Gaming with Science

Gaming with Science Podcast
  • 5.0 (3)
  • SCIENCE
  • UPDATED MONTHLY

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. S3E02.1 - Brynn Devine (Interview)

    1D AGO

    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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. S2E10 - Nature (Evolution redux)

    11/26/2025

    S2E10 - Nature (Evolution redux)

    #NatureGame #NorthStarGames #Evolution #Ecology #Predators #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Summary Welcome to Nature, the next evolution of Evolution! We're joined once again by Dr. Thiago Moreira to talk about this reimagining of a popular game, including covering a lot of evolutionary territory we couldn't last time. We'll talk about why everything isn't actually turning into crabs, why anteater-ification needs to be a word, how humans shape evolution from moths to elephants, what exactly a species is and where they come from, and why there's no such thing as "more evolved" creatures, (at least among anything still alive). Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 02:14 Better DNA preservation 05:00 Bird-hunting tortoise 06:54 Basics of Nature 16:23 Evolution in a nutshell 18:30 Convergent evolution 27:42 Human-induced evolution 34:22 Species and speciation 40:52 Evolution toward simplicity 45:49 Final grades Links Nature Web Site (North Star Games)  Preserving DNA with EDTA (Phys.org)  Video of tortoise hunting a bird (YouTube)  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  0:10   Today, we will be talking about nature by North Star games. Hey everyone, welcome back. This is Jason. Brian  0:18   This is Brian.  Thiago  0:19   I'm Thiago Jason  0:20   again, Thiago, so y'all may remember Tiago Moreira from our episode on evolution back in season one. He is back with us today to talk about nature, which is the next evolution of evolution. So Thiago, can you give our listeners a quick refresh on who you are and what your background is?  Thiago  0:38   Hi, of course. My name is Thiago Moreira, I'm a assistant professor of honors and biology at George Washington University in Washington, DC. I do have a background in zoology, and my PhD was in evolutionary biology, and my object of studies are spiders.  Brian  0:54   So Tiago has the questionable honor of being our first returning guest. Jason  1:00   All right, we're going to assume that is a high honor.  Thiago  1:03   I consider an honor.  Jason  1:05   And Tiago, I don't know if we asked you this the first time, but we're making it a habit to ask our guests what their favorite game is. What's your favorite game? Thiago  1:13   Tabletop game?  Jason  1:14   Sure.  Brian  1:14   Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be.  Thiago  1:17   I get into the habit of like playing tabletop games, like board games later. So like, as a gamer, my favorite was always role playing games. And I'm from Brazil, and in Brazil at the time that I was a kid, we didn't have DND officially there, so we have others. So like, I play some very old school ones, but I guess the one that marked my teenage years and young adult years more was like Vampire the Masquerade.  Jason  1:43   Oh, okay, I never played that one, but I did play several other of white wolf's Orpheus is my personal favorite.  Thiago  1:49   Okay, Brian  1:50   so you were sort of in the sort of 90s renaissance of indie tabletop roleplay  Thiago  1:54   kind of, yeah. Jason  1:56   So did you like, have cape and fangs and all that sort of stuff? Thiago  2:01   I never do the the live action was, it's always tabletop, like, always rolling dice and like, that's it. Brian  2:07   That seems like a shame, Tiago, because I think you'd make a pretty good vampire. Thiago  2:12   I tried once. Didn't work. Brian  2:13    Okay, Jason  2:14   well, let's move on to our fun science fact. Tiago, as our guest, you get to go first. What do you have for us from the world of science.  Thiago  2:21   So I got this news the other day, like and like something that is probably going to be very influential in what I do. I'm a systematic person, so I do work with systematics, trying to uncover the tree of life. And we use a lot of molecular data. And this was this news from, apparently, people in Northwestern University, they found something that actually preserves DNA better than actually what we use currently, which is ethanol. So apparently when they use EDTA, which is a food preserver, it actually preserved the DNA samples more efficiently than actually ethanol, Brian  2:57   just like a suspension, like a solution of EDTA? Thiago  3:00   Yeah, they made a kind of solution to it. And actually, they found this by accident, apparently. So they just got a sample that fell in there, like, and apparently it works. Apparently it says here that, like, they got some samples from fish in ddta, and they obtain high quality DNA in large quantity. So they just pull up something from a food preservative. And it works really well.  