Gaming with Science

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

#Interview #Maize #Corn #Genetics #Scientists
It's our mid-season break, so we've got a bonus episode talking to a handful of game-loving scientists at the 2024 Maize Genetics Meeting. We talk about science, games, perseverence, the winding path of becoming a scientist, and plenty more. 
Timestamps
01:35 - Introductions02:25 - How did you get into science?06:28 - What do you research?09:38 - Favorite games?12:29 - Turning your work into a game?14:24 - Advice to aspiring scientists17:44 - Closing remarks
Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net 
Links
2024 Maize Genetics Meeting
Full Transcript
Brian  0:06  Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.
Jason  0:14  Welcome back to Gaming with Science. This is Jason and it's just me today. So right now we're technically in our mid season break. But to make sure y'all have something, I want to introduce you to a bunch of scientists I met at the Maize Genetics Meeting back in March. And that's maize as in corn, not maze as in puzzles. Although of course, you may have been to a corn maze, which is actually a maze maze. And yeah, anyway, one of my goals with this podcast was trying to show the human side of scientists, we see a bunch of things in Hollywood where scientists are all uber-nerdy or geeky or have no social life. And I want to show that scientists are human, we have interests, we play games, we have fun. And so when I was back at this conference, I wanted to show off what real scientists are like and so I grabbed a microphone and started grabbing some people and just talking with them and ask them questions about how they got into science, what games they like, how we could turn their research into a game, that sort of thing. So, many thanks to the people who let me interview them: Briana, Chip, Jacob, Kate, Kyle, Lauren, and Mohammed; I'll let them all introduce themselves in a little bit. To keep things from getting repetitive, I spliced all the interviews together. So you'll hear me asking one question, but then you'll hear a bunch of them in turn, even though they were recorded at different times in different places, you'll have different amounts of background noises depending on where we were and how much stuff was going on at the time. Also, you probably guessed that being a maize genetics conference, corn genetics, everyone here works on corn. If you'd like this, we'll try to do a few more we'll maybe get some other ones. So without further ado, I'm just gonna let everyone introduce themselves and I hope you enjoy this. 
Okay, so first off, can you please introduce yourself?
Brianna  1:37  My name is Brianna Griffin. I'm originally from Florida, but I'm actually at Iowa State University where I study molecular plant pathology.
Chip  1:44  Yeah, I'm Chip Hunter. I work for the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Gainesville, Florida.
Jacob  1:51  I am Jacob Kelly. I am a PhD student at the University of Missouri.
Kate  1:56  I'm Kate Eastman, and I'm a graduate student at Purdue and Jen Wisecavers lab.
Kyle  2:01  Hi, my name is Kyle Swentowski. I'm a postdoctoral fellow in David Jackson's lab at Cold Spring Harbor.
Lauren  2:07  I'm Lauren Whitt. I'm a postdoc at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, just recently graduated and I'm a plant genetic researcher.
Mohammed  2:17  My name is Mohammed El-Walid. I'm a fourth year PhD candidate at Cornell University working in Ed Buckler's lab.
Jason  2:25  So what got you into science in the first place?
Brianna  2:27  I've always been interested in science but it was it's a kind of an interesting path though. I actually went to an art school for middle and high school, like science was definitely not the focus at our school, but I just always really enjoyed it. And as I continued to advance it, I actually started to see science as a type of art form. I just thought it was very interesting and very creative, but in a completely different way than like I was used to seeing with like the dancers and the painters and stuff like that. And so actually, when I started in undergrad, I actually thought I was gonna go to med school and I luckily joined a program called Women in math, science and engineering at Florida State University. And they're really big on getting people more involved in research like earlier on. So my sophomore year, I actually started working in a maize genetics lab. So corn corn lab, as I was doing that, at the same time as doing everything for pre med and working at the hospital and stuff, I realized that I really enjoyed science, a lot more than healthcare, nothing wrong with doctors, you know, we definitely need them. But at least for me, science just seems so much more interesting. It was a lot more creative a field, there was a lot more options like to do kind of what you wanted to and each day is very different. And so that was something that was really appealing to me.
Chip  3:36  I was on track to become a dentist like my father, I was studying for the DAT exam in college and I took a course and it was called "the seeds of change". And it was taught by an agronomic professor. But it was all about genetic engineering in crops and plants. That one course changed my trajectory because I was so impressed by the possibility of plant genetic engineering to improve agriculture. But really to improve the world. I think that still holds such great promise. We've seen cool successes. Some of the examples that I was impressed by were, you know, turf grass that can be watered irrigated with saltwater, roses that never wilt, fruit that doesn't spoil, those kinds of sorts of things.
Lauren  4:13  So, let's see, I wanted to be a vet growing up. Where I was from science, scientist wasn't really a thing you could be, it was you could be a science teacher, or you could be a vet, or you could be a nurse, and I'm not good with blood. I'm very queasy, unfortunately, as much as I loved animals. So I was like, Oh, I'm gonna be a science teacher. And so that's what I went to do. And I took a genetics class, and I really liked it. And I just went and talked to the professor, hey, do you have room in your lab? Can you just teach me how to do this stuff? Like how do I extract DNA? How do I isolate a gene, you know, doing PCR, that kind of stuff. And she had a really cool project for me to extract DNA from ancient permafrost up in Alaska, like 50,000 year old soil samples and like, you know, get to try to characterize what the plant population looked like across Alaska as it changed during the Pleistocene. So you know, the unknown aspect that I was like, Wait, we don't really know what that is. And she's like, well, you know, we have theories. But we don't have like, you know, the DNA, we don't have like the proof yet. And it's like, Oh, I get to do something that no one else has known about, like, I get to contribute something new.
Mohammed  5:17  Actually, initially, during high school, I studied more computer science, I always had like an interest in science, but I didn't really think I'd be good at it necessarily, or really think that I, I didn't really know what a scientist looked like. And so it never really occurred to me that that's something I could actually do. But my elder sister was taking this genetics class during her, during her undergrad at the University of Missouri and the genetics professor that she was with requested some like field help from some students. And my sister agreed, and asked if she could bring me along. And this was like, the summer right after I graduated high school. So I went with her. And we were talking about like, heterosis, and things like that. And it was just, it was kind of captivating the genetics and starting to like, understand it a little bit more, and understand what kind of questions you can ask and what it looks like, what it really looks like to be a scientist and to do science. And so instead of going to computer science, I switched to biochemistry. And I found this nice avenue where I can do a lot of computational things for genetics, and now I do.
Jason  6:29  Okay, and what's your research on?
Brianna  6:30  So generally, I would say that I do crop improvement. So I work on diseases and working on plant immunity. So you know, how you have an immune system. And with humans, like there's also one in plants too, but it's a lot less defined at this point. And so I'm trying to help figure out that so that we can make stronger plants so that we just have better crops for the future.
Mohammed  6:49  I do a lot of genomics work, we're trying to map a freezing tolerance in this wild relative of corn called Trispacum dactyloides, a lot of what I've been doing is, is is trying to figure out how we parse through all this genomics data, this genetic data that we have, and try to identify causal genes related to Tripsacum's freezing tolerance, so that we can introduce it into maize.
Chip  7:13  I study maize genetics, and especially focused on defense chemistry, the regulation of defenses against insects, and pathogens by plant hormones.
Lauren  7:24  We look for places in the genome that are different across populations. So just genetic variants, and then we can link that to changes in what we see in the plant. So changes in their traits. And my research is to try to narrow that down to the genes that are actually responsible for that. So just because there's a change at a certain part of the genome, doesn't mean specifically that we know which gene that that's telling us is the causal gene that's actually changing, like, making the plant taller, making plant shorter. And I guess the reason I got into it is because I found out that we actually don't know what all the genes do. So I actually might be able to discover something new. And that's exciting to me.
Kate  8:02  So I study primarily two different projects. The first is a sea slug that steals chloroplasts from the algae it eats and uses its chloroplasts to photosynthesize. And then the next project is actually maize insect interactions, as well as a wild grass called Setaria viridis. And investigating the impacts of different caterpillar on plant defense responses.
Jacob  8:30  I use molecular machines to move large segments of DNA from one location on a chromosome to another location on a different chromosome. It's proof of concept research to show that it can be done. One of the major problems that plant breeders run into is having different genes of interest located on different chromosomes. If we're able to insert a large segment of DNA into a plant, and that large segment of DNA has lots of genes of interest, and then we're able to move that to a specific target site, then, not only can we partially control the expression of the large segment of DNA, like the genes located in it, but because it's all incorporated in the same spot, it inherits together.
Kyle  9:18  In my research, I'm interested in the differences between annual and perennial plants. Annuals are really good at growing and taking everything they've produced in their life and putting it into what's going to be harvested. Whereas perennials have to be able to recycle their nutrients and keep growing year after year. So I'm trying to figure out how that process actually works.
Jason  9:38  So what are some of your favorite games?
Jacob  9:40  So my favorite game is actually chess. I got into chess when I was a little boy, my dad taught me how to play chess, and he and I would stay up in the evenings. And we would play a game or two of chess, sometimes three before bed, and it was a fun way for my dad and I to bond with each other.
Jason  9:57  How long was it until he stopped letting you win and you legitimately, just legitimately just beating him.
Jacob  10:03  So I don't think my dad actually ever let me win. He would kick my butt, he would absolutely wreck me. When I was like four or five years old, he could beat me in just a few moves. And then as I got older and more experienced, it got to where I would win about a third of the games. And then after I left for college, I kept playing with other people that I met that also loved chess, and I got better. And my dad, he kind of stopped playing because he didn't have anyone to play with. And so now whenever my dad and I play, I return the favor from when I was four or five.
Chip  10:37  My favorite game of all really is Magic the Gathering, I think the strategy and you know, constantly evolving game type that it is, is is the most fun for me. So I've played that game for quite a long time now, about 20 years, I think.
Kate  10:53  I primarily love a game called Spirit Island. Other than that, classic board games, things like Monopoly, Risk and thinking of more modern ones. I really like Ecos lately and Mariposas. They're both kind of the same board game producers kind of animal interactions and things like that.
Mohammed  11:16  I think right now I mostly it's a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, mainly because there's not a whole lot of prep time for me, at least that has to go into it. So
Jason  11:25  You're obviously not the GM.
Mohammed  11:26  No, I am not the GM. I've got, so I'm in two campaigns, and one of them started in like 2020 and is still going on right now. And it's a bunch of actually other graduate students and former graduate students. Some of them are real faculty now and join remotely. But we've been playing for a few years now, it's really, a really good, good way to kind of take the edge off, enjoy some time with friends and think about, honestly think about science actually in like a different context really a lot of the time because I feel like, especially with something like Dungeons and Dragons, you have a lot of creative freewill. And sometimes you can use the things that you know to help you.
Kyle  12:08  So, I'm into both board games and video games video game wise. Some of my all time favorites are Age of Empires, Civilization, some first person shooter games, and then as far as board games go, I've lately been into this plant base board, plant molecular biology game called Cellulose. But I also I love pretty much any board game you could throw at me.
Jason  12:29  And so if we were to take your research and turn it into a game, what would it be like?
Brianna  12:35  I probably would say that it would be an open world adventure, where it's kind of a choose your own adventure, there's an overarching goal. But at the same time, there's a lot of different pathways you can take to like reach the end goal. And there's also a lot of side quests you can do that maybe distract you from the main mission, but still may be interesting, and still may get you some cool results along the way also.
Jason  12:53  So is that one about your research itself, or is that about being a graduate student?
Brianna  12:57  Probably both, honestly
Lauren  12:59  It'd honestly be probably pretty similar to the Evolution board game, where you get to evolve your species to out compete with the people at the table for limited resources and give them certain traits and kind of like play with the population size and like the animal size and how much resources they need. So I really liked that aspect of it. But trying to make it more like evolution and actually adding the random part into it actually had a teacher in undergrad who taught us a lab that way where he added in random aspects to it. So maybe adding a little bit more of the plants back into it? And so like, you know, animals are always fun, like maybe more of like, you know, growing like your plant population and competing for maybe underground resources.
Kate  13:35  I've worked a lot with horizontal gene transfer, which is non-hereditary passing of genetic information. So I've looked into these fungi that live in trees and pass genes between the trees that they live in, or other plants. And I also studied this sea slug that we expected had stolen some genes from the algae and eats so that it can support these chloroplasts. So it'd probably be different organisms stealing components of other organisms.
Jason  14:06  Sounds like you'd be stealing bits and pieces from other players creatures and trying to make the best one.
Kate  14:10  Yes, yeah, kind of like Spore. If you ever played that game on the computer, you're making this organism and slowly evolving it and adapting it to its environment. Yeah, that, that would probably be my inspiration.
Jason  14:24  I assume we have some aspiring scientists among our listeners. So what sort of advice would you give to them?
Jacob  14:30  I would say focus on what you love. And then as you focus on the science that you enjoy learning about the most, you will come across people that can point you in the right direction for not just learning more, but actually getting involved in the science and being able to push the perimeter of what is known and ultimately make discoveries and discover things related to what it is that you are interested in.
Kate  14:56  Just stay passionate about things. I have always loved science. Science. But when it becomes your job, you have to remember to separate your love for something from your hatred of a nine to five, or your dislike for school or things like that. So just kind of looking back at what got me passionate about science. And what I really love helps me to stay committed and stay driven.
Mohammed  15:23  It's much more doable than you think. There are a lot of challenges along the way. And then also, you do get paid for your PhD, you don't have to pay for that. So I think that was, that was something that really, I didn't realize until I started working in a laboratory and didn't know that was a thing. And then also, I think that the most important thing is really to make sure that you can maintain good relationships with your advisor, and with your colleagues, and then that you also have like a good balance outside of work, because it really is just like more of a marathon than anything. And I think that transition from from undergrad where everything did feel like a race to kind of slowing it down and just trying to keep taking slow steps forward was a challenge for me initially.
Chip  16:10  Yeah, dive in early as you can and try to find a place that you can have freedom to play, to learn and to do experiments. My personal philosophy is with students is to really let them take a stab at leading experiments and design experiments.
Kyle  16:26  If you really love what you're doing, keep going with it. I know it's gonna be a lot of hard work, but the dedication you put into it with anything in life will really pay off later.
Lauren  16:35  Definitely talk to your professors. I didn't know that that was the thing that you could do until one of my friends told me that she was working in someone's lab. And so it's like, yeah, just go up and talk to a professor. They're normal people, they have first names, a lot of professors I know like to go by their first names, actually. You know, a lot of them are going to be really down to earth and also want to pass on, like, I'm sure every scientist had a previous scientist that inspired them when they were a student. At least for me, and a lot of people I know, it's like wanting to pass that forward. And just showing that you're interested is like all we need, it's like you don't have to know all this stuff. You don't have to know how to do DNA extraction, you don't need to know how to use R or Python, I can teach you that. But if you have the desire to do it, then you know, that's really all we're looking for. And we're all just a bunch of nerds really. So we love sharing common interests. And you know, what makes us passionate. So, you know, don't be afraid to I guess show that side either. You know that I guess there's a stereotype about scientists being a certain way and being, you know, only concerned about their research and very serious and very analytical, but a lot of us are really fun. We have other outside hobbies, we have fandoms that we like to do sports that we like to do. And so just talk to a scientist and figure out if it's for you.
Jason  17:46  And I can't really top that so thank you very much to Brianna, Chip, Jacob, Kate, Kyle, Lauren, and Mohamed for letting me interview them. Thank you for sharing a little bit about themselves. And thank you to you all for listening. This episode was a bit of an experiment. So if you have strong opinions about whether we should do this again or not do it again, go ahead and jump on the Discord and let us know. Link is at www.gamingwithscience.net. You can get the invite there, jump on, talk to us. We really friendly people. Get on & let us know if there's something you want us to do more of. And with that, we'll go ahead and wrap it up for now. Y'all have a great week, happy gaming and have fun playing dice with the universe. This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. Listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to Gaming with Science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.

#Chemistry #Bonds #Scientists #LabWork #ScienceGames
It's time to grab some atoms and make some bonds! In this episode we cover Compounded: The Peer-Reviewed Edition by Greater Than Games. We'll cover chemistry basics, how bonds work, a bit of what it's like in an actual research lab, and why sabotaging others is fun in games but not so much in real life.
Timestamps
00:53 - Corn diversity for humans05:05 - Basics of the game11:30 - Basics of atoms & electrons17:00 - Making bonds22:17 - What makes things explode?27:59 - Depiction of scientists37:48 - Final grades
Find our socials at GamingWithScience.net 
Game Results
[Not recorded, but apparently Jason won by a lot]
Links
Compounded: The Peer-Reviewed Edition
Crash Course Chemistry 
Full Transcript
Jason  0:06  Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of the favorite games.
Brian  0:13  In today's episode we're going to discuss compounded by Greater than Games. Hey, I'm Brian, this is Jason. And welcome back to the fifth episode of Gaming with Science. Today we're going to talk about Compounded: the Peer-Reviewed Edition, which is an interesting chemistry game created by Darrell Louder. But before we get into that, Jason, do you have any science topics for us to talk about today?
Jason  0:39  So I do have one and this one is close to my heart. It has nothing to do with chemistry. Sorry. So I was again at a conference recently, actually, we're gonna have a bonus episode out probably next month, the maize genetics meeting. So the big meeting for all the corn geneticists, a lot of us based in the US, also some outside. But I was talking to one of the USDA researchers there, Sherry Flint-Garcia, who I've known for a few years. And I love her work, because she's got these projects that are looking at corn from a human consumption point of view. So basically, corn that people eat. This is one thing that comes up a lot, we grow a lot of corn here in the US, and almost none of it goes to humans. Most of it goes to animal feed, and a small amount goes to ethanol. And then some of it, a little tiny bit, gets made into like tortillas and chips and sweet corn and stuff. But she has all these projects that are looking at corn from the human perspective. So she's been working with local groups to do tortilla-making quality on corn for a while. I believe she's working with one group now on whiskey, and how to make that. And then the one that I'm really cool that she's doing a big evaluation of like 1000 traditional varieties of corn from the US just to evaluate, like how they perform, because people haven't looked at this information in decades. But there's things they're like, they have different flavor profiles, they have different use profiles. You know, for being one of the largest producers of corn in the world, the US, just, we don't appreciate it at all. I mean, you go down to Mexico, they appreciate their corn, I mean, corn is a big deal in Mexico, you don't mess with their corn, but here in the US, it's like we don't care. And that's kind of sad. So I'm glad that there's someone doing that now. And I hope they come up with some really cool stuff out of there. I hope they get some good evaluations, they can find some varieties that work well and that people can use for actual eating varieties.
Brian  2:22  I really was hoping you were gonna say she was doing a big study of popcorn varieties. 
Jason  2:26  No, she doesn't do popcorn, although I think she has a collaborator who's actually specifically looking at all the popcorn varieties in there. Yeah, we, we're both plant people. We could go off on this for a full hour in terms of all the varieties and their adaptations and stuff. And I mean, I love genetic diversity among plants. And we could talk about that all day long. And that's not what this podcast is about.
Brian  2:48  No, well, not this particular podcast, maybe we'll find a game that will give us a better excuse to talk about that. But for now, I think. Yeah, let's get back to talking about board games. 
Jason  2:56  Yeah, let's see. Is there any science in Agricolae? I actually haven't played it. 
Brian  3:00  I don't know. I know you put it on the list. I guess we could find out. Probably not. But we'll find out someday. So you want to talk about this game?
Jason  3:08  Sure.
Brian  3:09  Okay, so we're going to talk about Compounded, specifically Compounded: The Peer-Reviewed Edition. And this was released last year in 2023. Designer is Darrell Louder, at Greater Than Games, the original version of compounded was released 2013. So it was a 10 year span, there were a couple expansions in there, including like a radioactivity expansion, I didn't get a chance to look at those. Now, one of the things that I was trying to figure out that I have tried to figure out in the past, is what inspires a board game designer to want to make a science based game? So for instance, the creator of Wingspan was an avid birder. And the creator of stellar Horizons was an MIT...what was his, what was his major?
Jason  3:48  He was, his graduate degree was in like human space exploration. And then he went off to work at SpaceX. So yeah.
Brian  3:56  So the connection is obvious, right? Well, I actually had to do some digging on Darrell Louder, who unfortunately didn't have a Wikipedia page. So it made it a little challenging. I listened to an interview that he gave and like, eventually, I was able to find in a blog on the Greater than Games website, that he has a theatre, a theatre degree. And, like, went back to get in graphic design and do that. So like to be honest, after all my digging, I don't know what inspired Darrell Louder to design a chemistry game. It's really unclear to me. Maybe that comes through a little bit in the design of the game a little bit. I don't like being critical of games, but there's got to be some criticism of this one, I think.
Jason  4:30  Yeah, we'll see. You talked a little bit about it. I may have some pushback on that. But we'll see. But if there's enough in here that either he talked a lot with people who actually do chemistry, or he had some background, even if it was just an undergrad, undergraduate laboratory. Actually, that would explain why fire plays such a big role in this game.
Brian  4:48  I absolutely agree. And I do want to talk about that. I, I can tell that a lot of careful choice went into balancing and selection and how this game was designed. But almost unfortunately, almost none of that is in the metaphor of the game. So that's where we're kind of got to talk about things later. But okay, so what is this game? What does it look like? If you want to play compounded, what are you going to do? It is a game for two to five players, plays in 45 to 70 minutes. That sounds about right to me. The suggested ages 14 and up. Now, this is not an overly complicated game. So that age seems high. But I think that maybe the sabotage/traitor mechanics might just be something that maybe a child maturity level could be the suggestion for 14 and up, as opposed to the complexity of the game, there's a lot of ways to mess with other players.
Jason  5:34  I gotta say that, as someone who likes messing with other players, there's not that many ways of messing with other players, there's a few.
Brian  5:42  We just didn't do as much of it. That's all, like, I think that there's a whole, you could play this game as a, as a pure troll if you wanted to, and just play it to be disruptive and just destructive. You wouldn't win the game. But maybe, I don't know, maybe there's a balancing issue there, potentially. So what does this game look like? So you, you'll open this up, you have a full copy of the periodic table. So the periodic table is basically just your score tracker. It also has some places where you could do some actions like activate various sciency tools like Bunsen burners or lab notebooks and stuff like this. There's a lot of like science theming in this game, the players are going to have these little player mats, they've got four little tracks on them. And then you're going to have a grid of chemical cards, compound cards. And each of these cards has between two and six different atoms on it, two to four different types of atom. You lay these out in a grid of four by four if you're in a three player game, or more. And then you've got this little bag of these beautiful little crystalline little plastic things that are supposed to represent different types of elements like hydrogen, and oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, which we'll come back and talk about that, and sulfur. And your little track, you've got four of them, and it gets to decide like, Okay, how many of the little elements do you get to pull out of the bag? How many can you keep? How many can you place out onto the cards, and then your last track is how many actions you get a turn. And this is a victory point game, you just collect points from the face value on the cards, you get some points for advancing your track. I think that was it. Seem right to you?
Jason  7:14  Yeah, that's it there. Yeah, if there's other ways of getting points, we didn't play with them, but I don't think there are.
