S1E9 - Earth (ecology) | 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

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.

S1E9 - Earth (ecology)

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