Jason  3:21   That's interesting, because in my graduate work, we work with RNA, so DNA is less stable, more interesting cousin, and we always had to use EDTA, because what the chemical does is it binds metal ions, and it basically keeps them from interacting with the RNA or the DNA. That's what kind of makes it fall apart. RNA is tricky to work with, because that one difference of the one hydrogen, or, sorry, the one oxygen. So the deoxy in deoxyribonucleic acid, that makes a huge difference in chemical stability. And if there are metal ions around, the RNA will actually cleave itself. And there's all sorts of proteins around that are meant to break apart RNA, because it's meant to be temporary. You literally sweat RNAses, they're called, enzymes designed to tear apart RNA, so it's tricky to work with, and we'd use EDTA to keep them intact. I'm just surprised that it works so well on DNA. I would have expected that degradation would still happen, and I guess not  Brian  4:16   A lot of the enzymes that cut DNA as well. Nucleases generally need these metal cofactors as well. DNA stores information, but it is a chemical, right? So what we do is we keep it at a buffer that keeps it at slightly basic so that it improves stability, and then you suck up all of the metal ions, so the enzymes that would cut it up can't do that. Jason  4:35   I'm just surprised it works better than ethanol, which basically dehydrates everything, so nothing can work. Thiago  4:40   Yeah, that was surprising as well. I personally didn't during my PhD, but like some of my lab colleagues, they would, they were working with transcriptome, so they do have to work with, like, a RNA and like, the whole extraction was like painful, the whole rituals, especially when they have, like, to preserve the specimens in the field to do it. It was not fun. Jason  4:59   How about you, Brian, you also had a science fact right? Brian  5:03    I did okay. So based on the game and what we're going to talk about later, I heard about this story first, actually, from Will and David from Common Descent, while we were at Dragon Con, we had a panel called, "Are you really going to eat that?" which was about unusual dietary habits in the animal world. So for instance, alligators will pursue and eat fruit actively, it's not an accident. They will actually eat it if it's available. This is a story from Current Biology in 2021 it's a correspondence so it's not a full length paper documenting a tortoise hunting, killing, and eating a baby bird.  Brian  5:36   So herbivores eat what? Thiago  5:39   they're very opportunistic. Apparently, like those turtles,  Brian  5:42   carnivores eat meat, herbivores eat plants. But an herbivore will be happy to take meat if it is available, and lots of things will basically eat baby birds if they have the opportunity. They are very helpless, not very good at protecting themselves. And this is an instance of a tortoise on an island group that is just on the west of Africa. And it's a video of a tortoise just hunting this baby tern chick that fell out of the nest, sort of slowly backing away as the tortoise slowly walks toward it, trying to bite it, trying to bite it, until it eventually bites its head and kills it and eats it. So we can have a video of that if you're interested in watching a tortoise hunt and eat a baby chick. Thiago  6:19   that tortoise like was not known to eating meat before? Brian  6:22   No, I think that they've been scavenging. Yes, and evidently, this is not the only time that this has been observed, but this is the first time it's been documented from the process of actively hunting, killing and eating. Jason  6:35   There are also some very horrifying videos online of horses eating baby chicks around farms. So there's a lot of things that will eat meat if you give them the opportunity. It turns out, Brian  6:45   yeah, things will eat eggs, and things will definitely eat baby birds if they have the opportunity to do so. I guess birds primarily have to defend themselves by flying. Baby birds are not going to be able to do that. Jason  6:54   This actually ties very into the game, so we're now going to transition to the game itself, because the game actually has a card called opportunistic which lets your foragers, your herbivores start eating some meat. So let's jump into this game. So the game for today is nature by North Star games. It is basically the next evolution of the game, evolution which we covered back in season one, basic stats of the game. It's for one to four players, although there are very easy optional rules to extend it up to six, ages 10 plus 30 to 45 minutes for the base game, and about a suggested retail price of $35 Wow, that's good, yeah. The thing about natur

