Gaming with Science

Gaming with Science Podcast

Gaming with Science is a podcast that looks at science through the lens of tabletop board games. If you ever wondered how natural selection shows up in Evolution, whether Cytosis reflects actual cell metabolism, or what the socioeconomics of Monopoly are, this is the place for you. (And if not, we hope you’ll give us a try anyway.) So grab a drink, pull up a chair, and let’s have fun playing dice with the universe!

  1. S3E05 - Ark Nova (Zoos)

    6d ago

    S3E05 - Ark Nova (Zoos)

    #ArkNova #CaptstoneGames #Zoos #Zoology #AnimalGames #WAZA #AZA #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Time to run a zoo! In this episode, we're joined by Ellen Weatherford (of Just the Zoo of Us) to talk about Ark Nova and all things zoos. Learn why running a zoo is probably best left to game imagination, what it takes to get accredited, how you can tell good zoos from bad ones, the enclosure preferences of tree kangaroos, and tons of other fun facts. So grab some peanuts (but please don't feed the animals), and join us for a zootastic episode of Gaming with Science. (Also, we promise this episode was not sponsored by Board Game Arena; Brian just likes it a lot.) Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 05:20 Rabbit faces & zero-g mice 10:33 Ark Nova gameplay 23:47 Zoo origins and operations 32:40 Ark Nova versus reality 38:45 Designing good animals enclosures 45:06 How can you tell a good zoo? 50:35 Nitpick corner: Poop and merch 53:45 Final grades 1:04:56 Goodbyes Links Ark Nova official site (Capstone Games) And the picture with all the bits! (Board Game Geek) Just the Zoo of Us  Space mice and muscle loss (Science Advances) The Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA)  Splash image background courtesy of Stephanie Verbeure  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:06   Hello, and welcome to the Gaming with Science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Today, we're going to talk about Ark Nova from Capstone Games. Brian  0:17   Hey, welcome back. This is Brian Jason  0:19   this is Jason Brian  0:20   and we have a very special guest with us today, Ellen Weatherford. Ellen, can you introduce yourself? Ellen  0:27   I have to make sure that I add in the sounds I'm expecting the audience be making. Brian  0:32   The crowd goes wild. Ellen  0:35    Hi everybody, it's so nice to talk to you, Brian and Jason. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited. Brian  0:41   Yeah, so Ellen, tell us about yourself. Ellen  0:43   Yeah, I am a science communicator, I'm a podcaster and a writer, and I have been the host of Just the Zoo of Us, which is a podcast reviewing animals on the Maximum Fun Network. We've been at that for about seven years now.  Brian  1:00   Could you just explain, because I know this is like the entire schtick. The what is the rating scale for just the zoo of us?  Ellen  1:08   So we have different categories, because we realized very quickly that it's hard to give an animal just one score. So we have effectiveness, which are physical adaptations, things built into the animal's body out of 10, and then ingenuity, which is behaviors, things that the animals like doing, ways that they're like navigating the world or solving problems, and then just aesthetics, which is just how nice they are to look at, which that can also often be the most contentious category, that is usually what people have the biggest feelings about. Jason Wallace  1:39   So, do the nightmare fuel animals get high on aesthetics or low on aesthetics? Brian  1:43   We had some big discussion with Brynn Devine, who loves deep sea horrible fish. Ellen  1:49   Yeah, Brian  1:50   as like, oh, they're so cute and wonderful. It's like, no, they're full of knives, they're not wonderful. Speaker 1  1:56   I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Tom Linley, who is a deep sea biologist who actually got to like discover and scientifically describe the ethereal snail fish, which is he mentioned as like the deepest fish ever found, and he described a very interesting phenomenon where there's this sort of uncanny valley effect, almost like the deeper you go in the ocean, where that you go deeper and deeper, and they get spookier and spookier and spookier and spookier and spookier, but then once you hit a certain point it loops back around and they stop being spooky and they go back into being like cute, because then you get like blob fish and snail fish and like flapjack octopus like little Dumbo octopus and stuff, like they swing back around because like you get that layer so deep in the ocean where things just become very flabby and blobby and pink and like that's when they're cute again, so there's this sort of like buffer zone of nightmare creatures, but once you pass that, it, everything's adorable down there.  Brian  3:04   I mean, I really can't argue with the Dumbo octopus as being absolutely adorable. Speaker 2  3:08   They're very cute. Jason  3:09   Agreed, Speaker 3  3:10   there's also a lot of animals that I find to be like nightmare fuel, but I also find them really like endearing and lovely in their own way, and some of them also grow on you. Sure, them are acquired tastes, Brian  3:19   literally, Speaker 4  3:21   yeah. some of them can be an acquired taste, like I personally think that, like, wasps are beautiful. I think they're gorgerous, Brian  3:29   they definitely Brian  3:30   can be terrifying, but I mean, so is a tiger. Ellen  3:34   Yeah, I think they're really beautiful in their own way, so that can be a contentious category. Brian  3:38   Ellen, one more thing, and I don't want to forget this. What do you have a favorite game? It doesn't have to be a board game or a science game, but it's cool if it would be. Ellen  3:48   I am a big video game person. Brian  3:50   Yeah, Speaker 5  3:50   I'm currently in the trenches of a Pocopia addiction. I am cripplingly addicted to Pocopia right now. I'm a lifelong Pokémon fan. OG picked it up. Learn to Read on playing Pokémon, so I've always been a Pokémon fan, but when people ask me what my, like, favorite video game is, or my favorite game, I have the most experience playing video games. Two things come to mind. Number one is Horizon Zero Dawn, very cool. Ever played Horizon Zero Dawn? Love that game, like such a great blend of, like, a very interesting story, beautiful graphics, and also really fun and satisfying gameplay. Like, it's so rare that you get all three, but they were firing on all cylinders. So, Horizon Zero Dawn is definitely one of my favorite. I have the tall neck Lego set. Brian  4:32   Oh yeah, me too. Ellen  4:34   I love that set, it's so cool. But my other one is Outer Wilds. Brian  4:39   Oh dude, we are hitting you, so you need to, you need to talk to Jason's better half, because these are literally.. this is also one of my very favorite games. Okay, Ellen  4:47   Are we same braining?  Jason  4:48   Yes, definitely. We have so both of us actually have wooden Nomai masks that I laser cut out and assembled, so as a gift to my wife, and then a gift to Brian and his wife. Ellen  5:01   Wow, how do I get on this list? Jason  5:05   You're on it now, apparently. Ellen  5:07   Yes, Brian  5:08   let's switch up our science facts to talk about Horizon Zero Dawn and Outer Wilds instead. Jason, go. Actually, no. Let's transition into our science banter topic. So, let's talk about some cool stuff that we learned about science recently, so you know, a an interesting fact, a story, a news article. You know, I am sure Ellen has a deep well of weird animal facts that she can pull from. Ellen  5:31   Deep, a deep one. Brian  5:33   Ellen, we usually let the guests host go first. Would you like, what would you like to share with the class today? Ellen  5:38   Yeah, so I was doing notes on jackrabbits recently, and I was kind of reminded of something that I had heard about jackrabbits a very long time ago, and hares in general. If anyone doesn't know, hares are different, hares and rabbits actually distinctly like different groups of lagomorphs, and the thing that I found really interesting that I had never really noticed about it is that if you look at the three sort of groups of lagomorphs that are in existence right now, there are rabbits, hares, and pikas, and if you look at them, they all have sort of differently shaped heads, where the pikas, their snout goes sort of straight out, almost like in line with their eyes, like along their sort of line of sight, and rabbits, they're sort of tilted down a little bit, their snout sort of slopes down a little bit, like 45 degrees. In hares and jackrabbits, it is like, like a straight drop off, almost like their snout points down from their line of sight, like eyes looking out at the horizon, this snout is pointed down significantly. So, in all three of these groups, you see this sort of like increasing degree of facial tilt, and that's also correlated with their speed, because pikas are very slow, they don't really move very fast. Rabbits are kind of quick, like they can, they can get little bursts of speed. Hares and jack rabbits are very, very fast, so like the faster they go, the more their snout is tilted down at the ground, and the idea is that it gets their snout out of the way, so that they can see the ground in front of them when they're running. Okay, and it, like, their whole skull shape is like completely modified to accommodate their field of view, while they're running, which I think is really interesting. Brian  7:25   So, you got to have that quake pro view, where it's just.. Ellen  7:29   I can't think of any other, like, because usually when you think of animals adapted for speed, you think of them being very streamlined. And, Brian  7:37   well, yeah, Brian  7:38   I would say, like, why do they have their face be like that, so it's not about supposedly it's about their sensory syst