Brian  7:19  Okay, so the other mechanic is after you complete a compound, that you get to score the points, you take a new card out of the deck and you place it down and it's either going to be a different compound, or it's going to be a fire. And if you have a fire, it can catch fire to the surrounding cards. If they run out of places for fire to be, they will explode and scatter the elements to the surrounding card. All of the players have a fire extinguisher, it's everybody's responsibility to put out the fires when they happen. Because you know, if you don't, then you're gonna have things blow up.
Jason  7:51  I got to say this is one of my favorite little mechanics of the game. It doesn't have to be there. But it's a fun bit that sometimes you're doing organic chemistry, things just blow up. Yep, that happens, which is why everyone has a fire extinguisher and why half the compounds catch on fire. I do like that when they catch on fire their point values go down, because there's a real reason why you want to put out the fire. And then of course, you can use this a little maliciously, because there are some tools that let you set fire to other people's compounds that are in the middle of building and possibly blow them up.
Brian  8:21  There are some compounds where when you score them, they just catch fire no matter what, because they're just that flammable. And like it says "as if a fire had occurred". There is one of the tools, the Bunsen burner, where you can literally set fire to any compound you want of somebody else. You can set fire to water.
Jason  8:37  Which I think mechanically is just you're boiling it off.
Brian  8:39  I think they said the mechanic is that you've contaminated their sample in some way. Okay, to you know what you've put something into it that allows it to catch on fire, just like the rivers in Cleveland, right? Those are the basics of the game. Another interesting element to this is that this is the only game we've played so far, where as the players you are supposed to be taking on the role of a scientist, of a researcher. And the original conceit was you are all scientists in the same lab competing to be the lead scientist, which Jason and I are in labs. That's not how that works. But okay.
Jason  9:13  Competing to be the lead postdoc, let's call it that, like the lead scientist doesn't actually do research anymore. They're up managing and writing grants and supervising people. All the people doing the fun stuff in the lab. They're the postdocs and the grad students and the research scientists. Yeah.
Brian  9:27  I think it's somebody who does research. In my head, I was like, Oh, I'm the lead researcher and I'm collaborating with other labs, not individuals in one lab. But anyway,
Jason  9:36  I think one thing in there, so the, one thing to point out is the tracks, the four tracks that the player board has. So as you go up in the tracks, they not only get you points, but they get you resources you need. So there's a limited number of little atoms, you can draw turn, how many you can keep, how many you can play, that sort of thing. And as you move up in the tracks, you're get access to more. So there's a little bit this tension because if you go out after high value compounds, then you get a lot of points, but you don't move your tracks very much. And so you have limited ability to do more. Whereas if you go after a bunch of cheap compounds, you're not getting many points, but you're improving your ability to do other things later. And there's a little bit where the compounds are like solids or liquids or gases, and that determines which track you can move up. And it's a nice little touch. I like that.
Brian  10:19  Yeah, the game really did have a lot of care and design that was put into it. There's a lot of strategy, there's a lot of different ways to play. You can work together, you can work against each other. I mean, it's a good game.
Jason  10:29  Yeah, you even have the expansion or the component where there's the mega compounds that are designed for two players to work together on them.
Brian  10:35  Oh, yes, very good point. Thank you. That is the key mechanic of the peer reviewed edition, that you have these double sized cards that two people could work on together. Those can range up to 20 atoms and be worth up to 38 points
Jason  10:48  Which is like half a victory condition right there. 
Brian  10:50  Yeah, pretty much. Now one thing about those large cards, the little cards all have, they're real chemicals, real chemical names, they have little facts about each of the chemicals. The giant size cards have some really interesting compounds on them. But they're missing the little facts. I don't know if the assumption is oh, that people will just Google it or something. But, like, nitroglycerin is a very charismatic compound. I think everybody knows what nitroglycerin is, it's extremely explosive, dimethyl trisulfide, which I know personally, because it's the stinky compound that's made when garlic breaks down, which is something I study. Trimethylamine, which is the odor that we would associate with fish, these are interesting chemicals. But there's there's no little like kind of fact about what these do. Anyway.
Jason  11:29  Well, that's a missed opportunity.
Brian  11:30  Yeah, I think so a little bit. That's the basics of the game. Let's, let's try to talk about the science here. And this, I am going to consider this a little challenging because basically what I'm going to try to do right now is speed-run chemistry. Okay. As I see the things to talk about here, this sort of science, the core science concepts that are in compounded at least tangentially are atoms, elements in the periodic table, compounds, what is a compound, and what is a chemical bond. And then I also spent a little bit of time like, what makes something flammable? Or more specifically combustible, since it is such an important part of the game, and maybe a little bit on phase of matter, I don't know how much we want to get into that. I also thought it would be worth talking a little bit about the depiction of research and scientists in this game, because again, this is one of the only games we've had where scientists are part of the game. So we can talk a little bit about, like some of the depictions, what we think they got right, and what maybe we think, maybe not so much. Let's get started with this. Again, this is my crazy, "here's chemistry in a nutshell". So what is an atom? An atom is made up of three different particles, you've got a proton with a positive charge, a neutron, that pretty much is just there to kind of help the protons stick together, and an electron. So the protons and the neutrons are in the nucleus. They don't really do very much. They're not really that interesting. All of the action is happening with the electrons that kind of orbit around that. Not really an orbit more of like a shell. It's all quantum II stuff. And I don't really want to get into it.
Jason  13:05  Yeah, this is the sort of thing where you could spend an entire  undergraduate degree really understanding what's going on here and still not be deep into it. Now that said, the nucleus, the protons, and the neutrons are extremely interesting for nuclear chemistry, which is where radiation and nuclear bombs and all that stuff happens. Stellar fusion, that's what powers the sun. But ordinary everyday chemistry like we do in Compounded. That's all with the electrons.
Brian  13:29  Yeah, for sure. Like all of the interesting stuff that happens with chemistry in our day to day lives. So that's all it's all about the electrons, right? 
Jason  13:36  So with atoms and trying to build an atom, there's kind of two forces at play that we really want to care about, at least for today's episode. One is charge. So protons are positively charged, electrons are negatively charged. So the first thing you want is you need basically the same number of protons and electrons, so the atom itself is not charged. That makes things happy, the atom doesn't want to be charged. Usually. There's a second thing that modifies that though, it has to do with just the electrons. This is quantum stuff, it has to do with how they form groups and the electron shells and stuff. And we're not going to go into that because that's like, that's very complicated. But basically, if you have certain numbers of electrons, and they fill these little shells they're in, a full shell is more stable than a partially full shell. And so sometimes that will overcome it. So there are some atoms where they actually want to gain an additional electron or lose an electron because that leaves them with completely full shells instead of partially full shells. And that sort of trading of electrons is actually what forms all sorts of chemicals and bonds as the, essentially the nuclei are either sharing or donating or stealing electrons from each other, to make sure they're all happy and have the right number of electrons in their shells. 
Brian  14:45  Yeah, for sure. So the analogy that I liked for this is the I think it's usually called the bus seat analogy, but I actually kind of like the train car analogy. If you imagine when people are sitting on the bus, the electrons don't want to sit with each other. They'll sit in the open seats first until there are no are more open seats, and then they start pairing up and sitting in twos. As the atoms get bigger, you kind of hitch new train cars onto the back of the train that have more seats, but they're still kind of going to fill up in that basic way. An atom is an element based on having the number of protons, so like hydrogen is got one, helium has got two, and you just keep going up this list. As you make the bigger atoms, you're adding more places for electrons to go, and how many unpaired electrons are sitting in those outermost seats, that's kind of determining what kind of chemistry this is going to be able to do. And that's actually the basis of the periodic table, is as you're filling up these electrons, you kind of come back around and you do the circle again. And now you're repeating the same pattern of unpaired electrons. So everything in a column of a periodic table sort of has similar chemical properties to it. In fact, like it's a table, but really, it should be like a ring, where they kind of like connect back around together as like a spiral. I was watching a video by Hank Green, that was one of the original proposals, they didn't publish it because the publisher couldn't figure out how to publish a spiral periodic table. So Mendeleev's became more popular. So actually, this is the thing, like the periodic table is based on every time you go up one proton, that's a new element, and you just keep going all the way. So unfortunately, for science fiction authors, like, if you want to discover a new element, there's nowhere for it to go but at the end. Like we know all of the elements, you know, ever, it's just adding protons until eventually you get to the end. And the ones at the end are so big and so heavy that they can't hold together. They're all radioactive, and they just decay. So we're, we may find new compounds, but we're probably not going to find any new elements at this point.
Jason  16:35  Yeah, I like the way Mass Effects got out of that they found Element Zero. I don't know how that works. But that's what they found. And that's what makes all the science magic in that, in that video game series work
Brian  16:47  Something less than hydrogen. Okay. That's funny, as you pointed out, though, so that is the basics of an atom, an element, the elements are just gonna have a set number of protons. And how many electrons they have that want to have partners is based on how we're going to get our bonds. So let's talk about bonds. So what does that go? So you said it's about sharing or trading electrons, right? Electrons want to be in pairs. An ionic bond is something like sodium chloride. In that case, there's no sharing happening.
Jason  17:17  Table salt.
Brian  17:17  Yes, table salt, sorry, the electrons get stolen by one atom from the other. And that's the preference and those ends up when, you get charged. That's where you get like ions, and stuff like that.
Jason  17:28  Yeah. And that usually only happens with the ones that are on the far left and the far right of the periodic table, because they're the ones that are closest to that stability point. So it's easier for them to just get rid of one or gain one. And suddenly, they're perfectly happy.
Brian  17:42  And those are the, so in a board game context, that's the, that's the competitive elements. They don't then then we've got our organic compounds are ones that will form covalent bonds they'd like to share, those are our collaborative board gamers. In that case, instead of, they actually don't trade, they kind of will use the same ones together. And that's where a lot of the really interesting chemistry happens because they're, they're very stable, they're very happy to just kind of sit right next to each other and share those electrons. It kind of keeps them into a tight connection with each other. So this is, so things like carbon have four unpaired electrons, so they can bind to four different things. So actually, a lot of our actually, let's talk about this. What is organic, what is an organic compound?
Jason  18:25  From a chemistry perspective it's something that involves carbon. This is completely different from organic produce, which is something that irked me for many years. It's like all produces organic it's all carbon-based stop using that. And that's a personal pet peeve. I have gotten over it and accepted the fact that the label means two different things in two different contexts.
Brian  18:46  So for instance, water is not an organic compound, water does not have carbon in it. So carbon can bind with four things, nitrogen can bind with three things, oxygen can bind with two, hydrogen can bind with one, sulfur can also bind with one, and then we've got our weirdo in this game, which is calcium, right? So I was looking at these and the way that they're colored and the balance and everything. And I'm pretty sure I know part of the inspiration for why Compounded uses these. I did ask, I think this might only be something at the college level. But Jason, you've I assume played with a ball and stick chemistry model in college.
Jason  19:20  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can get them at bookstores or get them online or whatever. 
Brian  19:23  So these are the little balls, they've got little sticks, they've got the right number of holes, like carbon, you can shove four things into it, hydrogen you can only do one. The distribution of elements that you have in Compounded is very, very close to the distribution that you would have in one of those chemistry kits. And actually, the colors are the same too for the most part. There's sort of this mnemonic thing where like hydrogen is a clear gas, so it's always white, and oxygen's in our blood, so it's red. And nitrogen is in the atmosphere so it's blue. Carbon is coal, so it's black. And sulfur. Why is sulfur yellow? I mean, sulfur makes various yellow compounds.
Jason  19:57  I mean, elemental sulfur is yellow. Why is calcium green? 
Brian  20:02  Well, that's a good question. Because actually, in your typical chemistry kit, it wouldn't be calcium, it would be chlorine, or something like that, or fluorine or something like that. I did check this as well, there are versions of this sort of scheme of sort of color mnemonics where calcium would be green. So organic compounds, like you said, is carbon, anything with carbon in it. The origin of the term comes from, Oh, these are the compounds that we find in living things, right? I mean, that's kind of where it originally came from.
Jason  20:35  Back when they thought that only living things could make it, there's some special life force that that allowed it. And then people figured out organic chemistry and was like Oh, no, we can make these too. Yeah, one can be really annoying to make sometimes, but yes, we can make them.
Brian  20:47  Yeah, living things are really good chemists. It's really hard to do in a test tube what can be done easily in a body. Well, maybe "easy" isn't giving them enough credit.
Jason  20:55  I mean, given the Rube-Goldberg like contraction that is a living cell, I'm not sure "easy" applies here. They're very good at it, because they've had 4 billion years to get good at it.  If you actually figure out everything that's involved in making even simple compounds, it's like, oh, no, no, no, this is just a, this is a highly tuned system. But easy is not it.
Brian  21:16  Okay, that's fair, that's fair. So calcium is the oddball. Calcium is not something that can make, it's not one of the ones that shares, calcium is actually a metal. It's like way off to the side, and it doesn't participate in covalent bonds. Now I was thinking about this. And I'm, what you would typically see in a chemistry kit would have been phosphorus, not calcium. Or chlorine or something like that. A lot of the compounds in compounded are these sort of nice organic chemicals with carbon in them, phosphorus would have been typical, but phosphorus typically doesn't hang out by itself, it usually has a bunch of extra oxygens in there. Because usually a phosphate, it's like a phosphorus and a couple of oxygens, usually three, and then that's what gets stuck on to other compounds. So I imagine it was literally a game balancing choice. If you don't want to use phosphorus, because, well, you're never going to have it on its own, the compounds are going to be too big. And there was this clear choice of making it between two and six atoms on each compound card. So phosphorus just didn't make sense. So okay, so here's where I actually spent a little bit of time trying to figure out, now what makes something flammable? Because this was a big part of Compounded. And that as I don't know, that's more complicated than you would think. In a sense, it's not. So "combustible" is a much more easy thing to understand. Something is combustible when it can react with oxygen, and release energy in the form of heat or light. So anything that can react with oxygen would be considered combustible. Now what makes something combustible in that sense, is so for instance, wood is combustible. Once you get the reaction going, it produces more heat and light and then creates a more heat and creates a chain reaction, sort of reacting with more compounds. And that's what causes things to burn.
Jason  23:03  And going back to the reason behind this is because oxygen is very good at taking electrons from other things, it wants to share electrons, but it's very good at grabbing onto them and holding them tightly, arguably one of the best atoms at doing that, which is why it's essentially the chemical dead end of so many things. Once you react with oxygen you have to pour energy into it to get it back out. 
Brian  23:27  So okay, that's what makes something combustible, something that can react with oxygen release energy, which if you're releasing energy, it means it's like a preferable state for the chemical to be in. It's like, things are always wanting to go towards the lowest energy state. Flammable is a little weird, flammable, is just like how volatile something is. And that's very dependent upon pressure and temperature and everything else. Something's flammable, where you put an ignition source in it, and it just goes "fwooph", like that's flammable. So you can be combustible and not flammable. It gets really complicated, like vapor pressure and all this stuff that we don't really need to get into, I think. And then there's also like "explosive", which is about producing gas, it's, it's too much, it's too much to get into.
Jason  24:07  Okay, but basically for flammable, it has to be able to evaporate yes to get into the air and then essentially be pre mixed with oxygen. So all you need is a spark or a heat source to do it. Whereas wood is not going to evaporate. It's just going to sit there.
Brian  24:20  But interestingly, to get wood to catch fire, you do have to go through a process of called pyrolysis where basically you are releasing flammable gases from the solid, like it has to be able to mix with the oxygen, so it has to be able to vaporize in some way to be able to be flammable. That is the basics of the science. Hopefully we did a good job of that. I think we did the best we can considering we did it in, what 15 minutes? 20 minutes?
Jason  24:43  There are plenty of YouTube videos about basic chemistry, but there's a lot of ground to cover here because this is how chemicals, how atoms form bonds. Yeah. Which is chemistry. Yeah, basically. That's the entire field of chemistry, right there, atoms forming bonds.
Brian  24:58  There is legitimately a great short crash course on chemistry. It's a series by Hank Green. If you're curious, I would say just watching it, it's got really good production values. It's a lot of fun. It's Hank Green, he's a great science communicator. Yes, let's talk about how that science is represented and compounded. Um, it's, it's not really.
Jason  25:20  But I'm going to push back. I'm gonna say it's subtle. Like, and that's the point, you talk about the science and game, this game is not meant to be a science communication game. It has the science skin painted on it, but there are little nods, like the one I noticed the first time we played, when you get the little plastic bits of the atoms, so half of them are clear, and half of them are opaque. And it turns out the clear ones are all the gases, and the opaque ones are all the solids, at least at normal room temperature. There are the fact that like, things are flammable. Well, only some of them are flammable. And they are presumably the ones that are actually flammable. You have this solid-liquid-gas phase, which determines which of your tracks you're able to move up. It's like, they're there. But they're subtle. This is, this is not wingspan, this is not trying to teach you all sorts of chemistry facts. They're there if you go digging, but they're not there if you don't care about them.
Brian  26:12  Which I guess is kind of, I don't know, maybe that's kind of my point. You don't accidentally learn things playing Compounded. Maybe you do Maybe I'm being too harsh. Again, I think that there, there's a way to do it. Where okay, like, again, I hate to constantly be comparing to Wingspan, it's going to be hard not to I apologize if this is already going to get old. for people who are listening to this. You can't play Wingspan and not learn something, you just can't. It's impossible. But no, you're right. There was a lot of nods here. So for instance, the color array, right, that consistent elemental coloring, now that is something where you could start to intuitively, if you had played compound is like, oh, it's carbon, right? Because it's consistent. You've gotten used to it, it's always depicted. They are real chemicals, right?  But nothing about like how you play the chemicals onto the cards.... In the terms of designing this game, I, I am certain a lot of care went into this selection of the appropriate chemicals, with the right balance of elements, the correct structures, balancing the point values, the flammability, the phases of matter, all of that. I'm sure there was a ton of effort. The specific choice of calcium over phosphorus or chlorine or something like that, so that you could have smaller ionic compounds, instead of just these large organic compounds. All of that was behind the scenes. The problem is I don't know how much of it is in the in the front for the player to kind of absorb. So that's that's really where my criticism lies. 
Jason  27:41  Yeah, and that's probably a design choice. I mean, that's one of the knobs you get to tune as a designer is you choose how upfront am I going to make this? How behind the scenes? Like what do I want to focus on to be. And the game designer here just chose to have there be science in there, but have it be a subtle, it's a background thing, it's not in the foreground?
Brian  27:59  So another aspect of this that I think we should talk about is the depiction of scientists in a game, which we haven't really had a chance to do yet. I mean, Stellar Horizons arguably had more to do about politicians. This you actually have like, scientist, you are playing a scientist trying to discover chemistry, chemicals, compounds, and competing with one another or cooperating with one another in the process of doing that. So a lot of these are just like, the way that the terms are applied, don't always make a ton of sense. Your four little tracks on your board are called your "experiments." But then they're labeled discover-study-research-lab, which I'm not really sure. Like, there is sort of that standard process of the scientific method of like Hypothesis Testing research, and then I guess we would consider "publish" to be an important part of the process. You got to tell people what you found. So you know, that's fine. I mean, the player markers are just random pieces of glassware. I mean, that's fine. It's fun to play as a little beaker. This is your monopoly dog for, for playing compounded is getting to play a little Bunsen burner. There are some other weird stuff, I suppose. One thing that that caught my attention was one of the tools is, one of the things you can get as a research grant. In this game, the research grant just benefits the person who's doing the worst. I can tell you from experience, that's not how research grants work. They do not go to the lab and most need.
Jason  29:19  Yes, and there are specific funding mechanisms for that. But by and large, like the successful labs get most of the big successful grants, which lets them be successful and get most of the big successful grants. I mean, as in many other things, the rich tend to get richer.
Brian  29:32  So another big mechanic, a fundamental mechanic of the game is this ability to claim a compound. You said I am working on this one. And that's it. You say you're working on this one and your other people then, they could work on it if they want to, but they won't derive the benefit. It's still is your compound. Now, it kind of works like that. A little bit like, but that's really casual. Like, there are definitely people who will... okay So, in science, we have this process called "getting scooped", which I imagine that also happens in like news and anytime where you're in a truth-based field, I am studying something, I am working on this really hard. And then I find out just as we're about to finish up our work that someone else has published the exact same observations. Oh, no, now they get all the credit and none of our stuff counts. So I can tell you that from a career perspective, getting scooped does suck, because of the way we sort of apply credit. And it's like, oh, now that's their discovery, it doesn't matter that we were working on it. But really scooping is the sign that science is working the way that it's supposed to. It means that you can have people on different sides of the planet not talking to each other. Unaware of what the other one is doing, making observations about the world and finding the exact same thing. Scooping is a good thing. It means that the process is working. Okay. 
Jason  30:55  That said, I prefer...much as I joke about how much I like messing with other people in games, in real life, I like cooperation. And so if I realize I'm working on something similar to someone else, I'll usually try to cooperate with them, or at least see how we can carve out our own niches. Now part of that is because the fields I work in tend to be relatively small, there's not enough space for us to compete with each other. If we compete against each other, everyone loses. There's just not enough grant money flowing around. I've gathered that's not the case with the big money areas, like human cancer research I've gathered is pretty cutthroat because there's so much money going around, you can have five or six labs all studying the same thing, all racing to get the same new research, the same new discovery out there.
Brian  31:35  Yeah, that's and you're right. I mean, obviously, cooperation people will work together, you reinforce each other's work. That is the that is the path. It is not the path that has always taken though, there are definitely people who want the credit.
Jason  31:49  Yeah, now I was gonna say, the whole way where that you can claim one and then other people can work on it, that seems to be sort of like first authorship. So the, the way we scientists boosts our reputation is we publish papers. And although there's different standards in different fields for exactly what the order of who goes on that paper matters, generally speaking, whoever is the first author gets the most credit, they did the most work, it was their idea, whatever. And so there's actually the thing that when we go to publish, you have kind of negotiate what order people go in, in order to make sure everyone gets the right amount of credit. And so that claiming seems to me like, Oh, this is the first author on this. Other people can help if they want, but they're the one that's going to get the most credit, I think, it'd be nice if there were some mechanics to represent that where like, Oh, if you assist on this, you get some small amount of points, like, oh, you get one point or two points for everything you put on there, while the main person gets most of it, but that would require other things to track it. And so it's not really an easy fix to add to add to it. But that's how I see that particular aspect of the game. 
Brian  32:51  We need, like, Compounded the Collaborative Edition.
