason  36:19   I wasn't outright sabotaging. I mean, most of the outright sabotage seems to be you like someone else's compound on fire. Mostly, I was poaching. There were definitely times where someone had partially built a compound and left it open. It's like, oh, I can fill it out. I'm gonna grab that compound now. Thank you for doing the preliminary work. Brian  36:35   No, it's it was a fun game. I'm trying to decide like on my personal scale. Well, okay. Is there anything else you want to talk about the game? I mean, the game is very pretty. For sure. I love the design. The elements are fun. They're in a nice little cloth bag. Darryl Louder is a graphic designer. And I think that that shows, it's all looks very nice. I do think that the use of the periodic table as just a score tracker. It makes sense. I don't know what else you would do. But it seems like having a whole periodic table and have that not really matter, except is just tracking your scores. Maybe a little unfortunate. Jason  37:06   Yeah, it is a nice touch that it's a very easy way to know when victory hits. Because if you remember the periodic table, there's those two lines that are always put down at the bottom. Technically, they belong in the middle, but then the periodic table would be stupidly wide. And so they're always translated down. When you go down there, that's when you trigger the victory condition. It's like the top row's for a two player game. And I think the bottom row's are like a three or four player game. So that's an easy, easy way of tying that table to knowing when to stop. Brian  37:33   I just realized the actinides and the lanthanides are basically Hawaii and Alaska on a map of the United States. You pull them off in their own little separate section, because to try to show the whole thing would make it too big. All right. So should we do some scores? Jason  37:49   Yeah, and this is an important thing, I realized, we've never really defined how we set these scores, we get these letter grades, but we never like calibrated it. So I wanted to put that out here. At least this is how I do it in my head, that everything starts at a B. And I want to say that because eBay and Amazon, and everything have all trained us that anything less than five stars is failure. And that's not the case here. Things start at a B. And then if you do things well, you go up and if you think poorly, you go down. So that's kind of the, the, at least in my head, that's how I'm assigning these grades. So getting a B is not a bad thing. It's like okay, you did something, you did it well, that's fine. Brian  38:28   It sounds like there's a B in there. Jason  38:31   Well, there will be a B in here. Okay, but Brian  38:36   How do I do it? I mean, at this point, I think we're sort of establishing the scales we go. Wingspan's an A. Right? Yeah, the definition of an A. But I think it's, I think what I'm thinking about it is, I guess I don't have as much of that, I don't have a set starting point. But it's this idea of like, are you going to learn science while playing this game? And how much? Right? I think that, again, I agree with you, a C is not bad. If we're going less than a C, that means you're teaching somebody something wrong. But a C is okay. Okay, so what is your score, then? Jason  39:08   Well, so we do this in two parts. So let's start with the science part. So I would say the science part of this, I would give a B. Like it, it didn't set out to do a bunch of science. So there's science there, if you look for it, if you dig, it's there, and there's little subtle nods to it. So it's like, okay, it's fine. It's a B. It's like, you're not gonna learn a ton of science by this, but the things that are there are correct, and they actually fit together pretty well. Brian  39:30   I don't like to be critical, but I'm gonna give this one a slightly lower grade, I'm gonna say a C+, I think that the, the idea that you're going to come away from this with chemistry knowledge, I just don't know if that's going to happen. So, from that perspective, I think that the because this in an educational game category, which is a game where you're either intrinsically supposed to be learning something, or will learn some things like by proxy by playing the game. I just don't know if that's true. And I think maybe for the depiction of scientists kind of being like, obviously not informed by talking to people who do science, that kind of bugs me a little bit too. So I'm gonna give it a C+. it's okay. Jason  40:07   It's not doing as much as you want it. Brian  40:09   It's not. Jason  40:11   Okay. And we'll just have to agree to disagree on that. And again, to everyone, we have a Discord, you can come on and tell us all sorts of ways we got it wrong. Okay, so let's move on the gameplay. So, your turn. What do you think of the gameplay? How do you score that? Brian  40:24   So in terms of gameplay and fun, I think, well, since we're talking about this idea of what are we basing our scores on? For me, it's how likely am I to want to grab this off the shelf and play when we get together to play? How likely am I to stick it in my car when we go to board game night? And for this, it's like, it's a fun game. Is this the one that I'm going to go to and grab? Probably not. So for me, that's a B. Right? I enjoyed playing it, I'm probably not going to grab it off the shelf all that often. So that's that B score. Jason  40:55   Yeah, I'd probably give about the same. I may go into B+ range. I thought it was a bit fun. As you point out, I did tend to get a lot more points than everyone else. So I think I hadn't solved the game, but I think it was closer to solving it than most of the other players. And like I liked that bit of strategy was like, Okay, how can I find the optimal move? What is the best thing here, but again, it's not gonna be one, I grab off the shelf, like, Oh, I just really want to play this one. So it's like, if someone brings this in, I play with it, I'll be perfectly happy with that, I'm probably not going to seek it out a ton. Brian  41:22   So that's Compounded. Solid chemistry in the background, probably not going to take that much away from it by playing it. But a fun game. I did enjoy it. Jason  41:32   And I liked it. I mean, and if I were a chemist, I would have a copy of this in the lab. I like the little touches, the little subtle nods, like the the clarity versus opacity of the little pieces. I mean, I'd like that there are little science facts, I like that the phases of matter, matter, for what you're going to do that sort of thing. So like, they're, they're subtle, but they're there. And I really liked that. So one quick announcement before we close. Looking forward a few months, this episode is going to drop near the end of May. So if you're going to be going to Dragon Con in Atlanta on Labor Day weekend, I will be there helping out with the science track. Brian may or may not be there. We're still trying to figure that out. But we will be there. Again, check our Discord, we'll be coordinating stuff, we may be doing something for the podcast there. And even if not, then you could just contact us we can find some place to meet up. We could play some games or anything like that. So just heads up.  Brian  42:23   Oh, and one more announcement, while we're on that, this is the "we're going to take our end of semester break after this" episode. But we're still going to have something in the feed for you. So we'll be back in two months with another regular episode. All right. And with that, I think we're going to wrap it up and I hope you guys all have a great month and enjoy the break and the bonus content. Jason  42:44   Take care, happy gaming. Brian  42:46   Have fun playing dice with the universe. This has been the Gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to get new science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. I have so many notes for this Jason. You would not believe Jason  43:17   you know for a game you keep saying doesn't have all that much science in it. You have a lot of research on it.  

#SpaceExploration #StellarHorizons #Space #CompassGames  Find our socials at GamingWithScience.net  This month we head to the final frontier, with Stellar Horizons from Compass Games. We also have our very first guest host, Christoph Wagner from Kennedy Space Center. We talk about near-future space exploration, colonization, asteroids, launch failures, space pirates, and more. Timestamps 00:44 - Meet Christoph Wagner 03:19 - Science facts - Rusty Mars and poisonous oxygen 05:26 - Stellar Horizons game overview & mechanics 15:25 - Science overview 17:01 - Reusable rockets 18:47 - Space politics and game factions 23:50 - Astronomy in the game 26:00 - Space combat and space pirates! 29:25 - Getting to Mars & the Lagrange points 32:26 - Game tweaks wish list 39:41 - Final grades Game Results  - Game 1: Earth destroyed by asteroid  - Game 2: China and Russia save Earth from asteroid! Links Stellar Horizons official website (Note: Rules PDF *is* downloadable from here) Kennedy Space Center The Great Oxygenation Event Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Brian  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talked about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:11   Today, we'll be talking about Stellar Horizons by compass games. All right, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason. Brian  0:22   This is Brian. Christoph  0:23   This is Christoph Jason  0:24   So yes, we have our very first special guest host here. Christopher Wagner. Wagner or Wagner? Christoph  0:29   Wagner is the German way to say it and Wagner here in the States, that's fine.  Jason  0:33   For those of you who know the game, this is a game about near Earth space exploration. Brian and I are plant biologists we have no expertise here. So we wanted to get someone on who actually knew what they were talking about. So Christoph, tell us about yourself. Christoph  0:44   Sure. So I am I have a degree in physics and master's degree in mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering. I'm originally come from Germany and did my mechanical engineering in physics in Germany, and then studied aerospace engineering at Purdue University with a major in astrodynamics control and guidance, navigation and control theory. Unfortunately, after I got done with that degree, I could not get a job in that field here in the US because of my German citizenship. And most of those jobs do require a higher levels of security clearances. And so I ended up working Caterpillar for 10 years, Jason  1:19   not involved in space exploration Christoph  1:21   not involved in space at all, unfortunately, but then through some, I got let go from Caterpillar in 2016 ended up in a company, a hydraulics company up in Minnesota, but that got way cold for me. So I only lasted two years. And I took a job at Walt Disney Imagineering down here in Orlando. So I designed or I was part of the ride team that designed the Guardians of the Galaxy cosmic rewind roller coaster at Epcot Center.  Brian  1:49   I just rode that. That's so much fun.  Christoph  1:51   Yes, yes, it is a lot of fun. And it was a lot of fun designing it too. But I was only a contractor. So when COVID hit, they let me go. And I was unemployed for a few months, and obviously started looking and I found this job that was essentially almost tailored for me at Kennedy Space Center, which is fluid design engineer. So I applied it took a while but in October 2020, I started my position as a fluid design engineer at Kennedy Space Center, I worked for a contractor for NASA contractor called Jacobs. And my main responsibility these days is that I'm the lead contract engineer for the hydraulic systems on the mobile launch tower ordinance.  Brian  2:33   That's very cool.  Christoph  2:34    It's very cool to say that I am actually part of the Artemis team. And I have my little pin to prove it right here.  Brian  2:43   That's awesome.  Christoph  2:43   So yeah, so my biggest dream was always working in the space related field. And it took a while. But now I'm finally here. And I've been I'm having a good time. Brian  2:52   It sounds like you are super overqualified to talk about this game. Christoph  2:59   Well, I'll try not to use any fancy language here. Because the game does the same thing. I thought they did a fantastic job with how they tried to relate progression and space development and space engineering to somebody who you know, like you guys have nothing to do with space. So I thought they did a wonderful job and I'll try and keep it at the same level.  Jason  3:19   All right,sounds good. So before we dive into the game, I always like doing this fun science fact first and Christophe as our guest, you get first priority. Have you picked up any fun science facts lately? Christoph  3:29   Well, one fight since we're talking about space, do you guys know why the white Mars is red?  Brian  3:35   Iron oxide? Jason  3:36   Yeah, rust iron oxide in the regolith. Christoph  3:39   That's My mind science. Fun fact. Most people don't know that it's a rusty planet. Brian  3:44   So where did all the oxygen come from that rusted out all the iron? Christoph  3:47   Yee, good question. I'm not a geologist. That is, I mean, most of these planets, you know, they were formed many many many, many billion years ago from solar dust. I'm, I'm just gonna say I don't know. Jason  4:00   Yet right? We have to respect the specialties of the people. He's a fluid engineer. And there are currently no fluids on Mars. So that's all right little area.  Christoph  4:09   As far as we know. We haven't found any. We have some found some evidence, but we have not found any actual water or fluids yet.  Brian  4:15   Well, I found a science fact too but now I want to talk about something different. I want to talk about how photosynthesis almost destroyed the world.  Jason  4:22    Photosynthesis was three episodes ago, Brian.  Brian  4:26   No, no, no, no, not the game, not the game, the chemical process. So when photosynthesis developed there was not a lot of free oxygen in the atmosphere. And as oxygen was poisonous to the majority of life and basically started to slowly build up and actually you can see there's these layers in the geological record of rusted out iron that happens periodically. And as oxygen builds up in the atmosphere, it caused climate change that plunged the entire planet into like a giant snowball almost presumably killed all life on Earth. But when eventually it came out the other side now we have complex eukaryotic life. So something about the process like yes, photosynthesis almost destroyed life on the planet and completely rewired the ecosystem. Jason  5:08   I'm trying to come up with a witty response to that and I'm having trouble. I don't think we're gonna be quite so lucky if we almost destroy the planet this way. But But yes, I've heard of the great oxygenation event and all the the iron bands and everything. Brian  5:21    My other thing was going to be the methane plumes on Mars, but I think we're good. Okay. Jason  5:26   All right. Well, let's go into this game. So Stellar Horizons by compass games, designed by Andrew Rader, who is also overqualified to design this game, so I looked him up. He has his PhD from MIT in like human space exploration. He works for SpaceX. He's published multiple children's books about space exploration. So this guy definitely has it down. The game itself, It's for one for  one to seven players ages 14 up which I will say that's probably accurate. This is a very complicated game. Play time. Some of the scenarios claimed to be able to be played in 30 minutes, I have my doubts. The full campaign for experienced players is supposed to last eight or more hours, this is a game this is not a let's break it out during party time. This is something that you devote at least half of your Saturday to sometimes even the whole weekend, depending on if you've got the full seven players spread going. As far as the game itself, it's very high quality. There's all sorts of pieces in there, there is so much game in this game, there is been a 11 pound box with about 5 billion little components inside it, which is only a little bit of an exaggeration. I actually looked at the parts list. And slight aside, this is the only parts list for a game I've ever seen that included the box as one of the components. So it's very thorough, and there are just over 1700 individual components to this game. Can I ask did you time yourself when you were popping out all the tokens and how long it actually took?  I did not because I was just doing it while watching my wife play video games. So it was just kind of taking advantage of other side it took a while there were literally like 25 sheets of chipboard now they're high quality chipboard, very good game components. When I bought this, I said it was the most expensive and heaviest board game I've ever bought was like $130 at my local game store. Like I said 11 pounds. Most of those bits are resources or other bookkeeping things. So like you got your fuel your money, your ore you've got little faction markers to mark things up. So a lot of it is just bookkeeping stuff, which is just incidental to the game. The real core of the game is you have your planet tiles, which there's a dozen of those. So there's the eight planets. There's also the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt, even Alpha Centauri, there's 24 satellites slash Moon Slash dwarf planets, there's seven different factions. Each of them has their board and about 30 individual units they have, they're all slightly different from each other. There's a big tech tree board, there's a policy board, there's player aids, there are mini rule books for each player to reference during the time there is a lot of game in this game. There's a lot of components, there's a lot of moving parts. The impression I got while reading is that it has the potential of being a very deep game. Like if you really sink the time into understand this well, there's all sorts of different strategies and ways you can play it and such there's a lot going on, but is a lot It is not for the faint of heart to get in. It is a very complicated game. Christoph, you said you looked over the rules you didn't have a chance to play, what were your thoughts on that it is a very, very complex game. And I also felt that you can make it as complex as you want to, you can simplify it if you want to. There's options there. I think I felt that just the base mechanics are not that hard. But the problem is you can put layers and layers and layers on top of that, that can make the game extremely complicated. And for people that like that, it's you know, like me, it was really well designed. I have to say the way he did that, but yes, you do need I don't even know if you can get a an average teenager to play this game. Because it is it does take some thought and patience and time to get into it. Brian  8:54   We were talking about that and trying to figure out like who is this game for specifically, and it seems to be just in terms of space, you need an enormous table to lay out to play the whole campaign. You need to leave it there all day. I think there's a tradition of people playing Risk where they will show up in the morning and they will play all day long. This is that game this is I can dedicate a huge amount of space and time and have a group of friends that will that will play this ridiculous game with me over the entirety of the campaign. That's monopoly for with densely more complication. Jason  9:25   Yeah so the the genre this falls into it's a 4X Strategy game or the 4X is our explore, expand, exploit and exterminate where basically you are exploring things you are expanding your territory, you are extracting resources, exploiting resources, and you are exterminated or combating other factions to try to take over this is more famous in computer games. Civilization is probably the quintessential 4X game. There are some board games Twilight Imperium is probably the most famous board game in this area. And so there's definitely people who really liked this Twilight Imperium is somewhere in the top 50 Maybe the top 30 of Board Game Geek so there's definitely a strong and following for it, it's not necessarily what Brian and I tend to play a lot. But there's definitely a big market out there for and it's, as far as I can tell, this is a well designed one speaking as someone who's not super experienced in this area, but it seems very well put together for that. As far as how playing the game works, you lay out the planets and all the satellites and everything, you lay out your faction board and your tech tree and things like that. And then there's different scenarios you can go through. So the default campaign is you basically start in 2030, and you play 150 years, which is literally 150 turns of near future space exploration, exploring worlds and launching probes and developing new technologies, and eventually moving on to colonizing outer space and mining it and possibly fighting wars in it. And the end goal is that after that in 2170, I think is when it ends, then you end and you count up all your victory points, and whoever has the most victory points wins. There's also a bunch of other scenarios out there. So Brian and I played a much shorter scenario where there's an asteroid headed to Earth and you have 20 years to try to deflect it or shoot it to bits or whatever. So the Earth does not get blown up. We played really poorly the first time and so we just stopped halfway through because we knew the Earth was just gonna get obliterated. So we started over again, and did much better the second time because we realized we could not explore the asteroid to death, it was not going to work. We just took guns up there and blew it apart and then towed it with some other stuff. And it worked much better at that time. Brian  11:22   We also realized that some of the resources that we were dependent on and say, Well, wait a second, look more carefully. You can only make fuel on Earth. If you're not able to shuttle or make it where you're going like it was we didn't understand the game that first time like in terms of that explore part we were we were not exploiting correctly.  