    1h 8m
  2. S3E04.1 - The Mating Game (bonus)

    May 13

    S3E04.1 - The Mating Game (bonus)

    #PangolinScienceGames #TheMatingGame #SexualSelection #BoardGames #Science #Bonus Summary In this bonus episode of Gaming with Science, we’re joined by Dr. Andrea Roth Monzón and Dr. Andrew Thompson of Pangolin Games to discuss their upcoming Kickstarter project, The Mating Game. We dive into how they’ve translated complex evolutionary concepts like sexual selection and reproductive trade-offs into a vibrant, cartoony tabletop experience that’s as much a teaching tool as it is a game. From the strategic nuances of "flashy" versus "sneaky" mating behaviors to the challenges of designing for a K-12 classroom, Andrea and Andrew share their eight-year journey of balancing hard science with high-energy fun. Whether you want to learn why an elephant seal dresses like a luchador or how games can foster a lifelong love of discovery, join us for a look at the wild world of sexual selection with The Mating Game. Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 03:52 - Game vision and origin 11:57 - Balancing science and fun 17:01 - Tuning complexity 23:31 - Tabletopia and classroom accessibility 26:41 - Favorite other games 31:50 - Kickstarter pitch Links The Mating Game - Pre-launch page and Tabletopia  Pangolin Science Games on Instagram and Facebook, and Bluesky Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) 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   Today, we're having a creator interview with the creators of the mating game by pangolin games. Hey, welcome back to a bonus episode. This is Brian. Jason  0:22   This is Jason Brian  0:23   and today we are joined by Andrea Roth Monzón and Andrew Thompson, the creators of the mating game. Why don't you introduce yourselves? Andrea  0:31   I'm Andrea, a researcher. I've worked with a very broad different kinds of things. I've done anything from like herpetology to more like evolutionary ecology stuff to basically parasitology, which is where I'm at at the moment. And I've always been interested in teaching science and getting people interested in science, specifically from an experiential point of view. I think science is to be discovered. And so I think games create an opportunity to discover, basically science, to have an opportunity to discover the process before you actually learn about it through a game.  Brian  1:05   Awesome. Thank you.  Jason  1:06   And some vocabulary for our listeners. So herpetology is the study of like snakes and lizards and reptiles and stuff. Parasitology is the study of parasites. So it basically sounds like Andrea studies creepy crawly squiggly things. Brian  1:18   Herpetology is my favorite paraphyletic science. When I talk about jargon, it's a group of things that are not actually related to one another, right? Because you got amphibians and snakes and lizards and all the things that crawl across the ground, all the vertebrates that drag their bellies, Andrea  1:32   but you also have all the cool stuff. I still tell people they're my first love, and would always be my love. Brian  1:39   What about you? Andrew?  Andrew  1:41   Yeah. So my name is Andrew Thompson. I actually met Andrea in grad school, so that's where we started this venture together. My background is in microbiology, and I transitioned from microbiology as an undergraduate into biology, and I did some microbial ecology in soils, and I also did some astrobiology. So I got the opportunity to work down antarctica with the largest ice free region in Antarctica, and we were studying soils down there to understand kind of fundamental ecological processes, because it's a lot the diversity is so reduced to that you can actually ask some of these big questions. that led into astrobiology. And I've always been a big kind of sci fi idea guy, and so that fit really well. And after grad school, I decided that I was kind of tired of research, and I liked ideas more than I liked research. And so I've been transitioning since then towards more of a sci fi author, game entrepreneur thing, but I still am actively researching my postdoc right now, doing some computational biology work with soil food web modeling and also some more soil environmental microbiology. Brian  2:38   So just to clarify, you guys are both PhDs, correct? Yes, yes. Okay, so you're Dr Andrea and Dr Andrew.  Andrew  2:46   Yes, that's correct. Brian  2:48   Okay, but I did want to follow up. So you worked at, were you at McMurdo Station?  Andrew  2:52   I was yes, in the dry valleys.  Brian  2:55   I actually, I wonder if we know some of the same people. Brent Christner is somebody who I work with on cryoconite soils that were collected from Antarctica when I was an undergraduate. Brent Christer, well, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Jason  3:08   Don't worry. Like, when we were undergrad, this is like the stone age period, so, like, they hadn't accumulated enough geological layers yet to be that interesting. Andrew  3:18   I sure that we know some people who know the same people. Okay, I don't remember that name specifically, but I'm sure that if he was working on cryoconite holes in the dry valleys, and he was working with the leadership that I was working with, for sure, because they've been there for a long time. Brian  3:30   And Jason and I actually have a unpublished preprint on bacteria that were recovered from immured glacial ice at some point. And Jason does soil microbiology, and we're both microbiologists, so there's more connections here than we even realized. Awesome. That's cool.  Jason Wallace  3:45   Sorry Andrea we do plants, so we don't work with lizards and snakes and stuff. Andrea  3:49   Sorry, that's fine. I do fish now. So Jason Wallace  3:52    all right, well, let's talk about this game you've put together, the mating game, which I must admit, I was confused at first, because when I started looking this up, we need to work on your search engine optimization. I was like, I look it up, and I first find, like, a 1959 romantic comedy, a 2005 paranormal romance, some BBC nature special. And then apparently, a 1969 Hasbro board game that beat you to the name by like, 40 years. Brian  4:16   Hopefully, the copyright on that's already expired, though, so it shouldn't.  Jason Wallace  4:19   One should hope so. What is the mating game? Tell us about this game that you put together. Andrea  4:24   So the mating game is basically a game in which every single player is a multiplayer game. It works better with bigger crowds than smaller crowds. It's meant to be enjoyed by several people, and it's up to six players. So every player has basically a deck of cards with male traits, and then your strategy depends on how you basically choose the trait, because what you want to do is basically attract the ladies, right? This is an attract the ladies. Let them come to you so that you can mate, and then you can pass your genes on to the next generation. But there are risks, right? The environment plays a. A little bit here, and there will be risks. So the environment may give you very little resources, so you may not be able to invest in in such mate, or they may also kill you, or they may not be enough females for you, right? So it is a competition, and that's kind of had the gist, like the general gist of it, I would say, Andrew  5:16   Yeah, I would say that our the mating game is our attempt to bring in evolution. There's natural section and sexual selection. It's our attempt to bring this much less talked about, but still very important concept to a broader audience. And for the most part, I mean, there's the male side and the female side. The mating game focuses on the male side, the selection that males experience. It's animals, not humans. We get that question a lot, weirdly enough, and so the game is just trying to simulate what it's like to be a male and what it's like to invest differently in different strategies, to try and convince the females that you are worth taking a chance on so you can pass on your genes. And so it's trying to simulate that aspect of sexual selection and teach the concepts that are often taught in college courses in a game format. Brian  5:57   So what is the story of the mating game? How did you guys come to this game in particular? Tell me the origin story of the mating game. Andrea  6:05   So when I was in grad school, there was this class for teaching students, and so I was taking this class that it was meant for you to be a better professor. And so that kind of got us started. In this class, we were asked to do an activity to show our actual like research. And so I was doing competition at the moment, so nothing to do with mating, and I decided that I was going to do a competition game. And when I saw how well that work in the class setting with like other grad students, they were like, so happy and so excited about it. I started thinking about sexual selection, because sexual selection has been one of my favorite subjects in evolution, because I think it brings some of the coolest traits that people also don't know. I also think it brings a lot of like, misconceptions, the amounts of times I've talked to people that said, like, Oh, that's not natural, like in nature, like an animal doesn't do that. And I'm like, well, there's always exceptions, like, there's fish that change sex, there's full communities of all females. And so I've always been like, I feel like it is wrong that t