    50 min
  6. S2E09 - Periodic (the Periodic Table)

    10/29/2025

    S2E09 - Periodic (the Periodic Table)

    #Periodic #GeniusGames #Chemistry #PeriodicTable #Atoms #Elements #STEM #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Summary In this episode we get elemental for the game Periodic, with the amazing Dr. Raychelle Burks as our special guest. We talk about why the table is arranged like it is, why some elements are weird, what the groupings mean, why we should love *all* subatomic particles, how isotopes help solve crimes, and how some people get viscious when playing Monopoly. So grab some dihydrogen monoxide and join us for Periodic, by Genius Games. Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 02:52 - Molybdenum poisoning & glowing plants 12:39 - Basics of Periodic 19:14 - What is the Periodic Table? 32:35 - Why are some elements weird? 39:53 - Not just electrons 55:16 - Nitpick corner 1:00:37 - Final grades Links Periodic official site (Genius Games) Cattle molybdenum poisoning (Australian Veterinary Journal) Glowing succulents (Matter)  Glowing rubidium (Youtube; Royal Society of Chemistry) NIST periodic table  Dr. Raychelle Burk on Tiktok, and her Trace Analysis column 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   Jason, hello Jason  0:06   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 talking about periodic by genius games. Hello. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian Jason  0:20   this is Jason Brian  0:21   and we are joined by Dr Raychelle Burks, Raychelle, could you introduce yourself please? Raychelle  0:26    Yes, I am Raychelle Burks, I am a chemist and a forensic scientist.  Brian  0:32   Well, I'm so glad you're able to join us today. We were just talking about, let's see you said that your Instagram handle is radium, yttrium, and you'rr Dr. rubidium. And this is game is all about the periodic table. You use three different elements in your sort of social or media, like internet handles. So I think we got the right person for this. Raychelle  0:51   I hope so.  Jason  0:52   And just to give a bit more information to our listeners, you said you're at American University in Washington, DC, right? Raychelle  0:57   Yes, the and actually, it's funny, because it's like, it is American University. What a wild name for a school. We have a lot of universities, but it is one that's kind of got a congressional mandate. There was, you know, back in the day, they were like, we are going to have the American University. And it's like, it didn't quite work out, Brian  1:16   but that's interesting. So you said there's a congressional mandate. So this is kind of like, we're at the University of Georgia. We're a land grant institution, so we sort of have this mission that the university is supposed to satisfy you. You are in a similar situation. Raychelle  1:29   It's, well, it's weird, you know, I went to a land grant institution, so I'm a proud corn Husker. That's where I got my PhD. So University of Nebraska at Lincoln and so land grant institutions, definitely a bit different, right? Because you're taxpayer money, there's some property involved, and you have a mandate, you have an extension office. I believe you have a fantastic extension office. I think all state residents you know, have the ability to have, like, a library card and come to a university event, like there's a real community kind of based thing. And in a way, American actually also has that many universities do, especially for the neighborhood they're in. But American University is actually chartered by Congress, like, way back in the day, I think it's 1893 is this a pop quiz now? But so it's, it's an interesting history that that kind of comes about. Brian  2:25   Well, very cool. Let's see. So, so we're here to talk about the game periodic by genius games. This is another in our genius games roster, which I figure eventually we'll be working our way through all of the genius games games at some point or another. But this is our second chemistry game. So we're excited to talk about it, but really, this game is about the periodic table specifically, which is very cool, and I definitely have questions, so I'm excited to have somebody here to to give answers. But why don't we start with our science banter topic? So what have we learned or found studies something interesting in the world of science today. So we usually let our guests go first if they've got something, if not, Jason has something queued up Raychelle  3:08   well, as a forensic scientist, I will say I spent a lot of time kind of in crime. I mean, hey, Okay, Brian  3:17   makes sense.  