Jason  11:37   Yeah. And part of this is just there's a lot of rules to keep track of I kept wishing I had a computer to keep track of all the little bookkeeping, things like how much money I have, which level of the tech tree I'm at. So do my robots fail at a 27% rate? Or at a 24% rate? How often do my engines fail? These little things that are built in there? I mean, this is really, Brian, you like talking about the metaphor of the game? This game has no metaphor. It's a simulation game, you are playing a game about exploring space, and you do it by exploring space. Like that's it. Like there's no metaphor here at all. Brian  12:10   Yeah, blue, the entire Russian space budget of $40 billion in two turns.  Jason  12:15   Yes, there's that you only get money every 10 turns. So it does mean that you're kind of strapped by the end of it. So but it does include all the little bits of space exploration like your engines can fail, your robots can just blow up at some point when you try to use them. If you have a crewed vehicle, there's a 50% chance they're gonna have to come back every time you use them because something went wrong. Now what I like is that every time something like that goes wrong, you actually get tech points representing that you're learning from your mistakes, like, Oh, our robot blew up. Well, now we know how to build better robots. So I get some tech points toward my next technology, or oh, we had to get our crew back. Because who knows what happened? It's like, well, now I get some biology points. Because now we know better how to keep people alive in space. Like I liked that. That was a it's a nice consolation for things always blowing up, I did a little bit of solo play, to try to figure out the rules. And the poor European Union could not get a satellite into space for the life of them. I rolled so many engine failures for those poor people. Like every single satellite, they took spent 10s of billions of dollars on these telescopes and probes and stuff. And they just blew up on the launchpad one after another after another. Brian  13:18   I was so sad when the one ship I had just blew up, blew up. Yeah.  Christoph  13:22   And you know, that's very realistic, right there. I mean, if you look at the development of the APOLLO PRO of the Apollo program, you know, going from Germany and joining with Gemini program and how many rockets, they blew up before they were able to launch it successfully for the first time. You know, if you look in any more younger history, we look SpaceX and Blue Origin. Those guys keep blowing up stuff. You may not always hear it in the news, but I mean, it took it took a while for them to have their first successful flight. And while in flight, for now, it's SpaceX. I think it hasn't has a pretty stellar record. So they have to see what happens to Blue Origin. I mean, they have they've had one failure with a human flight right, but they got the humans back to Earth no problem. I thought that that whole scenario and how they do how that was integrated into the game was really well done. The presented I mean, they they worked with percentages on how likely it is for your engine yet and you have to go for it. I tried to look into those percentages if that it's really hard to put a realistic number on that. If you look at human spaceflight, you know, if you look at the Apollo program, and there's only during the entire Apollo program, there was only one one set of astronauts that died Grissom Chaffin White with Apollo I, but they only had not that many missions. So overall, I still think it was a massively successful program, obviously. Yep. I think the percentage for failure is about 5% On launch and slightly lower if you you're launching a crewed vehicle because presumably we take more care when there's people involved would probably would actually about fit with Apollo, to be honest, right?  That you know, it also depends on the launch vehicle that kind of launch vehicle the Soyuz is incredibly reliable, that launch that failure percentage just have to be really, really, really low probably even below 5%. But they had to come, they had to put some number on it. And my feeling is that they just looked at a few different programs of failure of the rockets and came up with the used a big thumb. And well, this looks good. And let's go down this way, Jason  15:17   and probably balance it with, we don't want to make this so high that it becomes unfun. Christoph  15:21   right, because that's still the most important part of the game and has to be fun to play. Jason  15:25   Yep, so let's move on to some science stuff. So I was looking through this. And there's obviously a lot of science potentially in here. So space exploration, vehicle design, near Earth astronomy, there is an actual deep space astronomy, you can explore but only with telescopes doesn't come in hugely. Most of it is within the solar system, engineering, orbital mechanics. So they actually, there's different transit times to go from one planet to another to another that are roughly on par with how far they are apart in the solar system, running a space program, a little bit of the economics of it, it is funny that the unit of currency is billions, you cannot have less than a billion dollars and nothing cost less than a billion dollars. So yeah, so you've already talked about this a little bit, Christoph. But how does this reflect as someone who's in the space program, and probably one of the premier space programs on the planet right now? How does this feel to you? Does it feel like an accurate representation?  Christoph  16:16   Well, it's, I would say, it's very idealized. I mean, in real reality, any spacecraft program, you look like they run over budget, so you can put a budget on it? You know, I don't I don't think I saw anything where we have that mechanic in there where you overrun the budget, you always meet it, or you have to go under it, right?  Brian  16:35   I think they do. You can overrun your support limit, you can have more vehicles out there, then you can pay for and then you don't get all of your budget, you have to use some to support your ships. I don't know if that's exactly the same as what you mean. But yeah, you can be in debt based on the number of vehicles you have out there. Jason  16:52   But only if they're you're there when the decade turns so you could have them up till year nine. Oh, and then you just scrap them all. And you don't have to pay for them come year 10.  Christoph  17:01   Yeah, For non reusable rockets, that may be true. But these days, everything is going to reusable rockets. Right. So you have a maintenance fee maintenance cost. If you look at SpaceX, they have a whole science now devoted to looking at how to refurbish the rockets, the most optimal, most quickest and most cheapest way. And it's it's very, very interesting to see all that back in the day. They didn't even think of that stuff. Jason  17:29   Yeah. Which is actually an interesting part. So the part of the game is they have this big tech tree of all the near future technologies you can develop. And some of them are way out there like antimatter reactors and fusion drives. But some of the early ones are some of them we already have one of the very first ones is reusable launch vehicles, which I think only the United States starts off with it technically is North America, the United States and Canada, but I'm pretty sure it's meant to be just the US. Anyway, North America starts off with reusable launch rockets and the full campaign I don't think anyone else does. And the game implies that's one of the first ones most people are going to go for so that you stop just burning money every time you get something into space. One thing I'm curious about those launch rockets have a 75% chance of recovery, but a 25% chance of failure is that about on par with what we see with real reusable launch rockets. Christoph  18:17   I would have to dig a little deeper into this. But my first instinct is absolutely not. They will be there. SpaceX has recovered all their rockets so far, as far as I can tell. Jason  18:26   OK, so they don't blow up on the launchpad, they actually get up into space. And we have a very good ability to get them back.  Christoph  18:31   Right, it lands, right, some of them land way out on the ocean on a re designed oil platform. And then the sometimes even land back at Kennedy Space Center. So you can see them come back. Yeah, but 25% Failure seems awfully high.  Jason  18:47   OK, So that may be one of the game mechanics they put in and just so you don't get free launch vehicles from then on out, right. So probably to even up because I mean, looking at the full campaign, you should not start the full campaign and then just play 20 or 30 years because North America has a huge advantage to start with the other factions are usually in there for the long game like that. That's why most of the other scenarios, they start with a more even tech tree, but I think the campaign is meant to simulate roughly where we're going to be in about 10 years with some some exceptions. So actually, it's probably good time to talk about the factions. And you'd probably know a lot better how the various space programs around the world are. So there's seven factions. There's North America, which is the US and Canada. There's the European Union, there's China, Russia, Japan, Asia, which is sort of India, Pakistan, and a few other of the Middle East, Southern Asian countries. And then South America and Africa, which is essentially just the entire global south glommed together. And I was doing some research on this. I know some of these places have space programs currently U.S.,  Russia and China being the most advanced that I'm aware of Europe has a bunch of satellite work, JAXA, in Japan. How big are these players in the global scheme of things? Christoph  19:56   Well, right now obviously the biggest player's NASA there's nothing Bigger than that right now, some people like to use like using old word words again, like space race with Russia and China, because you can see that there seems to be some I don't think it's been really confirmed yet but that China and Russia are working together now on the space program and launching rockets. One thing you have to make clear these days, no country can do a run space program all on its own anymore. Just not possible not feasible. If you look at the NASA and you know, I can look at our Artemis program, there's the Artemis Accords, where I once I want to see there's like 60 or 70 countries that signed on to it. And so they're all working together to land people back on the moon. Jason  20:41   So what drives that? Is it? Is it the technologies like you just need different aspects of technology? Is it the price like no one nation can actually afford this level of engineering? What is it that drives that level of collaboration. Christoph  20:53   Technology and sharing technology is definitely a small part of it. But big part is the cost. You want to share the cost of planning the first man on world not the first but the first man after Apollo back on the moon, the economy involved is unbelievable. No country would would want to carry all that burden on its own anymore these days. So So you have these days, you have the obviously, as I just mentioned, China and Russia that seem to be working together, obviously, it's really hard to tell right now. But then on on the western civilization side, you have, you know, China, JAXA, NASA, ISA that are working together, India is coming up really fast. They just landed the first probe on the moon not too long ago, that was also a story where they had, you know, four or five failures. And finally, it worked out. So that's the next. I think the next biggest player on the field, South America, you don't really hear too much about them. And I'm not sure they but they I'm sure. We obviously have Latin American engineers that work at NASA. So while I was looking, thinking about this game, it's I realized something is somehow the people that originally were all involved in astronomy, the Egyptians, the Mexican that makes it of the Aztec culture. None of those are really spacefaring anymore. They started it somehow looking up into the stars, but these days have very little influence on what's going on anymore. Hopefully, that will change. I'd love to see it change. I know that Mexico has its own space agency. See, for example,  Jason  22:25   Yeah, oddly, Mexico does not belong to any of the factions. So if you look at the launch trailer for the game, there's one spot where they show the world and they outline countries, according to the faction and Mexico just got left out in the cold, unfortunately,  Brian  22:38   It didn't even get included in North America for some reason. Jason  22:41   Yeah. The global south when it based on the flag, it looks like it's basically Brazil and friends. And I did look, Brazil has some sort of space agency, they obviously don't have their own launch capacity. But I think they do have they do put up some satellites, Christoph  22:52   they have launched satellites in the past. Jason  22:54   OK, That's about the extent I know of that Brian  22:56   When we when Jason and I played our scenario, we worked as China and Russia, we worked together. Jason  23:01   The time we won, we worked as China and Russia because I realized that Chinese ships in the game had more weaponry than the global south ships that I was trying the first time around. There's only one ship of the global south that actually has armaments to shoot an asteroid, unfortunately, and China had two or three, so I switched to them instead, I didn't check part of me suspect that the North American may have the most guns of them all. But maybe that's just my own impression of how our country works. Christoph  23:26   Now, let me let me make one more comment here. If us space cadets that all work at the these various space agencies around the world had our choice, we would get politics out of the way completely just all work together. Jason  23:38   I imagine I met most of the people in the rank and file probably care more about the science and the the goal of getting there then which country gets credit and who's jockeying with whom. Absolutely. Okay, so let's get into the Astronomy Part of this now. So there's a lot of not just engineering, but also the astronomy, there's all these different world cards, the planets of the entire solar system, and there's actually some nice science facts on them. So if you start if you look on the fine print on each of the cards, it tells you its gravity rating, it'll tell you if it's a rocky or icy planet, a gas giant, it may have its astronomical distance from the sun. If not, I know the player inserts actually have a to scale showing of here's all the planets and the thing and they actually have a little scale bar underneath. So they show you how much how far apart things are. I am not a I don't even know what the word for it is an extra planetary geologist. What does that EXO geologist is, you know, geologist, Christoph  24:31   yeah, planetary geologist,  Jason  24:33   planetary geologist, not a planetary geologist. I don't know how accurate these are other than they look kind of like what I understand. What's your thought about the game? So they have these different little bits of pieces. How, how accurate are they? Are they simplified? I'm trying to go I don't know how to phrase this question.  Christoph  24:49   Yeah, I looked into it a little bit. And obviously, I'm an engineer not a geologist either, but from the little  I could tell, It's obviously it's very simplified at To make it accessible to everybody, they also had to make some guesses, you know, because some of this was you have to have resources on certain planets to, that you need to be able to get to for your, if you want to build a base and things like that. So I have a feeling they had to take some liberties here. But they can actually mined and get from the planet. But a few years ago, we had that it's also a great book, where they settled for the sent a human to Mars. I can't remember who was in it. The Martian, The Martian? Yes, yes, exactly. If you read that book and look at it and watch the movie, it is really well very accurately done. There's some minor mistakes, I'm not gonna go there right now. But you can just see what kind of effort it is to put somebody on Mars and make it habitable. So you need resources that the planet has to offer. So as I said, it looks like they may have taken some liberties there, just my broad sense. Brian  25:54   So maybe there is a little bit of metaphor here. It's not a full simulation. It did. There are approximations. Christoph  26:00   Yeah. I mean, ya know, you we haven't talked about it, but that you have space combat, I hope there's never going to be space combat, Jason  26:08   yet, but they put it in there is an altarnate rule where you can actually take that out of the game, where you you remove the combat, you live in the utopia rule set, I think it was, but I do like with space combat, the very first step of combat is you have to search for who you're trying to shoot, like space is big, and you may not find them. So you actually have to roll to see if you can even find who you're trying to engage with. And then if you do, then you get to do this whole system of tactics, points. And do you shoot from a distance? Or do we get close enough to actually shoot directly? Bases are easier to find. I was a little worried when I saw Oh, if you do this thing, this is orbital bombardment. It's like, I really don't want that to be a real thing. But I can understand why they put it in the game. Christoph  26:48   Yeah space combat is fun right, but only in fantasy.  