    36 min
  3. S3E04 - Diatoms (Diatoms)

    Apr 29

    S3E04 - Diatoms (Diatoms)

    #Diatoms #DONA #Ludoliminal #Microbiology #BoardGames #Science In this episode we're going microscopic to talk about everything Diatoms! Starting from the game by Ludoliminal and going through the classic (and obscure) Victorian art form of arranging these beautiful glass-shelled organisms on microscope slides, our special guest Laura Aycock--collections manager at the world's *largest* diatom herbarium--helps us understand all the beauty and wonder of these tiny, shimmingering marvels. From tepid ponds to hot springs to arctic ice, diatoms are everywhere, and they do a lot for us while looking absolutely fabulous. So grab a microscope and prepare to never look at pond scum the same way again! Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:09 Fun facts: diatom oxygen and ice habitats 03:53 Overview of Diatoms the game 11:41 What is a diatom? 15:06 What is a diatom herbarium? 20:55 Diatom reproduction (and shrinkage!) 25:43 Diatom artwork 32:20 Diatomacious earth 35:06 DNA complicating things 38:15 Weird diatom facts 42:05 Nitpick corner & grades 47:27 Wrap-up Links Diatoms official website (Ludoliminal Games) Diatoms living in arctic ice (Stanford University) Diatom art (Google image search) Diatoms of North America (and recorded lectures) Jeffrey Stone's diatom electron micrographs (Instagram) The Diatomist documentary (Vimeo) Henry Dalton's micro-mosaics (Microscopist.net) Amazon rain forest fertilization (Wiley.com) Diatom slide preparation part 1 & part 2 (YouTube) Specific diatoms:  Ancient diatoms (ScienceDirect) Campylodiscus - Pringles chip shaped diatom (ResearchGate) Entomoneis - twisted figure 8 (Diatoms.org) Ethnomodiscus - 2m diatom (Wikipedia) Aulacodiscus - Diatom with antennae (MIcroscopy UK) The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Brian  0:00   Jason, hello and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about science behind some of your favorite games. Jason Wallace  0:10   Today, we will be talking about diatoms by ludoliminal Games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason. This is Brian, and today, for our special guest, we have Laura Aycock. Laura, can you please introduce yourself? Laura  0:25   Sure. I'm Laura Aycock. I am the Collection Manager of the diatom herbarium at the Academy natural sciences in Philadelphia that's affiliated with Drexel University. And I've been working with diatoms for about 15 years, and I find them fun and enjoyable. Brian  0:38   That's really cool. Thank you for coming on, Jason. How did you manage to get the exact right person to come talk to us? Good job  Jason Wallace  0:44   being very persistent with emails.  Laura  0:46   Theres also not very many of us  Jason Wallace  0:49   there is that when there's actually a website called diatoms.org, that has all the nation's top diatoms scientists linked to it, somehow, it's not that hard to find someone. So before we get into this lovely game about absolutely beautiful, microscopic creatures. Let's start with our fun science facts. So Laura, as our guest, we usually pass the privilege to you to start. Do you have something you'd like to share with our audience? Laura  1:09   Sure. My favorite fact about diatoms is they produce about a fourth of the oxygen we breathe. So they're very important to life on Earth, and we wouldn't survive without them. Brian  1:16   So trees get all the credit, but they're stealing that  Jason Wallace  1:19   we talkabout plant blindness, where people just don't look at plants. There's definitely what macroscopic bias, where we just don't think about all the things that aren't within, you know, human size scale. So yeah, trees get all the credit, but all these little microbes are actually doing a whole bunch of the work there.  Laura  1:33   Yeah, diatoms, along with other groups of algae, actually produce about half of the oxygen we breathe, so they are as important, if not more important, than land plant, but no one thinks about them, sees them, or really acknowledges them.  Brian  1:44   So let me think. Then I'm thinking about this track of carbon dioxide that we've been seeing sort of dip and rise and dip and rise and dip and rise. Now that dip and rise that's from the like Alpine forests in the northern continents, right? But the stable activity that's presumably all the algae in the ocean, right? Or do they also fluctuate on an annual cycle?  Jason Wallace  2:04   I'd assume they'd also fluctuate annually, just because of temperature, if nothing else. Laura  2:07   It depends on the environment. So diatoms in the ocean are relatively consistent, but I think it does fluctuate with temperature. I actually don't know too much about marine diatoms, because my expertise lies in benthic freshwater diatoms. Brian  2:19   Benthic freshwater. So that means, like, the things that live in the muck at the bottom of fresh water environments,  Laura  2:24   yeah, the brown slime you see when you go to creeks. That's what I love to look at.  Brian  2:28   Oh, you're a slimologist. That's awesome.  Jason Wallace  2:30   All right, Brian, your turn. What fun fact do you have for us today?  Brian  2:33   Well, funny enough, I also brought a diatoms one I was looking for something recently about diatoms in the news. It's a press release out of Stanford, about diatoms remaining active down to negative 15 degrees centigrade, so cold, basically, in solid ice isn't as solid as you'd think. Actually, it can have these little micro fluidic chambers within it, sort of threads of liquid water. And the diatoms were actually not only colonizing these but moving through these chambers. I didn't even know diatoms could move. I guess they have like little actin filaments that they use to move on slime. I want to know more about this, and I'm hoping that Laura can explain it.  Laura  3:08   Diatoms are very capable of active movement. Not all of them, though, they have to have a slit in the center of the cell, which is called the raphe and they can secrete mucilage. And they glide along like slugs.  Brian  3:18   So you can tell just by looking at them if they're going to be able to be mobile?  Laura  3:21   yep,  Brian  3:22   Do all the ones with Raphe have mobility? Or do some of them have the Raphe and are not mobile? Laura  3:26   No, all of them have mobility. The raphe can vary in its placement on the cell, whether it's in the center of the cell, along the sides, if it's on one half of the valve. Because diatoms are made in two parts, they're kind of like a box where you have a top half and a bottom half. So when they're dead, they split apart. So you'll see the raphe on one valve and not the other. But they do have their Raphe. Brian  3:43   That's really cool, man. So diatoms are kind of like mimics in D & D. They live in a box.  Jason Wallace  3:48   They are a box, a glass box. They make themselves. Brian  3:51   That's okay. These are very cool organisms.  Jason Wallace  3:53   They are. So let's go on to this game, then, because this game is a beautiful game about these beautiful creatures. So diatoms is a game by Ludoliminal Games and published by 25th century games. It actually won a 2025 Mensa select award, and I like the tagline on the publisher's website. It is a stunningly beautiful game about making art from algae, which is not something you would think about, but the whole metaphor of this game is about Victorian diatom art, which is this obscure art form, where, back when microscopes, well, microscopes for the masses, were a new fangled thing, and people were trying to sell them. They wanted to sell things that you could look at right away. And so they would sell these little slides you could put under and they had diatom art on them, which is what you're making in this game. We'll talk more about what diatom art is in a little bit for the game itself, its basic stats. It's for one to four players, obligatory single player mode, although I'll say this is one of the few games we've played where I actually have played the single player mode, and I can attest it's actually quite fun.  Brian  4:51   Yeah, I was gonna say you actually said you liked it like you enjoyed it. Jason Wallace  4:54   It's very calming. And ages eight plus about 30-45, minutes to play. Suggested retail price is $55 a lot of that is probably going to the very high quality components. So there's very high quality chipboard, most of which has foil embossing on it in some degree, oftentimes, lots. The game is played in two sections. You have your tile placing one where you've got these hexagonal tiles that have colors coming off of them. So every hexagon consists of six triangles joined at the tip. And so those six triangles can be any one of a number of colors. They've got five different ones, red, yellow, green, blue and purple. Some of them are white as wild spots. And it's a typical like color matching game. You have the hexes down on the board, and then you try to place new hexes so that the colors match. That part is fairly straightforward. The thing is based on the colors you make at that intersection. So when you place a hex down next to two other tiles, it forms a point where all three of those tiles touch, and where, therefore there are six triangles around that central point. And the size and distribution of the color patches determines which diatoms you then collect. Metaphorically, this is you like looking at a patch of wa