Jason  32:56  Yes, or unfortunately, the competition part does happen. It's like, although it's not good, I have actually heard of scientists sabotaging others' research. This is thankfully very rare. And when it's found out, it is like, that is your way of getting blacklisted in science, like you do not sabotage other people. You can collaborate, you can compete, you can try to scoop them, but you do not undermine other people's work. And I have heard of some people where, this was years ago, I read like there was some postdoc where he was just feeling very stressed and pressured. And for reasons I still don't understand, he poured ethanol on his labmate's cell cultures. So this is basically, this is how to kill cells. And he like added it to some of her growing media, so it would kill them. Like I still don't understand the reasoning why, because as far as I can tell, he was not competing with her. It happens. Now, he got found out pretty quickly, because ethanol smells very different from normal cell growth media. And they put a camera and they saw it happening, he got confronted, fired, et cetera, et cetera. So like, action was taken, like justice was served, but still up that wasted weeks at the very least of one person's work, sometimes months. And so this is why...we scientists don't have very much when you get down to it. We don't have much money, we don't have that much prestige. Most of us pretty much all we've got is our reputation and our results. And so we protect those pretty fiercely. And basically, number one way of getting blacklisted as a scientist is to do something to actively harm someone else's research
Brian  34:24  Well I think that sort of covers the basics of the science that is behind compounded, how compounded addresses it, and kind of like a little bit about being a scientist in a board game like setting and how that's represented. But let's talk about the game itself. Did you, did you enjoy the game? What did you, how did you like playing the game? Or what were things you liked? Or didn't like?
Jason  34:45  I did. I found it enjoyable. I think it's a fairly straightforward game. At least, maybe if we played it more I'd realized there were like deeper depths in terms of how you can interact with others. But mostly, it seems pretty straightforward. Like okay, I need to move my research tracks up so I get more resources. I need to acquire compounds as fast as I can so that I get victory points. And I need to do that faster and better than everyone else. It seems pretty straightforward to me. But that's my impression so far like, there's not an obvious way for there being a bunch of depth to it. It's pretty straightforward. It's a nice light game.
Brian  35:16  I'm sure there's an optimal way to play it. Well, clearly there is because, I think again, as has become tradition, I think you completely annihilated everybody on points. So clearly, there is an optimal way to play. And one of the things that I noticed is not a single time in all the times that we play did we actually have a fire get out of control, which is a huge part of the game that just doesn't seem to come up very much. 
Jason  35:39  Yeah, I noticed that when we were playing together as families, we just, someone always had a fire extinguisher ready. In part, I think we were so paranoid about a fire happening that if we all ran out, someone would refresh their fire extinguisher to make sure we could handle a fire. And then when you and I played individually, they just, by the way the deck was shuffled, they just never came up. 
Brian  35:58  Yeah it's a fun game. You know, there's sort of the Catan style trading mechanic, which we didn't get into. It's like, hey, I'll trade you two hydrogen for an oxygen or something like that, to try to get on what you're working on. There's plenty of opportunities to sabotage, but I don't know, I guess it just didn't come up that much. Were you sabotaging anybody? Or were you focused on just scoring your own points?
Jason  36:19  I wasn't outright sabotaging. I mean, most of the outright sabotage seems to be you like someone else's compound on fire. Mostly, I was poaching. There were definitely times where someone had partially built a compound and left it open. It's like, oh, I can fill it out. I'm gonna grab that compound now. Thank you for doing the preliminary work.
Brian  36:35  No, it's it was a fun game. I'm trying to decide like on my personal scale. Well, okay. Is there anything else you want to talk about the game? I mean, the game is very pretty. For sure. I love the design. The elements are fun. They're in a nice little cloth bag. Darryl Louder is a graphic designer. And I think that that shows, it's all looks very nice. I do think that the use of the periodic table as just a score tracker. It makes sense. I don't know what else you would do. But it seems like having a whole periodic table and have that not really matter, except is just tracking your scores. Maybe a little unfortunate.
Jason  37:06  Yeah, it is a nice touch that it's a very easy way to know when victory hits. Because if you remember the periodic table, there's those two lines that are always put down at the bottom. Technically, they belong in the middle, but then the periodic table would be stupidly wide. And so they're always translated down. When you go down there, that's when you trigger the victory condition. It's like the top row's for a two player game. And I think the bottom row's are like a three or four player game. So that's an easy, easy way of tying that table to knowing when to stop.
Brian  37:33  I just realized the actinides and the lanthanides are basically Hawaii and Alaska on a map of the United States. You pull them off in their own little separate section, because to try to show the whole thing would make it too big. All right. So should we do some scores?
Jason  37:49  Yeah, and this is an important thing, I realized, we've never really defined how we set these scores, we get these letter grades, but we never like calibrated it. So I wanted to put that out here. At least this is how I do it in my head, that everything starts at a B. And I want to say that because eBay and Amazon, and everything have all trained us that anything less than five stars is failure. And that's not the case here. Things start at a B. And then if you do things well, you go up and if you think poorly, you go down. So that's kind of the, the, at least in my head, that's how I'm assigning these grades. So getting a B is not a bad thing. It's like okay, you did something, you did it well, that's fine.
Brian  38:28  It sounds like there's a B in there.
Jason  38:31  Well, there will be a B in here. Okay, but
Brian  38:36  How do I do it? I mean, at this point, I think we're sort of establishing the scales we go. Wingspan's an A. Right? Yeah, the definition of an A. But I think it's, I think what I'm thinking about it is, I guess I don't have as much of that, I don't have a set starting point. But it's this idea of like, are you going to learn science while playing this game? And how much? Right? I think that, again, I agree with you, a C is not bad. If we're going less than a C, that means you're teaching somebody something wrong. But a C is okay. Okay, so what is your score, then?
Jason  39:08  Well, so we do this in two parts. So let's start with the science part. So I would say the science part of this, I would give a B. Like it, it didn't set out to do a bunch of science. So there's science there, if you look for it, if you dig, it's there, and there's little subtle nods to it. So it's like, okay, it's fine. It's a B. It's like, you're not gonna learn a ton of science by this, but the things that are there are correct, and they actually fit together pretty well.
Brian  39:30  I don't like to be critical, but I'm gonna give this one a slightly lower grade, I'm gonna say a C+, I think that the, the idea that you're going to come away from this with chemistry knowledge, I just don't know if that's going to happen. So, from that perspective, I think that the because this in an educational game category, which is a game where you're either intrinsically supposed to be learning something, or will learn some things like by proxy by playing the game. I just don't know if that's true. And I think maybe for the depiction of scientists kind of being like, obviously not informed by talking to people who do science, that kind of bugs me a little bit too. So I'm gonna give it a C+. it's okay.
Jason  40:07  It's not doing as much as you want it.
Brian  40:09  It's not.
Jason  40:11  Okay. And we'll just have to agree to disagree on that. And again, to everyone, we have a Discord, you can come on and tell us all sorts of ways we got it wrong. Okay, so let's move on the gameplay. So, your turn. What do you think of the gameplay? How do you score that?
Brian  40:24  So in terms of gameplay and fun, I think, well, since we're talking about this idea of what are we basing our scores on? For me, it's how likely am I to want to grab this off the shelf and play when we get together to play? How likely am I to stick it in my car when we go to board game night? And for this, it's like, it's a fun game. Is this the one that I'm going to go to and grab? Probably not. So for me, that's a B. Right? I enjoyed playing it, I'm probably not going to grab it off the shelf all that often. So that's that B score.
Jason  40:55  Yeah, I'd probably give about the same. I may go into B+ range. I thought it was a bit fun. As you point out, I did tend to get a lot more points than everyone else. So I think I hadn't solved the game, but I think it was closer to solving it than most of the other players. And like I liked that bit of strategy was like, Okay, how can I find the optimal move? What is the best thing here, but again, it's not gonna be one, I grab off the shelf, like, Oh, I just really want to play this one. So it's like, if someone brings this in, I play with it, I'll be perfectly happy with that, I'm probably not going to seek it out a ton.
Brian  41:22  So that's Compounded. Solid chemistry in the background, probably not going to take that much away from it by playing it. But a fun game. I did enjoy it.
Jason  41:32  And I liked it. I mean, and if I were a chemist, I would have a copy of this in the lab. I like the little touches, the little subtle nods, like the the clarity versus opacity of the little pieces. I mean, I'd like that there are little science facts, I like that the phases of matter, matter, for what you're going to do that sort of thing. So like, they're, they're subtle, but they're there. And I really liked that. So one quick announcement before we close. Looking forward a few months, this episode is going to drop near the end of May. So if you're going to be going to Dragon Con in Atlanta on Labor Day weekend, I will be there helping out with the science track. Brian may or may not be there. We're still trying to figure that out. But we will be there. Again, check our Discord, we'll be coordinating stuff, we may be doing something for the podcast there. And even if not, then you could just contact us we can find some place to meet up. We could play some games or anything like that. So just heads up. 
Brian  42:23  Oh, and one more announcement, while we're on that, this is the "we're going to take our end of semester break after this" episode. But we're still going to have something in the feed for you. So we'll be back in two months with another regular episode. All right. And with that, I think we're going to wrap it up and I hope you guys all have a great month and enjoy the break and the bonus content.
Jason  42:44  Take care, happy gaming.
Brian  42:46  Have fun playing dice with the universe. This has been the Gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to get new science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. I have so many notes for this Jason. You would not believe
Jason  43:17  you know for a game you keep saying doesn't have all that much science in it. You have a lot of research on it.
 

#SpaceExploration #StellarHorizons #Space #CompassGames 
Find our socials at GamingWithScience.net 
This month we head to the final frontier, with Stellar Horizons from Compass Games. We also have our very first guest host, Christoph Wagner from Kennedy Space Center. We talk about near-future space exploration, colonization, asteroids, launch failures, space pirates, and more.
Timestamps
00:44 - Meet Christoph Wagner03:19 - Science facts - Rusty Mars and poisonous oxygen05:26 - Stellar Horizons game overview & mechanics15:25 - Science overview17:01 - Reusable rockets18:47 - Space politics and game factions23:50 - Astronomy in the game26:00 - Space combat and space pirates!29:25 - Getting to Mars & the Lagrange points32:26 - Game tweaks wish list39:41 - Final grades
Game Results
 - Game 1: Earth destroyed by asteroid - Game 2: China and Russia save Earth from asteroid!
Links
Stellar Horizons official website (Note: Rules PDF *is* downloadable from here)
Kennedy Space Center
The Great Oxygenation Event
Full Transcript
Brian  0:06  Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talked about the science behind some of your favorite games.
Jason  0:11  Today, we'll be talking about Stellar Horizons by compass games.
All right, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason.
Brian  0:22  This is Brian.
Christoph  0:23  This is Christoph
Jason  0:24  So yes, we have our very first special guest host here. Christopher Wagner. Wagner or Wagner?
Christoph  0:29  Wagner is the German way to say it and Wagner here in the States, that's fine. 
Jason  0:33  For those of you who know the game, this is a game about near Earth space exploration. Brian and I are plant biologists we have no expertise here. So we wanted to get someone on who actually knew what they were talking about. So Christoph, tell us about yourself.
Christoph  0:44  Sure. So I am I have a degree in physics and master's degree in mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering. I'm originally come from Germany and did my mechanical engineering in physics in Germany, and then studied aerospace engineering at Purdue University with a major in astrodynamics control and guidance, navigation and control theory. Unfortunately, after I got done with that degree, I could not get a job in that field here in the US because of my German citizenship. And most of those jobs do require a higher levels of security clearances. And so I ended up working Caterpillar for 10 years,
Jason  1:19  not involved in space exploration
Christoph  1:21  not involved in space at all, unfortunately, but then through some, I got let go from Caterpillar in 2016 ended up in a company, a hydraulics company up in Minnesota, but that got way cold for me. So I only lasted two years. And I took a job at Walt Disney Imagineering down here in Orlando. So I designed or I was part of the ride team that designed the Guardians of the Galaxy cosmic rewind roller coaster at Epcot Center. 
Brian  1:49  I just rode that. That's so much fun. 
Christoph  1:51  Yes, yes, it is a lot of fun. And it was a lot of fun designing it too. But I was only a contractor. So when COVID hit, they let me go. And I was unemployed for a few months, and obviously started looking and I found this job that was essentially almost tailored for me at Kennedy Space Center, which is fluid design engineer. So I applied it took a while but in October 2020, I started my position as a fluid design engineer at Kennedy Space Center, I worked for a contractor for NASA contractor called Jacobs. And my main responsibility these days is that I'm the lead contract engineer for the hydraulic systems on the mobile launch tower ordinance. 
Brian  2:33  That's very cool. 
Christoph  2:34   It's very cool to say that I am actually part of the Artemis team. And I have my little pin to prove it right here. 
Brian  2:43  That's awesome. 
Christoph  2:43  So yeah, so my biggest dream was always working in the space related field. And it took a while. But now I'm finally here. And I've been I'm having a good time.
Brian  2:52  It sounds like you are super overqualified to talk about this game.
Christoph  2:59  Well, I'll try not to use any fancy language here. Because the game does the same thing. I thought they did a fantastic job with how they tried to relate progression and space development and space engineering to somebody who you know, like you guys have nothing to do with space. So I thought they did a wonderful job and I'll try and keep it at the same level. 
Jason  3:19  All right,sounds good. So before we dive into the game, I always like doing this fun science fact first and Christophe as our guest, you get first priority. Have you picked up any fun science facts lately?
Christoph  3:29  Well, one fight since we're talking about space, do you guys know why the white Mars is red? 
Brian  3:35  Iron oxide?
Jason  3:36  Yeah, rust iron oxide in the regolith.
Christoph  3:39  That's My mind science. Fun fact. Most people don't know that it's a rusty planet.
Brian  3:44  So where did all the oxygen come from that rusted out all the iron?
Christoph  3:47  Yee, good question. I'm not a geologist. That is, I mean, most of these planets, you know, they were formed many many many, many billion years ago from solar dust. I'm, I'm just gonna say I don't know.
Jason  4:00  Yet right? We have to respect the specialties of the people. He's a fluid engineer. And there are currently no fluids on Mars. So that's all right little area. 
Christoph  4:09  As far as we know. We haven't found any. We have some found some evidence, but we have not found any actual water or fluids yet. 
Brian  4:15  Well, I found a science fact too but now I want to talk about something different. I want to talk about how photosynthesis almost destroyed the world. 
Jason  4:22   Photosynthesis was three episodes ago, Brian. 
Brian  4:26  No, no, no, no, not the game, not the game, the chemical process. So when photosynthesis developed there was not a lot of free oxygen in the atmosphere. And as oxygen was poisonous to the majority of life and basically started to slowly build up and actually you can see there's these layers in the geological record of rusted out iron that happens periodically. And as oxygen builds up in the atmosphere, it caused climate change that plunged the entire planet into like a giant snowball almost presumably killed all life on Earth. But when eventually it came out the other side now we have complex eukaryotic life. So something about the process like yes, photosynthesis almost destroyed life on the planet and completely rewired the ecosystem.
Jason  5:08  I'm trying to come up with a witty response to that and I'm having trouble. I don't think we're gonna be quite so lucky if we almost destroy the planet this way. But But yes, I've heard of the great oxygenation event and all the the iron bands and everything.
Brian  5:21   My other thing was going to be the methane plumes on Mars, but I think we're good. Okay.
Jason  5:26  All right. Well, let's go into this game. So Stellar Horizons by compass games, designed by Andrew Rader, who is also overqualified to design this game, so I looked him up. He has his PhD from MIT in like human space exploration. He works for SpaceX. He's published multiple children's books about space exploration. So this guy definitely has it down. The game itself, It's for one for  one to seven players ages 14 up which I will say that's probably accurate. This is a very complicated game. Play time. Some of the scenarios claimed to be able to be played in 30 minutes, I have my doubts. The full campaign for experienced players is supposed to last eight or more hours, this is a game this is not a let's break it out during party time. This is something that you devote at least half of your Saturday to sometimes even the whole weekend, depending on if you've got the full seven players spread going. As far as the game itself, it's very high quality. There's all sorts of pieces in there, there is so much game in this game, there is been a 11 pound box with about 5 billion little components inside it, which is only a little bit of an exaggeration. I actually looked at the parts list. And slight aside, this is the only parts list for a game I've ever seen that included the box as one of the components. So it's very thorough, and there are just over 1700 individual components to this game.
Can I ask did you time yourself when you were popping out all the tokens and how long it actually took? 
I did not because I was just doing it while watching my wife play video games. So it was just kind of taking advantage of other side it took a while there were literally like 25 sheets of chipboard now they're high quality chipboard, very good game components. When I bought this, I said it was the most expensive and heaviest board game I've ever bought was like $130 at my local game store. Like I said 11 pounds. Most of those bits are resources or other bookkeeping things. So like you got your fuel your money, your ore you've got little faction markers to mark things up. So a lot of it is just bookkeeping stuff, which is just incidental to the game. The real core of the game is you have your planet tiles, which there's a dozen of those. So there's the eight planets. There's also the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt, even Alpha Centauri, there's 24 satellites slash Moon Slash dwarf planets, there's seven different factions. Each of them has their board and about 30 individual units they have, they're all slightly different from each other. There's a big tech tree board, there's a policy board, there's player aids, there are mini rule books for each player to reference during the time there is a lot of game in this game. There's a lot of components, there's a lot of moving parts. The impression I got while reading is that it has the potential of being a very deep game. Like if you really sink the time into understand this well, there's all sorts of different strategies and ways you can play it and such there's a lot going on, but is a lot It is not for the faint of heart to get in. It is a very complicated game. Christoph, you said you looked over the rules you didn't have a chance to play, what were your thoughts on that
it is a very, very complex game. And I also felt that you can make it as complex as you want to, you can simplify it if you want to. There's options there. I think I felt that just the base mechanics are not that hard. But the problem is you can put layers and layers and layers on top of that, that can make the game extremely complicated. And for people that like that, it's you know, like me, it was really well designed. I have to say the way he did that, but yes, you do need I don't even know if you can get a an average teenager to play this game. Because it is it does take some thought and patience and time to get into it.
Brian  8:54  We were talking about that and trying to figure out like who is this game for specifically, and it seems to be just in terms of space, you need an enormous table to lay out to play the whole campaign. You need to leave it there all day. I think there's a tradition of people playing Risk where they will show up in the morning and they will play all day long. This is that game this is I can dedicate a huge amount of space and time and have a group of friends that will that will play this ridiculous game with me over the entirety of the campaign. That's monopoly for with densely more complication.
Jason  9:25  Yeah so the the genre this falls into it's a 4X Strategy game or the 4X is our explore, expand, exploit and exterminate where basically you are exploring things you are expanding your territory, you are extracting resources, exploiting resources, and you are exterminated or combating other factions to try to take over this is more famous in computer games. Civilization is probably the quintessential 4X game. There are some board games Twilight Imperium is probably the most famous board game in this area. And so there's definitely people who really liked this Twilight Imperium is somewhere in the top 50 Maybe the top 30 of Board Game Geek so there's definitely a strong and following for it, it's not necessarily what Brian and I tend to play a lot. But there's definitely a big market out there for and it's, as far as I can tell, this is a well designed one speaking as someone who's not super experienced in this area, but it seems very well put together for that. As far as how playing the game works, you lay out the planets and all the satellites and everything, you lay out your faction board and your tech tree and things like that. And then there's different scenarios you can go through. So the default campaign is you basically start in 2030, and you play 150 years, which is literally 150 turns of near future space exploration, exploring worlds and launching probes and developing new technologies, and eventually moving on to colonizing outer space and mining it and possibly fighting wars in it. And the end goal is that after that in 2170, I think is when it ends, then you end and you count up all your victory points, and whoever has the most victory points wins. There's also a bunch of other scenarios out there. So Brian and I played a much shorter scenario where there's an asteroid headed to Earth and you have 20 years to try to deflect it or shoot it to bits or whatever. So the Earth does not get blown up. We played really poorly the first time and so we just stopped halfway through because we knew the Earth was just gonna get obliterated. So we started over again, and did much better the second time because we realized we could not explore the asteroid to death, it was not going to work. We just took guns up there and blew it apart and then towed it with some other stuff. And it worked much better at that time.
Brian  11:22  We also realized that some of the resources that we were dependent on and say, Well, wait a second, look more carefully. You can only make fuel on Earth. If you're not able to shuttle or make it where you're going like it was we didn't understand the game that first time like in terms of that explore part we were we were not exploiting correctly. 
Jason  11:37  Yeah. And part of this is just there's a lot of rules to keep track of I kept wishing I had a computer to keep track of all the little bookkeeping, things like how much money I have, which level of the tech tree I'm at. So do my robots fail at a 27% rate? Or at a 24% rate? How often do my engines fail? These little things that are built in there? I mean, this is really, Brian, you like talking about the metaphor of the game? This game has no metaphor. It's a simulation game, you are playing a game about exploring space, and you do it by exploring space. Like that's it. Like there's no metaphor here at all.
Brian  12:10  Yeah, blue, the entire Russian space budget of $40 billion in two turns. 
Jason  12:15  Yes, there's that you only get money every 10 turns. So it does mean that you're kind of strapped by the end of it. So but it does include all the little bits of space exploration like your engines can fail, your robots can just blow up at some point when you try to use them. If you have a crewed vehicle, there's a 50% chance they're gonna have to come back every time you use them because something went wrong. Now what I like is that every time something like that goes wrong, you actually get tech points representing that you're learning from your mistakes, like, Oh, our robot blew up. Well, now we know how to build better robots. So I get some tech points toward my next technology, or oh, we had to get our crew back. Because who knows what happened? It's like, well, now I get some biology points. Because now we know better how to keep people alive in space. Like I liked that. That was a it's a nice consolation for things always blowing up, I did a little bit of solo play, to try to figure out the rules. And the poor European Union could not get a satellite into space for the life of them. I rolled so many engine failures for those poor people. Like every single satellite, they took spent 10s of billions of dollars on these telescopes and probes and stuff. And they just blew up on the launchpad one after another after another.
Brian  13:18  I was so sad when the one ship I had just blew up, blew up. Yeah. 
Christoph  13:22  And you know, that's very realistic, right there. I mean, if you look at the development of the APOLLO PRO of the Apollo program, you know, going from Germany and joining with Gemini program and how many rockets, they blew up before they were able to launch it successfully for the first time. You know, if you look in any more younger history, we look SpaceX and Blue Origin. Those guys keep blowing up stuff. You may not always hear it in the news, but I mean, it took it took a while for them to have their first successful flight. And while in flight, for now, it's SpaceX. I think it hasn't has a pretty stellar record. So they have to see what happens to Blue Origin. I mean, they have they've had one failure with a human flight right, but they got the humans back to Earth no problem. I thought that that whole scenario and how they do how that was integrated into the game was really well done. The presented I mean, they they worked with percentages on how likely it is for your engine yet and you have to go for it. I tried to look into those percentages if that it's really hard to put a realistic number on that. If you look at human spaceflight, you know, if you look at the Apollo program, and there's only during the entire Apollo program, there was only one one set of astronauts that died Grissom Chaffin White with Apollo I, but they only had not that many missions. So overall, I still think it was a massively successful program, obviously.
Yep. I think the percentage for failure is about 5% On launch and slightly lower if you you're launching a crewed vehicle because presumably we take more care when there's people involved would probably would actually about fit with Apollo, to be honest, right? 
That you know, it also depends on the launch vehicle that kind of launch vehicle the Soyuz is incredibly reliable, that launch that failure percentage just have to be really, really, really low probably even below 5%. But they had to come, they had to put some number on it. And my feeling is that they just looked at a few different programs of failure of the rockets and came up with the used a big thumb. And well, this looks good. And let's go down this way,
Jason  15:17  and probably balance it with, we don't want to make this so high that it becomes unfun.