Jason  26:52   Yeah, I do wonder about it, though, because there's some pretty harsh limits in terms of how many ships you can support at once. Most factions start by being able to support three at most, usually, only two crewed vehicles. And even if you invest all your politics points into it, you only get like two or three more than that. And so we're talking fleets that consist of like five ships trying to attack each other across the solar system. So again, we never got to this point in the campaign, we didn't have the eight to 12 hours to get that far into it. I just wonder how that would work in practice? Or if it's basically like, well, I'm claiming Jupiter, and you're claiming Saturn, and we're just going to let each other do our thing, because it's not worth wasting chips on this. Christoph  27:31   Yeah, I mean, if you just look at what's happening now on Earth, if you're SpaceX has like four or five rockets that they can launch that are refurbished will you know, and then if he add Blue Origin to it, I would probably say there's a good dozen reusable rockets out there right now that can be used and launched on a regular basis. So five is a very small number.  Jason  27:52   Yeah, I think the five limit is more for the crewed vehicles. So that would be theoretical manned missions going somewhere, Christoph  27:58   even for manned. You know, right now. The Falcon Heavy, I think there's like two or three of them out there. There'll be more in again, if you want new Glenn is ready to launch, you know, they'll double that capacity at least. Okay. Brian  28:11   What about space pirates? Are we? gonna have space pirates?  Jason  28:16   Yes, there's a part of the game that after a certain point of development, Space Pirates just spontaneously appear on the board.  Brian  28:22   They just spawn into existence Jason  28:24   Yes, they just appear, like no one creates them, they just start happening. They're like rats, or yeast or mold or something. They just kind of come out of the woodwork or the space work as your economy gets sufficiently developed.  Christoph  28:36   Who knows? I mean, it I guess you can pose the question, is that a natural progression of we saw that happen here on Earth? And why would it happen in space as well that you'll get some Freebooters out there that got start invading other ships? Brian  28:53   Because if you if the economics of it makes sense, then it Yeah, we will happen? Christoph  28:57   Yeah, I'm not sure if there's one faction that will be able to finance that. But you know, there's other Elon Musk's out there that have a boatload of money hidden away somewhere. Why not? Jason  29:08   They're probably spin off from the various bases. You're supposed to be building this disgruntled employees and such as like, I'm tired of working for the EU or for China or whatever. I'm just gonna go off on my own and become a pirate. Sounds like a legitimate career move. Brian  29:21   We'll have a black market, sugar beet wine. Jason  29:25   Now what about near future? So one thing, there's another technology that only North America I think starts with in the campaign is the ability to get ships to Mars, like manned crewed vehicles to Mars. And I know I've heard about the efforts to get people to Mars, but I haven't heard a lot about it recently. What's the status of that right now? Christoph  29:43   So right now it's all the purpose of the Artemis program at the end of the Artemis program is landing the first man on on Mars, but getting there you know, they they claim they can do it in the 2030s not sure if that's going to happen because there's a lot of things that have to be engineered. and designed first. So the plan right now is to get to the moon first start building a base on the moon, and especially in a space station that will be going around the moon called Gateway, and then they will launch to Mars from Gateway. So the plan is probably to assemble the rocket that's going to go to Mars on Gateway, and then it will launch from Gateway from orbit around the moon.  Brian  30:22   That's so cool.  Christoph  30:24   Which, by the way, one of the things I missed in this game is that these days, there's a lot of missions that go to the ligrange points. So the there's five equilibrium points in a three body system, where you can, in theory, put a mass satellite there to never move, you know, so between Sun earth, earth, moon, so on and so forth. We always have these five points. So Gateway, one of the proposals is to put it at Earth Moon L1, Jason  30:47    Okay, that's the one that's in between the Earth and the Moon? Christoph  30:50   The between Earth and Moon, yes, L2 is on the other side of the moon. And then you have L3, which is on the other side of Earth. And then you have L4 and 5, which are an equilateral triangle between Earth and Moon.  Jason  31:02   And the benefit of these places, you can put something there and then he doesn't require any fuel to stay there. It just is sort of held there by the gravitational interactions of the multiple bodies. Christoph  31:12   Correct. So it's our, the orbit, so you can't really reach those points in a practice, but you can orbit them so that's what they do more with these points called ligrational orbits, lagrange orbits, whatever, you want to lose a few names for the there's been some successful missions. Like for example, this, the James Webb Telescope is at L2. So. Brian  31:34   interesting. So how would we how would we do that in Stellar Horizons, you'd have to have like places where you could send a mission or build a base, but it wouldn't be able to, like generate resources the way other things can in Stellar Horizons, because there's nothing there. It's just a stable.  Christoph  31:47   Yeah, you Jupiter's space station that would be supplied by whatever moon or planet you're, it's, it's orbiting.  Jason  31:55   probably the abstractions that anytime something is in orbit around a planet, you could just hand wave that say it's actually at one of the Lagrange points, the game has enough bookkeeping, I don't want to keep track of multiple stable orbit locations, in addition to all the planets and moons and everything else.  Christoph  32:10   Yeah. And by the way, it doesn't mean that you need no fuel to stay around Lagrange points, because L1, L2, L3 are considered unstable. So you do need some station keeping fuel on board. Jason  32:21   Okay, got it. So you need to like minor adjustments, basically, just to kind of nudge it back and forth.  Christoph  32:25   Minor adjustments, Yes.  Jason  32:26   Okay. All right. So kind of getting down to the end of the game discussion. If you could change something about this game that you think like, would you are there things that you think we could make this maybe a bit more accurate? Or maybe things that they tried too hard on? Like, what would you try to adjust to the game to make it fit your vision of space exploration better? Christoph  32:44   Oh, good point. Good question. You know, I'm a little bit of an idealist, I will probably try it and take some of the politics little out of it and not be so heavily on diplomacy and, and have the countries work together better, but you have to roll for it. So that kind of that bothered me a little bit. And then it just you still have to roll for engine failures and stuff like that. So you have a probability effect there that, yes, you have it in real life, too. But it's not a it's not a gamble if a rocket explodes in that it explodes because there are failures in the system. It'd be better to maybe add a mechanic that there is, you know, some people saw something on during assembly went wrong or something like that.  Jason  33:28   Yeah, that sounds like one of those abstractions. I do know some of the technology can reduce your failure rate, some that may represent superior engineering capacity. Christoph  33:36   That sort of bugged me a little bit, but I know the way they did I think it's still fine. It's still, you know, it's not game ruining or anything. It's I think this I'm eager to played with my group here. And still think it's should be a fantastic game to play for Space Cadets like me. Jason  33:51   And imagine part of that is that you're an engineer. And so you don't want your hard won engineering to just blow up due to a bad dice rolls that that kind of a fair assessment, right? Brian  33:59   Yes. Or to have the politics get in the way of what you're trying to do. Christoph  34:02   That explosion was preceded by 1000s of 1000s of people dedicating a lot of time, effort and love into designing this engine, and then having this random effect, there, I don't like it maybe just because I am an engineer. But yeah, Brian  34:18   I suppose if you just decide we don't want to do that. You just don't do it. Right. That's the joy of a board game. If you don't like a rule, don't use it. Christoph  34:25   You know, that's what I said in the beginning. This game has lots of lots of levels. And I think you can add and delete levels any any way you want to. I feel it's pretty flexible. Um, so. Jason  34:34   What were your thoughts, Brian, so we played this, we did a three hour play session, which is longer than normal. We basically got the world creamed by an asteroid the first time but then saved it the second time, we got to know the rules.  Brian  34:46   We went back in time we did that never happened. We Gosh, what do I think? I think that the I've never played a game where you're rolling that percentile dice so many times and so often does it not matter. So I do agree that those very low percentage events like do take a lot Like efforts to maintain this seems like the kind of game where if you're willing to dedicate the time and really learn it, it probably would be a lot of fun. But that that eight hour play time, that's hard. That's a hard commit. I used to play tabletop war games. This is this is one of those. This is spend two hours setting up and six hours playing.  Jason  35:17   Yeah, my feeling I kept getting while playing is "I wish I had a computer to handle all the bookkeeping", because there's really two kinds of rolls and stuff you're doing. There's the bookkeeping ones, like, Okay, how much money do I get this turn? What percentile do I need to roll under? Oh, I'm moving this ship from here. How long does that take with my current technology, etc. I really wish I had a computer to handle all of that little niggling detail so that I could focus on the important things of which planet do I want to explore? This probe is going to get there next turn, but I can explore it a penalty this turn, do I want to risk losing it and get it now? Or do I want to wait but have a less time in the future? Those decisions that I consider be the important decisions and offload to a computer all the little things? I think this would make a great computer game. So I didn't play civilization that much. But I played it see, it's sort of sci fi spin off Alpha Centauri, it reminded me a lot of that probably because there was a lot of similar technologies, some space exploration, the tech tree everything. I've heard some people when I was doing research, some people said that particular game Alpha Centauri is considered by some people to be one of the best 4X games made for computers. And so I found a lot of similarities between that and this game is I was playing it and wishing that I could offload to a computer, the same thing that I offloaded to the computer when I was playing the computer game. Brian  36:28   One thing I would say is that that price points for this, you said it was 120 at your friendly local game store? Jason  36:34   130. Although I did see at some point, compass games was running the sale at 99. But I think it's back up to 130. Now, Brian  36:41   so that's about two times the cost of your average designer board game. But if you think about it, in terms of time played, I mean, there are plenty of board games that have sat on my shelf that have maybe been played three or four times. If you play Stellar Horizons, the whole campaign twice, you've probably gotten more value for your money than your average designer board game for most people. Of course, you know, there are some games, you're going to bust out all the time and play a lot. But I think most of us have to admit that a lot of our games, we don't play that often.  Jason  37:09   Yeah, that's fair. Christoph  37:10   Did, there's a lot of replay value of this one, they have a bunch of scenarios that you can play and you know, you can come up with yours. I think there's, it's well worth the money. Jason  37:20   Yeah, those scenarios I think are a good touch. So there's the the defend from an asteroid one we played, there's the full campaign, there's one where one player is playing like a rogue AI that is basically versus all the other human players. There's one where, it's the shortest one, it's 30 minutes, it's literally, there's an alien spaceship, you have this much money, figure out how to build some ships and go blow it up before it blows you up. That's it, it's a 30 minute scenario, the only world tile is Earth, and you get a pile of money. And that's it. So like, there's a whole range of things you can do here, I do wish there was like a quickstart, like a little Quickstart for like, here's how you ease into the game and play or maybe like a YouTube how to play video, because the rules are very well laid out. And they're obviously laid out by an engineer, every rule has a number, this is 2.6.5. This is rule 3.4.7. And they're logical, they're logical in one way, but I think logically in a different way. So they're all logically all the movement rules are together, all the exploration rules are together, all the combat rules are together, which is great for looking up when you're in that phase. But I think in terms of what's doing the action, so I want all the crewed vehicle rules to be in one spot, and then all the robot vehicle rules to be in one spot. And I kept having to flip back and forth to find it, I actually made little cheat cards on the on three by five index cards to give the rules for oh, this is a crewed vehicle, it can do this and this and this and this and this. And if I were to be playing this a bunch, I would actually print those out and make them nice and neat. So I had these quick reference, because that's how I think but I mean, there's a lot of stuff in this already, I can perfectly understand why they didn't do that. From what I read online. I'm not the only person who wishes things were maybe laid out a bit differently.  Christoph  38:51   Yeah, I missed it. So they have the index, but there's no page numbers. Oh,  Jason  38:56   but they're all numbered, though.  Christoph  38:58   So they are numbered. So you can go through and find it. But I sometimes want to do well, but what page, you have to leave through it and find the right number.  Brian  39:05   This does come with a PDF version that you could search through?  Jason  39:08   So it's not that easy to find. But yes, you can actually download the PDFs from the Kickstarter page of all places. I don't think it's linked from the main compass games website. But the Kickstarter still has a full PDF that you can download. And I actually did that while we were playing. You may have seen I had my laptop open. I was searching for some of the rules we were trying to figure out because sometimes like okay, I read this rule somewhere, but I don't remember where and there's 10 pages of rules to go through so that that searchability was very useful there.  Christoph  39:34   About but Yeah I'd like to see a computer game for this one.  Brian  39:37   Yeah, this would make a fun app.  Jason  39:38   Actually, this would be a great app. I would love to see that.  Brian  39:41   So we've been doing these report cards for the games that we've been reviewing that review like the science how well the science is represented as well as the fun and honestly I was trying to decide if I feel qualified to grade the science in this game, but I guess I'll I'll give it my best guess. I think this is definitely a game where the science was at the front and it was trying its very best to represent the science the best that it could. And I think that it feels like it's probably an A like just for effort. Jason  40:08   I probably do like A-. It's not quite as at the forefront as wingspan, which is my personal bar currently for what a high science game is. There's a lot there. There's also like Christoph said some simplifications and some places where there could have been more, but there's not, there is a lot there. And so yeah, A/A- range seems good to me. Brian  40:27    Our actual qualified person. What how do you grade it? Christoph  40:30   No, I would I would have to agree i would give it an A-does vary. And the way they simplified it, or you know, took took some edges off that now it to me, it makes total sense. You can't go into all the detail and nitty gritty in a game like this that's supposed to be for broader audience. So yeah, A- for sure. Brian  40:49   It's so funny hearing that this game is not detailed and complicated enough. Jason  40:54   No, no, that's a good thing. It's the science part of it. Next part is gameplay. I was thinking about this. And this is one where I'm split, because like I said, this is not my genre of game. So for me, I would give this like a B- just because of how complicated it is, and how much I wish I had a computer keep track of the bookkeeping. However, for someone who really likes this type of game, I imagine it would probably be more on the A-/A range, I did do some looking online. Sounds like there are some very loyal fans of it. Some of them have kind of the same quibbles about the rulebook or a combat being a little complicated. So it seems like for the people who really love this game, it falls again, in that kind of A- range.  Brian  41:31   I think I'm gonna give it a B just because it's I think it's probably one of those games that is fun if you put in the work. And I don't know if I can, I don't literally don't know if my life accommodates a game like this. Really, it was fun to play. I like playing the short scenario. I'm just trying to imagine the day that we would play the whole campaign.  Jason  41:50   Well, it's hard now that we have jobs and kids and other responsibilities like that, like if I was in college, this would be much more likely I could see just taking my friends groups like hey, we're just gonna devote this Saturday to Stellar Horizons and just make a day of it. order some pizza, take some breaks in the game. I could definitely see that happening. But in our current life situation, yeah, probably not. Christoph  42:09   I don't have a family here except the people that I play games with every once in a while. So but I would, I would rate it a B. It's massive. It's very complicated. It's not a not a game. I prefer games that you can pick up and set up in 15-10 minutes and start playing it. This is not that game. That's why I'm giving it a B. But fun wise, I haven't played it yet, unfortunately. But I will definitely I'm definitely looking forward to doing it with my gaming group here at some point. So that's just because of the massive just takes a long time to play is what I say I would give it a B. Jason  42:41    Yeah, you said you were but you got sick. So unfortunately, that wasn't the plan, but hopefully not COVID But something  Christoph  42:47   Oh, no, no, not COVID Just just a little bit of a Con crud. Brian  42:50   Oh, did you go to a con? Christoph  42:51   Yeah, we I went to Megacon here in Orlando. Brian  42:54   Oh, is that a gamer? Con? No, it Christoph  42:56   is a pop culture con. Brian  42:57   Awesome. That's fun. I know Jason goes to Dragon Con all the time.  Christoph  43:00   Yeah Dragon Con is so it's just like Dragon Con but except much bigger. Jason  43:04   All right. Well, I think that's we're gonna wrap up again with the grades. Remember, these are just our opinions. So you are welcome to disagree, and we are welcome to be wrong about it. If you dislike it, we actually have a discord you can come in and you can tell us how wrong we are or if we got anything incorrect, but otherwise, I think we'll sign off. Christoph, thank you so much for coming. It was great having you on here. I'm glad we were able to meet. If we do any other engineering based stuff we might get back in touch. Christoph  43:27   Absolutely. It'd be my pleasure. It's been a lot of fun.  Jason  43:29   All right, so that's we're gonna wrap it so thank you everyone for listening and take care have fun happy gaming. Brian  43:35   Yep, have fun playing dice with the universe See Ya!. Jason  43:44   This has been the Gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.  