    49 min
  4. S3E03 - Cellulose (Plant Cell Biology)

    Mar 25

    S3E03 - Cellulose (Plant Cell Biology)

    #Cellulose #GeniusGames #InDefenseOfPlants #Plants #Botany #CellBiology #MolecularBiology #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Summary This mont we talk Cellulose and all things plants with special guest Matt Candeias, of the In Defense of Plants podcast. In this sequel to Cytosis, we dive inside of a plant cell in a worker-placement game that while similar to its predecessor also adds a lot of new mechanics and strategy. As usual, Genius Games's science is top-notch, and we get to talk about photosynthesis, Rubisco, how plants nearly wrecked the environment (twice!), why C4 photosynthesis is the best photosynthesis, and the weirdest ways plant use their energy. So grab a houseplant and settle back for all things Cellulose. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 02:40 Pollen and pointy sticks 07:59 Intro to Cellulose 13:47 Rubisco & chloroplasts 20:47 The cell wall 25:15 Plant movement 29:12 Elements of photosynthesis 32:09 CAM & C4 photosynthesis 38:03 Water and light shaping plant distributions 42:14 Weirdest use for cellulose 44:52 Nitpick corner 51:12 Grades 56:27 Wrap-up Links Official Game Website (Genius Games) In Defense of Plants (Podcast & Book) 430,000 year old wooden tool (Science.org) The evolution of C4 photosynthesis (New Phytologist) Skunk cabbage and philodendron making heat (In Defense of Plants)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:00   Hello, and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:10   Today, we're going to talk about cellulose by genius games. Hey, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian. This is Jason, and we have a very special guest with us today, Dr Matt Candeias, who is holding up the wall against plant blindness. He is the host of In Defense of Plant, and I'm already breaking my thing. I should be letting him introduce himself, Matt, tell us about yourself. Matt  0:36   Well, first off, thank you guys so much for having me. It's an honor to be here. My name is Matt Candeias, yeah, I'm an ecologist by training. I have always had an interest in sort of the way the natural world interacts with itself, us including and for about the last probably 20 years of my life, that has largely been focused on how plants set the foundation for everything in this world. So yeah, my PhD is in plant ecology. I spent a lot of time looking at how plants kind of form communities and structure themselves over different gradients in the environment. It's been a lot of fun. And as you mentioned, I run in defense of plants, so for many, many years of my life, surprisingly, that number goes up every year and just hits me with a whole new sense of, Oh, I'm getting older. Yeah. It's been a, basically my Ode to My love to plants, and trying to share that passion with the world and try to get people to see plants the way I do. You know, it was one of those things where I just kind of always thought that plants got the short shrift when it came to science communication and the way we looked at the natural world. You know, cheetahs are exciting, elephants are brilliant. Why aren't we talking about plants like that, other than as food or medicine, which is cool, but plants are their own organisms, so I created in defense of plants to celebrate that. And it's been a love affair of communicating that in many different forums, but mostly through podcasting, ever since, Brian  1:51   you are the host, but you have talked to everyone. You have had so many episodes, and you have on special guests pretty much almost every episode. I can't imagine what it's like to schedule all of that. Matt  2:03   Calendars give me anxiety. So it's always anxious. I have tons of anxiety around it, but it's kind of streamlined at this point, and it's just fun. And it turns out that people really want to share their passion too. And when you come in and say, Hey, I'd like to promote the science you're doing, I think it's really cool. People are really receptive to that. So, you know, they my guests make it very easy on me as best as they can. You know, it's the herding cats. The phrase always comes to mind though. You know, we just do our best. Brian  2:29   All right, so I'm glad that you were able to join us for a very plant centric game. I know it's much more cellular biology than ecology, but again, couldn't pass up the opportunity to try to get you to come on and talk to us. But before we get into talking about cellulose, let's do a little bit of science banter. So what's something cool you learned recently or heard about a story or anything like that? We usually let the guest host go first. Did you? Did you have anything that you want to share with the class? Matt  2:57   Yeah? Yeah. So luckily, shout out to my friend Allison, who puts me on on point every week goes give me a plant fact. I was thinking about this the other day, and it's one thing that I've heard, you know, throughout my education, throughout my career, and just for some reason, tucked away and never gave it much thought. But lately it's really been hitting me is that pollen is a male gametophyte. It's technically a separate organism. And I think, you know, people make a lot of jokes about what pollen is, and they're getting allergic to, you know, certain types of essentially, plant sperm. And, yeah, that's not wrong. There's sperm involved. But pollen itself is a fascinating structure that is really it's its own haploid organism. And I think that, to me, is really cool, because if you're in the plant world, you know, mosses and ferns get a lot of credit for having this alternation of generations flowering plants have carried that on. It's just a highly reduced form, and we don't think of it in the classic model that you do when you're teaching about the non vasculars or the ferns, that kind of thing. Brian  3:50   I still remember in college learning about the alternation of generations just being so confused. Matt  3:57   It's so cool, though. It's one of those things that when you think about the way we approach teaching about plants or getting people excited about plants, we're still so stuck in decades old ways of kind of getting that their head wrapped around, like, what is the parts of a flower, which eventually you can learn. I think if we started with these, like, how alien plants can be in terms of what we take for granted as everyday life as a vertebrate, mammal, animal, whatever you want to call it. It's just these things that like they can be very confusing, but plants are very weird, and that's a good jumping off point to get people excited about it. Jason  4:29    Yeah, my primary experience with pollen is walking through a cornfield where corn is taller than I am. It's dropping tons of pollen because it's wind pollinated. It falls on my sweaty arms, germinates and tries to burrow into my skin. Corn pollen allergies are actually a serious occupational hazard in my field, Matt  4:29    I believe it. Yeah, I feel bad for all of my botanist colleagues that like have pine pollen allergies and work on the coastal plain like it's a nightmare, but they endure. But that's a good sci fi book, right there. I mean, you've got the foundation for a good pitch. You just kind of got to flesh it out a little bit more  Jason  5:04   The Last of Us, but it's corn. Okay. Brian  5:07   What about you? Jason, what'd you bring? Did you bring anything to share? Jason  5:10   So a few weeks ago, I read this article summarizing a paper in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences about finding the oldest confirmed wooden tools used by humans. It's from 430,000 years ago in Greece, around an elephant carcass that was apparently killed and butchered by some of our human ancestors. And the thing is, apparently, at least, if you're an archeologist, being able to tell a rock from a stone tool is apparently fairly easy. At least the article made it implies such, but telling a stick that has been sharpened to be used as a tool from just a kind of pointy stick is hard, apparently they but around this elephant, there were apparently several dozen wooden bits, and so they cataloged them all. They looked at them, and two of them under the microscope showed clear signs of having been shaped by humans in terms of like scraping and being used as a tool for various things. Exactly what? Don't know, because, as one of the authors said, there's a lot you can do with a pointy stick. But given that there were a lot of predators around, there was a lot of prey around, they were probably doing something. And they even pointed out that it's a relatively primitive pointy stick, because they basically just grabbed, they used a piece of wood from something local, and they basically just sharpened it, and that was it. Whereas you go forward a few 10s of 1000s years, apparently we found Spears where they're sourced from hardwoods, they're further away and that they have been not only sharpened, but then they've been hardened in fire to make them better points and so this is like a very early example of woodworking for human tool use. Brian  6:49   Okay, so we learned how to slowly refine the pointy stick technology, yes, to Jason  6:55   make them pointier and harder and better at doing whatever you want to do with a pointy stick, which is largely stabbing it in something else. Brian  7:04   This reminds me of a story that you told at a panel that we were on at Dragon Con about when early humans moved into places where bamboo was common and you stop having a history of s