Raychelle  3:19   And so, you know,  Brian  3:20   so does CSI, does this show CSI drive you insane? It must, oh, Raychelle  3:24   you know, it's because I know it's fiction. And you know, there's a lot of like, I'm sure, you know, if you ask an astronomer, physicist, you know, it's like, Oh, does this show drive you like, there's some good bits, there's some bad bits. So I would say, if anything, it'd be like Breaking Bad, where you're, like, the one time we've got a full-time chemistry show, it's a meth cook? Brian  3:48   Well crime, you know, there you go. Raychelle  3:49   But crime, you know? But I would say one of the stories that I came across was, you know, we see some of the same elements as kind of like, culprits, right? People are like, sure, sure, arsenic, like we get, you know, thallium, right? People are very familiar with that, not only because of news stories, but because of kind of historical crime fiction. I mean, if you know, you've seen it, Agatha Christie, you're like, is it going to be arsenic? You know? But there are other elements that you're like, Excuse me, like you just you don't see them as often. So it just seems really wild. And it really caught my attention. I came across a story involving molybdenum, molybdenum. Jason  4:32   Oh, wait, it's not molybdenum? Have I been saying that wrong my entire life? Raychelle  4:35   No, no, it's Don't, don't, because we I will pronounce things as I like them. Brian  4:41   I think in Biology, we usually say it's a molybdenum cofactor. I've never heard this other pronunciation, but I'm going to start using it Raychelle  4:47   and that, that is my new and exciting way to say it. But, yeah, don't, don't go by me, because I will also, in a weird way. I went to a year abroad in England, in college, and I will actually say aluminium. And but to me, I It helps me actually remember how to spell it. I mean, it makes sense. Alu-mini-um, right? So when I pronounce it molybdenum, that's literally to help me remember, oh, it's Molly, a B, a D, like, because I'm like, I love how they spell these elements sometimes where it's just wacky. Well, for us English speakers, we're like, did you really put a Y, a B and a D, like, right next to each other? But to have the we just don't hear about this element. Yeah, right. And you know, even though, of course, like a lot of your metals, the kind of shared impact, you know, kind of, quote, heavy metal poisoning, where you're going to see the same types of symptoms, but you usually it's like, the same old heavy metals, you know, like, you're like, your lead Jason  5:53   lead mercury, arsenic... Raychelle  5:55   the usual suspects. And that's why this was, like, it's like a twist in a Dateline episode, where you're like, you mean, it wasn't the husband, Brian  6:04   so this is  Jason  6:05   so what happened with it? Brian  6:06   Yeah, yeah, what was the story? Speaker 1  6:08   It really kind of affected cattle. And that's the thing. Is, this wasn't a human poisoning. Is that some of the features you know, your your GI distress, joint pain that should sound familiar to folks that kind of clock, some of these metallic poisoning things. But there's also a big part of crime that involves, like, wildlife related like people will actually, like, try to hurt each other's cattle or try to poison crops, right? Like, sabotage level tomfoolery. And so it was about, you know, the real impact of this on this livestock, and then how did they kind of map it out and kind of get to the root of things? And so it, you know, that kind of a crime. Sometimes we're so focused on human-involving action, which I understand why we all do, but to just see how they apply the same type of toxicology work and, like sleuthing to be like, who is poisoning these cows was, like, really interesting to me. But again, also, because it's just an element that, I mean, it's just not one that we talk about. It's not, you know, one of the most when we talk, like, biologically, you're like, yeah, yeah, it's the same seven elements. Okay, you know, a lot of time on carbon, a lot of time, you know, and you got your coinage metals, and you're like, sure, sure, snooze fest. But when you hear something that's like an element that even you forgot about as a chemist, is kind of like, Oh, Brian  7:39   I'm trying to think so there are, there's a surprising number of elements, the micro trace elements you need, like Selenium, and you need a little bit of cobalt, and you need, I think you probably do need, a little bit of molybdenum. And there's a couple of, what else Am I forgetting? What are some of the weird ones? You need some zinc. You need a little bit of copper.  Raychelle  7:56   Oh, you need plenty of zinc. Yeah.  Brian  7:58   Oh, you do? Raychelle  7:58   You need copper. not too much, all right? Not too much, but, but Selenium, and the fact that you said that, t