Christoph  15:21  right, because that's still the most important part of the game and has to be fun to play.
Jason  15:25  Yep, so let's move on to some science stuff. So I was looking through this. And there's obviously a lot of science potentially in here. So space exploration, vehicle design, near Earth astronomy, there is an actual deep space astronomy, you can explore but only with telescopes doesn't come in hugely. Most of it is within the solar system, engineering, orbital mechanics. So they actually, there's different transit times to go from one planet to another to another that are roughly on par with how far they are apart in the solar system, running a space program, a little bit of the economics of it, it is funny that the unit of currency is billions, you cannot have less than a billion dollars and nothing cost less than a billion dollars. So yeah, so you've already talked about this a little bit, Christoph. But how does this reflect as someone who's in the space program, and probably one of the premier space programs on the planet right now? How does this feel to you? Does it feel like an accurate representation? 
Christoph  16:16  Well, it's, I would say, it's very idealized. I mean, in real reality, any spacecraft program, you look like they run over budget, so you can put a budget on it? You know, I don't I don't think I saw anything where we have that mechanic in there where you overrun the budget, you always meet it, or you have to go under it, right? 
Brian  16:35  I think they do. You can overrun your support limit, you can have more vehicles out there, then you can pay for and then you don't get all of your budget, you have to use some to support your ships. I don't know if that's exactly the same as what you mean. But yeah, you can be in debt based on the number of vehicles you have out there.
Jason  16:52  But only if they're you're there when the decade turns so you could have them up till year nine. Oh, and then you just scrap them all. And you don't have to pay for them come year 10. 
Christoph  17:01  Yeah, For non reusable rockets, that may be true. But these days, everything is going to reusable rockets. Right. So you have a maintenance fee maintenance cost. If you look at SpaceX, they have a whole science now devoted to looking at how to refurbish the rockets, the most optimal, most quickest and most cheapest way. And it's it's very, very interesting to see all that back in the day. They didn't even think of that stuff.
Jason  17:29  Yeah. Which is actually an interesting part. So the part of the game is they have this big tech tree of all the near future technologies you can develop. And some of them are way out there like antimatter reactors and fusion drives. But some of the early ones are some of them we already have one of the very first ones is reusable launch vehicles, which I think only the United States starts off with it technically is North America, the United States and Canada, but I'm pretty sure it's meant to be just the US. Anyway, North America starts off with reusable launch rockets and the full campaign I don't think anyone else does. And the game implies that's one of the first ones most people are going to go for so that you stop just burning money every time you get something into space. One thing I'm curious about those launch rockets have a 75% chance of recovery, but a 25% chance of failure is that about on par with what we see with real reusable launch rockets.
Christoph  18:17  I would have to dig a little deeper into this. But my first instinct is absolutely not. They will be there. SpaceX has recovered all their rockets so far, as far as I can tell.
Jason  18:26  OK, so they don't blow up on the launchpad, they actually get up into space. And we have a very good ability to get them back. 
Christoph  18:31  Right, it lands, right, some of them land way out on the ocean on a re designed oil platform. And then the sometimes even land back at Kennedy Space Center. So you can see them come back. Yeah, but 25% Failure seems awfully high. 
Jason  18:47  OK, So that may be one of the game mechanics they put in and just so you don't get free launch vehicles from then on out, right. So probably to even up because I mean, looking at the full campaign, you should not start the full campaign and then just play 20 or 30 years because North America has a huge advantage to start with the other factions are usually in there for the long game like that. That's why most of the other scenarios, they start with a more even tech tree, but I think the campaign is meant to simulate roughly where we're going to be in about 10 years with some some exceptions. So actually, it's probably good time to talk about the factions. And you'd probably know a lot better how the various space programs around the world are. So there's seven factions. There's North America, which is the US and Canada. There's the European Union, there's China, Russia, Japan, Asia, which is sort of India, Pakistan, and a few other of the Middle East, Southern Asian countries. And then South America and Africa, which is essentially just the entire global south glommed together. And I was doing some research on this. I know some of these places have space programs currently U.S.,  Russia and China being the most advanced that I'm aware of Europe has a bunch of satellite work, JAXA, in Japan. How big are these players in the global scheme of things?
Christoph  19:56  Well, right now obviously the biggest player's NASA there's nothing Bigger than that right now, some people like to use like using old word words again, like space race with Russia and China, because you can see that there seems to be some I don't think it's been really confirmed yet but that China and Russia are working together now on the space program and launching rockets. One thing you have to make clear these days, no country can do a run space program all on its own anymore. Just not possible not feasible. If you look at the NASA and you know, I can look at our Artemis program, there's the Artemis Accords, where I once I want to see there's like 60 or 70 countries that signed on to it. And so they're all working together to land people back on the moon.
Jason  20:41  So what drives that? Is it? Is it the technologies like you just need different aspects of technology? Is it the price like no one nation can actually afford this level of engineering? What is it that drives that level of collaboration.
Christoph  20:53  Technology and sharing technology is definitely a small part of it. But big part is the cost. You want to share the cost of planning the first man on world not the first but the first man after Apollo back on the moon, the economy involved is unbelievable. No country would would want to carry all that burden on its own anymore these days. So So you have these days, you have the obviously, as I just mentioned, China and Russia that seem to be working together, obviously, it's really hard to tell right now. But then on on the western civilization side, you have, you know, China, JAXA, NASA, ISA that are working together, India is coming up really fast. They just landed the first probe on the moon not too long ago, that was also a story where they had, you know, four or five failures. And finally, it worked out. So that's the next. I think the next biggest player on the field, South America, you don't really hear too much about them. And I'm not sure they but they I'm sure. We obviously have Latin American engineers that work at NASA. So while I was looking, thinking about this game, it's I realized something is somehow the people that originally were all involved in astronomy, the Egyptians, the Mexican that makes it of the Aztec culture. None of those are really spacefaring anymore. They started it somehow looking up into the stars, but these days have very little influence on what's going on anymore. Hopefully, that will change. I'd love to see it change. I know that Mexico has its own space agency. See, for example, 
Jason  22:25  Yeah, oddly, Mexico does not belong to any of the factions. So if you look at the launch trailer for the game, there's one spot where they show the world and they outline countries, according to the faction and Mexico just got left out in the cold, unfortunately, 
Brian  22:38  It didn't even get included in North America for some reason.
Jason  22:41  Yeah. The global south when it based on the flag, it looks like it's basically Brazil and friends. And I did look, Brazil has some sort of space agency, they obviously don't have their own launch capacity. But I think they do have they do put up some satellites,
Christoph  22:52  they have launched satellites in the past.
Jason  22:54  OK, That's about the extent I know of that
Brian  22:56  When we when Jason and I played our scenario, we worked as China and Russia, we worked together.
Jason  23:01  The time we won, we worked as China and Russia because I realized that Chinese ships in the game had more weaponry than the global south ships that I was trying the first time around. There's only one ship of the global south that actually has armaments to shoot an asteroid, unfortunately, and China had two or three, so I switched to them instead, I didn't check part of me suspect that the North American may have the most guns of them all. But maybe that's just my own impression of how our country works.
Christoph  23:26  Now, let me let me make one more comment here. If us space cadets that all work at the these various space agencies around the world had our choice, we would get politics out of the way completely just all work together.
Jason  23:38  I imagine I met most of the people in the rank and file probably care more about the science and the the goal of getting there then which country gets credit and who's jockeying with whom. Absolutely. Okay, so let's get into the Astronomy Part of this now. So there's a lot of not just engineering, but also the astronomy, there's all these different world cards, the planets of the entire solar system, and there's actually some nice science facts on them. So if you start if you look on the fine print on each of the cards, it tells you its gravity rating, it'll tell you if it's a rocky or icy planet, a gas giant, it may have its astronomical distance from the sun. If not, I know the player inserts actually have a to scale showing of here's all the planets and the thing and they actually have a little scale bar underneath. So they show you how much how far apart things are. I am not a I don't even know what the word for it is an extra planetary geologist. What does that EXO geologist is, you know, geologist,
Christoph  24:31  yeah, planetary geologist, 
Jason  24:33  planetary geologist, not a planetary geologist. I don't know how accurate these are other than they look kind of like what I understand. What's your thought about the game? So they have these different little bits of pieces. How, how accurate are they? Are they simplified? I'm trying to go I don't know how to phrase this question. 
Christoph  24:49  Yeah, I looked into it a little bit. And obviously, I'm an engineer not a geologist either, but from the little  I could tell, It's obviously it's very simplified at To make it accessible to everybody, they also had to make some guesses, you know, because some of this was you have to have resources on certain planets to, that you need to be able to get to for your, if you want to build a base and things like that. So I have a feeling they had to take some liberties here. But they can actually mined and get from the planet. But a few years ago, we had that it's also a great book, where they settled for the sent a human to Mars. I can't remember who was in it. The Martian, The Martian? Yes, yes, exactly. If you read that book and look at it and watch the movie, it is really well very accurately done. There's some minor mistakes, I'm not gonna go there right now. But you can just see what kind of effort it is to put somebody on Mars and make it habitable. So you need resources that the planet has to offer. So as I said, it looks like they may have taken some liberties there, just my broad sense.
Brian  25:54  So maybe there is a little bit of metaphor here. It's not a full simulation. It did. There are approximations.
Christoph  26:00  Yeah. I mean, ya know, you we haven't talked about it, but that you have space combat, I hope there's never going to be space combat,
Jason  26:08  yet, but they put it in there is an altarnate rule where you can actually take that out of the game, where you you remove the combat, you live in the utopia rule set, I think it was, but I do like with space combat, the very first step of combat is you have to search for who you're trying to shoot, like space is big, and you may not find them. So you actually have to roll to see if you can even find who you're trying to engage with. And then if you do, then you get to do this whole system of tactics, points. And do you shoot from a distance? Or do we get close enough to actually shoot directly? Bases are easier to find. I was a little worried when I saw Oh, if you do this thing, this is orbital bombardment. It's like, I really don't want that to be a real thing. But I can understand why they put it in the game.
Christoph  26:48  Yeah space combat is fun right, but only in fantasy. 
Jason  26:52  Yeah, I do wonder about it, though, because there's some pretty harsh limits in terms of how many ships you can support at once. Most factions start by being able to support three at most, usually, only two crewed vehicles. And even if you invest all your politics points into it, you only get like two or three more than that. And so we're talking fleets that consist of like five ships trying to attack each other across the solar system. So again, we never got to this point in the campaign, we didn't have the eight to 12 hours to get that far into it. I just wonder how that would work in practice? Or if it's basically like, well, I'm claiming Jupiter, and you're claiming Saturn, and we're just going to let each other do our thing, because it's not worth wasting chips on this.
Christoph  27:31  Yeah, I mean, if you just look at what's happening now on Earth, if you're SpaceX has like four or five rockets that they can launch that are refurbished will you know, and then if he add Blue Origin to it, I would probably say there's a good dozen reusable rockets out there right now that can be used and launched on a regular basis. So five is a very small number. 
Jason  27:52  Yeah, I think the five limit is more for the crewed vehicles. So that would be theoretical manned missions going somewhere,
Christoph  27:58  even for manned. You know, right now. The Falcon Heavy, I think there's like two or three of them out there. There'll be more in again, if you want new Glenn is ready to launch, you know, they'll double that capacity at least. Okay.
Brian  28:11  What about space pirates? Are we? gonna have space pirates? 
Jason  28:16  Yes, there's a part of the game that after a certain point of development, Space Pirates just spontaneously appear on the board. 
Brian  28:22  They just spawn into existence
Jason  28:24  Yes, they just appear, like no one creates them, they just start happening. They're like rats, or yeast or mold or something. They just kind of come out of the woodwork or the space work as your economy gets sufficiently developed. 
Christoph  28:36  Who knows? I mean, it I guess you can pose the question, is that a natural progression of we saw that happen here on Earth? And why would it happen in space as well that you'll get some Freebooters out there that got start invading other ships?
Brian  28:53  Because if you if the economics of it makes sense, then it Yeah, we will happen?
Christoph  28:57  Yeah, I'm not sure if there's one faction that will be able to finance that. But you know, there's other Elon Musk's out there that have a boatload of money hidden away somewhere. Why not?
Jason  29:08  They're probably spin off from the various bases. You're supposed to be building this disgruntled employees and such as like, I'm tired of working for the EU or for China or whatever. I'm just gonna go off on my own and become a pirate. Sounds like a legitimate career move.
Brian  29:21  We'll have a black market, sugar beet wine.
Jason  29:25  Now what about near future? So one thing, there's another technology that only North America I think starts with in the campaign is the ability to get ships to Mars, like manned crewed vehicles to Mars. And I know I've heard about the efforts to get people to Mars, but I haven't heard a lot about it recently. What's the status of that right now?
Christoph  29:43  So right now it's all the purpose of the Artemis program at the end of the Artemis program is landing the first man on on Mars, but getting there you know, they they claim they can do it in the 2030s not sure if that's going to happen because there's a lot of things that have to be engineered. and designed first. So the plan right now is to get to the moon first start building a base on the moon, and especially in a space station that will be going around the moon called Gateway, and then they will launch to Mars from Gateway. So the plan is probably to assemble the rocket that's going to go to Mars on Gateway, and then it will launch from Gateway from orbit around the moon. 
Brian  30:22  That's so cool. 
Christoph  30:24  Which, by the way, one of the things I missed in this game is that these days, there's a lot of missions that go to the ligrange points. So the there's five equilibrium points in a three body system, where you can, in theory, put a mass satellite there to never move, you know, so between Sun earth, earth, moon, so on and so forth. We always have these five points. So Gateway, one of the proposals is to put it at Earth Moon L1,
Jason  30:47   Okay, that's the one that's in between the Earth and the Moon?
Christoph  30:50  The between Earth and Moon, yes, L2 is on the other side of the moon. And then you have L3, which is on the other side of Earth. And then you have L4 and 5, which are an equilateral triangle between Earth and Moon. 
Jason  31:02  And the benefit of these places, you can put something there and then he doesn't require any fuel to stay there. It just is sort of held there by the gravitational interactions of the multiple bodies.
Christoph  31:12  Correct. So it's our, the orbit, so you can't really reach those points in a practice, but you can orbit them so that's what they do more with these points called ligrational orbits, lagrange orbits, whatever, you want to lose a few names for the there's been some successful missions. Like for example, this, the James Webb Telescope is at L2. So.
Brian  31:34  interesting. So how would we how would we do that in Stellar Horizons, you'd have to have like places where you could send a mission or build a base, but it wouldn't be able to, like generate resources the way other things can in Stellar Horizons, because there's nothing there. It's just a stable. 
Christoph  31:47  Yeah, you Jupiter's space station that would be supplied by whatever moon or planet you're, it's, it's orbiting. 
Jason  31:55  probably the abstractions that anytime something is in orbit around a planet, you could just hand wave that say it's actually at one of the Lagrange points, the game has enough bookkeeping, I don't want to keep track of multiple stable orbit locations, in addition to all the planets and moons and everything else. 
Christoph  32:10  Yeah. And by the way, it doesn't mean that you need no fuel to stay around Lagrange points, because L1, L2, L3 are considered unstable. So you do need some station keeping fuel on board.
Jason  32:21  Okay, got it. So you need to like minor adjustments, basically, just to kind of nudge it back and forth. 
Christoph  32:25  Minor adjustments, Yes. 
Jason  32:26  Okay. All right. So kind of getting down to the end of the game discussion. If you could change something about this game that you think like, would you are there things that you think we could make this maybe a bit more accurate? Or maybe things that they tried too hard on? Like, what would you try to adjust to the game to make it fit your vision of space exploration better?
Christoph  32:44  Oh, good point. Good question. You know, I'm a little bit of an idealist, I will probably try it and take some of the politics little out of it and not be so heavily on diplomacy and, and have the countries work together better, but you have to roll for it. So that kind of that bothered me a little bit. And then it just you still have to roll for engine failures and stuff like that. So you have a probability effect there that, yes, you have it in real life, too. But it's not a it's not a gamble if a rocket explodes in that it explodes because there are failures in the system. It'd be better to maybe add a mechanic that there is, you know, some people saw something on during assembly went wrong or something like that. 
Jason  33:28  Yeah, that sounds like one of those abstractions. I do know some of the technology can reduce your failure rate, some that may represent superior engineering capacity.
Christoph  33:36  That sort of bugged me a little bit, but I know the way they did I think it's still fine. It's still, you know, it's not game ruining or anything. It's I think this I'm eager to played with my group here. And still think it's should be a fantastic game to play for Space Cadets like me.
Jason  33:51  And imagine part of that is that you're an engineer. And so you don't want your hard won engineering to just blow up due to a bad dice rolls that that kind of a fair assessment, right?
Brian  33:59  Yes. Or to have the politics get in the way of what you're trying to do.
Christoph  34:02  That explosion was preceded by 1000s of 1000s of people dedicating a lot of time, effort and love into designing this engine, and then having this random effect, there, I don't like it maybe just because I am an engineer. But yeah,
Brian  34:18  I suppose if you just decide we don't want to do that. You just don't do it. Right. That's the joy of a board game. If you don't like a rule, don't use it.
Christoph  34:25  You know, that's what I said in the beginning. This game has lots of lots of levels. And I think you can add and delete levels any any way you want to. I feel it's pretty flexible. Um, so.
Jason  34:34  What were your thoughts, Brian, so we played this, we did a three hour play session, which is longer than normal. We basically got the world creamed by an asteroid the first time but then saved it the second time, we got to know the rules. 
Brian  34:46  We went back in time we did that never happened. We Gosh, what do I think? I think that the I've never played a game where you're rolling that percentile dice so many times and so often does it not matter. So I do agree that those very low percentage events like do take a lot Like efforts to maintain this seems like the kind of game where if you're willing to dedicate the time and really learn it, it probably would be a lot of fun. But that that eight hour play time, that's hard. That's a hard commit. I used to play tabletop war games. This is this is one of those. This is spend two hours setting up and six hours playing. 
Jason  35:17  Yeah, my feeling I kept getting while playing is "I wish I had a computer to handle all the bookkeeping", because there's really two kinds of rolls and stuff you're doing. There's the bookkeeping ones, like, Okay, how much money do I get this turn? What percentile do I need to roll under? Oh, I'm moving this ship from here. How long does that take with my current technology, etc. I really wish I had a computer to handle all of that little niggling detail so that I could focus on the important things of which planet do I want to explore? This probe is going to get there next turn, but I can explore it a penalty this turn, do I want to risk losing it and get it now? Or do I want to wait but have a less time in the future? Those decisions that I consider be the important decisions and offload to a computer all the little things? I think this would make a great computer game. So I didn't play civilization that much. But I played it see, it's sort of sci fi spin off Alpha Centauri, it reminded me a lot of that probably because there was a lot of similar technologies, some space exploration, the tech tree everything. I've heard some people when I was doing research, some people said that particular game Alpha Centauri is considered by some people to be one of the best 4X games made for computers. And so I found a lot of similarities between that and this game is I was playing it and wishing that I could offload to a computer, the same thing that I offloaded to the computer when I was playing the computer game.
Brian  36:28  One thing I would say is that that price points for this, you said it was 120 at your friendly local game store?
Jason  36:34  130. Although I did see at some point, compass games was running the sale at 99. But I think it's back up to 130. Now,
Brian  36:41  so that's about two times the cost of your average designer board game. But if you think about it, in terms of time played, I mean, there are plenty of board games that have sat on my shelf that have maybe been played three or four times. If you play Stellar Horizons, the whole campaign twice, you've probably gotten more value for your money than your average designer board game for most people. Of course, you know, there are some games, you're going to bust out all the time and play a lot. But I think most of us have to admit that a lot of our games, we don't play that often. 
Jason  37:09  Yeah, that's fair.
Christoph  37:10  Did, there's a lot of replay value of this one, they have a bunch of scenarios that you can play and you know, you can come up with yours. I think there's, it's well worth the money.
Jason  37:20  Yeah, those scenarios I think are a good touch. So there's the the defend from an asteroid one we played, there's the full campaign, there's one where one player is playing like a rogue AI that is basically versus all the other human players. There's one where, it's the shortest one, it's 30 minutes, it's literally, there's an alien spaceship, you have this much money, figure out how to build some ships and go blow it up before it blows you up. That's it, it's a 30 minute scenario, the only world tile is Earth, and you get a pile of money. And that's it. So like, there's a whole range of things you can do here, I do wish there was like a quickstart, like a little Quickstart for like, here's how you ease into the game and play or maybe like a YouTube how to play video, because the rules are very well laid out. And they're obviously laid out by an engineer, every rule has a number, this is 2.6.5. This is rule 3.4.7. And they're logical, they're logical in one way, but I think logically in a different way. So they're all logically all the movement rules are together, all the exploration rules are together, all the combat rules are together, which is great for looking up when you're in that phase. But I think in terms of what's doing the action, so I want all the crewed vehicle rules to be in one spot, and then all the robot vehicle rules to be in one spot. And I kept having to flip back and forth to find it, I actually made little cheat cards on the on three by five index cards to give the rules for oh, this is a crewed vehicle, it can do this and this and this and this and this. And if I were to be playing this a bunch, I would actually print those out and make them nice and neat. So I had these quick reference, because that's how I think but I mean, there's a lot of stuff in this already, I can perfectly understand why they didn't do that. From what I read online. I'm not the only person who wishes things were maybe laid out a bit differently. 
Christoph  38:51  Yeah, I missed it. So they have the index, but there's no page numbers. Oh, 
Jason  38:56  but they're all numbered, though. 
Christoph  38:58  So they are numbered. So you can go through and find it. But I sometimes want to do well, but what page, you have to leave through it and find the right number. 
Brian  39:05  This does come with a PDF version that you could search through? 
Jason  39:08  So it's not that easy to find. But yes, you can actually download the PDFs from the Kickstarter page of all places. I don't think it's linked from the main compass games website. But the Kickstarter still has a full PDF that you can download. And I actually did that while we were playing. You may have seen I had my laptop open. I was searching for some of the rules we were trying to figure out because sometimes like okay, I read this rule somewhere, but I don't remember where and there's 10 pages of rules to go through so that that searchability was very useful there. 
Christoph  39:34  About but Yeah I'd like to see a computer game for this one. 
Brian  39:37  Yeah, this would make a fun app. 
Jason  39:38  Actually, this would be a great app. I would love to see that. 
Brian  39:41  So we've been doing these report cards for the games that we've been reviewing that review like the science how well the science is represented as well as the fun and honestly I was trying to decide if I feel qualified to grade the science in this game, but I guess I'll I'll give it my best guess. I think this is definitely a game where the science was at the front and it was trying its very best to represent the science the best that it could. And I think that it feels like it's probably an A like just for effort.
Jason  40:08  I probably do like A-. It's not quite as at the forefront as wingspan, which is my personal bar currently for what a high science game is. There's a lot there. There's also like Christoph said some simplifications and some places where there could have been more, but there's not, there is a lot there. And so yeah, A/A- range seems good to me.
Brian  40:27   Our actual qualified person. What how do you grade it?