    1 hr
  5. S3E02.1 - Brynn Devine (Interview)

    Mar 11

    S3E02.1 - Brynn Devine (Interview)

    #Oceans #Finspan #OceansNorth #MarineBiology #Interview #BoardGames #Science Summary In this special bonus episode, we talk with Dr. Brynn Devine, one of the science consultants on Finspan. We get to hear what it was like helping the game's development, why monitoring fish and oceans is so crucial, how cold-calling can open surprising doors, and details on many lovely, lovely fish. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 04:16 How Brynn met Finspan 07:37 Being a science consultant 16:37 Balancing accuracy and gameplay 21:20 Favorite fish 25:30 Brynn's great secret 27:36 Wrap-up Links Finspan Designer Diary (where Brynn is specifically thanked) Ocean's North  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Brynn's photo courtesy of Ocean's North Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Brian  0:00   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason Wallace  0:10   In today's bonus episode, we will be interviewing Dr Brynn divine about her role as science consultant for finspan. All right, everyone, welcome back. This is Brian  0:21   Jason. This is Brian, and Jason Wallace  0:23   today we are joined by a very special guest, Dr Bryn Devine, who was one of the science consultants, maybe the science consultant for finspan. I guess we'll find that out. Dr Devine, Brynn, can you please introduce yourself? Brynn  0:34   Yeah, hi, Jason. Hi Brian. Thanks for having me. I'm Brynn Devine. I'm a fish biologist, fish scientist, and was one of three actually marine biologists who were consulting on the finspan game. Brian  0:44   Very cool.  Jason Wallace  0:45   Good to meet you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. When I was reading over the designer diary for finspan, they actually mentioned your name. In fact, it says specifically thanking you for all the endless insights about fish, from their abilities to their fun facts the accuracy of their art. So you apparently made an impression on at least one of the designers of the game. As soon as I read that, I was like, I want to talk to this person. We've had several game creators on this podcast, but we've never had one of the science consultants, one of the people in charge of getting the science right. And so I want to talk about that, but before we get that, let's talk about your credentials. So the internet says that your title is Arctic Fisheries Scientist at Oceans North. Can you tell us a bit about what is Oceans North? And then, what does an Arctic fishery scientist do? Brynn  1:29   Absolutely good questions. Yeah. So I'm currently working for Oceans north. So ocean North is a charitable nonprofit organization that's based here in Canada, and we do a variety of different marine conservation work in partnership with both coastal and indigenous communities across the Canadian Arctic and also the Atlantic region. So my role is Arctic fisheries scientist. Some of my job is providing stakeholder advice on some northern fisheries stocks, but a lot of my job is research based, and I have a long academic science research background, so I really love that aspect of my job. And I get to work with communities to help design science projects and research projects to help answer questions that they may have related to fish and fisheries in their local waters. So for example, I'm currently working on a project tagging sharks up in Nunavut, which is a region in northern Labrador and we're expanding that to look at other species, like cod and salmon, so looking at fish movement. So some of my job is more indoor cat vibes, going to meetings and in the office. And a lot of it, though, is, you know, get to go in the field, get to go to some amazing places, and get to work with really cool fish and really cool people. So  Brian  2:30   it's half indoor cat, half catfish.  Brynn  2:32   Yes, exactly. It's a good mix.  Brian  2:34   How do you tag a shark?  Brynn  2:37   Oh, good question. Well you catch one first. And then we're using satellite tags. So it's a little tag that you put either on their fin or in their muscle, and it stays on the shark for you can program it forever, long you want, but usually up to a year, about Max. And then it collects all the data on where they go, their depth, the temperature they use, and then it pops off the shark and relays all the data.  Brian  2:56   Really, it actually releases from the shark, and you collect it, or it transmits, or how do you Brynn  3:00   It transmit it all through the you like, pre program, the date you want it to release, and then as soon as it gets surface, it dumps it all through the satellite. So I can just sit at my desk here in Canada and I can just download all the information about the shark. It's really cool. Brian  3:12   So the sharks are showing off their cool, new piercing to their friends, and then just randomly, it just pops off  Brynn  3:17   exactly. I like to think it's a little accessory that they get to show off to their friends, and they enjoy having it, but Brian  3:22   that's super cool.  Jason Wallace  3:23   What's the purpose of a lot of this research? Is it all fisheries management, so figuring out appropriate catch, or some of it just basic science. We don't know how this fish, how it works, like, where it lives, what it behaviors, like, I realized in this area that the boundary between basic research and applied research is probably pretty fuzzy, but like, Where does a lot of this fit Brynn  3:41   absolutely so I mean, many regions of the Arctic are notoriously under-sampled. They're just remote. They're seasonally ice covered, so there's just not a lot of information. And for some of these species, like the sharks that we're tagging, they're sharks that are really taking advantage of the warming temperatures up there, and so they're pushing further and further north. And so then people in these communities that maybe they don't often see that that many sharks, but now they're seeing a lot of sharks. And so people in the communities have a lot of questions, how long are they staying? Where are they going? Where are they coming from? Why are we seeing these things? So it's really supporting communities to collect data that then they can have and they can use that data to help monitor their own marine resources and manage their own resources up there. Jason Wallace  4:16   Okay, and then getting more towards the game side of this. How did you get involved with finspin? In the emails beforehand. You said that was not part of your official job. That was something you're doing on the side. But how did you get connected with them? Brynn  4:26   I think it was kind of a weird way to get involved, maybe. But yeah, I guess it was 2021 back during the pandemic. Like many people, we were all playing probably more board games than we've ever played before, just not a lot to do when everything's closed down. I found myself with a group of friends that were really into board games, and one of our favorite games to play was wingspan. We're all biologists, so a bunch of nerds, and it was a really nerdy game to play. I had never seen that game before. Had never come across it, and I was blown away immediately, not only by the scientific detail in the game, like it's so cool how they've integrated that into so many components of the gameplay. And just aesthetically it's stunning, the artwork and everything. I was blown away. Love the game, but maybe after the second or third time playing it, I was like, "guys, you know, what would make this game so much better?", "if all these birds were actually fish? so much better." And I just kept thinking more and more about it, and I feel like I could just see so many similarities and how the game could be played, but also the demographics of the audience. I mean, for birders, you have the classic ornithologists. You have people who like backyard birds and bird feeders, and then you have this huge force of recreational birders that are really into it. And the same for fish, you know, you have ichthyologists like myself, aquarium hobbyists. You have all of these recreational anglers. I get to see the demographics kind of playing well for both groups, and then maybe after one too many glasses of wine, I was like, You know what? I'm going to email the game makers. And so I went on their website, and I just found, I think they had, like, a web portal to contact Stonemaier games. And so I was just like, hear me out. This is why I think this game would work so well for fish. Sent it off like no expectations to ever hear back from anyone. Lo and behold, I had a reply from Jamie Stonemaier, Stonemaier games, I think, like in 12 hours after I sent it. So lovely. And he was like, it's so great to hear from you. Like, I'm gonna let you on in a little secret. Don't tell anyone. It's weird you mentioned that because we're working on an aquatic version of wingspan right now. So I was like, No way. Well, I was like, if you need any like fish people. Let me know. Brian  6:22   I love that you describe yourself as a fish person. She is, in fact, a human I promise.  Brynn  6:27   I am a human. Yeah, they can see me on video.I'm a human.  Jason Wallace  6:29   We keep calling ourselves plant people. Brian,  Brian  6:31   that's true. Okay, okay, legitimate, legitimate. I do not actually photosynthesize  Brynn  6:36   We are people of our nerd realms, but, but yeah. So then and he contacted me back, and he was like, That would be great. I'll put you in touch with our game maker. So, yeah, that was