    1h 8m
  7. S2E08 - Daybreak (Climate Change)

    09/24/2025

    S2E08 - Daybreak (Climate Change)

    #Daybreak #CMYKGames #Climatechange #ClimateScience #BoardGames #ScienceCommunication #SciComm  Things are warming up in this episode as we talk with Dr. Jacquelyn Gill about Daybreak, a cooperative game about combatting climate change while keeping society intact. We cover tipping points, carbon drawdown, ocean acidification, the clean energy transition, what fossil fuels actually are, and some actually good news about climate change. Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 01:31 - Baby pterosaurs and frog saunas 06:11 - Playing Daybreak 22:53 - Designer choices 27:50 - Sense of urgency 32:45 - Tipping points 40:44 - Ocean acidification 47:05 - Clean energy as the focus 52:53 - RCP and climate projections 58:50 - What are fossil fuels? 1:02:00 - Niggling nitpicks 1:07:12 - Final grades Links Daybreak Official Site (CYMK Games) Designer diary FSC Certification (sustainable components) Matteo Menapace site  Warm Regards (Jacquelyn's podcast)  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  0:11   Today, we're going to discuss Daybreak by CMYK. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian.  Jason  0:20   This is Jason Brian  0:21   and we're joined today by a special guest, Jacquelyn Gill. Jacquelyn, can you please introduce yourself? Jacquelyn  0:26   Hi, I'm Jacquelyn. I'm a paleoecologist from the University of Maine, and I am also a science communicator, and I focus on climate change. Brian  0:34   That's cool. And then you also said that you are, in fact, a board gamer yourself. What games do you enjoy playing? Jacquelyn  0:41   Oh gosh, I have been a gamer of many stripes for a long time, everything from video games to tabletop RPGs to board games. And these days, I've been getting really into two player games because we haven't really found our gaming community. So I get really excited when I have a new two player game, and I think my husband's just going to be really excited to play daybreak, because we've been playing a lot of twilight struggle, which is a cold war game where one of you plays the Soviet Union and the other plays the United States.  Brian  1:14   Oh, man.  Jacquelyn  1:14   And you know, that's starting to feel a little too close to home these days. So yeah, and it also takes a million years to get through.  Brian  1:21   Well, I don't think this game takes a million years to get through, but I would say that this is not a light game either from that perspective. But you know, you can when you win. Man, does it feel good, though. Before we get into the game, we'll do our science banter, some kind of story or topic or something from the world of science that we want to discuss. We usually let the guest host go first. Jacquelyn, do you have something you like to share? Jacquelyn  1:42   I do. And, you know, the folks might have seen those T shirts or mugs that have a dinosaur on them that say all my friends are dead. As a paleoecologist, I feel this, you know, this is my life. So this is not a this is not a happy story. You know, when we talk about a highly productive fossil site, we're talking about a death trap. So, I mean, on September 5, there was this really cool study that came out in the journal Current Biology, and it's all about baby pterosaurs. So these were these, yeah, these  Brian  2:13   dead baby pterosaurs.  Jacquelyn  2:14   Dead baby pterosaurs. I know, and we know. So the fossils themselves are, I would classify them as cute. They're pretty small and but it turns out that this, this particular location, does have a tendency to have a lot of young pterosaurs in it. The fossils that are kind of coming out of this location tend to be on the young side, and these particular baby pterosaurs had evidence in their bones of there's like twisting and breakages, and it's thought that they were basically killed in a severe windstorm. And and pterosaur fossils in general are very rare because they have really fragile bones, and so the fact that we have juveniles with direct evidence of trauma is pretty unique and exciting. These kinds of fossils for from animals from a young age help us to understand more about the biomechanics or the ability of these animals to fly. But also, there are of the hundreds of pterosaur fossils that have been found, A lot of them are very small and very young, and it just suggests that, you know, this was a really rough life for these animals to be flyers when the when the storms were, you know, maybe even more intense than some of the ones that we might see now because of the climate conditions at the time. Brian  3:30   Yeah, I know we've had will and David on from common descent. And they always say the best paleontology starts with tragedy.  