Christoph  40:30  No, I would I would have to agree i would give it an A-does vary. And the way they simplified it, or you know, took took some edges off that now it to me, it makes total sense. You can't go into all the detail and nitty gritty in a game like this that's supposed to be for broader audience. So yeah, A- for sure.
Brian  40:49  It's so funny hearing that this game is not detailed and complicated enough.
Jason  40:54  No, no, that's a good thing. It's the science part of it. Next part is gameplay. I was thinking about this. And this is one where I'm split, because like I said, this is not my genre of game. So for me, I would give this like a B- just because of how complicated it is, and how much I wish I had a computer keep track of the bookkeeping. However, for someone who really likes this type of game, I imagine it would probably be more on the A-/A range, I did do some looking online. Sounds like there are some very loyal fans of it. Some of them have kind of the same quibbles about the rulebook or a combat being a little complicated. So it seems like for the people who really love this game, it falls again, in that kind of A- range. 
Brian  41:31  I think I'm gonna give it a B just because it's I think it's probably one of those games that is fun if you put in the work. And I don't know if I can, I don't literally don't know if my life accommodates a game like this. Really, it was fun to play. I like playing the short scenario. I'm just trying to imagine the day that we would play the whole campaign. 
Jason  41:50  Well, it's hard now that we have jobs and kids and other responsibilities like that, like if I was in college, this would be much more likely I could see just taking my friends groups like hey, we're just gonna devote this Saturday to Stellar Horizons and just make a day of it. order some pizza, take some breaks in the game. I could definitely see that happening. But in our current life situation, yeah, probably not.
Christoph  42:09  I don't have a family here except the people that I play games with every once in a while. So but I would, I would rate it a B. It's massive. It's very complicated. It's not a not a game. I prefer games that you can pick up and set up in 15-10 minutes and start playing it. This is not that game. That's why I'm giving it a B. But fun wise, I haven't played it yet, unfortunately. But I will definitely I'm definitely looking forward to doing it with my gaming group here at some point. So that's just because of the massive just takes a long time to play is what I say I would give it a B.
Jason  42:41   Yeah, you said you were but you got sick. So unfortunately, that wasn't the plan, but hopefully not COVID But something 
Christoph  42:47  Oh, no, no, not COVID Just just a little bit of a Con crud.
Brian  42:50  Oh, did you go to a con?
Christoph  42:51  Yeah, we I went to Megacon here in Orlando.
Brian  42:54  Oh, is that a gamer? Con? No, it
Christoph  42:56  is a pop culture con.
Brian  42:57  Awesome. That's fun. I know Jason goes to Dragon Con all the time. 
Christoph  43:00  Yeah Dragon Con is so it's just like Dragon Con but except much bigger.
Jason  43:04  All right. Well, I think that's we're gonna wrap up again with the grades. Remember, these are just our opinions. So you are welcome to disagree, and we are welcome to be wrong about it. If you dislike it, we actually have a discord you can come in and you can tell us how wrong we are or if we got anything incorrect, but otherwise, I think we'll sign off. Christoph, thank you so much for coming. It was great having you on here. I'm glad we were able to meet. If we do any other engineering based stuff we might get back in touch.
Christoph  43:27  Absolutely. It'd be my pleasure. It's been a lot of fun. 
Jason  43:29  All right, so that's we're gonna wrap it so thank you everyone for listening and take care have fun happy gaming.
Brian  43:35  Yep, have fun playing dice with the universe See Ya!.
Jason  43:44  This has been the Gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.
 

Let's talk birds! In this episode we cover Wingspan, an amazing game by Elizabeth Hargrave and published by Stonemaier games. Also, Jason just got back from a conference and has tons of fun science facts to share.
One note: we had an audio glitch that resulted in lower audio quality than normal, which we didn't realize until after the recording. Quality will be back to normal next episode.
Timestamps
00:33 - Conference news about hemp, COVID evolution, and bird pangenomes07:58 - Wingspan overview12:50 - Making a bird sanctuary21:04 - The power of corvids23:40 - Assembling an ecosystem26:47 - Actions, goals, and other ways to win29:50 - Cornell Lab of Ornithology is awesome!31:35 - Grades & wrap-up
Find our socials at https://gamingwithscience.net 
Game Results
Game 1: Brian 65, Jason 81
Game 2: Brian 71, Jason 85
Links
Official Wingspan website
Cannabis genebank - Zachary Stansell
Bird pangenome - Scott Edwards
COVID19 evolution - Lucy Van Dorp
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Macualay sound library
Full Transcript
Jason  0:06  Hello, and welcome to the Gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of the favorite games.
Brian  0:11  In today's episode, we're going to discuss wingspan from Stonemaier games.
Hey, this is Brian.
Jason  0:23  This is Jason.
Brian  0:25  Welcome back to our third episode, we're going to talk about wingspan today. But before we get into that, Jason, do you have any science topics for us to talk about?
Jason  0:33  So yeah, I am brimming with topics today because I just got back from a major conference. For those of you who don't know how science works, conferences are how academics exchange information and network and such. Yes, technically, we publish papers. And those are important. But everyone knows that most of the real work happens by in person meetings, being at a conference presenting things either in front of an audience or at a poster session or something. And there can be a mixed bag because scientists are not always the best communicators. But so sometimes, they're really good. And sometimes they're not. But the one I was just at is plant and animal genome, which is every year this time of year, and it is the biggest one in my area, which is agricultural genomics. So studying the genes and genomes of plants and animals. And there's just a ton of stuff. And so there was all sorts of cool things going on. There's someone in upstate New York, who works for USDA, who is assembling a collection of hemp to use as a germplasm resource. So basically, where people who are breeding hemp can ask for seeds, and they can use it to, to breed new varieties. You have to be affiliated with an actual company or research lab. So no, if you're just a private individual, sorry, you can't do that. They can't send it to just anyone who wants to grow some. I'm also pretty sure they're focusing on fiber varieties, not THC and the ones that give you actual highs
Brian  1:57  Not yet anyway
Jason  1:58  Not yet anyway. But yeah, as it continues to get legalized and assuming that trend continues, then yes, the USDA will eventually want to accumulate a large supply, because that's sort of the basis of what people used to breed. There was I can relate to today's topic, there was someone who has done a lot of what are called pan genomes of birds. This is where you don't just get one genome sequence, you get the genome sequences of a lot of individuals. And then you're able to compare a lot of differences among them, especially things that are there in one person's genome, or in this case, one birds genome and absent in another and how these can affect behavior and traits and stuff. The one I really liked, there was this woman from the UK, who really came onto the scene during COVID, because she studies viral evolution. So she's making use of all these 1000s upon 1000s of COVID sequences that were deposited during the pandemic, to study viral evolution in real time, where she can actually track down using mathematical models, how the virus was changing over time, how long it had been circulating, and based on her results confirms that, yes, it probably made the jump to humans sometime in September, October of 2019. And she really drove home just how much globalization is changing the way these viruses move around, because she studied the data from Britain, in terms of what the viruses were. And as far as her well, her and her lab, because she has a bunch of people working with her, as far as they can tell. By March 2020, so when everything really went to pot, there have been over 1000 independent introductions of the SARS- COV-19 virus to Britain by that point. It's not like there's a single patient zero who brought it in. I mean, this thing was just jumping plane after plane after plane and coming in and then just spreading like wildfire.
Brian  3:46  Wow, that's interesting to hear about viruses. I know like in the agricultural context, you know, I study bacteria that infect plants, when they find an epidemic strain, and they check its history, it always seems to turn out Oh, that's actually been around for decades before it became a problem. So it's fascinating to see that that's not what happened here. As soon as it jumped to humans, it was a problem.
Jason  4:05  That seems to be the thing with animals. These are called zoonotic diseases, which I think is just a fancy Latin term for "it came from an animal" that basically when they jump hosts, when they go from a pig to a human or a bird to human, or vice versa--she's actually studying the opposite direction too where we give diseases to our animals, which apparently actually happens a lot more. But anyway, when it makes that jump, suddenly the new virus or the virus, assuming it can actually make progress in its new host, which most of the time it can't, but the rare lucky one that can, there's no immunities against it, and so it just takes off. And she was saying how, like she's studying all this viral diseases and everything. But at the end of the day, there's actually not that much variation in the virus compared to most other viruses because it is still so new and so young. It's only been in humans for...at the time of recording, what, three and a half years, something like that.
Brian  5:00  Something like that.
Jason  5:01  So, anyway, it's still a very young virus in us. And then I mean, this is my own personal observation, but it seems like it's just here to stay. It's now just like the seasonal flu, it'll just be circulating around like all other coronaviruses we have.
Brian  5:14  Yeah, we'll just have to get those shots every, every fall, probably forever now.
Jason  5:19  Yep.
Brian  5:21  Can I ask a question about the bird pangenome study?
Jason  5:23  Sure. I can't guarantee I can answer it. But yes, you can ask.
Brian  5:28  So you said that it is looking at sort of presence absence of genes in birds? Was this just like across all birds, or a population of one type of bird.
Jason  5:36  So the one he specifically did was scrub jays, which are a type of blue jay, he was looking at three populations, there's a big one that's in kind of the southwestern United States, there's a small little population on some island off of California. And then there's another population on the south of Florida. And it I mean, who knows, I actually didn't have time to check, maybe at least one of these is actually in wingspan, but they...he was following the patterns of them and seeing that, yes, the big one has a whole lot more genetic variation than the little ones, as you'd expect. Small populations, they just tend to have less variation. And problematic, problematic genes tend to rise to higher frequencies, because natural selection is not very efficient Wwen you have a small number of individuals. It's much more efficient when there's a lot of them,
Brian  6:23  Yeah, just random chance you end up carrying through bad genes, because you've got to work with the genes you got.
Jason  6:28  Yeah, and the thing is like this, he's working on birds. But I know the human geneticists are doing the exact same thing. Actually, they're probably a lot more advanced than the plant and animal people are just because, like big surprise, human genetics gets a lot more money than those of us working on animals and plants. And so they tend to have a lot more tools. And just be, I usually say maybe five, five to 10 years ahead of the plant and animal community just because there's so many more resources there.
Brian  6:54  It makes sense. But then how do you define your separate populations of humans?
Jason  6:59  That's the thing, you don't really, especially not today with so much globalization. You could 20,000 years ago, not so much today. Why no humans are actually kind of the outlier this was brought home a few times is that we have a lot less genetic variation than most other species out there. Especially ones with our population size. And it's thought that we went through a bottleneck, I don't know, a few 100,000 years ago, where we got down to like, less than 1000 breeding individuals. So we almost went extinct before anything happened. But apparently, we got lucky.
Brian  7:33  That sounds like a really cool basis for some kind of a novel or story of telling the story of when humans almost got wiped out.
Jason  7:42  I don't know that we know enough information about it, though. Like I've only ever heard about it from genetic studies. I don't know anything archaeological, or anything like that. So I don't know if anyone knows exactly when it was or why it was or anything.
Brian  7:54  Even more open for speculation then right?
Jason  7:57  There you go.
Brian  7:58  All, right. That was fun. Um, should we talked about this board game?
Jason  8:01  Yes, let's talk about wingspan, which is a lovely board game. 
Brian  8:04  Yeah. What a game. For science content purposes, for just fun, for overall quality for the enthusiasm of the community that is built around Wingspan, there is this enormous, enthusiastic, active community making resources for Wingspan, discussing strategies for Wingspan, optimizations, everything there, there is an app for Wingspan that replicates the full gameplay. This is quite the game. So Wingspan was designed by Elisabeth Hargrave. It's published by Stonemaier Games. It is for one to five players, which is the first game that we played that actually has a single player mode, I wish I'd had a chance to play that; I did not. The single player mode was designed by Automa Factory, which as I understand it, they design apps to allow board games to be played single player. Let's see...it is for ages 10 and up, which seems right and 40 to 70 minutes, which also seems right depending on how quick your opponent is and sort of taking...well we we've primarily played two player I imagine when you get up to the higher player counts, it's going to take longer.
Jason  9:04  Yeah, probably there's only so fast that people can do. Although good players--and this is a tip for everyone out there--good players plan your move while other people are playing so that it doesn't come to you, and then suddenly you spend two minutes trying to figure out what you're going to do.
Brian  9:18  I mean, that's that's just a general tip for any kind of turn based game, though, isn't it?
Jason  9:21  Yes it is. And yet, it's surprising how many people I've played with don't get that. Especially in wingspan where you don't affect each other, the only thing you can do to someone else's steal a card from the draw pile.
Brian  9:32  Yeah, that is a good point. And when we talk about the game plays like there are relatively limited interactions between the players, mostly you're sort of playing against the game trying to get as many points as possible. There's a few things where you do have to pay attention because if you do something, your opponent may do something else, right. You have to kind of interact from that perspective. Let's try to address the challenge of a audio medium for a visual, visual board game. What does this game look like? So in terms of display, it's relatively simple. Every player will have a play mat that is in front of them. I think most of this is done as watercolors. Each mat is divided into three sections representing forests, grasslands, and wetlands. And on that map, there will be places for five cards in each of those sections. You have two decks of cards, you have this thick deck of 170 bird cards, each unique, and a smaller deck of goal cards. You have the little cardboard tokens that represent five different types of foods, so seeds, berries, rodents, invertebrates, which are supposed to represent all types of invertebrates, not just bugs, but like based on designer notes also like aquatic invertebrates, clams or stuff like that. Let's see what am I forgetting? Ah, yes, fish, of course. Thank you. You have these wonderful chunky wooden dice, where each face represents some of those food tokens and this gorgeous foldable dice tower that looks like a bird feeder that you put in your backyard, which is totally unnecessary, but really fun to roll your food dice into. Little wooden egg miniatures, or little resin egg miniatures of different colors, which is great to have the different colors, they don't do anything. But it's really fun to be able to pick your favorite color, some action cubes, and then like a goal mat that I don't know if that's a good picture. But mostly this is mats and cards and a little dice tower. Right is how you play this game.
Jason  11:19  Yeah, and the game. I mean, you alluded to this, the game is just beautifully designed the watercolors and the bird designs. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely done by people who care a lot about birds. I almost wonder if the popularity in that community you mentioned taps into that because I know birders are a very avid community. I'm not a birder. So I, I haven't done it. I don't really get it. But I know some people who are, and it just inspires a lot of enthusiasm and people. So I wonder if they're, the game is managing to tap into that somehow.
Brian  11:48  I think it I think absolutely 100%, it does. Yes, the components, the quality of the components, they just they had a wonderful feel, the cards, the cardstock is thick, and it's got a wonderful sheen to it. Everything looks like it was designed with a lot of care and attention to detail. The decks come in a plastic molded holder with a tray that can hold all the cards. None of this is necessary. Like you could play the game with just cheap paper. But it's so much nicer that you don't have to, it just feels good to hold the well design materials hold the cards in your hand.
Jason  12:21  No, I agree quality of game components is important. Board games are tactile. I mean, if you're playing the app, not so much. But if you're playing around the table with people, it's a tactile experience. And so the little visuals and the sensory things that make it so much better, really up the quality of the game.
Brian  12:36  Yeah for sure. I do wish that the game was I think when you get used to it, it does take a little bit of time to set up. Like if I could just throw out the game and have it ready to go in a few minutes, I feel like I would play this every evening. We also have a cat so we can't leave the game out. So we have to actually then pack everything up and put it away. But anyway, let's talk about some of the science concepts here because this has layers to it. From a pure scientific concept perspective. I think I mean, this is bird facts that game. 
Jason  13:03  Yes, I mean, look, let's start with what you got the metaphor of the game. So the game claims you're building a bird sanctuary and you're trying to build the most elegant bird sanctuary or the most beautiful one based on what you get. Mechanically, it's a worker placement slash engine building game, you choose which action you're going to do each turn, that says what you're allowed to do, and you're trying to build up the right combination of birds in the right places to get as many victory points as possible. So like, I don't know how much that those mechanics mesh with that metaphor, but the metaphor is a great package for having a whole bunch of bird stuff you're trying to do.
Brian  13:37  I think okay, so so this was what I've been thinking about is if we think about the metaphor as exclusively the game play, I agree with you that maybe the way that the game is played doesn't necessarily tie directly and meaningful to the to the actual science, but this this entire game, how everything is set up is based on science. Let's start with the, just the core concepts. You've got ornithology, right, which is the study of birds, which is a sub discipline of Zoology. I said, Okay, great. So what what do you study specifically about birds? What makes ornithology unique? And from looking around one of the things and I think you already brought this up, one of the things about ornithology that is interesting is that it is a field where enthusiastic amateurs still make regular contributions to the field. So people who don't have a formal education from a university or a degree are still making important contributions to the study of birds, to ornithology. And that's actually reflected by Elizabeth Hargrave herself, the designer of the game, who does not have a science degree, although as far as I understand from looking at her biography, if we can trust Wikipedia as a as a valued source, I don't know why anybody would be spamming Wikipedia for a game designer. She did volunteer, she worked in a survey of stingrays like volunteered to do that, like an ecological survey, but she's a birder, that amateur enthusiasm for the study of birds is a huge part of this game. The other thing that we have here where it's sort of like it's inlaid into the game is ecology, right? And what is ecology? It's the study of living organisms, how they interact with each other and their environment. These are the kinds of layers that I see. The first is the player mat itself. So we've got these three different sort of habitats, the forest, the grasslands, the wetlands, the birds that you play have to have a corresponding food cost based on it is modeled based on what these birds actually eat. So you're essentially representing in a very limited sense, their ecological niche, what are their habitat and food requirements to be able to play them out onto the mat? So that, that's one layer there. And when we come to the cards themselves, one thing is every card has flavor text that basically represents actual bird facts. That doesn't really influence the game. But it is awfully neat, because sometimes they do tie together in interesting ways.
Jason  15:53  Yeah, no, I, I that's one thing that I really liked about the game is how there are things you think wouldn't matter. They end up mattering, like every bird has its wingspan put on it. Like how big is this bird? Which seems like a just a random fact, except that are some birds, which are the hunting birds that when things trigger them to do, you will look at bird cards from the deck. And if it's smaller than a certain size, they basically capture it and eat it and you get to stash that for victory point.
Brian  16:20  Yeah, or some of the goal cards for instance, will be based on collecting a certain number of birds under a certain size. Yeah, let's talk about the cards and everything that goes into the cards themselves. So oh, I didn't even mention this is...okay, we've only done three games. At this point. This is our third game. This is the only game I've ever played that cites its sources. Like in the design of this game, it says this, basically used the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Audubon Society to derive all of the facts about the birds that were used to design the cards. So what's on the card is a beautiful illustration of the bird itself, a point value represented to it. Now, there's actually no notes in the game about how those point values were derived. I think that these are based on the rarity of that bird. That would make sense based on the sort of overall design and metaphor of the game of attracting birds to your place. But other things that are on this card. One is, what is its habitat? Now the base game is explicitly birds that are native to North America. There's 170, unique birds out of like over 900 birds, so 170 seems like a lot. But it's still only only a small fraction of those. Other things are, like you mentioned the size of the bird, which does have real consequences. Other things that are just on every card will be what type of nest does it lay, with four different categories. A bowl nest is sort of classic bird nest, cavity nests...so birds that will lay nest inside of hollow trees or other similar situations. Platform nests, so you know, an eagle building that big sort of platform of sticks on top of something, and then ground nesting birds that just lay their eggs right on the ground. And then there's a wild card, which basically, well, this doesn't cleanly fit in anything else. So just counts as all of them. The number of eggs that you could put on the card is proportional to the real life number of eggs that that bird would lay. Not a one to one, but just like they must have been sectioned out into groups of just, you know, one egg to lots and lots of eggs, I think they go from zero to six. Let's see what else is on the cards. 
Well, my favorites are the birds that they don't have a nest because they lay their eggs in other birds nests. And then mechanics reflect that.
Exactly. And this is the other place that we get this. So we have all of these details about the birds that affect the mechanics, their habitat, their food requirements are all there. But then the birds will also like you said, sometimes they'll have abilities that are based on collecting food, or yes, you're right, the nest parasites that do not have their own nests, will have powers to lay eggs on other birds nests. So not every single of the unique 170 bird cards has powers that are uniquely associated with that bird, but easily half of them do. For instance, if the species is endangered, it will have all of the ones that are endangered have the same ability to draw two new goal cards. So it's like is that uniquely associated with them as being endangered? No. But does it basically key you in to this information that these birds are all endangered if they have this ability? The...every card has the common name and Latin name. You can't play this game and not learn something. I don't think it's possible. Whether you realize it or not. You have learned something about birds when you played this game.
Jason  19:36  Yeah, and I think another great thing about it is that that's half the equation, is that the science is really top notch. The other half is that the gameplay is top notch. The mechanics work really well. So we didn't actually talk about how you win yet but the fact is, you're, you're trying to gather victory points, and there's many different ways you can do that. The birds themselves are worth points so you can just get a bunch of high value birds. Eggs you lay on the cards are worth points. There are ways to stash cards from the deck underneath them, those are worth points
Brian  20:05  That stashing is based on two different things. Either the hunting birds will take that card that they capture and tuck it under. Or it's also representing birds that travel in very large flocks. So this is how like the metaphor of the ecology is kind of like with the stashing cards under cards. 
Jason  20:20  Okay, I didn't know the flock part, that's good to know, that explains some of the other ones. Yeah, then you got your there's end-of-round goals that get you points, there are your own personal goals that are hidden from other players that get you points. So there's a lot of different ways to get points in this. And so there's a lot of different ways to play the game. The ideal, at least in my head is to try to build up some sort of engine so that when you do your actions, you're able to just generate points after points after points. I've only achieved this once. I got a card draw engine where, by the end of the game, every turn, I was drawing five cards, and tucking five cards underneath my birds and drawing five and tucking five. I'll be honest, like it was nice to do it, but actually got a little boring, because my last six actions were all the exact same thing.
Brian  21:04  When we played, you had the crows, the crows allow you to develop a pretty powerful engine, too.
Jason  21:09  Yes, that was a that's a general tactic, where if you can get the birds... So, each of the three habitats give you a different resource when you use them. So the forest gets you food, the grassland gets you eggs, and then the water gets you cards, and you need all of these, but you can only pick one each turn. And so by placing birds in each of those rows that get you resources from one of the other rows, you're able to get two things for one. And so I very early on in one of our games, managed to get in my grassland birds that could trade eggs for food, and birds that could trade eggs for cards. And so I pretty much just did that for an entire round to just build up tons and tons and tons of food and card resources, and then ran off of that the rest of the game and managed to get a pretty good score,
Brian  21:54  You pretty much didn't have to do the collect food action at all, it was unnecessary. Like you were getting all of your food from the ability of trading eggs for food.
Jason  22:03  Yeah, I could have but I didn't. Because I was using the middle row, I didn't really invest much in my forest. And so it's a pretty low payout. So this is one thing as you put more birds in your rows, they're more expensive to put there. But you get more from them each time. And so the game rewards you for filling out your ecology.
Brian  22:23  And my wife and I actually played this game a lot when we were researching and she got really into it. And there is an app that you can play on your phone where you can play against an AI and normal two player game, play against someone else online or just pass the phone back and forth and play wingspan. I read that they have taken the crows out of the game. With the expansion at this point the crows were considered, they basically are banned cards like an overly powered card in Magic.