    30 min
  6. S3E02 - Finspan (Fish)

    Feb 25

    S3E02 - Finspan (Fish)

    #Finspan #StonemaierGames #ElizabethHargrave #Wingspan #ScienceCommunication #Oceans #Fish #BoardGames #Science Summary In this episode we discuss the game "Finspan" by Stonemaier Games, and are joined by Emily Melvin, a PhD candidate in marine science at Duke University. In a game that's basically "Wingspan but with fish", we talk about the game differs from its predecessor, all whole bunch of different fish, what IS a fish, deep-sea nightmares, lovely bioluminescence, ecosystems, invasive species, and just how much we still don't know about our oceans. So take a dive with us into the undersea world of fish and Finspan, and let's have fun playing dice with the Universe. Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 01:41 - Fish bones and flatfish 04:17 - Overview of Finspan 10:02 - What is a fish? 13:41 - Fish eating fish 17:31 - Ocean dimensionality 23:31 - Young and schools 29:14 - Deep-ocean nightmares 32:46 - Bioluminescence and venom 36:35 - Threats to the ocean 43:46 - Nitpicks and constructive criticism 50:14 - Final grades 55:05 - Sign-offs Links Finspan (Stonemaier Games)  and on Tabletopia Single origin of flat fish (Nature Genetics) Seas the Day (Marine podcast from Duke University) Emily Melvin's professional website and Bluesky profile Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Brian  0:06   hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about science behind some of your favorite games. Jason Wallace  0:11   Today we'll be talking about finspan by Stonemaier games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason. This is Brian, and today we are joined by a special guest, Emily Melvin from Duke University. Emily, will you please introduce yourself for our audience? Emily  0:27   Yeah, hi. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Emily Melvin, and I am a PhD candidate in the marine science and conservation program at Duke's Marine Lab, which is in Beaufort, North Carolina. And I study issues of policy and governance. So broadly speaking, my work focuses on the relationships between humans and the marine environment. And I also am an avid scuba diver. I'm a licensed open water scuba instructor, so a lot of my knowledge relating to this game comes from my experience as a diver as well. Brian  0:57   Oh, that's extra cool.  Jason Wallace  0:59   Yes, you got hands on experience. Brian  1:01   That's right. You can talk to us about how when we use the divers to represent the actions.  Emily  1:05   Oh, I have thoughts about that.  Brian  1:06   I'll bet you do  Jason Wallace  1:10   all right. And one thing we've started asking guests recently, do you have a favorite game you like to play? Speaker 1  1:15   It is really hard to pick a favorite game, because I There are so many different categories, but lately, I've been really into playing Ark Nova on Board Game Arena. So I don't have the physical game because I don't know that I have anyone who will play a game that long with me, but I like to play that one online Brian  1:32   Ark Nova is on our list for this season, so we've never played it. I'm looking forward to it. We don't have a copy of it yet, do we?  Jason Wallace  1:37   No, so we'll probably be doing Board Game Arena too.  Brian  1:40   Oh, okay, okay,  Jason Wallace  1:41   all right. So we like to start off with a fun science fact. And Emily, we always give our guests first choice. Do you have some fun science fact that you know or that you picked up recently you'd like to share with our audience? Speaker 1  1:52   Sure, one thing that I came across as I was preparing for this podcast was thinking about the fact that actually fish, bony fish, like a salmon, for example, are more closely related to humans than they are to a shark. So we can talk a lot about that a little bit more later, if you'd like,  Brian  2:06   Isn't it like, technically, phylogenetically, we are fish. If you there's no way to draw a grouping around fish that doesn't include us? Jason Wallace  2:13   The word fish is a pretty tough word to define, because of that phylogeny, they're not necessarily grouped together in a way that scientifically makes a lot of sense So  Jason Wallace  2:22   yes, this is one of my questions for later. So we will get into that.  Brian  2:25   Fantastic. So I found out a thing about flounders or flat fish. So these are in the order, you'll have to tell me how I said this wrong. It's Carangiformes. Unknown Speaker  2:35   I am not great with pronunciation, so it sounds right.  Brian  2:37   Well, whatever, you can look at it on Wikipedia if I said it wrong. So this is a diverse group of fish that actually has some members that you might not expect. So it also includes Remora. It has barracuda. It has Archer fish, which are very cool in that they actually like spit, little jets of water to catch, prey all of that's in the same family. So you can get the diversity here. But it also has the flatfish, the flounders. So if you've ever seen a flounder, if I can describe them, they have a very flat body, and both of their eyes are on one side of their head, so their eyes point straight up, both the left and the right. So they undergo a pronounced metamorphosis. During development, they start as symmetrical, very fish looking fish, and at a certain point, the eye slowly moves over to one side of the head. There's no other way to describe that, except for metamorphosis. Interestingly, there was a long considered that that had actually independently arose multiple times in that group of fish. So that very unusual body plan had popped up several times independently. But what I saw was a study in 2024 where, based on genetic evidence, actually it does look like sanity prevails, and there was a single origin of that very unusual body plan. So all the flatfish have sort of a common origin of having one of their eyeballs move to the other side of the head, Jason Wallace  3:45   yeah, and they're all basically swimming sideways along the bottom, aren't they?  Brian  3:48   Yeah, they got a lot of weird adaptations, and some of them do active camouflage, like an octopus or a chameleon. And if you have one with a damaged eye, it actually doesn't do a good job of camouflaging anymore. Emily  4:00   When you're scuba diving, you will not see them until they move. It's crazy. They they're very camouflaged, Brian  4:06   and it's just burying themselves. They literally change their appearance, right? They're really good at it. Jason Wallace  4:10   So they've got, like, chromatophores, so little color changing cells in their skin,  Brian  4:14   yep. And they actually do have to look around at their environment to do that. Jason Wallace  4:17   Very cool. All right. Well, talking about fish. Let's make a transition now to the game finspan. So finspan, as you've probably guessed from the name, is a sort of not only sequel, but spiritual successor to wingspan, both of them by Stonemaier games. It came out in 2025 and its basic stats, so one to five players. So it comes with a single player mode, ages 10 plus due to complexity, runtime of about 45 to 60 minutes, which seems right, once people know what they're doing. I've taught this game several times at conventions and such, and it's definitely closer to an hour and a half to two hours when you have like, five brand new people to it, but once people figure it out, it can go a lot faster. Pedigree of this it was developed by Elizabeth Hargrave, although reading through the designer diary, it seems like she had more. An executive producer role. So the frontline developers were David Gordon and Michael O'Connell. They brought in some artists who had also worked on wingspan in order to do all the beautiful watercolors that it has. And Hargrave was sort of consulted at multiple times, and was doing play testing and such. So she had more of a higher oversight part bit of the layout of this game. It has these actually very large player boards that you play on. These things are pretty massive, at least two sheets of printer paper stuck like fat wise together, maybe larger. So this game, if you have all five players, takes up a lot of space. It has a bunch of fish cards that you draw and that you play out and that have various abilities you're trying to put together. You've got fish eggs, fish young, and then schools of fish, which in the base game are just little cardboard tiles, but with Kickstarter upgrades or some fancier options, which my copy has because I bought it secondhand, and I guess whoever had it firsthand bought those, but they have actually, like slightly squishy plastic eggs and little wooden meeples for the fish and the schools, which are nice. Brian  5:59   Yeah, Jason, you managed to find the ultimate copy at the lugcon swap meet, right? You got the Kickstarter thing with all the pretty extra things, and you didn't have to do the kickstarter backer  Jason Wallace  6:08   Yes, it was Southern Fried, actually, Southern Fried Gaming Expo in Atlanta. And then you have these little cute diver meeples that represent your actions each turn, and then are also showing you like going down through the ocean depths as you play. So what does this game look like, or what does it play like? It's just like wingspan. It's an engine building game. So you are trying to play fish into your ocean in order to set up combinations that get you the most points at the end. And you get points from the points that are printed on the fish. You get points for eggs and fo

    56 min
  7. S3E01 - Primates (Primate Evolution)

    Jan 28

    S3E01 - Primates (Primate Evolution)

    #Primates #Evolution #GreenButteryflyGames #Conservation #BoardGames #Science Summary Happy 2026, everyone! To celebrate Darwin Day (February 12th), we have a special 90-minute episode with Will and David from the Common Descent Podcast to talk all about Primates! We'll cover the new game by Green Butterfly Games, all six clades of primates it showcases, and tons of other fun facts about us an our arboreal cousins, like how monkeys rafted from Africa to South America and why Aye-ayes are the best nose-pickers. So grab a banana, build a nest, and settle in for a lively discussion of Primates. Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intros 00:02:07 - Dung Beetles and Human Endurance 00:11:42 - Game Overview 00:21:23 - Primate History 00:33:00 - Different Primate Groups 00:51:17 - Humans in the Game 00:57:17 - Representation through Game Mechanics 01:07:36 - Picking Nits 01:13:09 - Final Grades 01:21:55 - Wrap-up Links Primates (Green Butterfly Games) The Common Descent Podcast Dung beetles evolving to eat meat (Science.org) Limits of human endurance (Nature.com) An aye-aye picking its nose (YouTube)  When the Earth was Green, by Riley Black (Macmillan Publishers) Pitchstorm and Fate of the Nostromo (Board Game Geek)    Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason Wallace  0:00   Brian, hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:12   Today, we're going to discuss primates by green butterfly games. Hey, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian. This is Jason. And wait, we've got some other people here. Brian  0:26   Will and David, you're back!  Will  0:27   We're back.  David  0:28   Can't get rid of us,  Brian  0:30   no. Well, not that we would want to actually, this whole reason that this entire episode happened is actually your fault, so please explain yourself.  David  0:38   Oh, that's true. We this game was sent to us. We were sent it as a gift from one of our listeners, yeah, oh, we should have, we should have looked up who it was that sent it to us. That would have been really good to get the name. Jason Wallace  0:48   Thank you, anonymous. Listener of another podcast, Brian  0:54   common descent. Listener, whoever you are, thank you and make yourself known. You guys got a game, and you said, Well, we know some people who want to play, who like to play science games, and you approached us, which is totally different, because that's not how this works around here. We usually have to chase people down. David  1:08   We got the gift. I think it, I think we received it shortly after the last time we recorded with you guys.  Brian  1:15   Oh, wow.  David  1:16   And it was a really cool because it's the it's a perfect game for your podcast? Brian  1:22    Absolutely.  David  1:24   We thought it would be super fun, and so, yeah, it was one of the first things we did is we said, hey, do you guys want to play this you want to come back and play this game with us?  Brian  1:31   Yep, and we did, and it was fun. And we even did it the weekend of the museum meetup at Fernbank, which, again, is going to date this episode, but whatever, that's fine. We're releasing this episode that will also be our episode that's closest to Darwin Day. So it's also a good game for Darwin Day. So I'm excited to talk about this game. It has a huge amount of science content, and I'm excited about the conversation we're going to get to have about primates and how they're weird. But before we get into that, why don't we do a little bit of science banter? Anything you guys would like to talk about? Will  1:58   One that's on my mind because I literally just finished taking notes on it for one of our news sections, which will come out before this. So it won't be, I won't be spoiling our news. There was a study on dung beetles that have evolved to be necrophageous. So eating dead bodies, Brian  2:16   Did they roll them up into little balls?  Will  2:18   Yeah. And this is a thing that I was aware of. We talked about this in the decomposing episode, there are beetles that basically roll up a bit of a meatball and roll it away, bury it and let their young feet off of it,  Brian  2:30   okay, Will  2:30    instead of dung, yeah, meatballs. Brian  2:33   That's a different meaning of meatball. Yep. Will  2:37   And there was, there's a group of dung beetles that have evolved to do this, and they studied it by finding those underground  Brian  2:48   meat? Will  2:48    open like like like burrows that they used to there are Ichnofossils, trace fossils of these burrows that have preserved. And you can tell which kind of beetle does it, because they build the burrow differently. And so they were able to figure out the timing of the evolution. Because originally the idea was that, well, when the big herbivores that the dung beetles were eating the dung of died, they had to switch to something else. And so during the megafaunal extinction not too long ago in our earth's history. That must have been when the beetles switched over. But when they looked at the dating, it found out no they were eating meat well before the big herbivores started dying out. So what it seemed is more likely, is there were so many herbivores and so much dung and so many dung beetles that competition for some dung beetles to have to start doing something differently, because there was too much competition and too much to go around. So the herbivores now were just feeding dung beetles while alive and then flesh eating dung beetles while dead. Brian  3:59   What an unusual form of niche partitioning, and also meatball trace fossils! David  4:04   Yes, yeah. Cool. Jason Wallace  4:06   So which, which megafauna mass extinction. Was this? Is this like dinosaur mass extinction, or is this like 10,000 years ago mass extinction? Will  4:14   Yeah, yeah. The 10,000 the 10,000 years ago with the mammal, megafauna, mass extinction. This was a study focused on South America. So this would have been a lot of the American big animals that would have been these dung beetles, would have been living alongside of, of, like big marsupials and things like that. Brian  4:35   Were there coprophagous organisms that are known from, like the Jurassic I know we like to talk about how sauropods must have been crazy ecosystem engineers, but they must have been producing huge amounts of waste. David  4:49   There are dung beetle fossils in coprolites in the fossil record. I think they go back to the Mesozoic, although I'm off the top of my head, I'm not sure. But there are specific there are dung ball fossils, like coprolites that are specifically rolled up into balls and have often dung beetle larval burrows inside  Brian  5:14   interesting. So I would be it would be absolutely insane if basically, the origin of dung beetles corresponds with sauropods. Because, of course, Will  5:25   when it's like someone was definitely doing the job, I just don't know which group of insects it was, because how could you not take advantage of that? Brian  5:33   All right, what about you, Jason, you said you found the thing too.  Jason Wallace  5:37   Yes. So I was looking at things about primates, and I found one about humans recently, which were primates. So that counts. This was a recent one on our peak energy expenditure. So basically, there's the question of, what is the capacity for human like endurance, like, how much, many calories can you actually burn sustainably? And so they took a bunch of like, high endurance performance athletes, like people that are doing all sorts of crazy endurance feats, and they gave them a bunch of labeled heavy labeled isotopes, okay, heavy hydrogen, heavy oxygen. So they could trace it, you Brian  6:15   got to have that nice, sweet heavy water.  Jason Wallace  6:15   Yes. So and again, I don't know all the details, suffice to say, let them determine how much they were metabolizing, how much they were how many calories they were burning. And they found that for these extreme athletes, the limit was about two and a half times their basal rate. So your basal metabolic rate is how much your body burns when you're just lying there. It's how much it takes to pump your heart and to breathe and to maintain your organs and such, and they've known that. So in short bursts, you can go up to like, 10 times that amount if you're doing like a super, like a super endurance run, like, I know someone who did a 24 hour run. I think he's a little crazy, but he did it. Brian  6:57    I'm sorry. What? Jason Wallace  6:59    you run for 24 hours. That's that's the goal.  Jason Wallace  7:02   No You don't David  7:03   thank you. I don't want to run. I don't want to run for 24 seconds. Yeah. Jason Wallace  7:08   The thing is, when you do that, you're actually burning calories faster than you can metabolize them in you cannot digest food fast enough to replace those calories. So that's not sustainable. So they found that over the course of like six months, as these people were doing their hyper endurance stuff, it averaged out to about two and a half times, and that when they were performing their really high endurance stuff, they subconsciously cut down on other things like fidgeting or walking around or other stuff. So they cut back on their other caloric expenditure in order to keep it to about that amount. And the hypothesis is that that's about as fast as you can actually metabolize

    1h 27m
  8. S2E10.1 - John Coveyou (Interview)