Jacquelyn  3:35   It really does. It's true. Jason  3:38   Well, I have something a little bit more upbeat for my science fact. So this was one I ran across a month or two ago, and it talks about frog saunas. This is one of those things that sounds silly until you actually dig into it, because here's the thing. So some people listening may know that a lot of amphibians worldwide are suffering. They're having problems, and that frogs especially are having issues with various fungal infections. And there was a group in Australia that took this one fact people knows, like, oh, the fungus does better at lower temperatures, and that in like this, one particular part of their study area that had a bunch of rocks, the frogs were doing better around the rocks. And they hypothesized that, okay, these rocks could be storing heat during the day and helping the frogs keep their body temperature up in order to fight off this fungus better. And so they built these little frog saunas, which are essentially just bricks with with holes that are the right size for frogs to go in them. And they just stuck them out where they get plenty of sun. I think they may have put some little greenhouses over them, and they actually found that, yes, like when they put these out, they would then go and they'd capture frogs and put them near the saunas. And this frogs apparently did a good job, like getting inside on their own. It actually helped them fight off the fungus better. And this is actually a really nice thing, because it's a very low cost, easy thing to do. You put some bricks around that have the right size holes in them, and you can help these frogs fight off this infection. And so this is one of those. I love it. When science can take something cheap and easy and make a meaningful impact. And so I loved when I ran across as like, Oh, this is great. And it has the nice headlining thing of building frog saunas to try to save the to save the species. Brian  5:14   So Jason's encouraging everybody to throw bricks at frogs, yes? Jason  5:18   Not at frogs. Just deposit them near frogs. It's like, you don't throw a sauna at a person. Just build a sauna near a person.  Brian  5:26   Yeah, that's true. You can throw a person into a sauna, I suppose. But this is going to have the cutest little things in the show notes. It's going to be little frogs sitting inside of bricks and Little Baby pterosaurs, right? Jacquelyn  5:38    With with little like broken arms,  Brian  5:40   like little pterosaurs with their arms in slings. This, when you first said frog sauna, I was thinking, I don't even know, do we call this an idiom about the frog sitting in the pot of water that is slowly heating up? Is that also a good transition? Jacquelyn  5:51   Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. It's like, well, we talk about the frog in a in a pot, metaphor for climate change, and you just crank the heat up a little bit, a little bit. And the idea is, you don't know you're being boiled until it's, you know, too warm to do anything about it. Brian  6:03   Okay? Thank you very much. Both really good things. Should we hop into discussing this game?  Jason  6:09   Oh, that was a bad one.  Brian  6:11   Oh, what do you mean? Oh, oh, hop into it. Man, I didn't even catch that. So Daybreak was designed by Matt Leacock and Matteo manapace and published by CMYK in 2023 it's for one to four players. Plays in about 60 to 90 minutes, and it's suggested for ages 10 and up in the game, you're going to play one of four global powers, and you're working collaboratively to transition to green energy and build social resilience, ecological resilience and infrastructure resilience, all while dealing with crises and planetary effects of all of this carbon being pumped into the atmosphere and raising the global temperature. And you win the game by getting to the point where you are producing less carbon than the planet can absorb, and getting through a round of the crisis phase without failing. Everything in the game has a very distinct color block art style. The center of the board is a world map with a giant thermometer running down one side a couple little tracks that are scattered on the world that are tracking different things like loss of global sea ice, desertification, ocean acidification, things like that. I believe, if our memory serves. There are six tracks. We'll get into them in more detail later. Jason  7:23   Basically all the bad things that happen due to climate change.  Brian  7:26   Yeah, at a at a global, planetary level, there are also, you'll have a place where you can put these little wooden tree tokens representing the forests and their ability to absorb carbo