Jason  22:47  I totally agree. The corvids are usually the most powerful. So the common crow and the raven...let's see, one of them, I think you can trade an egg for two pieces of food and one an egg for one piece. I think maybe the the one egg for one food might be fair, but the one egg for two pieces of food is definitely very powerful anytime. So hint if you're playing with that corvid, if it shows up, get it because it is arguably the most powerful card in the game.
Brian  23:14  And again, how does the game represent that? They're the ultimate generalists. They can go into any habitat, they can choose any food, to play them. They have amazing abilities. They're smart, and like very Yeah, yep, makes sense to me. They're powerful. They're powerful birds. So let's come back to the metaphor of the actual gameplay. So this game integrates real biology, real ecology through most of it. Now, when you are assembling your bird engine, or, you know, recruiting birds into your bird sanctuary, you're, you're not really trying to assemble a functional ecosystem, per se, it's not like you would have a top predator and things that have a balanced use of different types of food resources or anything like that. So from that perspective, you're not building an ecosystem in the game. But you're building an engine, you're building something where the abilities of one creature interact meaningfully with another. So in a strange way, you're you almost are representing an ecosystem in a strange way of building a functional set of interactions between individuals that, I don't know, make them successful. I don't Is that too much of a stretch?
Jason  24:26  It may be a little bit of a stretch, but I can get it. You're trying to get synergies going on. So things support each other. I mean, the thing we don't have is you don't have when suddenly you introduce a new bird, suddenly the existing ecosystem collapses because you managed to predate something to extinction or something like that. So these birds all play nice with each other. Whereas reality is messier. Let's put it that way. Yeah, people have this idea that like nature's all in harmony and everything, and anyone who actually studies ecology knows it's not like that. It's only in harmony because everything is pulling as hard as it can in every different direction and it all cancels out. So there's no, this mystical harmony of nature where everything respects and helps everything else. No, no. Like, everything is  out to get as many resources as it can. They're just stymied by everything else also trying to get as many resources as they can. And yes, that's not nearly as like, feel good. But it explains things a lot better.
Brian  25:21  Yeah, no, cooperation in nature is tricky. Yeah. So this is not, okay, I was thinking about this. And I don't think that this is really fully replicating what you're what you're talking about, at the end, you introduce a new species, that everything goes crazy. In the expansion, because there are many expansions for this game, we only played the base game. But there are expansions that are the birds of Oceania that add Europe, that add Asia, the Oceania adds some new rules. And that's actually when they had to take the crow cards out because they became too powerful when coupled with some of these new rules. So from that perspective, when you introduce birds from different ecosystems together, the ecosystem breaks. So does that count?
Jason  26:04  Yes, I think that counts.
Brian  26:07  Sort of the unintended consequences of mixing species from different areas together. That's kind of the major science, I see four different layers. There's sort of record representation of ecological niches. There's all of the details on the bird cards themselves. There's the bird facts. And then there's just sort of a more nebulous, sort of, you're building an engine, which is a little bit like an ecosystem, right? Of course, an ecosystem doesn't just have birds in it.
Jason  26:30  Yes, but you're eating all the other stuff. So it's tricky. It's technically they're just all gets eaten. 
Brian  26:34  Yeah, that's very fair. Do we want to spend some time like talking about what the game feels like to play? I mean, I think we already addressed it a little bit, is there anything else you'd want to bring up about that?
Jason  26:47  I think we've covered it. It's a worker placement engine building game, you have so many moves. And so the game actually has a very specific set time length, because you have X number of moves to carry now and I forget what it is like eight plus each, each round, you actually get one fewer moves. So it's probably somewhere between 20 and 30. You could calculate it out exactly,
Brian  27:06  I believe you're right, the frustrating start with eight, sort of action cubes you use to declare what you're going to do. But at the end of each round, one of those cubes goes onto your scorecard. So as a consequence of that, you're always having one less action to take each round until I think when you're done, you only get I guess, five things or something.
Jason  27:22  Yeah. Although presumably, by then they are five very powerful actions, right?
Brian  27:26  If you've, if you've done a good job. I would always get into the situation where I'd get really focused on specific either public or private goals. And then I would have what looked like a lot of cards that were filled out, but then the face value of my birds was very low. And since the face value of your birds under a in a normal game actually makes up a huge majority of the points you'll earn. Oh, I actually didn't do that well. Even though I met all of my goals. Do you have a favorite goal card?
Jason  27:53  I remember reading over them, some of them seemed kind of clever. I think there was one that was like "forward thinking" and you have the most, you have more than 10 cards in hand or something like that.
Brian  28:02  That might be "visionary leader" where basically, you score points based on how many bird cards you have in your hand that you haven't played at the end of the game.
Jason  28:10  There's just all sorts of different ways they've chosen to give you points. Birds that are smaller than an amount or bigger than an amount or that have cavity nests, or this or that. And I like it that they have two tiers on them. There's the easy tier and the hard tier, and the easy tier is usually pretty easy to get. And then the hard tier takes significant effort and investment, you're not going to just accidentally hit the hard tier of your goal. And it's worth usually about double the points.
Brian  28:34  Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's a good point. Another thing I like about the goal cards is when you pull the goal card at the bottom of the card, it tells you what percentage of the birds in the game will be able to satisfy that goal. So if for nothing else, if you have two cards in front of you, you could say, well, this one only has 15% of all the bird cards can satisfy this. This one has 25% They're relatively well balanced. But But yeah. If say, I don't know, it's just a fun game. Like it's, it's competitive, but not in a way that where you feel bad when you lose, because you're kind of competing with yourself. 
Jason  29:05  Yeah, it's one of those we're you're racing towards a common goal. And it's whoever races first, you're not really sabotaging each other along the way. I mean, it is possible to hate draft, to choose a bird card, you know, someone else is going to want, but that, that doesn't happen all that much. Because, one, there's just not that many options out there. And two, you that if you're doing it just for that purpose, then you usually have something better you can be doing with your move.
Brian  29:30  Yeah, you'd be sacrificing your own ability to do something to stymie somebody else. So that's not really I know your playstyle is often wanting to mess with the other people at the table.
Jason  29:39  Yes, I love messing with other people at the table. So that's why I love Robo Rally so much is because I got to mess with people. So I can't do that with the birds, other than trying to grab the corvids as soon as they come out. Before we close. I do want to give a plug to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. You mentioned that that was one of the sources cited. So the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is really cool. I actually lived next to it for about three and a half years when I was postdocing. Literally, there was a a gate in the chain link fence next to our parking lot that I could go through. And we could just walk through the trails and go by the wetlands and everything. But the thing is, it's really cool for anyone anywhere because they maintain a vast library of animal sounds. You can actually look up different bird calls, and I think mammals and amphibians, I'm not super familiar with it, but I just did a Google search. It's called the Macaulay, M-A-C-A-U-L-A-Y library. Anyway, they have a library of animal sounds and animal media that you can, you can work with, that you can listen to and just I assume it's used for naturalist purposes. There's probably some way of trying to identify stuff based off of it. I don't know. But it's just it's a cool resource that puts out a lot of public stuff. And I know when we were there every year, I think it was golden eagles. Some birds of prey would nest in the middle of their big pond, and they would have their little chick cam so they'd have a live webcam just mounted up in the tree so you can see the little baby chicks as they were hatching and fledging and everything.
Brian  31:07  horrible little baby chicks.
Jason  31:09  Okay, yes, baby birds are not particularly cute. Chicks. Like actual chicken chicks? I don't know. Maybe they've been selected for cuteness. Most of the ones I've seen are just super ugly.
Brian  31:21  Until their feathers come in. Then they go, exactly.
Jason  31:24  They get better then. But when they're just little naked, tiny dinosaurs, they're just super ugly. I'm sorry, baby birds do not look cute. Baby mammals do, baby birds, sorry, you got the short end of the evolutionary stick.
Brian  31:35  Let's see. So let's do our, let's do our grades, let's do our scorecard. So let's start with the with the science. Now. We talked about this briefly. If this is not an A on science, I don't know what an A for science looks like.
Jason  31:50  I agree. It's like this is A, A+ territory. Definitely. I mean, it, it sets the bar for what a science themed board game really should be.
Brian  31:59  Great gameplay solid science content with like specific designer notes on, on how the real life science was integrated into the design of the game. I don't think you could ask for more. Okay, what about the, what about the fun? Where are you on the fun?
Jason  32:14  I'm also going to go A. I mean, there's a reason this has such a huge following, is that it has very deep gameplay. There's a lot of different ways to play the game, a lot of different ways to explore it. There's enough randomness in terms of the bird cards that it's not like you can just get us, you always play the exact same way because, those super corvids we talked about, they may never show up in your game.
Brian  32:35  I feel like, I hope I'm not just inflating this, but this is an A. This is, there's so much replay value. So much fun to play. I just, I wish the game was just a little quicker to set up so that you could just pop it down and play after dinner every night.
Jason  32:48  There's an app for that.
Brian  32:49  Yeah, there actually literally is an app for that. No, great game, really fun. And also while we're talking about plugs, I also wanted to thank our buddy Kyle for lending me the game for almost two months while I was researching it.
Jason  33:01  Alright, well that seems like a good place to wrap it up. So we're going to close down. Hope you all enjoyed this. I hope if you are not a wingspan fan already then I hope you're willing to at least give it a try. And if you were, hopefully you learned some things. So with that we're going to sign off and happy gaming.
Brian  33:16  Yep, thanks so much. Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya!
 This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.
 

We dive into one of Jason's all-time favorite games: Robo Rally, where you program little robots to play capture the flag while shooting each other with lasers and avoiding deathtraps. Also, some stuff about remote-controlled bacteria and computers destroying the world with paperclips.
Timestamps
0:04 - Remote-controlled bacteria2:18 - Robo Rally background7:54 - Game mechanics and updates12:07 - CPUs, GPUs, and computing17:32 - Machine learning22:12 - Factory automation25:38 - Grades and final thoughts
Links
Life-sized RoboRally
CPG Grey and AI (video 1)
CPG Grey and AI (video 2)
Full Transcript
Brian  0:04  Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.
Jason  0:10  Today we'll be talking about Robo rally by renegade game studios. Well, welcome to another episode of Gaming with science. I'm Jason.
Brian  0:18  I'm Brian.
Jason  0:19  And today we'll be talking about Robo Rally. Well, before we get into the main topic, though, fun science fact. So Brian, your turn this time? What fun science thing Have you learned in the past bit?
Brian  0:28  So yes, what did I find for us this week, based on the inspiration of Robo Rally and expressing my very severe biology bias, I found an interesting story about remote control the bacteria, maybe were more remote activated than remote controlled, there's a particular strain of E. coli that's approved for medical use in humans. And it can preferentially be taken up by cancer cells, you inject the bacteria into the bloodstream, and they will colonize cancer cells, because they're pretty good at living with less oxygen and solid tumors will often have a lower oxygen environment inside of them. They carry a type of engineered gene that can be turned on by heat very specifically. And by getting them to turn on this gene, you can have the make anti-cancer drugs, for instance. Now how do you turn this on inside of a human being, you basically use a combination of soundwaves to raise temperature in a very specific location at the site of the tumor, which is now colonized by these bacteria. And you kind of like trigger them to maybe not detonate but just start pumping out things that will kill cancer cells.
Jason  1:34  So you basically turn E. coli into a bunch of little suicide bombers.
Brian  1:37  Well, a bunch of little Yeah, a bunch of little attack robots, but a little attack drones saboteur. Yes, saboteur is for sure. Under normal circumstances, you probably don't want E. Coli in your cells, but the enemy of my enemy, I suppose,
Jason  1:49  as long as they don't cure the disease by killing the host. If they're approved for clinical trials, then I assume that little hurdle has been passed. Yeah,
Brian  1:57  you're you're able to use this inside of people, there is a strain of E coli you can inject into someone's bloodstream, and that is an approved form of therapy. 
Jason  2:05  Okay... Well, on to the actual topic for today, which is Robo rally. I wanted to do this as soon as I thought about this podcast. Robo rally has been one of my favorite games, since I first played it way back in college. It actually has an interesting history. So it was first published back in 1994. It was first designed in 1985 by Richard Garfield, whose name you might recognize if you're in the gaming area, because he took it to a little gaming company called Wizards of the Coast, who told him that it looked like a great game, but it'd be too expensive for them to produce. So they wanted something that would be cheaper and easier for people to carry around. They could play at a convention. So he spent a few years and came up with this little like unknown card game called Magic the Gathering. And after that became a smash success was there said okay, maybe we can publish the robot game now. So interesting sidenote, Richard Garfield, he's not just some random game designer, I think, based on the time and it looks like he designed Robo rally while he was getting his Bachelor's in Computer mathematics. And he did Magic the Gathering while getting his PhD in combinatorial mathematics. So he has the actual like scientific computational chops behind this, and I think it shows in the game design. Anyway, it's gone through a few iterations. There's the original 1994 release. There's the 2005 rerelease under Avalon Hill, that's the one that I originally owned. Then it got released again in 2016, with a major rules upgrade. And then the one we're going to be talking about is the current edition, the 2023, one by Renegade Games Studios, which mostly builds off the 2016 edition with a few little tweaks in terms of like product quality and tiny little rules tweaks, as far as I can tell,
Brian  3:42  oh, wow. So this is the third edition of this game at this point, basically.
Jason  3:46  Basiicaly or 2.5, or something, there's only two really different editions, there's the original one, which is like 94, and 2005. And then there's the 2016 2023, although there's some some minor tweaks, so it's more like 2.5 edition.
Brian  4:01  So it's just like Dungeons and Dragons, you skip over one edition.
Jason  4:04  Something like that. Yes. And the Board Game Geek ranks on these are all over the place. I mean, the originals, the highest rank that around 500, 2016 is about 1500. The current one is around 5000. But I think there's a bias there in terms of just how many people have reviewed them, because the current one actually has the highest average rating among users. But it's got the lowest rank. So there's something with the algorithm putting it there, but the people who have ranked it on average seem to like the most recent one best. And I've got to say after playing it, I kind of like it. There's a lot of quality of life changes that happened from the my original version to this one that I like it's a little bit more streamlined. There's some of the clunkiness that has gone out. I do enjoy this version better. As far as what the game consists of, for those of you who've never played it. The idea of the game is that you're playing these little robots that are running around the factory floor playing basically battle bot Capture the Flag, they're trying to touch a little flags on the board. and shooting each other with lasers. And if that were all it were, it'd be, it'd be an OK game. But the thing is, this is a nightmarish factory. And so there are conveyor belts and bottomless pits, and pushers and lasers, some of the expansions, you can get to have water or things, the old ones have like oil slicks, and flame throwers, crushers, there's all sorts of stuff going on on these boards. And your goal is to move your robot around the battlefield. Now, the main thing that makes this challenging is that you do this by virtue of having a stack of cards that are your programming cards, you draw up to nine every turn, and then you put five of them down facedown in a row. And those are your next five moves. So you have to program your robot five moves at a time to move it around the board. If it were just an empty, featureless void, this would be trivial, it would not be a problem. But the fact is that with all the board elements going on and other players going around, you have to keep in your mind visualizing where will my robot be, which direction will be facing, what board elements will be changing things, and what my other people do to screw me over. So really, the strategy in the game comes from being able to visualize multiple steps ahead and keep all these different moving parts in your head and how they affect what your robot will be doing. And a lot of the fun comes from that going wrong, either for yourself or my personal favorite being able to screw over other people by running into them, or pushing them off the plant track, or anything like that. So it's a bunch of little computer controlled chaos, basically. And so why is it on here, because it's actually not trying to be a science game. And most of the games we're aiming to do in this podcast are science focused? Well, I mean, the primary reasons, because it's one of my favorite games, and that's one of the hosts, I can do that. But the other one is that it actually is a pretty decent representation of computer programming. For my day job, I've been doing computer coding for oof, 20 years now?, something like that, ever since graduate school. And playing the game actually feels a lot like programming a computer, you've got to think several steps ahead, you have very specific incremental steps you can do in the game, it's like you move forward two spaces you turn, right, you make a U-turn something like that very small defined steps that you have to piece together into a much more complicated whole to in order to accomplish some objective. And as happens with real computer programming, things go wrong and crap happens. And what I thought would be great, I make some mistake, or I forgot about something on the board and everything goes wrong, because in the game, if you turn right instead of left, or if their conveyor belt moves you two spaces when you thought it would move you one, suddenly your entire program is off. And instead of touching the flag, this turn, you instead end up falling off the bottomless pit or ramming into a wall or getting shot by four different laser beams or something crazy like that,
Brian  7:49  you're still running that program, the fact that you made a mistake doesn't matter, you still have to deal with the consequences. 
Jason  7:54  Yeah, and so the main parts of the game are the actual boards that you go on. This version comes with four double sided boards, there's already some expansions out, you can get to have additional ones with some additional board hazards. You can also just find these online, not necessarily the copyrighted ones that come with the game, but people have liked the game for 30 years at this point. And so people have just made custom boards or icon elements, so you can download custom sheets to print out. In fact, I think the quintessential one of that is you can look up YouTube videos of people doing a like life sized one made out of Lego robots at GenCon a few years ago. So you can watch people programming them and seeing these life side robots, which they made look like some of the robots in the game. And some of them are like R2D2 and Wally and such moving around this life sized board. So anyway, you've got your boards, you've got your minis, you've got your cards, and there's a few other things, some tokens and like little energy cubes, but the main things are the board that you move around to the robots you're moving and the card to use the program along with a shared set of damaged cards and upgrade cards that represent when you take damage that kind of fill your deck with useless stuff or random stuff. And the upgrade cards which let you do extra things.
Brian  9:09  So one thing about this new version is the actual bot minis got a significant upgrade, right? 
Jason  9:15  Yeah, so previously, they're just unpainted plastic miniatures. For any of you that have the old version, good life hack, you can use those little plastic things that go around house keys. You can put those around the base to differentiate them if you're if you like me have no skill at painting miniatures, but these ones are actually all pre painted minis there's only six instead of the original eight, so maybe they're aiming for a smaller player count. But yes, they're pre painted. The original original game was actually pewter minis which are really high quality but also kind of expensive and apparently some people complained about that at the time because while nice, it did make the price significantly higher. Okay, so Robo rally builds itself as being for two to six players, ages 12 and up. Again, you can play with younger kids but if you want to play, especially the more advanced courses, probably on the upper end of that, I know my daughter used to love not playing the game, she wanted to set up the board for us to play and she was a sadist, she would make the most difficult hardest board she could possibly do when she was like eight, because she didn't want to play it, she just wanted to watch us suffer. She has thankfully gotten beyond that a little bit. Normal game times it claims is about 45 to 90 minutes. Obviously, that's very scalable. You can do this on just a single board with a single flag, in which case, it can be over in 15 minutes if you play it fast. Or you can have multiple boards hooked together with multiple flags all over the place. And you could do a two or even three hour game. I mean, theoretically, if you get a bunch of the expansions, you could make an absolutely massive board that takes probably multiple days to run. But why would someone do that to themselves? It's a game enjoy for the time it is, Brian, you're usually talking about the metaphor of the game. Well, the metaphor of this game is that basically, this is what happens after the lights go out at the factory. So the humans go home, then all the robots power up and they do this little racing while the humans aren't there to stop them. I think in previous editions, they actually said this is a highly advanced automated factory in the future. And the AI's that run it are just super, super bored. And so this is how they're entertaining themselves. 
Brian  11:16  But, that's not the metaphor anymore? It's not the super advanced AI? 
Jason  11:19  No, no, this is just what the robots are. autonomous robots are just battling with each other for entertainment.Yep. Because that's what you do when the humans go home. 
Brian  11:28  Yeah, I guess if you could just be reassembled, and it doesn't really matter if you fall into a bottomless pit, then why not?
Speaker 1  11:33  Yes. And that's definitely one of the quality of life upgrades is that previous editions, you had limited number of lives, which if you lost them, then you're out of the game. And that's just not fun to just sit on the sidelines watching everyone else. So now you have infinite respawns, although you do take a little bit of a hit every time, just so it's not free. Especially because there is a valid strategy of touching the flag of one point, killing yourself so that you respond closer to your next flag. And you can basically get a jump on that.
Brian  11:57  Yeah, we actually did that in one of our family play sessions, I think. So like, well, if you just dive yourself down to this pit, you'll be in a more tactical position for the next flag.
Jason  12:06  Yep, All right. Now as for the actual science here, so I admit, when I first put this up, I knew I wanted to do Robo Rally, I didn't really know where the science would be. So I started looking at it and looking at the pieces. And the part that really stuck is the programming phase where you put down the five cards, and they call that the register. So there are five registers each turn, and you have to do those five in order as you lay them down. Now I knew that registers were something in computer programming, but I didn't really know what so I started looking up and then I went down a rabbit hole. Because it turns out this has to do with the way CPU architecture is built the difference between CPUs and GPUs, which we'll get to cryptocurrency machine learning, like this is like literally the core of all computation here, in this little board game, the five card register, roughly speaking, well, similar to that, that computers can do more than five things. But yeah, because the register turns out the register is part of the CPU, the central processing unit, that is what makes a computer run, it's what handles all the computation and data and stuff. And the register is what actually does those computations. And it can only hold a small number of things at a time. And kind of the size of that register determines the quality of your CPU. A lot of you have probably heard about like 32 bit architecture versus the 64 bit architecture. And the 64 bit architecture is the newer that's determines how much stuff can actually be held in the CPU 64 bits. And it just lets it do more things at once and handle larger numbers. Now, the interesting thing here is when I started looking into it, I've heard about CPUs and GPUs graphical processing units, because they turned out they're very useful for certain types of computation. They were actually originally designed for what the name says graphical processing. So these are the things running in your game consoles, PlayStations, Xbox, etc, to do these high end 3D graphics, but then people found out they were really useful for all sorts of other things, the biggest ones probably being machine learning. So programming, these AI algorithms, including things like chat, GTP, and Dali, and these other big AI programs, and then cryptocurrency mining, specifically Bitcoin, but presumably also the others. And the reason has to do with the way they're built. So a central processing unit, the one that's in most people's computers, its goal is to be able to do everything. So it can be highly flexible. It can take all sorts of different things in it can take different processing functions and different needs, and it can move them around and allocate resources and be very, very flexible. But because of that it's not super fast, relatively speaking. I mean, obviously, nowadays, chips are actually quite fast relative to previous ones. But relative to the other person in town, the GPU, CPUs are actually kind of slow, because they have to have that flexibility. A GPU is not flexible. It has much, much less ability to do other types of programming or do with different types of programming, but what it does is it does a certain type of calculations over and over and over again very, very well. It's basically set up to do many, many more times this calculation in parallel, thus making that particular calculation faster. Now, this is really useful for applications where you essentially have to do the same thing. a bajillion times, like with graphics processing, you just have to render the screen. That's all you're doing. It's always the exact same thing. Just render what the screen looks like, with crypto mining, you have to do the I actually don't know how Bitcoin crypto mining was it something about hash codes, curious
Brian  15:38  primes or something, I don't know.