Let's talk birds! In this episode we cover Wingspan, an amazing game by Elizabeth Hargrave and published by Stonemaier games. Also, Jason just got back from a conference and has tons of fun science facts to share. One note: we had an audio glitch that resulted in lower audio quality than normal, which we didn't realize until after the recording. Quality will be back to normal next episode. Timestamps 00:33 - Conference news about hemp, COVID evolution, and bird pangenomes 07:58 - Wingspan overview 12:50 - Making a bird sanctuary 21:04 - The power of corvids 23:40 - Assembling an ecosystem 26:47 - Actions, goals, and other ways to win 29:50 - Cornell Lab of Ornithology is awesome! 31:35 - Grades & wrap-up Find our socials at https://gamingwithscience.net  Game Results Game 1: Brian 65, Jason 81 Game 2: Brian 71, Jason 85 Links Official Wingspan website Cannabis genebank - Zachary Stansell Bird pangenome - Scott Edwards COVID19 evolution - Lucy Van Dorp Cornell Lab of Ornithology Macualay sound library Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Jason  0:06   Hello, and welcome to the Gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of the favorite games. Brian  0:11   In today's episode, we're going to discuss wingspan from Stonemaier games. Hey, this is Brian. Jason  0:23   This is Jason. Brian  0:25   Welcome back to our third episode, we're going to talk about wingspan today. But before we get into that, Jason, do you have any science topics for us to talk about? Jason  0:33   So yeah, I am brimming with topics today because I just got back from a major conference. For those of you who don't know how science works, conferences are how academics exchange information and network and such. Yes, technically, we publish papers. And those are important. But everyone knows that most of the real work happens by in person meetings, being at a conference presenting things either in front of an audience or at a poster session or something. And there can be a mixed bag because scientists are not always the best communicators. But so sometimes, they're really good. And sometimes they're not. But the one I was just at is plant and animal genome, which is every year this time of year, and it is the biggest one in my area, which is agricultural genomics. So studying the genes and genomes of plants and animals. And there's just a ton of stuff. And so there was all sorts of cool things going on. There's someone in upstate New York, who works for USDA, who is assembling a collection of hemp to use as a germplasm resource. So basically, where people who are breeding hemp can ask for seeds, and they can use it to, to breed new varieties. You have to be affiliated with an actual company or research lab. So no, if you're just a private individual, sorry, you can't do that. They can't send it to just anyone who wants to grow some. I'm also pretty sure they're focusing on fiber varieties, not THC and the ones that give you actual highs Brian  1:57   Not yet anyway Jason  1:58   Not yet anyway. But yeah, as it continues to get legalized and assuming that trend continues, then yes, the USDA will eventually want to accumulate a large supply, because that's sort of the basis of what people used to breed. There was I can relate to today's topic, there was someone who has done a lot of what are called pan genomes of birds. This is where you don't just get one genome sequence, you get the genome sequences of a lot of individuals. And then you're able to compare a lot of differences among them, especially things that are there in one person's genome, or in this case, one birds genome and absent in another and how these can affect behavior and traits and stuff. The one I really liked, there was this woman from the UK, who really came onto the scene during COVID, because she studies viral evolution. So she's making use of all these 1000s upon 1000s of COVID sequences that were deposited during the pandemic, to study viral evolution in real time, where she can actually track down using mathematical models, how the virus was changing over time, how long it had been circulating, and based on her results confirms that, yes, it probably made the jump to humans sometime in September, October of 2019. And she really drove home just how much globalization is changing the way these viruses move around, because she studied the data from Britain, in terms of what the viruses were. And as far as her well, her and her lab, because she has a bunch of people working with her, as far as they can tell. By March 2020, so when everything really went to pot, there have been over 1000 independent introductions of the SARS- COV-19 virus to Britain by that point. It's not like there's a single patient zero who brought it in. I mean, this thing was just jumping plane after plane after plane and coming in and then just spreading like wildfire. Brian  3:46   Wow, that's interesting to hear about viruses. I know like in the agricultural context, you know, I study bacteria that infect plants, when they find an epidemic strain, and they check its history, it always seems to turn out Oh, that's actually been around for decades before it became a problem. So it's fascinating to see that that's not what happened here. As soon as it jumped to humans, it was a problem. Jason  4:05   That seems to be the thing with animals. These are called zoonotic diseases, which I think is just a fancy Latin term for "it came from an animal" that basically when they jump hosts, when they go from a pig to a human or a bird to human, or vice versa--she's actually studying the opposite direction too where we give diseases to our animals, which apparently actually happens a lot more. But anyway, when it makes that jump, suddenly the new virus or the virus, assuming it can actually make progress in its new host, which most of the time it can't, but the rare lucky one that can, there's no immunities against it, and so it just takes off. And she was saying how, like she's studying all this viral diseases and everything. But at the end of the day, there's actually not that much variation in the virus compared to most other viruses because it is still so new and so young. It's only been in humans for...at the time of recording, what, three and a half years, something like that. Brian  5:00   Something like that. Jason  5:01   So, anyway, it's still a very young virus in us. And then I mean, this is my own personal observation, but it seems like it's just here to stay. It's now just like the seasonal flu, it'll just be circulating around like all other coronaviruses we have. Brian  5:14   Yeah, we'll just have to get those shots every, every fall, probably forever now. Jason  5:19   Yep. Brian  5:21   Can I ask a question about the bird pangenome study? Jason  5:23   Sure. I can't guarantee I can answer it. But yes, you can ask. Brian  5:28   So you said that it is looking at sort of presence absence of genes in birds? Was this just like across all birds, or a population of one type of bird. Jason  5:36   So the one he specifically did was scrub jays, which are a type of blue jay, he was looking at three populations, there's a big one that's in kind of the southwestern United States, there's a small little population on some island off of California. And then there's another population on the south of Florida. And it I mean, who knows, I actually didn't have time to check, maybe at least one of these is actually in wingspan, but they...he was following the patterns of them and seeing that, yes, the big one has a whole lot more genetic variation than the little ones, as you'd expect. Small populations, they just tend to have less variation. And problematic, problematic genes tend to rise to higher frequencies, because natural selection is not very efficient Wwen you have a small number of individuals. It's much more efficient when there's a lot of them, Brian  6:23   Yeah, just random chance you end up carrying through bad genes, because you've got to work with the genes you got. Jason  6:28   Yeah, and the thing is like this, he's working on birds. But I know the human geneticists are doing the exact same thing. Actually, they're probably a lot more advanced than the plant and animal people are just because, like big surprise, human genetics gets a lot more money than those of us working on animals and plants. And so they tend to have a lot more tools. And just be, I usually say maybe five, five to 10 years ahead of the plant and animal community just because there's so many more resources there. Brian  6:54   It makes sense. But then how do you define your separate populations of humans? Jason  6:59   That's the thing, you don't really, especially not today with so much globalization. You could 20,000 years ago, not so much today. Why no humans are actually kind of the outlier this was brought home a few times is that we have a lot less genetic variation than most other species out there. Especially ones with our population size. And it's thought that we went through a bottleneck, I don't know, a few 100,000 years ago, where we got down to like, less than 1000 breeding individuals. So we almost went extinct before anything happened. But apparently, we got lucky. Brian  7:33   That sounds like a really cool basis for some kind of a novel or story of telling the story of when humans almost got wiped out. Jason  7:42   I don't know that we know enough information about it, though. Like I've only ever heard about it from genetic studies. I don't know anything archaeological, or anything like that. So I don't know if anyone knows exactly when it was or why it was or anything. Brian  7:54   Even more open for speculation then right? Jason  7:57   There you go. Brian  7:58   All, right. That was fun. Um, should we talked about this board game? Jason  8:01   Yes, let's talk about wingspan, which is a lovely board game.  Brian  8:04   Yeah. What a game. For science content purposes, for just fun, for overall quality for the enthusiasm of the community that is built around Wingspan, there is this enormous, enthusiastic, active community making resources for Wingspan, discussing strategies for Wingspan, optimizations, everything there, there is an app for Wingspan that replicates the full gameplay. This is quite the game. So Wingspan was designed by Elisabeth Hargrave. It's published by Stonemaier Games. It is for one to five players, which is the first game that we played that actually has a single player mode, I wish I'd had a chance to play that; I did not. The single player mode was designed by Automa Factory, which as I understand it, they design apps to allow board games to be played single player. Let's see...it is for ages 10 and up, which seems right and 40 to 70 minutes, which also seems right depending on how quick your opponent is and sort of taking...well we we've primarily played two player I imagine when you get up to the higher player counts, it's going to take longer. Jason  9:04   Yeah, probably there's only so fast that people can do. Although good players--and this is a tip for everyone out there--good players plan your move while other people are playing so that it doesn't come to you, and then suddenly you spend two minutes trying to figure out what you're going to do. Brian  9:18   I mean, that's that's just a general tip for any kind of turn based game, though, isn't it? Jason  9:21   Yes it is. And yet, it's surprising how many people I've played with don't get that. Especially in wingspan where you don't affect each other, the only thing you can do to someone else's steal a card from the draw pile. Brian  9:32   Yeah, that is a good point. And when we talk about the game plays like there are relatively limited interactions between the players, mostly you're sort of playing against the game trying to get as many points as possible. There's a few things where you do have to pay attention because if you do something, your opponent may do something else, right. You have to kind of interact from that perspective. Let's try to address the challenge of a audio medium for a visual, visual board game. What does this game look like? So in terms of display, it's relatively simple. Every player will have a play mat that is in front of them. I think most of this is done as watercolors. Each mat is divided into three sections representing forests, grasslands, and wetlands. And on that map, there will be places for five cards in each of those sections. You have two decks of cards, you have this thick deck of 170 bird cards, each unique, and a smaller deck of goal cards. You have the little cardboard tokens that represent five different types of foods, so seeds, berries, rodents, invertebrates, which are supposed to represent all types of invertebrates, not just bugs, but like based on designer notes also like aquatic invertebrates, clams or stuff like that. Let's see what am I forgetting? Ah, yes, fish, of course. Thank you. You have these wonderful chunky wooden dice, where each face represents some of those food tokens and this gorgeous foldable dice tower that looks like a bird feeder that you put in your backyard, which is totally unnecessary, but really fun to roll your food dice into. Little wooden egg miniatures, or little resin egg miniatures of different colors, which is great to have the different colors, they don't do anything. But it's really fun to be able to pick your favorite color, some action cubes, and then like a goal mat that I don't know if that's a good picture. But mostly this is mats and cards and a little dice tower. Right is how you play this game. Jason  11:19   Yeah, and the game. I mean, you alluded to this, the game is just beautifully designed the watercolors and the bird designs. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely done by people who care a lot about birds. I almost wonder if the popularity in that community you mentioned taps into that because I know birders are a very avid community. I'm not a birder. So I, I haven't done it. I don't really get it. But I know some people who are, and it just inspires a lot of enthusiasm and people. So I wonder if they're, the game is managing to tap into that somehow. Brian  11:48   I think it I think absolutely 100%, it does. Yes, the components, the quality of the components, they just they had a wonderful feel, the cards, the cardstock is thick, and it's got a wonderful sheen to it. Everything looks like it was designed with a lot of care and attention to detail. The decks come in a plastic molded holder with a tray that can hold all the cards. None of this is necessary. Like you could play the game with just cheap paper. But it's so much nicer that you don't have to, it just feels good to hold the well design materials hold the cards in your hand. Jason  12:21   No, I agree quality of game components is important. Board games are tactile. I mean, if you're playing the app, not so much. But if you're playing around the table with people, it's a tactile experience. And so the little visuals and the sensory things that make it so much better, really up the quality of the game. Brian  12:36   Yeah for sure. I do wish that the game was I think when you get used to it, it does take a little bit of time to set up. Like if I could just throw out the game and have it ready to go in a few minutes, I feel like I would play this every evening. We also have a cat so we can't leave the game out. So we have to actually then pack everything up and put it away. But anyway, let's talk about some of the science concepts here because this has layers to it. From a pure scientific concept perspective. I think I mean, this is bird facts that game.  Jason  13:03   Yes, I mean, look, let's start with what you got the metaphor of the game. So the game claims you're building a bird sanctuary and you're trying to build the most elegant bird sanctuary or the most beautiful one based on what you get. Mechanically, it's a worker placement slash engine building game, you choose which action you're going to do each turn, that says what you're allowed to do, and you're trying to build up the right combination of birds in the right places to get as many victory points as possible. So like, I don't know how much that those mechanics mesh with that metaphor, but the metaphor is a great package for having a whole bunch of bird stuff you're trying to do. Brian  13:37   I think okay, so so this was what I've been thinking about is if we think about the metaphor as exclusively the game play, I agree with you that maybe the way that the game is played doesn't necessarily tie directly and meaningful to the to the actual science, but this this entire game, how everything is set up is based on science. Let's start with the, just the core concepts. You've got ornithology, right, which is the study of birds, which is a sub discipline of Zoology. I said, Okay, great. So what what do you study specifically about birds? What makes ornithology unique? And from looking around one of the things and I think you already brought this up, one of the things about ornithology that is interesting is that it is a field where enthusiastic amateurs still make regular contributions to the field. So people who don't have a formal education from a university or a degree are still making important contributions to the study of birds, to ornithology. And that's actually reflected by Elizabeth Hargrave herself, the designer of the game, who does not have a science degree, although as far as I understand from looking at her biography, if we can trust Wikipedia as a as a valued source, I don't know why anybody would be spamming Wikipedia for a game designer. She did volunteer, she worked in a survey of stingrays like volunteered to do that, like an ecological survey, but she's a birder, that amateur enthusiasm for the study of birds is a huge part of this game. The other thing that we have here where it's sort of like it's inlaid into the game is ecology, right? And what is ecology? It's the study of living organisms, how they interact with each other and their environment. These are the kinds of layers that I see. The first is the player mat itself. So we've got these three different sort of habitats, the forest, the grasslands, the wetlands, the birds that you play have to have a corresponding food cost based on it is modeled based on what these birds actually eat. So you're essentially representing in a very limited sense, their ecological niche, what are their habitat and food requirements to be able to play them out onto the mat? So that, that's one layer there. And when we come to the cards themselves, one thing is every card has flavor text that basically represents actual bird facts. That doesn't really influence the game. But it is awfully neat, because sometimes they do tie together in interesting ways. Jason  15:53   Yeah, no, I, I that's one thing that I really liked about the game is how there are things you think wouldn't matter. They end up mattering, like every bird has its wingspan put on it. Like how big is this bird? Which seems like a just a random fact, except that are some birds, which are the hunting birds that when things trigger them to do, you will look at bird cards from the deck. And if it's smaller than a certain size, they basically capture it and eat it and you get to stash that for victory point. Brian  16:20   Yeah, or some of the goal cards for instance, will be based on collecting a certain number of birds under a certain size. Yeah, let's talk about the cards and everything that goes into the cards themselves. So oh, I didn't even mention this is...okay, we've only done three games. At this point. This is our third game. This is the only game I've ever played that cites its sources. Like in the design of this game, it says this, basically used the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Audubon Society to derive all of the facts about the birds that were used to design the cards. So what's on the card is a beautiful illustration of the bird itself, a point value represented to it. Now, there's actually no notes in the game about how those point values were derived. I think that these are based on the rarity of that bird. That would make sense based on the sort of overall design and metaphor of the game of attracting birds to your place. But other things that are on this card. One is, what is its habitat? Now the base game is explicitly birds that are native to North America. There's 170, unique birds out of like over 900 birds, so 170 seems like a lot. But it's still only only a small fraction of those. Other things are, like you mentioned the size of the bird, which does have real consequences. Other things that are just on every card will be what type of nest does it lay, with four different categories. A bowl nest is sort of classic bird nest, cavity nests...so birds that will lay nest inside of hollow trees or other similar situations. Platform nests, so you know, an eagle building that big sort of platform of sticks on top of something, and then ground nesting birds that just lay their eggs right on the ground. And then there's a wild card, which basically, well, this doesn't cleanly fit in anything else. So just counts as all of them. The number of eggs that you could put on the card is proportional to the real life number of eggs that that bird would lay. Not a one to one, but just like they must have been sectioned out into groups of just, you know, one egg to lots and lots of eggs, I think they go from zero to six. Let's see what else is on the cards.  Well, my favorites are the birds that they don't have a nest because they lay their eggs in other birds nests. And then mechanics reflect that. Exactly. And this is the other place that we get this. So we have all of these details about the birds that affect the mechanics, their habitat, their food requirements are all there. But then the birds will also like you said, sometimes they'll have abilities that are based on collecting food, or yes, you're right, the nest parasites that do not have their own nests, will have powers to lay eggs on other birds nests. So not every single of the unique 170 bird cards has powers that are uniquely associated with that bird, but easily half of them do. For instance, if the species is endangered, it will have all of the ones that are endangered have the same ability to draw two new goal cards. So it's like is that uniquely associated with them as being endangered? No. But does it basically key you in to this information that these birds are all endangered if they have this ability? The...every card has the common name and Latin name. You can't play this game and not learn something. I don't think it's possible. Whether you realize it or not. You have learned something about birds when you played this game. Jason  19:36   Yeah, and I think another great thing about it is that that's half the equation, is that the science is really top notch. The other half is that the gameplay is top notch. The mechanics work really well. So we didn't actually talk about how you win yet but the fact is, you're, you're trying to gather victory points, and there's many different ways you can do that. The birds themselves are worth points so you can just get a bunch of high value birds. Eggs you lay on the cards are worth points. There are ways to stash cards from the deck underneath them, those are worth points Brian  20:05   That stashing is based on two different things. Either the hunting birds will take that card that they capture and tuck it under. Or it's also representing birds that travel in very large flocks. So this is how like the metaphor of the ecology is kind of like with the stashing cards under cards.  