Gaming with Science

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

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

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

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