Gaming with Science

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

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