Jason  15:40  Something like that. I don't do crypto mining, I don't understand it. But lots of people are trying to make lots of money by using GPUs to do that. And then machine learning it's training. It's crunching all the data and running all these different algorithms on it, actually not running that many different now the same algorithm just many, many times. And so that's why GPUs are so favorable for some things. And that's why there's actually a shortage of them right now. I was talking to someone the other day, they said that someone I think they were saying the UK has basically bought all GPU units that are going to be produced in the next six months already, like they're backlogged at this point. Now, I suspect that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but it gives you an idea, these things are in really hot demand precisely because of their ability to run these sorts of computation. I suspect the UK wants them not for crypto mining, but probably for machine learning applications.
Brian  16:29  Interesting, so a GPU is good at doing one thing, it's it's a brute force solution to one type of calculation.
Jason  16:37  Yeah, basically, someone made the comparison that a CPU is like a fighter jet. It's fast, it's maneuverable, it can do all sorts of things. But you can't actually carry that much stuff in it. So if your goal is to move something from point A to point B, you don't want to use a fighter jet. Whereas if you have like a shipping barge, like it's not fast, it's not maneuverable, but it can move a ton of stuff. And so by virtue of having the GPU being able to move a ton of calculations, the net effect is that you're able to do those calculations much, much faster. A different comparison someone made is that a CPU is like a small team of geniuses who can do anything you want them to do, but they take a little while to learn the new system and get it set up and going. Whereas the GPU is like a an army of people who may not be geniuses, they're just Okay people, but you have them doing the same thing over and over and over again. And so they just due to the scale of how many you have working, they're able to get it done quickly.
Brian  17:37  So in the metaphor of Robo rally, we're dealing with a CPU a flexible programmable register,
Jason  17:43  pretty much yeah, this it's too simple to be a GPU.
Brian  17:45  So what would a GPU be in Robo rally?
Jason  17:49  Ooh, that I don't know if it could be represented in the game. Because unless you were doing something where you were actually trying to learn the game, by playing it against itself, it's almost like you'd have to be a bit of a metagame where you use it to play the game a whole bunch of times to learn the strategies and then implement them on the individual CPU calculations. Because I can't think of any way where you want to have like 12 different registers going at once and all your different robots going in different directions to figure out which one actually works.
Brian  18:20  You're, you're running an army of bots instead of one bot.
Jason  18:23  Yeah, although people have done that, not to play the game, but as a teaching tool. So when I was looking into this, I found that Robo rally has been used for a long time to teach computation to people, to high school students and undergraduates and such, sometimes it's really simple. It's just a basic board. And they'll just have the robot that they write the programming code to help it navigate around obstacles and end up getting to the flag. That's pretty simple. But I saw one person who had enough that they were actually doing machine learning on it. So it was the students tasks to train a machine learning algorithm to play Robo rally by itself. It's not explicitly programmed that here's the flag, make sure you go forward towards the flag, turn to avoid obstacles, but rather just play the game a bajillion times, and learn the rules so that you can play it on your own. This is things like Deep Mind and stuff did with AlphaGo. The original chess program was deep blue, I think. And it was more of a brute force programming. But modern ones I suspect use machine learning like this. They're using it for go for poker for pretty much all the things you're doing now with games, they're not trying to explicitly program in the rules of the game. They're just trying to have the computer essentially play against itself a whole bunch of times and learn the rules. 
Brian  19:36  That's interesting, because in those systems, I've seen people do things like this to try to teach an AI how to play Pokemon and you need to set the rules up very carefully to reward and punish appropriately. And I know the flags are the objective, but how's it going to accidentally find the flags? train it to Oh, don't go off the board or you can't stand still or stuff like that.
Jason  19:58  Yeah, basically, and again, And I don't know the algorithmic details of this, I know some of the terminology. But basically, when it does something that you want, which the first many hundreds or 1000s of times will basically be by random chance, it gets rewarded. So something about the way code is executed, that time gets strengthened, so it's more likely to happen again. Whereas if something bad happens, you go off the board, you fall down a pit, whatever, then you get punished. And we're literally talking 1000s upon 1000s of plays, just to get the first step, and then you iteratively go there. So these complex machine learning algorithms that can play Go and chess and pokimane, I've seen Minecraft and StarCraft being worked on, they take probably millions to billions of plays to learn the rules, basically. But by the end of it, they're actually really good. In fact, I remember when AlphaGo beat the world Go champion. The thing with it was that because it had played against itself, instead of learning from past human ones, it came up with strategies that humans don't do. Because Go is taught from essentially master to student you learn from other humans. And so there's a bit of culture in terms of like, Oh, these are the kinds of moves you make, like chess has certain opening moves and such. The computer didn't care. It just did whatever it happened to find. And so it found some solutions that were way outside the box, as far as human Go playing was, someone described it as Go from Mars, in some ways, that was probably give it an edge to beat the humans just because it did things that they weren't expecting,
Brian  21:27  Sort of developed its own culture. Here's my biology bias. Again, this sounds an awful lot like natural selection.
Jason  21:32  That's exactly what it is. In fact, early versions of this were called genetic algorithms, because you would actually mutate them, and then select the ones that worked best. And then you'd mutate them again, and so on. If you look under the hood, what they're doing, they're actually making many, many, many different versions of these AIs, randomly mutating them, keeping the ones that do best mutating those again, over and over and over again. So they're iteratively, improving it. And they are essentially evolving computers that can do these tasks.
Brian  22:00  I guess it's almost an extreme example of artificial selection, because you've set the task in front of it that you wanted to do, but you could do it millions, billions of times.
Jason  22:10  Yeah. And there's some really good YouTube videos on this. So it's CPG. Gray has a good one on just general artificial intelligence training. And then there's a bunch of people that actually show you what it looks like to train an AI to do something like to have a make a little AR avatar walk, just giving it basic instructions or play various games are such they're all over YouTube. So it's interesting. I mean, it's very fascinating. Watching the computer learn to do things also may be a little bit scary as people are realizing what's chat GTP as we're getting ones that are good enough to mimic a human and do things. I'm not worried about computers taking over the world yet, although that actually kind of leads into the third thing I wanted to talk about. Because looking into this, like I found stuff about basic computer programming, I found stuff about CPUs and GPUs, the last one I looked into was automated manufacturing. This is sort of like the quintessential end goal of replacing people with robots in factories, which is where you have a factory that is essentially completely robotic, there are no humans there. Or maybe there's like one to make sure things don't break, or maybe a few people doing quality control. But otherwise, the factory runs itself. So the company Phillips, that makes razors, they have a factory like this in the Netherlands, apparently there's got they've got some humans there that are only for quality control. And then this next one actually made me laugh. So there's a company called FANUC, F A N U C don't know how to pronounce that. In Japan, they have a an automated factory, where the robots are making more robots. And they can do about 50 robots per day, they work 24/7, they can go a full month without any humans checking in. And it has the advantages that they don't have to have lighting or heat or air conditioning or anything like that, that the humans need. But as I read that, I had to think Have you not seen any science fiction films about how robots actually do take over the world? The point at which you have robots making more robots is the point at which they start taking over the world.
Brian  24:06  Oh, they have. That's why they did it. What sorts of robots are they making?
Jason  24:11  I don't know. I mean, they could just be other manufacturing robots and such. The thing is like, I'm actually not concerned about robots taking over the world in terms like, oh, they suddenly develop sentience and want to command themselves and be autonomous and get rid of their human over masters. I don't think we can make AI that good yet. I'm more worried about what someone called, I think it was termed the paperclip problem. All you need is for a sufficiently powerful AI whose job it is to make paperclips. decide the best way to do that is to convert all other mass on the planet into paperclips. And that's not being able to stop it. It has no intelligence as far as we would understand it. It has no morality. It's not evil. It's just doing its job in a very efficient and kind of unfortunate way. That's the kind of AI I'm worried about is where it will do what we have programmed it to do so well that we suffer unintended consequences from it. Probably not from paperclips. But well, this is not the time to get into a spiral off tangent in terms of what social media and all that sort of stuff is doing with AI. That's where it concerns me. But thankfully, Robo rally is just cute little robots playing. When that laser tag gets actually they're shooting each other trying to blow each other up. So cute little robots playing battle bot, capture the flag in a factory at night when the humans have gone home.
Brian  25:28  It's full contact laser tag.
Jason  25:30  Yes. Oh, definitely pushing is a big part of this. There's nothing better than being able to push someone's robot one space to the side and throw off their entire plans.
Brian  25:39  Yeah, we went pretty pretty far away from I can't remember which direction a conveyor belt goes to AI is making paper clips that convert the entire planet into paper clips.
Jason  25:48  Yes, well, I mean, maybe we'll be better off and we'll just have the AI is will convert the entire planet into computational infrastructure for them to play Go against each other. That may be more like where we're heading now. But yes, we did have that issue where you cannot remember which way conveyor belts go. So I know any game in the future, I just need to introduce conveyor belts, so I can win.
Brian  26:08  But how well do you think the aim of Robo rally sort of represents the science of the metaphor? Is it doing a good job?
Jason  26:16  So this was tricky for me. And I was thinking about this because we wanted to give letter grades like how well does this actually represent the science of running a robot. And on the one hand, there's not that much science here, I mean, I did have to go looking a little bit to try to find something because it really is just Battle Bot Capture the Flag. That's what the game is trying to be. It's not trying to encapsulate a scientific project. But on the other hand, playing the game feels like writing computer code, it actually feels very similar to me. And I can see it being a good introductory thing for like, middle schoolers or such to teach them the very basics of, hey, this is how programming goes. And such. And so I think, for that point, in terms of capturing the the feel, and the essence of writing code of programming a computer, I think it does pretty well. I mean, if I were to give it a grade, I'd probably give it. Well, here's the thing as just pure science portrayal, probably like a B, B+. But if you take it like how much science is actually trying to convey, I'd bump it up to an A or an A-, because it's not trying to convey a lot of science. It's just trying to be fun. And using a little bit of computer science to do that. And it does that little bit quite well. 
Brian  27:21  Okay, well if we're going to look at it just purely from the science perspective, you think maybe a B+ then?
Jason  27:26  something like that. And that's mostly just because it doesn't have that much in it. 
Brian  27:29  Yeah, this is not an inherent objective of the game. It's there, but you kind of gotta go looking for it.
Jason  27:35  Yeah, which is not a problem. Like not all games need to have something in the science. So
Brian  27:40  Well, that's true. But our games do you have to have at least a little bit. So what does this game feel like to play? So let's see. Not facts, but feelings on this. For me, it makes me feel like I'm crazy.
Jason  27:54  How so? like, like, I can see frustration. But what do you mean crazy? 
Brian  27:58  It makes me feel like I am five years old and can't remember left from right. 
Jason  28:02  Okay yes, that happens. There have definitely been times I turned left when I meant to turn right. Yeah, I think one of our games that happened at least once, possibly twice.
Brian  28:09  It's interesting to me that the metaphor of the game is no longer I am an advanced AI because if I am an advanced AI, I evidently am one that cannot solve basic CAPTCHAs of what is a left and what is it a right, so maybe in that way, sure. I don't mind playing Robo rally, it's fine. I'm not good at the game. So it's really about feeling that I am offering very little competition for someone I'm playing with. But as long as they don't mind, I don't mind being a bad player at the game. It's enjoyable to watch your robot get pushed in unexpected ways.
Jason  28:38  I totally agree. In fact, it was infamous in my family that we owned this game. And it was my favorite game for like five or six years before I actually won a game. But I still loved it. It's one of those games where I don't care if I win. It's just fun to play. And sometimes it's even more fun to lose spectacularly.
Brian  28:56  So for those of us might be more videogame inclined for anybody who played Portal 2 the end of the game involves sort of a collaborative work of two robots trying to solve a puzzle and get through a complex factory. That's a collaborative game. In a way Robo rally feels a little bit like that. But you are not working together. You are explicitly working against each other. But it would be interesting to see what a collaborative form of Robo rally would look like.
Jason  29:21  I bet people could hack that and now you have me wanting to make the portal gun upgrade for you just be insane. Although there are teleporters and one of the expansions so actually not that crazy.
Brian  29:31  That can be one of the upgrade cards. Yeah, your laser creates a portal on a flat surface. 
Jason  29:36  Yeah, Okay, so how about you? If you had to grade the gameplay? How would this go? 
Brian  29:41  Oh, that's difficult for me. Because again, it's like, I know this is one of your favorite games. It's one that I'm happy to play, but it's not one that I'm super enthusiac. Yeah, it's not what I'm gonna get off the shelf. So if it just my own pure grade, I'm gonna have to give it a B, B- because it's not going to be one that's going to be a go to.
Jason  29:57  Okay, and obviously, you can probably guess I'm gonna give it an A or an A+, just because I think it is a blast to play, especially if you can get four or five people so that the robots are all running into each other a lot. We played it first with just two people. And it's, it's okay with two people. But you don't get that much interaction, when you have four or five, and you're all running into each other and shooting each other, it becomes a lot more fun, at least from my definition of fun. 
Brian  30:19  And we've done some of those games with more people. Luckily, it's not just the two of us, we do get to test these games out with a larger player count. And so we do kind of know what that's like as well. So you would recommend it clearly?
Jason  30:31  I would clearly recommend this. I love this game. And I actually really liked the rules upgrade. So I think they did a lot of good improvements for it. And I think I now prefer the newest version over the one I originally bought just because it's a little bit slicker and smoother. And the good news is that most of the pieces, especially the boards are actually still compatible, you just slap the board down, maybe figure out how to put a few of the new, the new elements on what stickers are just print off little things you can just place on as temporary tokens or something. But otherwise, it's still completely compatible.
Brian  31:02  I don't think we talked about this last time, what's the price point on this.
Jason  31:05  So when I got this, the MSRP was $50. Obviously, you can get it for less at Big box stuff for Amazon, we always encourage people to support your local game stores, which are probably selling it at full price. So I just consider that to be the tax for keeping my friendly local game store in business. But I would rather pay a little bit extra and make sure it's going in the pocket of someone who is here and local and who loves board games then to, Well, let's be blunt, Amazon technically has humans running it. But mostly it's run by an AI.
Brian  31:33  So we don't want to support robots?
Jason  31:36  They're doing just fine on their own. I can go to my local game store and Amazon will not care.
Brian  31:42  $50 actually doesn't seem that bad for a game that you're gonna get this much replay out of. And with that this was sort of intrinsic resources available so many ways to support it. So many different ways to play it if you want to hack it if you like it $50 seems like a good value.
Jason  31:56  Yeah, you get a few replays out of it. It's definitely worth it. And there's definitely a very devoted fan base that you can find on the internet with all sorts of stuff. All right. Well, I think that's where we're going to wrap it up. Thank you very much everyone for listening. Until next time, have fun, have good games, and we will see you next time. See ya. This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to Gaming with Science. This podcast is produced with the support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe
 

Our very first episode. We start with bio-inspired (or just plain biological) sensors, and move on to the game Photosynthesis, which is about growing trees until you harvest them for victory points. 
Timestamps:
1:09 - Artificial maple seed sensors3:30 - Plants as land mine sensors5:45 - Introduction to Photosynthesis8:50 - Ecological Succession (or maybe Forestry)14:19 - How seeds move around16:24 - Not that much photosynthesis in Photosynthesis18:12 - Soil fertility24:14 - Gameplay experience31:42 - Grading the game
Game results
- Game 1: Jason 77, Brian 62- Game 2: Jason 92, Brian 64
Links:
- Photosynthesis official website- 3D-printed maple seed sensors- Plants as land mine sensors
Full Transcript:
Jason  0:06  Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.
Brian  0:12  In today's episode, we're going to talk about photosynthesis from Blue Orange Games.
Hey, I'm Brian.
Jason  0:23  This is Jason.
Brian  0:25  So we're both plant scientists, biologists, and general all-around nerds. And welcome to gaming with science. This is our first episode.
Jason  0:32  So, I have been feeling that, for those of you who are just coming to this because you want to try it out, thank you. For those of you who are coming from the future and are watching this after we've become rich and famous and have millions of followers, I apologize because this is our first episode, we're still figuring things out. So things will probably be a little rough relative to the later ones. We hope.
Brian  0:51  Yeah, we'll come back and fix it. We'll just replace it with a better recording in the future. And you'll never know.
Speaker 1  0:56  You know, we won't do that. We don't have time. We're  university professors, we don't have time to do that.
Brian  1:03  Fair enough. Okay. All right. So what are we going to be talking about today?
Speaker 1  1:09  Well, I was thinking we'd start off with a fun science fact. And this one's actually related to the game today. So our game today is photosynthesis. And just last week, I saw that someone been doing some bio-inspired engineering. And so a group...I forgot to see where they were from, we'll post it in the show notes. But there's this whole drive to send out environmentally friendly sensors to use to take remote sensing data, temperature, pH, other things that are useful to monitor the environment and see how it's doing. And a lot of people are modeling these off of various seeds. And so this new group has done 3d printing of biocompatible polymers. So they're biodegradable, they're eco friendly, in the shape of maple seeds. And the idea is that the biopolymer, is impregnated with a whole bunch of metal nanoparticles. So very, very tiny bits of metal, they're attached to certain chemical compounds, and they fluoresce. So you shine a light on them, and they shine a different, a different frequency of light comes back out. But the thing is the type of fluorescence the wavelength, I'm not an engineer, I don't know the details, but it changes based on the temperature of the sensor. So the idea is you can take a bunch of these artificial maple seeds that they just print off a 3d printer with the right stuff, you go in, I guess, you distribute them by helicopter or something, they whirligig down and spread out, just like natural maple seeds. And then you can just fly a drone over at some later point and read in the correct wavelengths of light and be able to say, Okay, what's the temperature on the ground right here, and they have data showing that, Oh, as the temperature goes up by five or 10 degrees, then this is how the qualities of it change. And if I was reading it, right--again, not my area--but if I was reading the paper, right, it sounds like out in the wild, these things are expected to last a few years, like probably one to three years before they break down and decompose entirely. Obviously, not permanent. But that's kind of the point is they don't want be spreading out plastic and electronic waste everywhere to monitor it, they want something that you can throw out, and then it breaks back down.
Speaker 2  3:17  I can see the connection, and part of this game is going to be about seed dissemination and literally, maple is is in this game. So that's pretty cool. This is not the topic I thought you were going to talk about, though. I had seen something, again, with the idea of, of biological sensors, where they had engineered plants to respond to certain compounds in the soil and change color, and in such a way that you could easily monitor the presence of particular toxins. Of course, at that point, you're spreading genetically engineered plants out into the environment, which is something people aren't super enthused about. But the idea is really interesting. But again, that idea of a system, this is kind of the opposite. This is using biology to mimic a sensor, instead of using a sensor that mimics biology.
Speaker 1  4:01  Yeah, what would they be? What are the point of that be? I guess, where would be the most use for that sort of thing? Would it be like contaminated sites like Superfund sites, so you could get a very fine grain without having to take like a bajillion soil tests to figure out where the contamination is?
Speaker 2  4:16  The specific use case that I remember seeing, I'll go back and find this for the show notes as well was detection of explosives to detect landmines that were buried.
Jason  4:25  Okay, that's cool. That's very cool.
Brian  4:27  Because again, you wouldn't want to take 1000 soil samples, you just would say, hey, those red plants over there, don't go over there.
Jason  4:33  I was gonna say if there's landmines I don't want to take any soil samples.
Speaker 2  4:38  So that was the one I remember. I'll find that for the show notes. 
Speaker 1  4:41  Yeah, that would definitely be cool. I can definitely see. I mean, there's there's widespread issues to genetic engineering. I mean, there's no fitness benefit to being able to sense an explosive so I, like, we're gonna need to have a GMO discussion at some point probably. This is not the time to open that particular can of worms. But yes, let's say there's probably some pretty high regulatory burdens to get that particular product out. And in, in the field. I got, I have to wonder how many of these ideas started as someone just thinking, hey, that would be cool. Like, what if we could plant plants that would change color in the presence of landmines? What if we made sensors that flew down like maple seeds? I mean, you gotta admit, when I was a kid, I would just grab gather at maple seeds and just toss them in the air because they look super cool. And I wonder how much of that design is not like the whole thing. I mean, it has to withstand rounds of engineering and funding and all sorts of stuff. But that first initial germ of an idea is like, hey, this would be really cool.
Speaker 2  5:38  Yeah, you wonder if that's right. Was it the use case that came first? And then you figure out how to do it? Or was it the other way around?
Unknown Speaker  5:44  Don't know.
Brian  5:45  Yeah.
Jason  5:46  So anyway, bring it I think, bring this out into this game. So photosynthesis, which this is only the second time I've ever played this, but you own this game.
Speaker 2  5:56  We do. So photosynthesis is produced by Blue Orange Games. It was released in 2017. With game designer, Hjalmar Hach and art designer Sabrina Miramon. It's for two to four players. We only played two player, I think we've played four player before.
Jason  6:10  Yeah
Brian  6:10  Age is...ages are eight and up, which you can usually subtract a couple years from that based on your child, I suppose. I think eight's probably pretty accurate, though, based on you know, my look at this.
Speaker 1  6:23  I think so. I think you could probably play a simplified game with like a six or seven year old, but keeping track of them and playing optimally, is definitely going to require a higher age level. So like, if you just want a kid, the kid just wants to grow some trees, then you can play easy mode photosynthesis, But to play it real? Yeah, probably eight and up.
Speaker 2  6:41  It's probably one of those where a group of kids could play. And a group of adults could play. But if you're going to be mixed mixing skills and ages, you might have some different experiences there. 45 To 60 minutes to play, which seems about accurate to me, I think you could play a little faster if you're trying to play faster. I think we did.
Jason  7:00  Yeah, there are only two of us that made it easy. And yes, we, we had a hard deadline. So we were definitely playing the speed chess version of photosynthesis.
Speaker 2  7:08  So the setup of the board, you have a circular hex board. And two dimensional tree stands of different sizes. There's four different trees, each of them...they don't really play any different, but they all look a little different, slightly different colors. Good for colorblind, you know, they're all very distinct and easy to pick out and represent from each other. The conceit of the board is that you have a sun tracker that will rotate clockwise around the board at each corner of the hex sort of shows what direction the light is coming from. So the objective of the game is when you start, this board represents an empty field with no trees on it at all. You'll start by placing your small trees around the outside, and you'll collect light points that are the economy of the game that we'll use to plant seeds, grow up your trees to maturity, and then once they are mature, you'll, you'll collect you'll kill those trees to score your points. So when that tree is fully grown, you're able to remove it from the board and collect points that are based on the soil richness is how it's described in the game. With more points being awarded, the closer you are to the middle of the board, and sort of a rank scoring system. That's kinda like priority scoring, the first person to score in that area will get more points than the last person to collect in that area. Which actually is something I hadn't really thought about. There's, maybe there's a little bit of a metaphor there, too, that we should touch on
Speaker 1  8:29  a note we can reach for that later. Honestly, the difference in priority is not huge. We're talking like one or two points difference. So it's like, if it's a really tight game, then that matters. But in our our experience looking at some people on lines, like most times, it's a difference of a hole, you scored five times versus six times. So
Speaker 2  8:50  I can't...you're kind of right. I wonder what the game would have to look like to have that matter? Because it seemed like for the most part anyway, we can talk about design choices later, I suppose. So when I was researching this game, the major scientific concepts that I saw, that we're going to talk about in more detail are ecological succession, seed dissemination, photosynthesis, which the game spends not that much time talking about, really, and a little bit on soil fertility. So I think let's, let's talk about that aspect, sort of what those are, how the game is representing them. So ecological succession in the first place. So what is that? There are two types of ecological succession: primary ecological succession is like what happens after you've had lava completely like obliterate terrain, there is nothing ther. Life is biodiversity is at zero. And at that point, things like lichens and bacteria and eventually hardy plants come and they rebuild the soil. Primary succession is about rebuilding the soil reestablishing biodiversity in terrain that's been completely stripped of all life. Then you've got secondary succession. This is a different process, the soil is still there. But the plants are not. And that is what we're representing in photosynthesis. We have an area of land with no trees on it. 