Jason  20:20   Okay, I didn't know the flock part, that's good to know, that explains some of the other ones. Yeah, then you got your there's end-of-round goals that get you points, there are your own personal goals that are hidden from other players that get you points. So there's a lot of different ways to get points in this. And so there's a lot of different ways to play the game. The ideal, at least in my head is to try to build up some sort of engine so that when you do your actions, you're able to just generate points after points after points. I've only achieved this once. I got a card draw engine where, by the end of the game, every turn, I was drawing five cards, and tucking five cards underneath my birds and drawing five and tucking five. I'll be honest, like it was nice to do it, but actually got a little boring, because my last six actions were all the exact same thing. Brian  21:04   When we played, you had the crows, the crows allow you to develop a pretty powerful engine, too. Jason  21:09   Yes, that was a that's a general tactic, where if you can get the birds... So, each of the three habitats give you a different resource when you use them. So the forest gets you food, the grassland gets you eggs, and then the water gets you cards, and you need all of these, but you can only pick one each turn. And so by placing birds in each of those rows that get you resources from one of the other rows, you're able to get two things for one. And so I very early on in one of our games, managed to get in my grassland birds that could trade eggs for food, and birds that could trade eggs for cards. And so I pretty much just did that for an entire round to just build up tons and tons and tons of food and card resources, and then ran off of that the rest of the game and managed to get a pretty good score, Brian  21:54   You pretty much didn't have to do the collect food action at all, it was unnecessary. Like you were getting all of your food from the ability of trading eggs for food. Jason  22:03   Yeah, I could have but I didn't. Because I was using the middle row, I didn't really invest much in my forest. And so it's a pretty low payout. So this is one thing as you put more birds in your rows, they're more expensive to put there. But you get more from them each time. And so the game rewards you for filling out your ecology. Brian  22:23   And my wife and I actually played this game a lot when we were researching and she got really into it. And there is an app that you can play on your phone where you can play against an AI and normal two player game, play against someone else online or just pass the phone back and forth and play wingspan. I read that they have taken the crows out of the game. With the expansion at this point the crows were considered, they basically are banned cards like an overly powered card in Magic. Jason  22:47   I totally agree. The corvids are usually the most powerful. So the common crow and the raven...let's see, one of them, I think you can trade an egg for two pieces of food and one an egg for one piece. I think maybe the the one egg for one food might be fair, but the one egg for two pieces of food is definitely very powerful anytime. So hint if you're playing with that corvid, if it shows up, get it because it is arguably the most powerful card in the game. Brian  23:14   And again, how does the game represent that? They're the ultimate generalists. They can go into any habitat, they can choose any food, to play them. They have amazing abilities. They're smart, and like very Yeah, yep, makes sense to me. They're powerful. They're powerful birds. So let's come back to the metaphor of the actual gameplay. So this game integrates real biology, real ecology through most of it. Now, when you are assembling your bird engine, or, you know, recruiting birds into your bird sanctuary, you're, you're not really trying to assemble a functional ecosystem, per se, it's not like you would have a top predator and things that have a balanced use of different types of food resources or anything like that. So from that perspective, you're not building an ecosystem in the game. But you're building an engine, you're building something where the abilities of one creature interact meaningfully with another. So in a strange way, you're you almost are representing an ecosystem in a strange way of building a functional set of interactions between individuals that, I don't know, make them successful. I don't Is that too much of a stretch? Jason  24:26   It may be a little bit of a stretch, but I can get it. You're trying to get synergies going on. So things support each other. I mean, the thing we don't have is you don't have when suddenly you introduce a new bird, suddenly the existing ecosystem collapses because you managed to predate something to extinction or something like that. So these birds all play nice with each other. Whereas reality is messier. Let's put it that way. Yeah, people have this idea that like nature's all in harmony and everything, and anyone who actually studies ecology knows it's not like that. It's only in harmony because everything is pulling as hard as it can in every different direction and it all cancels out. So there's no, this mystical harmony of nature where everything respects and helps everything else. No, no. Like, everything is  out to get as many resources as it can. They're just stymied by everything else also trying to get as many resources as they can. And yes, that's not nearly as like, feel good. But it explains things a lot better. Brian  25:21   Yeah, no, cooperation in nature is tricky. Yeah. So this is not, okay, I was thinking about this. And I don't think that this is really fully replicating what you're what you're talking about, at the end, you introduce a new species, that everything goes crazy. In the expansion, because there are many expansions for this game, we only played the base game. But there are expansions that are the birds of Oceania that add Europe, that add Asia, the Oceania adds some new rules. And that's actually when they had to take the crow cards out because they became too powerful when coupled with some of these new rules. So from that perspective, when you introduce birds from different ecosystems together, the ecosystem breaks. So does that count? Jason  26:04   Yes, I think that counts. Brian  26:07   Sort of the unintended consequences of mixing species from different areas together. That's kind of the major science, I see four different layers. There's sort of record representation of ecological niches. There's all of the details on the bird cards themselves. There's the bird facts. And then there's just sort of a more nebulous, sort of, you're building an engine, which is a little bit like an ecosystem, right? Of course, an ecosystem doesn't just have birds in it. Jason  26:30   Yes, but you're eating all the other stuff. So it's tricky. It's technically they're just all gets eaten.  Brian  26:34   Yeah, that's very fair. Do we want to spend some time like talking about what the game feels like to play? I mean, I think we already addressed it a little bit, is there anything else you'd want to bring up about that? Jason  26:47   I think we've covered it. It's a worker placement engine building game, you have so many moves. And so the game actually has a very specific set time length, because you have X number of moves to carry now and I forget what it is like eight plus each, each round, you actually get one fewer moves. So it's probably somewhere between 20 and 30. You could calculate it out exactly, Brian  27:06   I believe you're right, the frustrating start with eight, sort of action cubes you use to declare what you're going to do. But at the end of each round, one of those cubes goes onto your scorecard. So as a consequence of that, you're always having one less action to take each round until I think when you're done, you only get I guess, five things or something. Jason  27:22   Yeah. Although presumably, by then they are five very powerful actions, right? Brian  27:26   If you've, if you've done a good job. I would always get into the situation where I'd get really focused on specific either public or private goals. And then I would have what looked like a lot of cards that were filled out, but then the face value of my birds was very low. And since the face value of your birds under a in a normal game actually makes up a huge majority of the points you'll earn. Oh, I actually didn't do that well. Even though I met all of my goals. Do you have a favorite goal card? Jason  27:53   I remember reading over them, some of them seemed kind of clever. I think there was one that was like "forward thinking" and you have the most, you have more than 10 cards in hand or something like that. Brian  28:02   That might be "visionary leader" where basically, you score points based on how many bird cards you have in your hand that you haven't played at the end of the game. Jason  28:10   There's just all sorts of different ways they've chosen to give you points. Birds that are smaller than an amount or bigger than an amount or that have cavity nests, or this or that. And I like it that they have two tiers on them. There's the easy tier and the hard tier, and the easy tier is usually pretty easy to get. And then the hard tier takes significant effort and investment, you're not going to just accidentally hit the hard tier of your goal. And it's worth usually about double the points. Brian  28:34   Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's a good point. Another thing I like about the goal cards is when you pull the goal card at the bottom of the card, it tells you what percentage of the birds in the game will be able to satisfy that goal. So if for nothing else, if you have two cards in front of you, you could say, well, this one only has 15% of all the bird cards can satisfy this. This one has 25% They're relatively well balanced. But But yeah. If say, I don't know, it's just a fun game. Like it's, it's competitive, but not in a way that where you feel bad when you lose, because you're kind of competing with yourself.  Jason  29:05   Yeah, it's one of those we're you're racing towards a common goal. And it's whoever races first, you're not really sabotaging each other along the way. I mean, it is possible to hate draft, to choose a bird card, you know, someone else is going to want, but that, that doesn't happen all that much. Because, one, there's just not that many options out there. And two, you that if you're doing it just for that purpose, then you usually have something better you can be doing with your move. Brian  29:30   Yeah, you'd be sacrificing your own ability to do something to stymie somebody else. So that's not really I know your playstyle is often wanting to mess with the other people at the table. Jason  29:39   Yes, I love messing with other people at the table. So that's why I love Robo Rally so much is because I got to mess with people. So I can't do that with the birds, other than trying to grab the corvids as soon as they come out. Before we close. I do want to give a plug to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. You mentioned that that was one of the sources cited. So the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is really cool. I actually lived next to it for about three and a half years when I was postdocing. Literally, there was a a gate in the chain link fence next to our parking lot that I could go through. And we could just walk through the trails and go by the wetlands and everything. But the thing is, it's really cool for anyone anywhere because they maintain a vast library of animal sounds. You can actually look up different bird calls, and I think mammals and amphibians, I'm not super familiar with it, but I just did a Google search. It's called the Macaulay, M-A-C-A-U-L-A-Y library. Anyway, they have a library of animal sounds and animal media that you can, you can work with, that you can listen to and just I assume it's used for naturalist purposes. There's probably some way of trying to identify stuff based off of it. I don't know. But it's just it's a cool resource that puts out a lot of public stuff. And I know when we were there every year, I think it was golden eagles. Some birds of prey would nest in the middle of their big pond, and they would have their little chick cam so they'd have a live webcam just mounted up in the tree so you can see the little baby chicks as they were hatching and fledging and everything. Brian  31:07   horrible little baby chicks. Jason  31:09   Okay, yes, baby birds are not particularly cute. Chicks. Like actual chicken chicks? I don't know. Maybe they've been selected for cuteness. Most of the ones I've seen are just super ugly. Brian  31:21   Until their feathers come in. Then they go, exactly. Jason  31:24   They get better then. But when they're just little naked, tiny dinosaurs, they're just super ugly. I'm sorry, baby birds do not look cute. Baby mammals do, baby birds, sorry, you got the short end of the evolutionary stick. Brian  31:35   Let's see. So let's do our, let's do our grades, let's do our scorecard. So let's start with the with the science. Now. We talked about this briefly. If this is not an A on science, I don't know what an A for science looks like. Jason  31:50   I agree. It's like this is A, A+ territory. Definitely. I mean, it, it sets the bar for what a science themed board game really should be. Brian  31:59   Great gameplay solid science content with like specific designer notes on, on how the real life science was integrated into the design of the game. I don't think you could ask for more. Okay, what about the, what about the fun? Where are you on the fun? Jason  32:14   I'm also going to go A. I mean, there's a reason this has such a huge following, is that it has very deep gameplay. There's a lot of different ways to play the game, a lot of different ways to explore it. There's enough randomness in terms of the bird cards that it's not like you can just get us, you always play the exact same way because, those super corvids we talked about, they may never show up in your game. Brian  32:35   I feel like, I hope I'm not just inflating this, but this is an A. This is, there's so much replay value. So much fun to play. I just, I wish the game was just a little quicker to set up so that you could just pop it down and play after dinner every night. Jason  32:48   There's an app for that. Brian  32:49   Yeah, there actually literally is an app for that. No, great game, really fun. And also while we're talking about plugs, I also wanted to thank our buddy Kyle for lending me the game for almost two months while I was researching it. Jason  33:01   Alright, well that seems like a good place to wrap it up. So we're going to close down. Hope you all enjoyed this. I hope if you are not a wingspan fan already then I hope you're willing to at least give it a try. And if you were, hopefully you learned some things. So with that we're going to sign off and happy gaming. Brian  33:16   Yep, thanks so much. Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya!  This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.  

We dive into one of Jason's all-time favorite games: Robo Rally, where you program little robots to play capture the flag while shooting each other with lasers and avoiding deathtraps. Also, some stuff about remote-controlled bacteria and computers destroying the world with paperclips. Timestamps 0:04 - Remote-controlled bacteria 2:18 - Robo Rally background 7:54 - Game mechanics and updates 12:07 - CPUs, GPUs, and computing 17:32 - Machine learning 22:12 - Factory automation 25:38 - Grades and final thoughts Links Life-sized RoboRally CPG Grey and AI (video 1) CPG Grey and AI (video 2) Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Brian  0:04   Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:10   Today we'll be talking about Robo rally by renegade game studios. Well, welcome to another episode of Gaming with science. I'm Jason. Brian  0:18   I'm Brian. Jason  0:19   And today we'll be talking about Robo Rally. Well, before we get into the main topic, though, fun science fact. So Brian, your turn this time? What fun science thing Have you learned in the past bit? Brian  0:28   So yes, what did I find for us this week, based on the inspiration of Robo Rally and expressing my very severe biology bias, I found an interesting story about remote control the bacteria, maybe were more remote activated than remote controlled, there's a particular strain of E. coli that's approved for medical use in humans. And it can preferentially be taken up by cancer cells, you inject the bacteria into the bloodstream, and they will colonize cancer cells, because they're pretty good at living with less oxygen and solid tumors will often have a lower oxygen environment inside of them. They carry a type of engineered gene that can be turned on by heat very specifically. And by getting them to turn on this gene, you can have the make anti-cancer drugs, for instance. Now how do you turn this on inside of a human being, you basically use a combination of soundwaves to raise temperature in a very specific location at the site of the tumor, which is now colonized by these bacteria. And you kind of like trigger them to maybe not detonate but just start pumping out things that will kill cancer cells. Jason  1:34   So you basically turn E. coli into a bunch of little suicide bombers. Brian  1:37   Well, a bunch of little Yeah, a bunch of little attack robots, but a little attack drones saboteur. Yes, saboteur is for sure. Under normal circumstances, you probably don't want E. Coli in your cells, but the enemy of my enemy, I suppose, Jason  1:49   as long as they don't cure the disease by killing the host. If they're approved for clinical trials, then I assume that little hurdle has been passed. Yeah, Brian  1:57   you're you're able to use this inside of people, there is a strain of E coli you can inject into someone's bloodstream, and that is an approved form of therapy.  Jason  2:05   Okay... Well, on to the actual topic for today, which is Robo rally. I wanted to do this as soon as I thought about this podcast. Robo rally has been one of my favorite games, since I first played it way back in college. It actually has an interesting history. So it was first published back in 1994. It was first designed in 1985 by Richard Garfield, whose name you might recognize if you're in the gaming area, because he took it to a little gaming company called Wizards of the Coast, who told him that it looked like a great game, but it'd be too expensive for them to produce. So they wanted something that would be cheaper and easier for people to carry around. They could play at a convention. So he spent a few years and came up with this little like unknown card game called Magic the Gathering. And after that became a smash success was there said okay, maybe we can publish the robot game now. So interesting sidenote, Richard Garfield, he's not just some random game designer, I think, based on the time and it looks like he designed Robo rally while he was getting his Bachelor's in Computer mathematics. And he did Magic the Gathering while getting his PhD in combinatorial mathematics. So he has the actual like scientific computational chops behind this, and I think it shows in the game design. Anyway, it's gone through a few iterations. There's the original 1994 release. There's the 2005 rerelease under Avalon Hill, that's the one that I originally owned. Then it got released again in 2016, with a major rules upgrade. And then the one we're going to be talking about is the current edition, the 2023, one by Renegade Games Studios, which mostly builds off the 2016 edition with a few little tweaks in terms of like product quality and tiny little rules tweaks, as far as I can tell, Brian  3:42   oh, wow. So this is the third edition of this game at this point, basically. Jason  3:46   Basiicaly or 2.5, or something, there's only two really different editions, there's the original one, which is like 94, and 2005. And then there's the 2016 2023, although there's some some minor tweaks, so it's more like 2.5 edition. Brian  4:01   So it's just like Dungeons and Dragons, you skip over one edition. Jason  4:04   Something like that. Yes. And the Board Game Geek ranks on these are all over the place. I mean, the originals, the highest rank that around 500, 2016 is about 1500. The current one is around 5000. But I think there's a bias there in terms of just how many people have reviewed them, because the current one actually has the highest average rating among users. But it's got the lowest rank. So there's something with the algorithm putting it there, but the people who have ranked it on average seem to like the most recent one best. And I've got to say after playing it, I kind of like it. There's a lot of quality of life changes that happened from the my original version to this one that I like it's a little bit more streamlined. There's some of the clunkiness that has gone out. I do enjoy this version better. As far as what the game consists of, for those of you who've never played it. The idea of the game is that you're playing these little robots that are running around the factory floor playing basically battle bot Capture the Flag, they're trying to touch a little flags on the board. and shooting each other with lasers. And if that were all it were, it'd be, it'd be an OK game. But the thing is, this is a nightmarish factory. And so there are conveyor belts and bottomless pits, and pushers and lasers, some of the expansions, you can get to have water or things, the old ones have like oil slicks, and flame throwers, crushers, there's all sorts of stuff going on on these boards. And your goal is to move your robot around the battlefield. Now, the main thing that makes this challenging is that you do this by virtue of having a stack of cards that are your programming cards, you draw up to nine every turn, and then you put five of them down facedown in a row. And those are your next five moves. So you have to program your robot five moves at a time to move it around the board. If it were just an empty, featureless void, this would be trivial, it would not be a problem. But the fact is that with all the board elements going on and other players going around, you have to keep in your mind visualizing where will my robot be, which direction will be facing, what board elements will be changing things, and what my other people do to screw me over. So really, the strategy in the game comes from being able to visualize multiple steps ahead and keep all these different moving parts in your head and how they affect what your robot will be doing. And a lot of the fun comes from that going wrong, either for yourself or my personal favorite being able to screw over other people by running into them, or pushing them off the plant track, or anything like that. So it's a bunch of little computer controlled chaos, basically. And so why is it on here, because it's actually not trying to be a science game. And most of the games we're aiming to do in this podcast are science focused? Well, I mean, the primary reasons, because it's one of my favorite games, and that's one of the hosts, I can do that. But the other one is that it actually is a pretty decent representation of computer programming. For my day job, I've been doing computer coding for oof, 20 years now?, something like that, ever since graduate school. And playing the game actually feels a lot like programming a computer, you've got to think several steps ahead, you have very specific incremental steps you can do in the game, it's like you move forward two spaces you turn, right, you make a U-turn something like that very small defined steps that you have to piece together into a much more complicated whole to in order to accomplish some objective. And as happens with real computer programming, things go wrong and crap happens. And what I thought would be great, I make some mistake, or I forgot about something on the board and everything goes wrong, because in the game, if you turn right instead of left, or if their conveyor belt moves you two spaces when you thought it would move you one, suddenly your entire program is off. And instead of touching the flag, this turn, you instead end up falling off the bottomless pit or ramming into a wall or getting shot by four different laser beams or something crazy like that, Brian  7:49   you're still running that program, the fact that you made a mistake doesn't matter, you still have to deal with the consequences.  