    1h 15m
  8. S2E07 - Genotype (Genetics)

    08/27/2025

    S2E07 - Genotype (Genetics)

    #genetics #genotype #GeniusGames #mendel #peas #BoardGames #Science This month we're talking about Genotype, by Genius Games, where you get to play a field assistant to the father of modern genetic, Gregor Mendel. We'll talk about who Mendel was, why his peas were so important to biology, how he got a bit lucky, and how many different ways there are to break a gene. (Also, why it's weird that some humans can drink milk as adults, and why cats and borrowed board games don't mix.) Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:30 New paper on Mendel's Peas 04:46 Overview of Genotype Game 08:16 The Meatball Incident 13:45 Who was Gregor Mendel? 16:08 The seven pea genes 20:36 How to break a gene 27:47 The Modern Synthesis of biology 31:04 Dominant and recessive genes 38:22 Mendelian genes in humans 44:59 Nitpick corner 48:40 Final grades Links Genotype (Genius Games) Massive study of Mendel's pea genes (Nature) Hankweed: Mendel's unfortunate second choice for plants to study (PubMed Central) Evolution of human lactase persistence (=drinking milk as adults) (Nature Genetics)  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  0:01   Brian. Brian  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:13   Today, we will be talking about Genotype by genius games. Brian  0:19   Hey, I'm Brian, and I am joined by a very special guest today, an expert in plant genetics. Jason Wallace, yay! Jason  0:26   Hey everyone. So I know you already know who I am, but this is, like, today's topic is what I do for my bread and butter. This is my research area. So we figured we'd run with this. It's been a while since it's been just us for a full episode. So Brian  0:38   yeah, it has. This is gonna be, this is gonna be harder work than we normally have to do, but, you know, but you are the expert today, so you are going to talk about it, and I'm going to be here to ping you with questions, Speaker 1  0:47   yeah, which means I probably should give a little bit of background, because I'm not sure I've ever done that. So we're both researchers at the University of Georgia, both associate professors. My background is in genetics and molecular biology and informatics, which basically means studying very small things and how they get passed down from organism to organism in bacteria and now plants. And my specific area, which we may talk about later, is quantitative genetics, which is complex traits, but not actually the very simple traits, like we're going to talk about with Mendel's peas for today in the game genotype, but traits that are controlled by many, many, many genes and that have more complex interactions.  Brian  1:28   Cool, cool, cool, cool.  Jason  1:30   Let's go ahead and start off with a fun science fact. And Brian, I'm going to throw this to you, because I'm going to be talking a lot this episode Brian  1:35   Yeah. I mean, totally, totally fine. There was a paper published recently in Nature, where they described and identified the genes responsible for the last three of Mendel's seven traits. So could not be more appropriate for this game. Four of the genes were known, so Mendel studied seven different traits. Jason  1:54   We'll talk about that later, and we'll probably talk about this paper a lot later. Yeah, Brian  1:59   we probably will. Honestly, I'm hoping you can explain it to me, because I study bacterial genetics, and it's way easier than plant genetics, but basically, the four of the genes had been described previously, three of them had not. And this study was a massive genome sequencing effort across a huge diversity of domesticated and wild pea species, and they were able to do something called a genome wide association study. So they looked to see which plants had a particular phenotype, they looked at their genotype, and we're kind of able to say it's like, well, if we look at this sort of mathematically, we can see that everything that has this feature seems to be pointed down to this region of the genome. And we're able to identify these last three genes and and really it's interesting, right? Because we knew about genetics way earlier than we understand how heredity actually worked, how DNA worked, how any of that stuff worked, because it follows simple mathematic principles. And actually, what's interesting is a lot of times it's about how genes get broken. And this study in particular was sort of understanding the for the most part, the way that these traits were associated with breaking these seven genes in very specific and very different ways. It's a real smorgasbord of different ways that genes get busted, like lots lots of transposons interrupting genes, lots of premature stop codons interrupting protein sequences. It's just every single one of them seems to tell a unique story of all the ways that you can break a gene.  