Jason  10:16  It was basically clear cut.
Brian  10:17  That is probably what happens, there was no other indication of any other sort of ecological disturbance, there was just nothing there. Succession is this process where plants will come back and recall as an area. And one thing that this game represents well is how the plants are competing with each other for space, for light, for other aspects. We don't really think about plants competing with one another. But that is what drives ecological succession is availability of light, availability of space. It's why we see a sort of regular pattern of succession of plants, starting with things that require a more open light environment until the trees come in, and they will shade out everything else. And then you'll see a transition in species during that. The secondary succession is driven by disturbances. Those disturbances can be as small as a tree falling over creating new space for something else to come in, or a forest fire or something like that. So this is really the key metaphor that this game is trying to represent is secondary ecological succession plants competing with one another for light for space. 
Speaker 1  11:22  Yeah, we've got, presumably, we have some forest around this clearing that is still intact, and that's where all the initial plants come from. And then this clearing is slowly being recolonized over, I don't know, you figured we're looking at the lifetime of a tree. So this could take several decades of time that are passing for, for the game.
Speaker 2  11:39  Yeah, I'm not sure what they're trying to represent. The sun moves around the grove, that's an important thing. So obviously, there's some cycle going on. But it doesn't really seem like it's a year, it seems like it must be a longer period of time of some kind.
Speaker 1  11:50  Yeah, well, this is the point where when you have to make a choice of making a fun game, and being completely accurate to the science, people choose to make a fun game. And I agree with that choice. The point like if you make a very accurate scientific game, that is also boring, no one's gonna play it. I'd rather have a very fun game that has some minor deviations from accuracy, or even major ones, as long as it's fun to play.
Speaker 2  12:13  Yeah, I think I think you're right, I think as long as the sort of the key concept is still there, and it's still being represented, I think that that's fine. And you can present it in different...I mean, obviously, there are board games that go up and down the scale in terms of how much they're trying to simulate things based on sort of the objectives. But as long as the key mechanics sort of still represent, I think that this does a pretty good job of sort of getting this key concept of plants competing for space in light, for sure.
Speaker 1  12:39  Definitely, the one odd thing there, one of these acceptable breaks is the fact that all the plants of the same species are working together. So one strategy is you have a bunch of tiny plants around the edges of the board, which isn't worth very many points. And then you use all those light points that you've gathered from the edges to grow your trees in the middle to get them really big and make a lot of points when you harvest them. And so that's because it's trees of a species are also competing against each other by and large. I mean, we, we talked about this while plays like okay, maybe this represents the mycorhizae, which are these underground fungal networks that connects trees and have been shown to be able to kind of help trees out from one tree to another, but there's still a lot not known about it. And I mean, by and large competition is the way things work in reality. So that's a again, acceptable break. You're trying to get your entire species of tree to do the best, not just individual trees.
Brian  13:33  Yeah, it's go Team Oak.
Speaker 1  13:35  Which is an odd thing. They don't actually tell you what the four trees are. I had to look this up. But they are oak, spruce, sycamore, which is what we thought was a maple tree, and linden, which is the tiny little berry ones.
Brian  13:50  Oh, that's interesting. So even though they have four species of tree in terms of the gameplay, they all function exactly the same, they all grow the same, they all need the same amount of light, they all like the same amount of soil, which is another sort of break from reality a little bit. Obviously, the economy of the game would be much more complicated if the light had to stay with the individual tree that collected it. More accurate, but way more fiddly.
Jason  14:14  Yeah, that's what we need a computer to handle that. I'm not going to do that myself.
Brian  14:19  But one thing that we did talk about there that actually leads us into the next topic is this idea of, Yes, plants will usually they're not only competing with members of other species, but with themselves. That is why seed dissemination is an important idea. This idea that a plant needs to spread its seeds to new territories. And seed dissemination can come in a variety of ways and in this case, all four of our trees disseminate similarly, it's purely based on size. But dissemination can be based on a wind you know, we have our dandelion fluffs or our Samarra, like maple seeds that will flutter down. We can have dissemination by water, which we didn't really get too much of that in this game, or dissemination by animals, which again, there's no animals in this game. There is an expansion with animals that also play roles with the moon tracker. We didn't play that, but it's an interesting idea.
Jason  15:06  We may revisit that in a future season.
Speaker 2  15:08  Potentially. But of course, oaks and squirrels have a well established symbiotic interaction. Oak seeds are kind of dependent upon animals. So acorns are largely dependent on animals to get planted, which we're not going to deal with here.
Speaker 1  15:22  Yeah, actually, let's take a look at so oaks. They're acorns. They depend on squirrels and other things that grab them, bury them. The spruce, how do spruce... they're, they've got cones. 
Speaker 2  15:32  Some cones are dependent upon disturbance and fire to open but I don't know if that's spruce. 
Jason  15:37  I don't know about spruce. Sycamores, which looking up people...either there's two very different trees that are both called sycamores or people are very confused about what Sycamore seeds look like, because sometimes they look like maple seeds. And sometimes they look like a ball of like tiny little spiky things held together. So the game has the maple seed ones, those are wind, so they just drop and they whirligig off somewhere. And then the Linden is berries, so probably birds.
Speaker 2  16:02  Probably. So that would be we've got two animal. I really don't know how spruce cones spread. I mean, the ones that are fire-based, it's a really interesting mechanism. The cones will be held shut with the pine resin that has a melting temperature that will only open when it's exposed to extremely high temperatures and release the seeds.
Unknown Speaker  16:23  Yeah, they're fire-dependent.
Speaker 2  16:24  So the other concept of the game is photosynthesis itself, which I think that most people, it's relatively common knowledge that plants need light. What do they need light for? What are they doing with it? They are able to use the energy of light to take carbon dioxide from the air, combine it with water and create glucose, sugar, right? And then in the process, releasing oxygen. So the light economy, the ability to to collect light is a key thing that plants need to do. And it basically means that as long as they can get water, carbon dioxide is everywhere. As long as they can get light, they can produce energy. What do they do with the glucose? They actually burn that glucose, reversing the process, to generate energy or they use the carbon to make other parts of their body. Trees are made from thin air.
Jason  17:13  And water
Brian  17:13  And water. Thin air and water? That's true. I was, actually I meant to look up, do we know what percentage of a tree is carbon?
Unknown Speaker  17:20  No, but I think the answer is a lot.
Brian  17:23  Like all of the carbon that is in the tree, the bulk of the tree itself, the carbon skeleton that makes up all of the tissues is coming from the air.
Speaker 1  17:33  Yeah, well, let's say you got carbon carbohydrates, you got a carbon. I mean, you got ones like glucose, you've got like a hydroxyl. So an oxygen and hydrogen on one side and a hydrogen on the other. So carbon and oxygen are about the same, hydrogen has a little bit. So if I were just to go off of that ratio, like C-H2-O as your typical carbohydrate, we could probably say, what like 40, 45%?
Brian  18:00  Yeah, it seems reasonable to me.
Jason  18:02  Another 45% is oxygen, and then the rest is hydrogen.
Unknown Speaker  18:05  There's some nitrogen in there, too, which will lead us into our next topic.
Jason  18:08  True, true, yeah, I forgot about all the nitrogen for, for the protein.
Speaker 2  18:12  Yeah, well, actually, that can lead us into our next topic, which is soil fertility. Which I had a little bit of a harder time researching it. But I think, for anybody who's been to a garden center, and essentially looked at a bag of fertilizer, you'll see three numbers on there. That is the nitrogen amount, the phosphorus amount, the potassium amount. Nitrogen is one thing that is in the air all the time, but it is in a form that is functionally unusable dinitrogen gas, the bonds between the two nitrogen atoms are so strong, that even though we're surrounded the air is 70% nitrogen, but it's not usable.
Speaker 1  18:48  Yet to put this in perspective, the formation of that nitrogen bond is what makes most explosives work. So trying to get it back apart so it can be used by a living thing is basically trying to reverse an explosion level of energy. Yeah, reverse explosion. In order to do it is like, like, I work in this a little bit. I study plant-microbe symbioses. And the microbes are the ones that are actually turning the nitrogen. And it is it takes so much energy to split that stupid bond. I mean, there's a reason why plants pay microbes to do it instead of doing themselves. It is so hard.
Speaker 2  19:22  And and it's it's a process. It's also poisoned by oxygen.
Jason  19:27  Yes, there's that too.
Brian  19:28  Yeah. So if you want to be able to do this, you also need to create a environment where oxygen is kept at a minimum or very little oxygen, which is something microbes are pretty good at doing. Certain microbes can live without oxygen at all. This is something there are specific bacteria that do this. The plants will make specific organs to facilitate and allow them to themselves to be colonized. There are some trees that form these associations, but microbes in soil can do it just on their own and the amount of...I don't know Is it fair to say that the amount of nitrogen in soil is probably one of the most limiting things for soil fertility?
Jason  20:03  Oh, yeah.
Brian  20:03  Okay. So, so that's the concept here, too, that we have in the game that this this idea of soil fertility, which the soil richness, and I'm not sure why...this is let's talk about the metaphor of the game. Why is killing the tree in the rich soil the good thing to do?
Jason  20:22  I mean, from just the game perspective, like, it's the hardest spot to go for, you want people to be vying for it. So you want there to be a reward for competing for a limited number of spaces. So if we were to try to extend that to the metaphor of, oh, this is ecological succession, this is a living biosphere, this is something going on. Well, there, there are better parts of soil, there's better parts of forests where there's more nutrients because of something maybe accumulated something, maybe there's just a pocket of extra rich earth there. I mean, some of my colleagues who work with crops say that this can sometimes be a problem when they are trying to figure out like do experiments. Because if you had, if the farmer 10 years ago, had a chicken coop on one part of the field, all that chicken poop is now sitting on the field. And there's just a much higher level of nutrients there. Or I know someone in Africa who had complained about ants, because ants, that ant colony is basically a giant engine for gathering nutrients over a large area and then concentrating them in a small area. And so the same things work in forests and such, so there are patches of better soil. And if you've got more nutrients there, then presumably you'll be able to grow better, you'll be able to make more seeds, and have a better chance of winning the evolutionary game of having as many offspring as possible. Which is something this game does not talk about very much like you're not rewarded for making a bunch of seeds, you're rewarded for harvesting mature trees.
Brian  21:52  Less about ecology at the end of the way scoring goes and more about forestry or that this is being maintained in some way. 
Jason  21:59  Yeah, well, yes. Now when I first saw this I was like, Oh, it's a game about succession. It's about plants moving in and colonizing a disturbed spot and then we get this point, oh, you score points by harvesting your mature tree and clearing its grounds. Like oh, no, this is a game about forestry. This entire lot got clear-cut. And now the trees are moving in from the from the outside, and we're just cutting them down and harvesting them when they get mature. I guess I did think maybe you could think about oh, maybe we're like capturing carbon in the soil or something if you want to do like a more ecological one, but it's really it's a game about forestry.
Brian  22:32  Yeah. old trees do die. They do create spaces of disturbance for new trees to move in to but it's not a...trees aren't seeking death upon maturity typically. I think you talked about another metaphor there that might have been a different way of doing scoring or a different way of dealing with the soil richness, which was which could be producing more seeds or affecting seed dissemination. In photosynthesis, seed dissemination is purely based on how tall the tree is, a one-tall tree can spread the seed one away two-tall tree can spread two away, a mature tree can spread up to three spaces away. Maybe the game would be more accurate to the metaphor of the science, if dissemination was affected by soil richness, rather than the size of the tree. I think we're meant to assume that in the game, because it's based on size, maybe these are all wind disseminated or something. So being a taller tree gives you access to more area.
Jason  23:29  I personally like the mental image of all of these trees just kind of catapulting their seeds, like one or two, two squares away.
Brian  23:36  There are there are plants that do that there are plants that use sort of a I'm trying to think of the best way they will launch seeds, the seed pods will grow under tension, and when they dry, they may fire seeds away, catapult them physically into another space. 
Jason  23:50  I've heard American witchhazel is one of those. I've never seen it myself. But I've heard that actually does that. 
Brian  23:57  I'm trying to remember there was one that grows in my a weed in my yard that... hairy bittercress does that. As you walk by the seed pods, they will explode percussively, and then spread seeds all over the place, which is why they're very thoroughly represented in my yard.
Jason  24:14  So we played this game twice. And as you said, we didn't do it quite right, because we had some of the light gathering rules wrong. Turns out that a short tree can't actually completely shade a taller tree next to it. We thought that was weird, but we were looking in the wrong part of the rulebook. So anyway, you'll find this like, we're very human, we make mistakes. So as we go this we may not quite get the rules right all the time. But that's okay. We'll, we'll play it right next time. But anyway, what was your experience of playing the game? So there's a lot of moving pieces like the sun is moving around, you're trying to grow trees, like a tree that is in a great position now can be shaded in two turns. What What was it like for you playing the game?
Brian  24:50  Hmm, let's see. It was... Well, I think that we have slightly different play styles. I typically just do the actions and then see how things sort of mature I'm usually not trying to plan too far ahead, which I'm just gonna say I'm playing like a tree. Trees are also not planning ahead, necessarily. But the use of the turn tracker to keep track handing that back and forth sort of developing sort of a good routine was good. Playing the two player game, we kept a pretty good pace. I would wonder if you had more players, if it would change the pace, if you'd get overly concerned about what I should do next, as you're waiting for everybody else to make their decisions. One thing that about the game that sort of threw me off one is okay, yes, it is a game you are planning, you are trying to achieve victory by harvesting your mature trees. The way that you spend your light points that you're collecting is you will prepare your tree is bring them to this sort of strange nether zone. And then you pay again to put them out onto the board. From a metaphor perspective, I don't know maybe the trees are saving up energy to do something that they want to be able to do next turn or that they will do at some point in the future. The game was not hard to learn. All right, Jason. So we played this a couple of times. What did you, did you enjoy photosynthesis? What was it like to play?
Jason  26:08  Oh it was fun. It's one of those games where the individual parts are relatively simple. But when you put them all together, it suddenly becomes very complicated. Especially because of that moving Sun tracker around, I found myself very quickly trying to plan out okay, where will this tree be in two or three turns? When I was about to harvest trees, I would say Okay, wait, the sun tracker is going, I've got two good turns of sunlight left, I'm gonna leave that tree to gather sunlight for now. And then I'll harvest it once it drops into another tree's shadow.
Brian  26:38  So one part from the metaphor was this idea of you spend lights to prepare a tree or a seed, and then you spend again, to place it on the board. So I screwed that up a couple of times in a couple of different ways. When we would harvest I would put things in the wrong place, I'd put them in my ready area, instead of back on the player board. Or in both of our games,  when we get near the end of the game, I would spend my points poorly on things that I couldn't actually do anything with. So...but I'm a less tactical player than you are.
Jason  27:05  Yes, no, I'm very much a plan-in-out, try to find all the pieces, see how they work together. Like I love games like this that reward people for like thinking ahead and trying to figure out the optimal place because that's what I enjoy doing. And so I was definitely looking at like those last few terms like, okay, my goal is to grow big trees and chop them down, grow big trees and chop them down. So everything I did was set towards gathering as much light as I could in order to do those two things, new trees, they don't matter. There's only two turns left, they're not going to be able to grow big enough. So sorry, little trees, you just get ignored. You all you only exist to serve the needs of the greater growth.
Brian  27:42  Just like real trees. No, not really so much. Actually, I would say that that's one thing is trees don't do a lot of planning typically, I wouldn't think so there's another sort of place where the game is a little different. One thing about this game is it's just very pretty. It's very pretty game. It's it's visually appealing to, to watch this grove kind of fill in with trees of different sizes in a...it's not quite natural. So again, the sun is coming in completely from the side. So there is sort of this, I think you noticed this when we played too, that middle ring kind of didn't get filled up that much. But that probably would be different. If you had more players.
Jason  28:19  It would probably also be different if we were playing with the correct light rules if we weren't completely shading out each and every tree.
Brian  28:25  Yes, that would probably also help. This is one of the fun things about board games, though is that you can play them wrong and still have fun and still sort of get the game and enjoy the game. Even if you screwed something up. 
Jason  28:36  Yeah, going back to the looks though, like I want to like that's a really important thing to me, like I enjoy games that really look good, that are very aesthetically pleasing. I have actually bought board games, simply because they were very pretty. Thankfully, they usually turned out to be very fun to play as well. If someone's going to invest the time and money to get good artwork, they've usually also invested the time for good gameplay. And this is a very pretty one. The trees are pretty, if...I need to double check, but I'm pretty sure each side has like eight tiny trees and like four or five middle sized one and two big ones. And I think they're different. I don't think they look identical all the pieces to each other. I think there's a few different models for them.
Brian  29:15  That's interesting. I didn't even notice that there are there are slightly different resources for the smalls, they're little two dimensional standees. And they might be.
Jason  29:24  I could be wrong. Maybe I just got that impression because each of the four sides are very different. There's a kind of a bluish, greenish or pinkish a golden colored and so again, the the grove ends up looking very, very pretty. 
Brian  29:36  It probably ends up happening because if you have two standee pieces, if you just put them together a different way you end up with a slightly different looking tree without even trying.
Jason  29:44  True, that could be it.
Brian  29:45  There are some advanced rules that we didn't play. One is to add a third revolution of the sun. 
Jason  29:51  You mean a fourth revolution?
Brian  29:52  Yeah, fourth revolution around I'm not sure why. How that would change things other than just giving you more time to plan and score and fill out the board more. The more interesting one, I think, is that you cannot place a seed in the shadow of another tree.
Jason  30:06  Now that would change the game a lot, the way it is right now is like you can place a seed anywhere where there's an open space where there isn't already a seed or someone else's tree. But the shadows in the game are very important. I mean, they're probably the most tactical part is figuring out where trees are going to be in shadow where they're not, and how you can avoid your opponent's shade, and literally throw shade on your opponent so that they can't actually earn any  light points. And so adding another monkey wrench where you can't put a seed down in a place that's in shadow, that will be hard. I almost wonder if it'd be more realistic if you can't sprout the seed. When it's in shadow.
Brian  30:45  I think that that does make more sense. Another thing that they do is a seed can hold a square, a seed can hold a hex just having the seed there means something else can be there
Jason  30:55  Including another seed
Brian  30:56  Including another seed, it's like, well, but really, though, that's not how that would be just having a seed there is not going to keep another seed from landing in that space. And then it should be erased. I don't know. I, I wonder how that would change things too.
Jason  31:11  Yep, I wonder how many people use seeds to just lock down parts of the board so that their opponents can't get them?
Brian  31:17  I mean, you 100% could do that. The downside is that you have a limited number of seeds, and that they get more expensive. So if you're going to put it out and you're not going to grow it, then you are taking a cost to do that. You're not even casting shade, you made the joke about casting shade on your opponents. You can cast shade on yourself. Like very easily. 
Jason  31:35  Yeah, you did that several times,
Brian  31:36  many times. That is true. Okay, anything else that we should talk about this game?
Jason  31:43  Let's see. I think we've covered it. I mean, overall, I thought it was a very fun game. You wanted to give... So we're both university professors. And so we are in the habit of grading things. And so you wanted to try to give a letter grade to these just to give our impressions. So you you did all the research on the science. So what would you grade the science as?
Brian  32:03  I'm trying to decide if I should be grading on a curve or grading objectively, I think the core science of ecological succession is represented here relatively well. The feeling is good. Hmmm...I'm gonna say...how do we feel about a B plus, for the forestry end point for scoring and sort of being a little off the biology rails?
Jason  32:30  Yeah, I was gonna say about a B plus, like, it's definitely there. They're definitely made some compromises. And the thing is, compromises are okay. But for grading, just like how accurate is the science? Yeah, B plus is probably good.
Brian  32:42  The, just the collecting phase. That's, that's, that's where just things get thrown off just a little bit. If it wasn't for that, I'd say probably would have scored a little higher. All right. What do you think about the fun the experience of playing the game? Is it easy to learn? Is it fun to play?
Jason  32:58  I'd give that an A. I mean, I think that this was a really fun game. I really enjoyed the tactical part of it. I mean, it's not going to be for everyone. I'm thinking of my own father here every time we get together and play games, my dad's refrain is, why can't we just play Uno? It's like, that's kind of his ceiling in terms of game complexity. So, but for people who like board games, like I think it's good, I just looked it up right now. So on Board Game Geek, its overall rank is 650...644. So which, okay, it's not in the top 20. But given that there are literally 1000s upon 1000s of games, it's pretty good. I really enjoyed it. And again, I really liked the aesthetics, and it's just very pretty growing trees. I can imagine some people may be turned off by the the planning aspect, and how easy it is to get in a bit of a bad position as your opponents are throwing shade all over you. So I'd probably give it an A maybe an A minus because it maybe it's too complex for some people, but I personally liked it. I give it an A. 
Brian  34:00  I think, I think I'm comfortable with an A minus. I'm actually excited to play it again. I think we should put it on the put it on the list for the next time we get together. I'd be curious to play again with the proper shadow rules, and also to play with more than two players. What is it like with three or four? How does the game feel different? Well, when we were playing our second round, it was a pretty quick back and forth. It was it was fun to sort of like play speed photosynthesis, I would do that again.
Jason  34:26  Yeah, that was...it was stressful and relieving at the same time. It was stressful because I still want to make optimal plays. But kind of relaxing when I realized I couldn't really so I just tried to do the best I could. I'm actually quite surprised that not only did both of us do better in the speed round, maybe because we knew the game better. But I trounced you, I had like 30 more points than you did.
Brian  34:50  Well, I think as we continue doing this experiment, we're going to hear that trend continue. Okay, all right. Well, this  was photosynthesis. It's a fun game. Science is pretty good. Give it a try.
Jason  35:06  And if you liked this, I mean, I know this is the cliche thing, but give us a review. We're new at this. I don't know if you can like, comment and subscribe a podcast. But if you can go ahead, we're trying this out. I mean, really, if you'd like this, share it with your friends. We're not like there's no Patreon. We're not doing this for money. If you know anyone at the National Science Foundation, that would be willing to give us a grant. That's great, but we're not going to ask for money. We're just doing this for the fun of it. We're hoping you enjoy it too. So until next time
Brian  35:35  Have fun playing dice with the universe
Jason  35:38  Later.
Brian  35:41  This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to gaming science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe