Gaming with Science

#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
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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
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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.