Jason  3:25   Brian, you just throw out so much vocabulary I have to define for people now.  Brian  3:28   Sorry, sorry.  Jason  3:28   So we'll go over some of this later. So genotype, phenotype, codon, transposon, like, if you don't know what those mean, that's okay. But basically, the idea of the studies, they looked at like 700 different peas. And then they did math, essentially to figure out, okay, we can see a bunch of ways that these are different from each other at the genetic level, which of these differences actually shows some sort of association with the traits we care about? And that's how they were able to narrow down on them. And they found a bunch of different ways that, like Brian said, genes can be broken basically, because most of these are the original plant, which biologists call the wild type. It's something got broken at some point, and humans said, Hey, I like that. And so we kept it. It became more common in some of our varieties that we cultivate. And so now it's common in, say, our domesticated peas that people grow in gardens, or in some varieties of them, but not in the wild ones. Usually, not always, Brian  4:24   yeah? So, like, and again, this is kind of a weird science fact, because this is actually going to blend in with our discussion of the game, right? But, like, yeah, okay, so like, flower color, like, there's, there's a series of gene. Have we talked about that DNA really doesn't do very much. Maybe, I feel like, maybe this is the wrong story, because honestly, discussing this paper is discussing this game, so maybe we should just let ourselves move ahead so we can talk about it in more detail.  Speaker 1  4:46   I think so probably yes, let's, let's let it go. All right, so let's talk about this game then. So genotype by genius games, basic stats, it's for one to five players, obligatory first player or single player mode takes about an hour to play. Okay, ages 14 and up, but again, depending on your kid, it can be younger. I had a my nine year old played it with me several times, and she actually quite enjoyed it. So it is, it is kind of complicated. There are a lot of moving parts to be aware of. Suggested retail price is about $60 which may be a bit on the pricey side, but they have a bunch of custom components. You get a bunch of custom dice, bunch of custom punched out tokens, and some trowel shaped meeples, which I think are just lovely and such, because the whole point of this game, the conceit of the game is that you are playing assistants to Gregor Mendel, who is essentially the father of modern genetics. And we'll talk more about him in a bit. At Thomas Abbey, way back in the 1800s and you are essentially his field assistants going out doing the work to try to get the data and validate these traits he's studying in peas. And so you have your little trowel meeples, which represent the work you're putting in. You've got dice, which are the genes. And because reproduction is a little bit of a random process, you roll the dice to figure out what types of plants you get every generation. The game is basically a combination of a worker placement game and a drafting game, because it goes into few phases. In the first phase, you place your little trowell meeples to indicate what sort of stuff you're doing. Most of this is actually just set up for the second phase, where you roll dice, and then you take turns picking those dice to be able to mark off your plants and score points from them. And then there is a third phase where you can buy upgrades that will let you do these things better in future rounds. There's only five rounds, so the game goes pretty fast, and the goal is to get as many points as possible, which most of which happens from marking off these pea plants, although there are a few other things, partially competed. Plants are worth a few points. You can pick up these little coin resources that are also worth points, but generally they're probably better spent buying upgrades and other things, just because the pea plants are really what give you the most points. Brian  6:56   One of the things that I've noticed because, you know, there's an entire ecosystem of of teaching people how to play games on YouTube and everything, I had a really hard time finding good videos teaching how to play Genotype because that first round, that setup round, doesn't make a lot of sense if you don't understand what you're doing in the second part, where you're actually planting and and while I understand the desire and the impulse to well, "you should start at the beginning. It's a very good place to start." Actually, you should not

    54 min
See All (28)

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

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!

Information

  • Creator
    Gaming with Science Podcast
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    28
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0)
  • Show Website
    Gaming with Science

You Might Also Like