Jason  7:54   Yeah, and so the main parts of the game are the actual boards that you go on. This version comes with four double sided boards, there's already some expansions out, you can get to have additional ones with some additional board hazards. You can also just find these online, not necessarily the copyrighted ones that come with the game, but people have liked the game for 30 years at this point. And so people have just made custom boards or icon elements, so you can download custom sheets to print out. In fact, I think the quintessential one of that is you can look up YouTube videos of people doing a like life sized one made out of Lego robots at GenCon a few years ago. So you can watch people programming them and seeing these life side robots, which they made look like some of the robots in the game. And some of them are like R2D2 and Wally and such moving around this life sized board. So anyway, you've got your boards, you've got your minis, you've got your cards, and there's a few other things, some tokens and like little energy cubes, but the main things are the board that you move around to the robots you're moving and the card to use the program along with a shared set of damaged cards and upgrade cards that represent when you take damage that kind of fill your deck with useless stuff or random stuff. And the upgrade cards which let you do extra things. Brian  9:09   So one thing about this new version is the actual bot minis got a significant upgrade, right?  Jason  9:15   Yeah, so previously, they're just unpainted plastic miniatures. For any of you that have the old version, good life hack, you can use those little plastic things that go around house keys. You can put those around the base to differentiate them if you're if you like me have no skill at painting miniatures, but these ones are actually all pre painted minis there's only six instead of the original eight, so maybe they're aiming for a smaller player count. But yes, they're pre painted. The original original game was actually pewter minis which are really high quality but also kind of expensive and apparently some people complained about that at the time because while nice, it did make the price significantly higher. Okay, so Robo rally builds itself as being for two to six players, ages 12 and up. Again, you can play with younger kids but if you want to play, especially the more advanced courses, probably on the upper end of that, I know my daughter used to love not playing the game, she wanted to set up the board for us to play and she was a sadist, she would make the most difficult hardest board she could possibly do when she was like eight, because she didn't want to play it, she just wanted to watch us suffer. She has thankfully gotten beyond that a little bit. Normal game times it claims is about 45 to 90 minutes. Obviously, that's very scalable. You can do this on just a single board with a single flag, in which case, it can be over in 15 minutes if you play it fast. Or you can have multiple boards hooked together with multiple flags all over the place. And you could do a two or even three hour game. I mean, theoretically, if you get a bunch of the expansions, you could make an absolutely massive board that takes probably multiple days to run. But why would someone do that to themselves? It's a game enjoy for the time it is, Brian, you're usually talking about the metaphor of the game. Well, the metaphor of this game is that basically, this is what happens after the lights go out at the factory. So the humans go home, then all the robots power up and they do this little racing while the humans aren't there to stop them. I think in previous editions, they actually said this is a highly advanced automated factory in the future. And the AI's that run it are just super, super bored. And so this is how they're entertaining themselves.  Brian  11:16   But, that's not the metaphor anymore? It's not the super advanced AI?  Jason  11:19   No, no, this is just what the robots are. autonomous robots are just battling with each other for entertainment.Yep. Because that's what you do when the humans go home.  Brian  11:28   Yeah, I guess if you could just be reassembled, and it doesn't really matter if you fall into a bottomless pit, then why not? Speaker 1  11:33   Yes. And that's definitely one of the quality of life upgrades is that previous editions, you had limited number of lives, which if you lost them, then you're out of the game. And that's just not fun to just sit on the sidelines watching everyone else. So now you have infinite respawns, although you do take a little bit of a hit every time, just so it's not free. Especially because there is a valid strategy of touching the flag of one point, killing yourself so that you respond closer to your next flag. And you can basically get a jump on that. Brian  11:57   Yeah, we actually did that in one of our family play sessions, I think. So like, well, if you just dive yourself down to this pit, you'll be in a more tactical position for the next flag. Jason  12:06   Yep, All right. Now as for the actual science here, so I admit, when I first put this up, I knew I wanted to do Robo Rally, I didn't really know where the science would be. So I started looking at it and looking at the pieces. And the part that really stuck is the programming phase where you put down the five cards, and they call that the register. So there are five registers each turn, and you have to do those five in order as you lay them down. Now I knew that registers were something in computer programming, but I didn't really know what so I started looking up and then I went down a rabbit hole. Because it turns out this has to do with the way CPU architecture is built the difference between CPUs and GPUs, which we'll get to cryptocurrency machine learning, like this is like literally the core of all computation here, in this little board game, the five card register, roughly speaking, well, similar to that, that computers can do more than five things. But yeah, because the register turns out the register is part of the CPU, the central processing unit, that is what makes a computer run, it's what handles all the computation and data and stuff. And the register is what actually does those computations. And it can only hold a small number of things at a time. And kind of the size of that register determines the quality of your CPU. A lot of you have probably heard about like 32 bit architecture versus the 64 bit architecture. And the 64 bit architecture is the newer that's determines how much stuff can actually be held in the CPU 64 bits. And it just lets it do more things at once and handle larger numbers. Now, the interesting thing here is when I started looking into it, I've heard about CPUs and GPUs graphical processing units, because they turned out they're very useful for certain types of computation. They were actually originally designed for what the name says graphical processing. So these are the things running in your game consoles, PlayStations, Xbox, etc, to do these high end 3D graphics, but then people found out they were really useful for all sorts of other things, the biggest ones probably being machine learning. So programming, these AI algorithms, including things like chat, GTP, and Dali, and these other big AI programs, and then cryptocurrency mining, specifically Bitcoin, but presumably also the others. And the reason has to do with the way they're built. So a central processing unit, the one that's in most people's computers, its goal is to be able to do everything. So it can be highly flexible. It can take all sorts of different things in it can take different processing functions and different needs, and it can move them around and allocate resources and be very, very flexible. But because of that it's not super fast, relatively speaking. I mean, obviously, nowadays, chips are actually quite fast relative to previous ones. But relative to the other person in town, the GPU, CPUs are actually kind of slow, because they have to have that flexibility. A GPU is not flexible. It has much, much less ability to do other types of programming or do with different types of programming, but what it does is it does a certain type of calculations over and over and over again very, very well. It's basically set up to do many, many more times this calculation in parallel, thus making that particular calculation faster. Now, this is really useful for applications where you essentially have to do the same thing. a bajillion times, like with graphics processing, you just have to render the screen. That's all you're doing. It's always the exact same thing. Just render what the screen looks like, with crypto mining, you have to do the I actually don't know how Bitcoin crypto mining was it something about hash codes, curious Brian  15:38   primes or something, I don't know. Jason  15:40   Something like that. I don't do crypto mining, I don't understand it. But lots of people are trying to make lots of money by using GPUs to do that. And then machine learning it's training. It's crunching all the data and running all these different algorithms on it, actually not running that many different now the same algorithm just many, many times. And so that's why GPUs are so favorable for some things. And that's why there's actually a shortage of them right now. I was talking to someone the other day, they said that someone I think they were saying the UK has basically bought all GPU units that are going to be produced in the next six months already, like they're backlogged at this point. Now, I suspect that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but it gives you an idea, these things are in really hot demand precisely because of their ability to run these sorts of computation. I suspect the UK wants them not for crypto mining, but probably for machine learning applications. Brian  16:29   Interesting, so a GPU is good at doing one thing, it's it's a brute force solution to one type of calculation. Jason  16:37   Yeah, basically, someone made the comparison that a CPU is like a fighter jet. It's fast, it's maneuverable, it can do all sorts of things. But you can't actually carry that much stuff in it. So if your goal is to move something from point A to point B, you don't want to use a fighter jet. Whereas if you have like a shipping barge, like it's not fast, it's not maneuverable, but it can move a ton of stuff. And so by virtue of having the GPU being able to move a ton of calculations, the net effect is that you're able to do those calculations much, much faster. A different comparison someone made is that a CPU is like a small team of geniuses who can do anything you want them to do, but they take a little while to learn the new system and get it set up and going. Whereas the GPU is like a an army of people who may not be geniuses, they're just Okay people, but you have them doing the same thing over and over and over again. And so they just due to the scale of how many you have working, they're able to get it done quickly. Brian  17:37   So in the metaphor of Robo rally, we're dealing with a CPU a flexible programmable register, Jason  17:43   pretty much yeah, this it's too simple to be a GPU. Brian  17:45   So what would a GPU be in Robo rally? Jason  17:49   Ooh, that I don't know if it could be represented in the game. Because unless you were doing something where you were actually trying to learn the game, by playing it against itself, it's almost like you'd have to be a bit of a metagame where you use it to play the game a whole bunch of times to learn the strategies and then implement them on the individual CPU calculations. Because I can't think of any way where you want to have like 12 different registers going at once and all your different robots going in different directions to figure out which one actually works. Brian  18:20   You're, you're running an army of bots instead of one bot. Jason  18:23   Yeah, although people have done that, not to play the game, but as a teaching tool. So when I was looking into this, I found that Robo rally has been used for a long time to teach computation to people, to high school students and undergraduates and such, sometimes it's really simple. It's just a basic board. And they'll just have the robot that they write the programming code to help it navigate around obstacles and end up getting to the flag. That's pretty simple. But I saw one person who had enough that they were actually doing machine learning on it. So it was the students tasks to train a machine learning algorithm to play Robo rally by itself. It's not explicitly programmed that here's the flag, make sure you go forward towards the flag, turn to avoid obstacles, but rather just play the game a bajillion times, and learn the rules so that you can play it on your own. This is things like Deep Mind and stuff did with AlphaGo. The original chess program was deep blue, I think. And it was more of a brute force programming. But modern ones I suspect use machine learning like this. They're using it for go for poker for pretty much all the things you're doing now with games, they're not trying to explicitly program in the rules of the game. They're just trying to have the computer essentially play against itself a whole bunch of times and learn the rules.  Brian  19:36   That's interesting, because in those systems, I've seen people do things like this to try to teach an AI how to play Pokemon and you need to set the rules up very carefully to reward and punish appropriately. And I know the flags are the objective, but how's it going to accidentally find the flags? train it to Oh, don't go off the board or you can't stand still or stuff like that. Jason  19:58   Yeah, basically, and again, And I don't know the algorithmic details of this, I know some of the terminology. But basically, when it does something that you want, which the first many hundreds or 1000s of times will basically be by random chance, it gets rewarded. So something about the way code is executed, that time gets strengthened, so it's more likely to happen again. Whereas if something bad happens, you go off the board, you fall down a pit, whatever, then you get punished. And we're literally talking 1000s upon 1000s of plays, just to get the first step, and then you iteratively go there. So these complex machine learning algorithms that can play Go and chess and pokimane, I've seen Minecraft and StarCraft being worked on, they take probably millions to billions of plays to learn the rules, basically. But by the end of it, they're actually really good. In fact, I remember when AlphaGo beat the world Go champion. The thing with it was that because it had played against itself, instead of learning from past human ones, it came up with strategies that humans don't do. Because Go is taught from essentially master to student you learn from other humans. And so there's a bit of culture in terms of like, Oh, these are the kinds of moves you make, like chess has certain opening moves and such. The computer didn't care. It just did whatever it happened to find. And so it found some solutions that were way outside the box, as far as human Go playing was, someone described it as Go from Mars, in some ways, that was probably give it an edge to beat the humans just because it did things that they weren't expecting, Brian  21:27   Sort of developed its own culture. Here's my biology bias. Again, this sounds an awful lot like natural selection. Jason  21:32   That's exactly what it is. In fact, early versions of this were called genetic algorithms, because you would actually mutate them, and then select the ones that worked best. And then you'd mutate them again, and so on. If you look under the hood, what they're doing, they're actually making many, many, many different versions of these AIs, randomly mutating them, keeping the ones that do best mutating those again, over and over and over again. So they're iteratively, improving it. And they are essentially evolving computers that can do these tasks. Brian  22:00   I guess it's almost an extreme example of artificial selection, because you've set the task in front of it that you wanted to do, but you could do it millions, billions of times. Jason  22:10   Yeah. And there's some really good YouTube videos on this. So it's CPG. Gray has a good one on just general artificial intelligence training. And then there's a bunch of people that actually show you what it looks like to train an AI to do something like to have a make a little AR avatar walk, just giving it basic instructions or play various games are such they're all over YouTube. So it's interesting. I mean, it's very fascinating. Watching the computer learn to do things also may be a little bit scary as people are realizing what's chat GTP as we're getting ones that are good enough to mimic a human and do things. I'm not worried about computers taking over the world yet, although that actually kind of leads into the third thing I wanted to talk about. Because looking into this, like I found stuff about basic computer programming, I found stuff about CPUs and GPUs, the last one I looked into was automated manufacturing. This is sort of like the quintessential end goal of replacing people with robots in factories, which is where you have a factory that is essentially completely robotic, there are no humans there. Or maybe there's like one to make sure things don't break, or maybe a few people doing quality control. But otherwise, the factory runs itself. So the company Phillips, that makes razors, they have a factory like this in the Netherlands, apparently there's got they've got some humans there that are only for quality control. And then this next one actually made me laugh. So there's a company called FANUC, F A N U C don't know how to pronounce that. In Japan, they have a an automated factory, where the robots are making more robots. And they can do about 50 robots per day, they work 24/7, they can go a full month without any humans checking in. And it has the advantages that they don't have to have lighting or heat or air conditioning or anything like that, that the humans need. But as I read that, I had to think Have you not seen any science fiction films about how robots actually do take over the world? The point at which you have robots making more robots is the point at which they start taking over the world. Brian  24:06   Oh, they have. That's why they did it. What sorts of robots are they making? Jason  24:11   I don't know. I mean, they could just be other manufacturing robots and such. The thing is like, I'm actually not concerned about robots taking over the world in terms like, oh, they suddenly develop sentience and want to command themselves and be autonomous and get rid of their human over masters. I don't think we can make AI that good yet. I'm more worried about what someone called, I think it was termed the paperclip problem. All you need is for a sufficiently powerful AI whose job it is to make paperclips. decide the best way to do that is to convert all other mass on the planet into paperclips. And that's not being able to stop it. It has no intelligence as far as we would understand it. It has no morality. It's not evil. It's just doing its job in a very efficient and kind of unfortunate way. That's the kind of AI I'm worried about is where it will do what we have programmed it to do so well that we suffer unintended consequences from it. Probably not from paperclips. But well, this is not the time to get into a spiral off tangent in terms of what social media and all that sort of stuff is doing with AI. That's where it concerns me. But thankfully, Robo rally is just cute little robots playing. When that laser tag gets actually they're shooting each other trying to blow each other up. So cute little robots playing battle bot, capture the flag in a factory at night when the humans have gone home. Brian  25:28   It's full contact laser tag. Jason  25:30   Yes. Oh, definitely pushing is a big part of this. There's nothing better than being able to push someone's robot one space to the side and throw off their entire plans. Brian  25:39   Yeah, we went pretty pretty far away from I can't remember which direction a conveyor belt goes to AI is making paper clips that convert the entire planet into paper clips. Jason  25:48   Yes, well, I mean, maybe we'll be better off and we'll just have the AI is will convert the entire planet into computational infrastructure for them to play Go against each other. That may be more like where we're heading now. But yes, we did have that issue where you cannot remember which way conveyor belts go. So I know any game in the future, I just need to introduce conveyor belts, so I can win. Brian  26:08   But how well do you think the aim of Robo rally sort of represents the science of the metaphor? Is it doing a good job? Jason  26:16   So this was tricky for me. And I was thinking about this because we wanted to give letter grades like how well does this actually represent the science of running a robot. And on the one hand, there's not that much science here, I mean, I did have to go looking a little bit to try to find something because it really is just Battle Bot Capture the Flag. That's what the game is trying to be. It's not trying to encapsulate a scientific project. But on the other hand, playing the game feels like writing computer code, it actually feels very similar to me. And I can see it being a good introductory thing for like, middle schoolers or such to teach them the very basics of, hey, this is how programming goes. And such. And so I think, for that point, in terms of capturing the the feel, and the essence of writing code of programming a computer, I think it does pretty well. I mean, if I were to give it a grade, I'd probably give it. Well, here's the thing as just pure science portrayal, probably like a B, B+. But if you take it like how much science is actually trying to convey, I'd bump it up to an A or an A-, because it's not trying to convey a lot of science. It's just trying to be fun. And using a little bit of computer science to do that. And it does that little bit quite well.  