    12/17/2025

    S2E10.1 - John Coveyou (Interview)

    #GeniusGames #STEMEducation #SciComm #JohnCoveyou #BoardGames #Science We've done several episodes on games from Genius Games (Cytosis, Periodic, Genotype), and now we get to speak to the man behind it all: John Coveyou, founder and CEO of Genius Games. John graciously sat down with us to talk about the beginning of Genius Games, the stigma of "educational" games, the challenges and joys of STEM game design, and some of his favorite non-Genius games to play. So sit back and enjoy this conversation with the man who makes our job easy, John Coveyou. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:55 History of John and Genius Games 07:50 Designing Educational Games 13:19 Balancing Fun and Realism 20:54 Most Challenging Games to Design 29:55 Upcoming Offerings 36:36 Favorite (Non-Genius) Games 38:23 Wrap-Up Links Genius Games website  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Splash images courtesy of Genius Games. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:00   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.  Jason  0:07   Today we're talking with John Coveyou, CEO and founder of genius games. Brian  0:16   Hey everybody. Welcome to a creator interview. I'm Brian.  Jason  0:19   This is Jason,  Brian  0:20   and joining us is John Coveyou from genius games, John, can you introduce yourself? John  0:26   Sure, yeah, I'm the owner of genius games. I've owned it since about 2011 and we make science accurate board games and jigsaw puzzles for the hobby market. Brian  0:38   Those are very cool and very popular. I think I like the the frog. One in particular is very good. John  0:44   You dissect a frog in a lot of public school science classes, so we want to make sure we threw that one in there.  Brian  0:49   I don't think I did a frog. Did you ever do a frog?  John  0:52   I did. I think it was 10th grade biology. Jason  0:55   I don't remember if I ever dissected a frog. I did do a fetal pig. Brian  0:59   I remember we did a heart one time and that actually, like, screwed me up for a long time. John  1:03   Yeah, I don't want to know what this stuff looks like inside of my body. Let me just move on. Brian  1:10   Fair enough. We're really excited to be able to get you on to talk to us today. Our whole reason for existence is to talk about board games and science and genius games. As you can imagine, we have done many of your games before. We've done cytosis and periodic. We did genotype. We have more games planned in the future. We're going to be doing cellulose and probably whatever else comes down the pipe. Eventually. I'm sure we'll, we'll touch on most, if not all, of the games in the genius library. John  1:37   Well, that's great, because those are two of my favorite things, science and board gaming and both have, I mean, honestly, had a dramatic impact on my life in many ways. I mean, I run a company that combines those two, but the impact goes much deeper than that. So I'm very excited to talk about both of those things and how they came together. Could you Jason  1:55   give us a bit of your background there? Because this is not necessarily a logical place to end up. At the intersection of science and board game. Your company basically lives in the space of making what I call hard science games, games where they're not just inspired by science, but they try to portray it accurately and faithfully. What brought you to that place? John  2:13   Yeah, and you know, it's a long, windy story, but I will try and summarize it as quick as possible. I think when you see a lot of games out there in the marketplace and you see, you know, a science-based game or a STEM-based game, what you're looking at is a product someone wanted to create, to just generate money. I did not arrive at the place of creating a product. I arrived. I mean, I fell in love with the sciences, and also loved board gaming, and those two things kind of randomly came together. So a little bit about my background in the sciences. After high school, I joined the military. I was in the military for eight years total, but only three of it was on active duty. I spent about a year and a half in Iraq in Mosul and Samara. And while I was there, I was enrolled in some university classes, and one was a chemistry class. And reading through I had, I got a lot of time to read through that chemistry textbook, and some other textbooks I had chemistry and some in physics, I think I was taking at the same time, because of the the stressful environment that I was in studying sciences actually became very therapeutic for me, like allowed me to take my mind off of the stress, the anxiety, the difficulty that we were facing as soldiers in that area, and I got to think about like, how atoms were built and how the universe was made, and how atoms combined to form compounds and molecules And and it actually, it was really nice to, like, take my mind off of everything. And so I really fell in love with the sciences in a way, while I was there. And at the same time, we were playing lots and lots of games, a lot of poker, a lot of risk, not, not stuff you would think of when you think about traditional, you know, hobby games. When you think about traditional hobby games, you know, a lot of times you're thinking about like Carcassonne and dominion and Settlers of Catan, which was probably the three most popular, or a ticket to ride. You're thinking about these really popular hobby games you can like buying target. For me, like poker, Texas Hold'em was a big introduction to getting my mind wrapped around the human experience, around games, and then we play a lot of risk, and boy, you know, playing risk in a combat zone with a bunch of angry soldiers, so many risk tables flipped. Brian  4:29   I feel like risk kind of sits at that, at that space where I know it's not, it's not quite part of what we would consider a modern hobby game, except I'm thinking about risk legacy and how it's kind of been inducted and almost like transitions between the games that most people would have at home and sort of the hobby game space. John  4:46   Yeah, it was that, yeah, I think Rob Daviau was the guy who did that, and he's an excellent legacy designer. And yeah, that did bring risk into a different place in the board gaming space. But anyway, so I came home. From the military, and I was studying engineering, so I got my degree, and have a master's degree in engineering. Went on to work as an engineer for a while. At the same time, really started to play a lot of other hobby games with some of my family and friends. Got into Dominion pretty heavy. Started playing some of the older stuff, like through the ages and mage night, some of these bigger like, whoa, you can, I mean, you can play these things for hours and hours and hours and real and really, like, never hit the bottom. You know, there's still, like, more game to be played. And I was teaching chemistry. I was teaching chemistry at the community college, and it just kind of struck me, like, Why? Why are we so intimidated by all these science concepts. You know, if I was to tell you that you have three oranges and three apples and each of them weigh one pound, you could do the math. It's real simple. But as soon as you remove these objects that we're really familiar with and you replace them with neutrons and protons, all of a sudden we lose our minds, and we're just like, I can't do it. It's too hard. It's not that hard. These are we're just intimidated, I think, by a lot of these concepts. So So I was thinking through that, and at the same time playing games with some of my friends, and they're like, memorizing just useless information that they'll never use in real life science fiction games. And I'm thinking, like, why is this the case? And it struck me that I just, I wish there was more real science based, like real science based board games, card games something so that when you're playing it, you're playing something that accurately mimics a real science concept, real process. And I think cyt-, you know, jumping forward, I think cytosis, in a lot of ways, is one that I'm the most proud of, in that sense, because it, because it's just such an interesting concept, the human cell, that game was really designed around the infrastructure that governs the activity within a human cell. So that's how it happened. That's that's the backstory.  Brian  6:56   What is the mission statement of genius games?  John  6:59   Yeah, that's a great question. We have toyed around with a few different mission statements. We say our core purpose is to create science based products that engage just allow people to have fun with the science concept. The wording isn't too tight on it. You know, I think sometimes you see mission statements, and you're like, what does that even mean? Brian  7:23   You got to create synergy.  John  7:25   Yeah, Team synergy. And, like, Listen, if I'm in a team and it's not synergetic, I'm leaving. So I don't know what this means, Brian  7:32   something that we've been dealing with, because, again, we're in this space, and we have, you know, read designer diaries and interviews and what people have said when they're trying to design games that are like this, where they're trying to use science concepts or have sort of an educational undertone to what they're doing. We did an episode on daybreak, which is all about climate change, designed by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, and they were very explicit in the designer diary, they didn't

    40 min
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About

Gaming with Science is a podcast that looks at science through the lens of tabletop board games. If you ever wondered how natural selection shows up in Evolution, whether Cytosis reflects actual cell metabolism, or what the socioeconomics of Monopoly are, this is the place for you. (And if not, we hope you’ll give us a try anyway.) So grab a drink, pull up a chair, and let’s have fun playing dice with the universe!

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  • Creator
    Gaming with Science Podcast
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    32
  • Rating
    Clean
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    © Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0)
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    Gaming with Science

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