Brian  27:21   Okay, well if we're going to look at it just purely from the science perspective, you think maybe a B+ then? Jason  27:26   something like that. And that's mostly just because it doesn't have that much in it.  Brian  27:29   Yeah, this is not an inherent objective of the game. It's there, but you kind of gotta go looking for it. Jason  27:35   Yeah, which is not a problem. Like not all games need to have something in the science. So Brian  27:40   Well, that's true. But our games do you have to have at least a little bit. So what does this game feel like to play? So let's see. Not facts, but feelings on this. For me, it makes me feel like I'm crazy. Jason  27:54   How so? like, like, I can see frustration. But what do you mean crazy?  Brian  27:58   It makes me feel like I am five years old and can't remember left from right.  Jason  28:02   Okay yes, that happens. There have definitely been times I turned left when I meant to turn right. Yeah, I think one of our games that happened at least once, possibly twice. Brian  28:09   It's interesting to me that the metaphor of the game is no longer I am an advanced AI because if I am an advanced AI, I evidently am one that cannot solve basic CAPTCHAs of what is a left and what is it a right, so maybe in that way, sure. I don't mind playing Robo rally, it's fine. I'm not good at the game. So it's really about feeling that I am offering very little competition for someone I'm playing with. But as long as they don't mind, I don't mind being a bad player at the game. It's enjoyable to watch your robot get pushed in unexpected ways. Jason  28:38   I totally agree. In fact, it was infamous in my family that we owned this game. And it was my favorite game for like five or six years before I actually won a game. But I still loved it. It's one of those games where I don't care if I win. It's just fun to play. And sometimes it's even more fun to lose spectacularly. Brian  28:56   So for those of us might be more videogame inclined for anybody who played Portal 2 the end of the game involves sort of a collaborative work of two robots trying to solve a puzzle and get through a complex factory. That's a collaborative game. In a way Robo rally feels a little bit like that. But you are not working together. You are explicitly working against each other. But it would be interesting to see what a collaborative form of Robo rally would look like. Jason  29:21   I bet people could hack that and now you have me wanting to make the portal gun upgrade for you just be insane. Although there are teleporters and one of the expansions so actually not that crazy. Brian  29:31   That can be one of the upgrade cards. Yeah, your laser creates a portal on a flat surface.  Jason  29:36   Yeah, Okay, so how about you? If you had to grade the gameplay? How would this go?  Brian  29:41   Oh, that's difficult for me. Because again, it's like, I know this is one of your favorite games. It's one that I'm happy to play, but it's not one that I'm super enthusiac. Yeah, it's not what I'm gonna get off the shelf. So if it just my own pure grade, I'm gonna have to give it a B, B- because it's not going to be one that's going to be a go to. Jason  29:57   Okay, and obviously, you can probably guess I'm gonna give it an A or an A+, just because I think it is a blast to play, especially if you can get four or five people so that the robots are all running into each other a lot. We played it first with just two people. And it's, it's okay with two people. But you don't get that much interaction, when you have four or five, and you're all running into each other and shooting each other, it becomes a lot more fun, at least from my definition of fun.  Brian  30:19   And we've done some of those games with more people. Luckily, it's not just the two of us, we do get to test these games out with a larger player count. And so we do kind of know what that's like as well. So you would recommend it clearly? Jason  30:31   I would clearly recommend this. I love this game. And I actually really liked the rules upgrade. So I think they did a lot of good improvements for it. And I think I now prefer the newest version over the one I originally bought just because it's a little bit slicker and smoother. And the good news is that most of the pieces, especially the boards are actually still compatible, you just slap the board down, maybe figure out how to put a few of the new, the new elements on what stickers are just print off little things you can just place on as temporary tokens or something. But otherwise, it's still completely compatible. Brian  31:02   I don't think we talked about this last time, what's the price point on this. Jason  31:05   So when I got this, the MSRP was $50. Obviously, you can get it for less at Big box stuff for Amazon, we always encourage people to support your local game stores, which are probably selling it at full price. So I just consider that to be the tax for keeping my friendly local game store in business. But I would rather pay a little bit extra and make sure it's going in the pocket of someone who is here and local and who loves board games then to, Well, let's be blunt, Amazon technically has humans running it. But mostly it's run by an AI. Brian  31:33   So we don't want to support robots? Jason  31:36   They're doing just fine on their own. I can go to my local game store and Amazon will not care. Brian  31:42   $50 actually doesn't seem that bad for a game that you're gonna get this much replay out of. And with that this was sort of intrinsic resources available so many ways to support it. So many different ways to play it if you want to hack it if you like it $50 seems like a good value. Jason  31:56   Yeah, you get a few replays out of it. It's definitely worth it. And there's definitely a very devoted fan base that you can find on the internet with all sorts of stuff. All right. Well, I think that's where we're going to wrap it up. Thank you very much everyone for listening. Until next time, have fun, have good games, and we will see you next time. See ya. This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to Gaming with Science. This podcast is produced with the support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe  

Our very first episode. We start with bio-inspired (or just plain biological) sensors, and move on to the game Photosynthesis, which is about growing trees until you harvest them for victory points.  Timestamps: 1:09 - Artificial maple seed sensors 3:30 - Plants as land mine sensors 5:45 - Introduction to Photosynthesis 8:50 - Ecological Succession (or maybe Forestry) 14:19 - How seeds move around 16:24 - Not that much photosynthesis in Photosynthesis 18:12 - Soil fertility 24:14 - Gameplay experience 31:42 - Grading the game Game results - Game 1: Jason 77, Brian 62 - Game 2: Jason 92, Brian 64 Links: - Photosynthesis official website - 3D-printed maple seed sensors - Plants as land mine sensors   Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.   Full Transcript: Jason  0:06   Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:12   In today's episode, we're going to talk about photosynthesis from Blue Orange Games. Hey, I'm Brian. Jason  0:23   This is Jason. Brian  0:25   So we're both plant scientists, biologists, and general all-around nerds. And welcome to gaming with science. This is our first episode. Jason  0:32   So, I have been feeling that, for those of you who are just coming to this because you want to try it out, thank you. For those of you who are coming from the future and are watching this after we've become rich and famous and have millions of followers, I apologize because this is our first episode, we're still figuring things out. So things will probably be a little rough relative to the later ones. We hope. Brian  0:51   Yeah, we'll come back and fix it. We'll just replace it with a better recording in the future. And you'll never know. Speaker 1  0:56   You know, we won't do that. We don't have time. We're  university professors, we don't have time to do that. Brian  1:03   Fair enough. Okay. All right. So what are we going to be talking about today? Speaker 1  1:09   Well, I was thinking we'd start off with a fun science fact. And this one's actually related to the game today. So our game today is photosynthesis. And just last week, I saw that someone been doing some bio-inspired engineering. And so a group...I forgot to see where they were from, we'll post it in the show notes. But there's this whole drive to send out environmentally friendly sensors to use to take remote sensing data, temperature, pH, other things that are useful to monitor the environment and see how it's doing. And a lot of people are modeling these off of various seeds. And so this new group has done 3d printing of biocompatible polymers. So they're biodegradable, they're eco friendly, in the shape of maple seeds. And the idea is that the biopolymer, is impregnated with a whole bunch of metal nanoparticles. So very, very tiny bits of metal, they're attached to certain chemical compounds, and they fluoresce. So you shine a light on them, and they shine a different, a different frequency of light comes back out. But the thing is the type of fluorescence the wavelength, I'm not an engineer, I don't know the details, but it changes based on the temperature of the sensor. So the idea is you can take a bunch of these artificial maple seeds that they just print off a 3d printer with the right stuff, you go in, I guess, you distribute them by helicopter or something, they whirligig down and spread out, just like natural maple seeds. And then you can just fly a drone over at some later point and read in the correct wavelengths of light and be able to say, Okay, what's the temperature on the ground right here, and they have data showing that, Oh, as the temperature goes up by five or 10 degrees, then this is how the qualities of it change. And if I was reading it, right--again, not my area--but if I was reading the paper, right, it sounds like out in the wild, these things are expected to last a few years, like probably one to three years before they break down and decompose entirely. Obviously, not permanent. But that's kind of the point is they don't want be spreading out plastic and electronic waste everywhere to monitor it, they want something that you can throw out, and then it breaks back down. Speaker 2  3:17   I can see the connection, and part of this game is going to be about seed dissemination and literally, maple is is in this game. So that's pretty cool. This is not the topic I thought you were going to talk about, though. I had seen something, again, with the idea of, of biological sensors, where they had engineered plants to respond to certain compounds in the soil and change color, and in such a way that you could easily monitor the presence of particular toxins. Of course, at that point, you're spreading genetically engineered plants out into the environment, which is something people aren't super enthused about. But the idea is really interesting. But again, that idea of a system, this is kind of the opposite. This is using biology to mimic a sensor, instead of using a sensor that mimics biology. Speaker 1  4:01   Yeah, what would they be? What are the point of that be? I guess, where would be the most use for that sort of thing? Would it be like contaminated sites like Superfund sites, so you could get a very fine grain without having to take like a bajillion soil tests to figure out where the contamination is? Speaker 2  4:16   The specific use case that I remember seeing, I'll go back and find this for the show notes as well was detection of explosives to detect landmines that were buried. Jason  4:25   Okay, that's cool. That's very cool. Brian  4:27   Because again, you wouldn't want to take 1000 soil samples, you just would say, hey, those red plants over there, don't go over there. Jason  4:33   I was gonna say if there's landmines I don't want to take any soil samples. Speaker 2  4:38   So that was the one I remember. I'll find that for the show notes.  Speaker 1  4:41   Yeah, that would definitely be cool. I can definitely see. I mean, there's there's widespread issues to genetic engineering. I mean, there's no fitness benefit to being able to sense an explosive so I, like, we're gonna need to have a GMO discussion at some point probably. This is not the time to open that particular can of worms. But yes, let's say there's probably some pretty high regulatory burdens to get that particular product out. And in, in the field. I got, I have to wonder how many of these ideas started as someone just thinking, hey, that would be cool. Like, what if we could plant plants that would change color in the presence of landmines? What if we made sensors that flew down like maple seeds? I mean, you gotta admit, when I was a kid, I would just grab gather at maple seeds and just toss them in the air because they look super cool. And I wonder how much of that design is not like the whole thing. I mean, it has to withstand rounds of engineering and funding and all sorts of stuff. But that first initial germ of an idea is like, hey, this would be really cool. Speaker 2  5:38   Yeah, you wonder if that's right. Was it the use case that came first? And then you figure out how to do it? Or was it the other way around? Unknown Speaker  5:44   Don't know. Brian  5:45   Yeah. Jason  5:46   So anyway, bring it I think, bring this out into this game. So photosynthesis, which this is only the second time I've ever played this, but you own this game. Speaker 2  5:56   We do. So photosynthesis is produced by Blue Orange Games. It was released in 2017. With game designer, Hjalmar Hach and art designer Sabrina Miramon. It's for two to four players. We only played two player, I think we've played four player before. Jason  6:10   Yeah Brian  6:10   Age is...ages are eight and up, which you can usually subtract a couple years from that based on your child, I suppose. I think eight's probably pretty accurate, though, based on you know, my look at this. Speaker 1  6:23   I think so. I think you could probably play a simplified game with like a six or seven year old, but keeping track of them and playing optimally, is definitely going to require a higher age level. So like, if you just want a kid, the kid just wants to grow some trees, then you can play easy mode photosynthesis, But to play it real? Yeah, probably eight and up. Speaker 2  6:41   It's probably one of those where a group of kids could play. And a group of adults could play. But if you're going to be mixed mixing skills and ages, you might have some different experiences there. 45 To 60 minutes to play, which seems about accurate to me, I think you could play a little faster if you're trying to play faster. I think we did. Jason  7:00   Yeah, there are only two of us that made it easy. And yes, we, we had a hard deadline. So we were definitely playing the speed chess version of photosynthesis. Speaker 2  7:08   So the setup of the board, you have a circular hex board. And two dimensional tree stands of different sizes. There's four different trees, each of them...they don't really play any different, but they all look a little different, slightly different colors. Good for colorblind, you know, they're all very distinct and easy to pick out and represent from each other. The conceit of the board is that you have a sun tracker that will rotate clockwise around the board at each corner of the hex sort of shows what direction the light is coming from. So the objective of the game is when you start, this board represents an empty field with no trees on it at all. You'll start by placing your small trees around the outside, and you'll collect light points that are the economy of the game that we'll use to plant seeds, grow up your trees to maturity, and then once they are mature, you'll, you'll collect you'll kill those trees to score your points. So when that tree is fully grown, you're able to remove it from the board and collect points that are based on the soil richness is how it's described in the game. With more points being awarded, the closer you are to the middle of the board, and sort of a rank scoring system. That's kinda like priority scoring, the first person to score in that area will get more points than the last person to collect in that area. Which actually is something I hadn't really thought about. There's, maybe there's a little bit of a metaphor there, too, that we should touch on Speaker 1  8:29   a note we can reach for that later. Honestly, the difference in priority is not huge. We're talking like one or two points difference. So it's like, if it's a really tight game, then that matters. But in our our experience looking at some people on lines, like most times, it's a difference of a hole, you scored five times versus six times. So Speaker 2  8:50   I can't...you're kind of right. I wonder what the game would have to look like to have that matter? Because it seemed like for the most part anyway, we can talk about design choices later, I suppose. So when I was researching this game, the major scientific concepts that I saw, that we're going to talk about in more detail are ecological succession, seed dissemination, photosynthesis, which the game spends not that much time talking about, really, and a little bit on soil fertility. So I think let's, let's talk about that aspect, sort of what those are, how the game is representing them. So ecological succession in the first place. So what is that? There are two types of ecological succession: primary ecological succession is like what happens after you've had lava completely like obliterate terrain, there is nothing ther. Life is biodiversity is at zero. And at that point, things like lichens and bacteria and eventually hardy plants come and they rebuild the soil. Primary succession is about rebuilding the soil reestablishing biodiversity in terrain that's been completely stripped of all life. Then you've got secondary succession. This is a different process, the soil is still there. But the plants are not. And that is what we're representing in photosynthesis. We have an area of land with no trees on it.  Jason  10:16   It was basically clear cut. Brian  10:17   That is probably what happens, there was no other indication of any other sort of ecological disturbance, there was just nothing there. Succession is this process where plants will come back and recall as an area. And one thing that this game represents well is how the plants are competing with each other for space, for light, for other aspects. We don't really think about plants competing with one another. But that is what drives ecological succession is availability of light, availability of space. It's why we see a sort of regular pattern of succession of plants, starting with things that require a more open light environment until the trees come in, and they will shade out everything else. And then you'll see a transition in species during that. The secondary succession is driven by disturbances. Those disturbances can be as small as a tree falling over creating new space for something else to come in, or a forest fire or something like that. So this is really the key metaphor that this game is trying to represent is secondary ecological succession plants competing with one another for light for space.  Speaker 1  11:22   Yeah, we've got, presumably, we have some forest around this clearing that is still intact, and that's where all the initial plants come from. And then this clearing is slowly being recolonized over, I don't know, you figured we're looking at the lifetime of a tree. So this could take several decades of time that are passing for, for the game. Speaker 2  11:39   Yeah, I'm not sure what they're trying to represent. The sun moves around the grove, that's an important thing. So obviously, there's some cycle going on. But it doesn't really seem like it's a year, it seems like it must be a longer period of time of some kind. Speaker 1  11:50   Yeah, well, this is the point where when you have to make a choice of making a fun game, and being completely accurate to the science, people choose to make a fun game. And I agree with that choice. The point like if you make a very accurate scientific game, that is also boring, no one's gonna play it. I'd rather have a very fun game that has some minor deviations from accuracy, or even major ones, as long as it's fun to play. Speaker 2  12:13   Yeah, I think I think you're right, I think as long as the sort of the key concept is still there, and it's still being represented, I think that that's fine. And you can present it in different...I mean, obviously, there are board games that go up and down the scale in terms of how much they're trying to simulate things based on sort of the objectives. But as long as the key mechanics sort of still represent, I think that this does a pretty good job of sort of getting this key concept of plants competing for space in light, for sure. Speaker 1  12:39   Definitely, the one odd thing there, one of these acceptable breaks is the fact that all the plants of the same species are working together. So one strategy is you have a bunch of tiny plants around the edges of the board, which isn't worth very many points. And then you use all those light points that you've gathered from the edges to grow your trees in the middle to get them really big and make a lot of points when you harvest them. And so that's because it's trees of a species are also competing against each other by and large. I mean, we, we talked about this while plays like okay, maybe this represents the mycorhizae, which are these underground fungal networks that connects trees and have been shown to be able to kind of help trees out from one tree to another, but there's still a lot not known about it. And I mean, by and large competition is the way things work in reality. So that's a again, acceptable break. You're trying to get your entire species of tree to do the best, not just individual trees. Brian  13:33   Yeah, it's go Team Oak. Speaker 1  13:35   Which is an odd thing. They don't actually tell you what the four trees are. I had to look this up. But they are oak, spruce, sycamore, which is what we thought was a maple tree, and linden, which is the tiny little berry ones. Brian  13:50   Oh, that's interesting. So even though they have four species of tree in terms of the gameplay, they all function exactly the same, they all grow the same, they all need the same amount of light, they all like the same amount of soil, which is another sort of break from reality a little bit. Obviously, the economy of the game would be much more complicated if the light had to stay with the individual tree that collected it. More accurate, but way more fiddly. Jason  14:14   Yeah, that's what we need a computer to handle that. I'm not going to do that myself. Brian  14:19   But one thing that we did talk about there that actually leads us into the next topic is this idea of, Yes, plants will usually they're not only competing with members of other species, but with themselves. That is why seed dissemination is an important idea. This idea that a plant needs to spread its seeds to new territories. And seed dissemination can come in a variety of ways and in this case, all four of our trees disseminate similarly, it's purely based on size. But dissemination can be based on a wind you know, we have our dandelion fluffs or our Samarra, like maple seeds that will flutter down. We can have dissemination by water, which we didn't really get too much of that in this game, or dissemination by animals, which again, there's no animals in this game. There is an expansion with animals that also play roles with the moon tracker. We didn't play that, but it's an interesting idea. Jason  15:06   We may revisit that in a future season. Speaker 2  15:08   Potentially. But of course, oaks and squirrels have a well established symbiotic interaction. Oak seeds are kind of dependent upon animals. So acorns are largely dependent on animals to get planted, which we're not going to deal with here. Speaker 1  15:22   Yeah, actually, let's take a look at so oaks. They're acorns. They depend on squirrels and other things that grab them, bury them. The spruce, how do spruce... they're, they've got cones.  Speaker 2  15:32   Some cones are dependent upon disturbance and fire to open but I don't know if that's spruce.  Jason  15:37   I don't know about spruce. Sycamores, which looking up people...either there's two very different trees that are both called sycamores or people are very confused about what Sycamore seeds look like, because sometimes they look like maple seeds. And sometimes they look like a ball of like tiny little spiky things held together. So the game has the maple seed ones, those are wind, so they just drop and they whirligig off somewhere. And then the Linden is berries, so probably birds. Speaker 2  16:02   Probably. So that would be we've got two animal. I really don't know how spruce cones spread. I mean, the ones that are fire-based, it's a really interesting mechanism. The cones will be held shut with the pine resin that has a melting temperature that will only open when it's exposed to extremely high temperatures and release the seeds. Unknown Speaker  16:23   Yeah, they're fire-dependent. Speaker 2  16:24   So the other concept of the game is photosynthesis itself, which I think that most people, it's relatively common knowledge that plants need light. What do they need light for? What are they doing with it? They are able to use the energy of light to take carbon dioxide from the air, combine it with water and create glucose, sugar, right? And then in the process, releasing oxygen. So the light economy, the ability to to collect light is a key thing that plants need to do. And it basically means that as long as they can get water, carbon dioxide is everywhere. As long as they can get light, they can produce energy. What do they do with the glucose? They actually burn that glucose, reversing the process, to generate energy or they use the carbon to make other parts of their body. Trees are made from thin air. Jason  17:13   And water Brian  17:13   And water. Thin air and water? That's true. I was, actually I meant to look up, do we know what percentage of a tree is carbon? Unknown Speaker  17:20   No, but I think the answer is a lot. Brian  17:23   Like all of the carbon that is in the tree, the bulk of the tree itself, the carbon skeleton that makes up all of the tissues is coming from the air. Speaker 1  17:33   Yeah, well, let's say you got carbon carbohydrates, you got a carbon. I mean, you got ones like glucose, you've got like a hydroxyl. So an oxygen and hydrogen on one side and a hydrogen on the other. So carbon and oxygen are about the same, hydrogen has a little bit. So if I were just to go off of that ratio, like C-H2-O as your typical carbohydrate, we could probably say, what like 40, 45%? Brian  18:00   Yeah, it seems reasonable to me. Jason  18:02   Another 45% is oxygen, and then the rest is hydrogen. Unknown Speaker  18:05   There's some nitrogen in there, too, which will lead us into our next topic. Jason  18:08   True, true, yeah, I forgot about all the nitrogen for, for the protein. Speaker 2  18:12   Yeah, well, actually, that can lead us into our next topic, which is soil fertility. Which I had a little bit of a harder time researching it. But I think, for anybody who's been to a garden center, and essentially looked at a bag of fertilizer, you'll see three numbers on there. That is the nitrogen amount, the phosphorus amount, the potassium amount. Nitrogen is one thing that is in the air all the time, but it is in a form that is functionally unusable dinitrogen gas, the bonds between the two nitrogen atoms are so strong, that even though we're surrounded the air is 70% nitrogen, but it's not usable. Speaker 1  18:48   Yet to put this in perspective, the formation of that nitrogen bond is what makes most explosives work. So trying to get it back apart so it can be used by a living thing is basically trying to reverse an explosion level of energy. Yeah, reverse explosion. In order to do it is like, like, I work in this a little bit. I study plant-microbe symbioses. And the microbes are the ones that are actually turning the nitrogen. And it is it takes so much energy to split that stupid bond. I mean, there's a reason why plants pay microbes to do it instead of doing themselves. It is so hard. Speaker 2  19:22   And and it's it's a process. It's also poisoned by oxygen. Jason  19:27   Yes, there's that too. Brian  19:28   Yeah. So if you want to be able to do this, you also need to create a environment where oxygen is kept at a minimum or very little oxygen, which is something microbes are pretty good at doing. Certain microbes can live without oxygen at all. This is something there are specific bacteria that do this. The plants will make specific organs to facilitate and allow them to themselves to be colonized. There are some trees that form these associations, but microbes in soil can do it just on their own and the amount of...I don't know Is it fair to say that the amount of nitrogen in soil is probably one of the most limiting things for soil fertility? Jason  20:03   Oh, yeah. Brian  20:03   Okay. So, so that's the concept here, too, that we have in the game that this this idea of soil fertility, which the soil richness, and I'm not sure why...this is let's talk about the metaphor of the game. Why is killing the tree in the rich soil the good thing to do? Jason  20:22   I mean, from just the game perspective, like, it's the hardest spot to go for, you want people to be vying for it. So you want there to be a reward for competing for a limited number of spaces. So if we were to try to extend that to the metaphor of, oh, this is ecological succession, this is a living biosphere, this is something going on. Well, there, there are better parts of soil, there's better parts of forests where there's more nutrients because of something maybe accumulated something, maybe there's just a pocket of extra rich earth there. I mean, some of my colleagues who work with crops say that this can sometimes be a problem when they are trying to figure out like do experiments. Because if you had, if the farmer 10 years ago, had a chicken coop on one part of the field, all that chicken poop is now sitting on the field. And there's just a much higher level of nutrients there. Or I know someone in Africa who had complained about ants, because ants, that ant colony is basically a giant engine for gathering nutrients over a large area and then concentrating them in a small area. And so the same things work in forests and such, so there are patches of better soil. And if you've got more nutrients there, then presumably you'll be able to grow better, you'll be able to make more seeds, and have a better chance of winning the evolutionary game of having as many offspring as possible. Which is something this game does not talk about very much like you're not rewarded for making a bunch of seeds, you're rewarded for harvesting mature trees. Brian  21:52   Less about ecology at the end of the way scoring goes and more about forestry or that this is being maintained in some way.  Jason  21:59   Yeah, well, yes. Now when I first saw this I was like, Oh, it's a game about succession. It's about plants moving in and colonizing a disturbed spot and then we get this point, oh, you score points by harvesting your mature tree and clearing its grounds. Like oh, no, this is a game about forestry. This entire lot got clear-cut. And now the trees are moving in from the from the outside, and we're just cutting them down and harvesting them when they get mature. I guess I did think maybe you could think about oh, maybe we're like capturing carbon in the soil or something if you want to do like a more ecological one, but it's really it's a game about forestry. Brian  22:32   Yeah. old trees do die. They do create spaces of disturbance for new trees to move in to but it's not a...trees aren't seeking death upon maturity typically. I think you talked about another metaphor there that might have been a different way of doing scoring or a different way of dealing with the soil richness, which was which could be producing more seeds or affecting seed dissemination. In photosynthesis, seed dissemination is purely based on how tall the tree is, a one-tall tree can spread the seed one away two-tall tree can spread two away, a mature tree can spread up to three spaces away. Maybe the game would be more accurate to the metaphor of the science, if dissemination was affected by soil richness, rather than the size of the tree. I think we're meant to assume that in the game, because it's based on size, maybe these are all wind disseminated or something. So being a taller tree gives you access to more area. Jason  23:29   I personally like the mental image of all of these trees just kind of catapulting their seeds, like one or two, two squares away. Brian  23:36   There are there are plants that do that there are plants that use sort of a I'm trying to think of the best way they will launch seeds, the seed pods will grow under tension, and when they dry, they may fire seeds away, catapult them physically into another space.  Jason  23:50   I've heard American witchhazel is one of those. I've never seen it myself. But I've heard that actually does that.  Brian  23:57   I'm trying to remember there was one that grows in my a weed in my yard that... hairy bittercress does that. As you walk by the seed pods, they will explode percussively, and then spread seeds all over the place, which is why they're very thoroughly represented in my yard. Jason  24:14   So we played this game twice. And as you said, we didn't do it quite right, because we had some of the light gathering rules wrong. Turns out that a short tree can't actually completely shade a taller tree next to it. We thought that was weird, but we were looking in the wrong part of the rulebook. So anyway, you'll find this like, we're very human, we make mistakes. So as we go this we may not quite get the rules right all the time. But that's okay. We'll, we'll play it right next time. But anyway, what was your experience of playing the game? So there's a lot of moving pieces like the sun is moving around, you're trying to grow trees, like a tree that is in a great position now can be shaded in two turns. What What was it like for you playing the game? Brian  24:50   Hmm, let's see. It was... Well, I think that we have slightly different play styles. I typically just do the actions and then see how things sort of mature I'm usually not trying to plan too far ahead, which I'm just gonna say I'm playing like a tree. Trees are also not planning ahead, necessarily. But the use of the turn tracker to keep track handing that back and forth sort of developing sort of a good routine was good. Playing the two player game, we kept a pretty good pace. I would wonder if you had more players, if it would change the pace, if you'd get overly concerned about what I should do next, as you're waiting for everybody else to make their decisions. One thing that about the game that sort of threw me off one is okay, yes, it is a game you are planning, you are trying to achieve victory by harvesting your mature trees. The way that you spend your light points that you're collecting is you will prepare your tree is bring them to this sort of strange nether zone. And then you pay again to put them out onto the board. From a metaphor perspective, I don't know maybe the trees are saving up energy to do something that they want to be able to do next turn or that they will do at some point in the future. The game was not hard to learn. All right, Jason. So we played this a couple of times. What did you, did you enjoy photosynthesis? What was it like to play? Jason  26:08   Oh it was fun. It's one of those games where the individual parts are relatively simple. But when you put them all together, it suddenly becomes very complicated. Especially because of that moving Sun tracker around, I found myself very quickly trying to plan out okay, where will this tree be in two or three turns? When I was about to harvest trees, I would say Okay, wait, the sun tracker is going, I've got two good turns of sunlight left, I'm gonna leave that tree to gather sunlight for now. And then I'll harvest it once it drops into another tree's shadow. Brian  26:38   So one part from the metaphor was this idea of you spend lights to prepare a tree or a seed, and then you spend again, to place it on the board. So I screwed that up a couple of times in a couple of different ways. When we would harvest I would put things in the wrong place, I'd put them in my ready area, instead of back on the player board. Or in both of our games,  when we get near the end of the game, I would spend my points poorly on things that I couldn't actually do anything with. So...but I'm a less tactical player than you are. Jason  27:05   Yes, no, I'm very much a plan-in-out, try to find all the pieces, see how they work together. Like I love games like this that reward people for like thinking ahead and trying to figure out the optimal place because that's what I enjoy doing. And so I was definitely looking at like those last few terms like, okay, my goal is to grow big trees and chop them down, grow big trees and chop them down. So everything I did was set towards gathering as much light as I could in order to do those two things, new trees, they don't matter. There's only two turns left, they're not going to be able to grow big enough. So sorry, little trees, you just get ignored. You all you only exist to serve the needs of the greater growth. Brian  27:42   Just like real trees. No, not really so much. Actually, I would say that that's one thing is trees don't do a lot of planning typically, I wouldn't think so there's another sort of place where the game is a little different. One thing about this game is it's just very pretty. It's very pretty game. It's it's visually appealing to, to watch this grove kind of fill in with trees of different sizes in a...it's not quite natural. So again, the sun is coming in completely from the side. So there is sort of this, I think you noticed this when we played too, that middle ring kind of didn't get filled up that much. But that probably would be different. If you had more players. Jason  28:19   It would probably also be different if we were playing with the correct light rules if we weren't completely shading out each and every tree. Brian  28:25   Yes, that would probably also help. This is one of the fun things about board games, though is that you can play them wrong and still have fun and still sort of get the game and enjoy the game. Even if you screwed something up.  Jason  28:36   Yeah, going back to the looks though, like I want to like that's a really important thing to me, like I enjoy games that really look good, that are very aesthetically pleasing. I have actually bought board games, simply because they were very pretty. Thankfully, they usually turned out to be very fun to play as well. If someone's going to invest the time and money to get good artwork, they've usually also invested the time for good gameplay. And this is a very pretty one. The trees are pretty, if...I need to double check, but I'm pretty sure each side has like eight tiny trees and like four or five middle sized one and two big ones. And I think they're different. I don't think they look identical all the pieces to each other. I think there's a few different models for them. Brian  29:15   That's interesting. I didn't even notice that there are there are slightly different resources for the smalls, they're little two dimensional standees. And they might be. Jason  29:24   I could be wrong. Maybe I just got that impression because each of the four sides are very different. There's a kind of a bluish, greenish or pinkish a golden colored and so again, the the grove ends up looking very, very pretty.  Brian  29:36   It probably ends up happening because if you have two standee pieces, if you just put them together a different way you end up with a slightly different looking tree without even trying. Jason  29:44   True, that could be it. Brian  29:45   There are some advanced rules that we didn't play. One is to add a third revolution of the sun.  Jason  29:51   You mean a fourth revolution? Brian  29:52   Yeah, fourth revolution around I'm not sure why. How that would change things other than just giving you more time to plan and score and fill out the board more. The more interesting one, I think, is that you cannot place a seed in the shadow of another tree. Jason  30:06   Now that would change the game a lot, the way it is right now is like you can place a seed anywhere where there's an open space where there isn't already a seed or someone else's tree. But the shadows in the game are very important. I mean, they're probably the most tactical part is figuring out where trees are going to be in shadow where they're not, and how you can avoid your opponent's shade, and literally throw shade on your opponent so that they can't actually earn any  light points. And so adding another monkey wrench where you can't put a seed down in a place that's in shadow, that will be hard. I almost wonder if it'd be more realistic if you can't sprout the seed. When it's in shadow. Brian  30:45   I think that that does make more sense. Another thing that they do is a seed can hold a square, a seed can hold a hex just having the seed there means something else can be there Jason  30:55   Including another seed Brian  30:56   Including another seed, it's like, well, but really, though, that's not how that would be just having a seed there is not going to keep another seed from landing in that space. And then it should be erased. I don't know. I, I wonder how that would change things too. Jason  31:11   Yep, I wonder how many people use seeds to just lock down parts of the board so that their opponents can't get them? Brian  31:17   I mean, you 100% could do that. The downside is that you have a limited number of seeds, and that they get more expensive. So if you're going to put it out and you're not going to grow it, then you are taking a cost to do that. You're not even casting shade, you made the joke about casting shade on your opponents. You can cast shade on yourself. Like very easily.  Jason  31:35   Yeah, you did that several times, Brian  31:36   many times. That is true. Okay, anything else that we should talk about this game? Jason  31:43   Let's see. I think we've covered it. I mean, overall, I thought it was a very fun game. You wanted to give... So we're both university professors. And so we are in the habit of grading things. And so you wanted to try to give a letter grade to these just to give our impressions. So you you did all the research on the science. So what would you grade the science as? Brian  32:03   I'm trying to decide if I should be grading on a curve or grading objectively, I think the core science of ecological succession is represented here relatively well. The feeling is good. Hmmm...I'm gonna say...how do we feel about a B plus, for the forestry end point for scoring and sort of being a little off the biology rails? Jason  32:30   Yeah, I was gonna say about a B plus, like, it's definitely there. They're definitely made some compromises. And the thing is, compromises are okay. But for grading, just like how accurate is the science? Yeah, B plus is probably good. Brian  32:42   The, just the collecting phase. That's, that's, that's where just things get thrown off just a little bit. If it wasn't for that, I'd say probably would have scored a little higher. All right. What do you think about the fun the experience of playing the game? Is it easy to learn? Is it fun to play? Jason  32:58   I'd give that an A. I mean, I think that this was a really fun game. I really enjoyed the tactical part of it. I mean, it's not going to be for everyone. I'm thinking of my own father here every time we get together and play games, my dad's refrain is, why can't we just play Uno? It's like, that's kind of his ceiling in terms of game complexity. So, but for people who like board games, like I think it's good, I just looked it up right now. So on Board Game Geek, its overall rank is 650...644. So which, okay, it's not in the top 20. But given that there are literally 1000s upon 1000s of games, it's pretty good. I really enjoyed it. And again, I really liked the aesthetics, and it's just very pretty growing trees. I can imagine some people may be turned off by the the planning aspect, and how easy it is to get in a bit of a bad position as your opponents are throwing shade all over you. So I'd probably give it an A maybe an A minus because it maybe it's too complex for some people, but I personally liked it. I give it an A.  Brian  34:00   I think, I think I'm comfortable with an A minus. I'm actually excited to play it again. I think we should put it on the put it on the list for the next time we get together. I'd be curious to play again with the proper shadow rules, and also to play with more than two players. What is it like with three or four? How does the game feel different? Well, when we were playing our second round, it was a pretty quick back and forth. It was it was fun to sort of like play speed photosynthesis, I would do that again. Jason  34:26   Yeah, that was...it was stressful and relieving at the same time. It was stressful because I still want to make optimal plays. But kind of relaxing when I realized I couldn't really so I just tried to do the best I could. I'm actually quite surprised that not only did both of us do better in the speed round, maybe because we knew the game better. But I trounced you, I had like 30 more points than you did. Brian  34:50   Well, I think as we continue doing this experiment, we're going to hear that trend continue. Okay, all right. Well, this  was photosynthesis. It's a fun game. Science is pretty good. Give it a try. Jason  35:06   And if you liked this, I mean, I know this is the cliche thing, but give us a review. We're new at this. I don't know if you can like, comment and subscribe a podcast. But if you can go ahead, we're trying this out. I mean, really, if you'd like this, share it with your friends. We're not like there's no Patreon. We're not doing this for money. If you know anyone at the National Science Foundation, that would be willing to give us a grant. That's great, but we're not going to ask for money. We're just doing this for the fun of it. We're hoping you enjoy it too. So until next time Brian  35:35   Have fun playing dice with the universe Jason  35:38   Later. Brian  35:41   This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to gaming science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe