Gaming with Science

Gaming with Science Podcast
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  • SCIENCE
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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. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. S2E06 - Atiwa (Fruit bats)

    07/30/2025

    S2E06 - Atiwa (Fruit bats)

    #Atiwa #Bats #UweRosenberg #LookoutGames #Extension #Outreach #SciComm #BoardGames #Science Overview It's time for bats! In this episode, we talk about Atiwa, a worker-placement game by Uwe Rosenberg based on a specific scientific study showing how fruit bats provide enormous ecological benefit to communities in Ghana. We're also joined by Mariëlle van Toor, one of the researchers involved in that exact study, to help explain why this whole thing is so important. So grab some fruit, settle into your favorite roost, and let's talk about Atiwa. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:30 Humans and honeyguides 05:55 Bats avoiding collisions during rush-hour 09:43 Atiwa gameplay 21:12 The study behind Atiwa 26:58 What is that fruit? 31:44 Uwe Rosenberg does great outreach 35:25 Exosystem services 39:48 More bat facts! 42:10 Nitpick corner 45:58 Final grades Links Atiwa (Lookout Games) Original study by Mariëlle van Toor et. al. (Current Biology) Video abstract for the above (Youtube) Press release for the above, with photo by Christian Ziegler (Max Planck) Straw-colored fruit bat eating a banana (Youtube) Paper on honeyguides working with humans (Science) Paper on convergent evolution of hearing genes in bats and whales (PubMed Central) The Eidolon monitoring network Tautonym - When genus and species have the same name (Wikipedia) Sugar plum tree (Upaca kirkiana) (iNaturalist) Research article on the New York Land Acquisition Program to limit pollution to New York City (Pace Environmental Law Review)  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/ ) Unknown Speaker  0:00   Brian, 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  0:10   Today, we're going to discuss a T wop by lookout games. All right, hello. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian.  Jason  0:21   This is Jason,  Marielle  0:22   and this is Marielle. And I'm a researcher at Linnaeus University in southeast Sweden, and I mostly work on combinational movement ecology, and especially looking into the role of animal movement for the spread of pathogens. And sometimes I also look into dispersion of seeds by animals. So this is what is relevant for the game today. Brian  0:42   Very much, and we're extremely excited to have Marielle van Toor here. This is a unique example of a science game for us. This game was explicitly inspired by a study that was published by Marielle and Dina Dechmann in it wasn't even that long ago when was the study published? Marielle  0:58    2019  Brian  0:58   in 2019 so that's relatively recent in Current Biology, which is a is a very bright and shiny journal. So very excited to be able to make this arrangement here to talk about a Atiwa and sort of environmental activism, scientific environmental activism and ecological services and bats and Ghana, okay, but before we get into that, we usually start with some kind of a science banter, science fact, Jason, you are up this time. Marielle, I think you said you might have something as well. So usually we give the guest host first dibs. So do you want to share us something with us?  Marielle  1:30   SoI have one thing that I think is really cool, and that is in some way related to the game, even though it's on a completely different system, but also located in Africa. So there's a researcher whose name is Claire Spottiswoode, and she works in South Africa, and she's been working on a system of mutualism, and that means interactions that are mutual or beneficial to both partners between humans and birds. And this is particularly the greater Honeyguide, which is a species that kind of indicates to honey badgers, but also humans, in this case, where to find bee nests as a resource for honey and for the honey guides also as a resource for the beeswax. And she's been working on this for a great time, a great long time. And I once saw a couple of years ago a plenary talk by her having never heard about her work. And it was absolutely amazing, because so this greater honey guide. The Latin name for that is Indicator indicator, which I think is really fun. Brian  2:25   I love a I can't remember the term for when the genus and species are the same name. It's my very favorite.  Marielle  2:31   I also don't remember,  Brian  2:32   yeah, I'll look it up. I did know that taxonomically, you cannot do that for plants.  Marielle  2:36   It's, it is, yeah, just animals. And I don't know about mushrooms.  Brian  2:39   I don't know about mushrooms either. I might look that up.  Marielle  2:43   But anyway, so she studies these in multiple different locations with different tribes of African peoples. And there is basically a way to make the interaction between humans and these honeyguides more likely, and that is because these people have developed, basically calls and whistles that attract the species. It's like, this is something that it's similar as to what you would do with your dog. You call it by its name, okay? But here's basically a specific type of whistle, and the birds locally to that, to that group of people would respond to that one more likely than to any other kind of like human sound.  Brian  3:17   That's fascinating. Are honey guides corvids, because this sounds like a crow thing. Marielle  3:22   Oh, now you're asking me things I do not know.  Brian  3:24   I also when I I've heard about honeyguides before, but I've usually heard them in the context of, don't they have a a symbiotic relationship with honey badgers? Marielle  3:31   Yes. So, so this is the same kind of this the same kind of behavior, only that they don't do it with honey badgers, but also with people, Jason  3:38   So I just looked it up. It looks like they're actually in the woodpecker family, or sister to the woodpecker family. Yes.  Brian  3:44   Okay, weird. If they were crows or corvids, I'd be like, Oh, well, of course. But to see this, like, pop up at a completely different group is actually very cool. Marielle  3:52   yeah. So anyway, she gave this talk, and it was completely mind blowing. So if you want, I can put in a link for one of her studies that was published in, think, Nature. So that would also give, like, a nice introduction to what is happening there. Brian  3:52   Yeah, absolutely. We'd be happy to, we'd be excited to put that into the show notes. For sure, is this like, sort of almost, like a form of, like, pre-domestication? Marielle  4:13   maybe it's a couple of years ago, so I don't really remember much, but I thought it was really, it's not something that we hear of usually. So this is quite unique, I think, yeah, if you don't consider, of course, kind of like interactions with domestic animals.  Jason  4:26   Yeah. Well, I want to know is, this sounds like humans are co-opting, what the birds already do with the Badgers. And I want to know how that came about. Like, obviously there's a mutualism. I assume the Badger gets the food and the honey guide gets, you said, the wax out of it. But how did the birds and the Badgers learn to communicate with each other? Marielle  4:42   Well, the question is, is it specific? Did it specifically evolve between honeyguides and Badgers, or is this a more kind of, like opportunistic behavior from the birds, like, in terms of like observing that there are species that prey on honey, kind of like bees Colonies, and then kind of use that information. It might not be specific to honey badgers from the start, but Iwouldn't know.  Jason  5:05   What do they use the wax for? I assume it's building their nest. Marielle  5:09   Let me just briefly check, because I don't actually know. Brian  5:11    I guess the other thing is thinking about like, is this a is this a learned behavior? Is this something they have to be taught? Is this something that every Honey Badger and honey guide sort of have to develop this relationship. Does the mama Honey Badger have to exp like, you know, indicate to the to the juveniles, like, Hey, you should pay attention to these birds.  Jason  5:11   Well, Wikipedia to take  Brian  5:28   the ultimate source of all scientific information Jason  5:34   Wikipedia says that they feed on wax,  Brian  5:37   okay,  Marielle  5:38   but also all the little critters that lives in there, like pupae and bees.  Brian  5:38   Okay, so this is like when you eat your little babybel cheese, and then you just bite through the wax, I guess. All right, thank you. That's extremely cool. And again, I think it's, it's fun to think about how these relationships sort of like pop up at this point. Jason, what did you have Jason  5:56   i I'm starting to follow your lead and try to find things that are on point with what we're talking about. So I started to find what was cool about bats recently, and I found one from a few months back, where some researchers fitted very, very tiny little microphones to bats in order to figure out their echolocation. Because there's a question of, how on earth do bats echolocate when they're leaving caves, when there are literally 1000s of bats all chirping at the same time trying to get their way out, and they use that echolocation to to find their way out and not crash into each other, into walls. But how do they do that when there's literally 1000s of them all doing the same thing, and those echoes are bouncing all around everywhere? So what they did is they made these teeny, teeny, tiny little microphones, like four g

    55 min
  7. S2E05.1 - Harmonies and Planet (Ecological Niches)

    06/25/2025

    S2E05.1 - Harmonies and Planet (Ecological Niches)

    #Harmonies #PlanetGame #Ecology #NichePartitioning #BoardGames #Science We have a short bonus episode today, going over two science-inspired games, Harmonies and Planet. Both of these games touch on ecology and what animals need in their environment, but in a very science-light manner. We talk about niche partitioning, compare and contrast the games, and even have a cool science fact about trees using lightning to kill their neighbors. Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 01:06 Trees weaponizing lightning 03:54 Harmonies overview 08:31 Planet overview 12:25 Compare and contrast 17:24 Humans and vertebrate bias 19:39 Niche specialization 22:53 No science grades 24:18 Fun grades Links Harmonies official site (Libellud) Planet official site (Blue Orange Games) Tonka bean trees survive lightning (LiveScience.com) Interview with Harmonies creator (Youtube, French) Translated and cleaned transcript 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  0:05   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:11   In today's bonus episode, we're going to discuss harmonies by Libellud Jason  0:15   and planet by blue, orange games.  Brian  0:18   hey, I'm Brian.  Jason  0:19   This is Jason. Brian  0:20   It's just the two of us. Welcome to a bonus episode anyway. So we're supposed to take a break midway through the season, and we have this is  gonna be a bonus episode. It's gonna be a little weird. We're talking about two games today, harmonies and planet. These games are similar. I've decided that these games are, instead of being based on a true story, they're inspired by a true story. Both of these have a strong nature theme, but it you know, they weren't really trying to directly model anything in science. They just sort of did it by accident.  Jason  0:52   and they're both completely coincidentally French, Brian  0:56   and have a lot of other similarities too, in terms of overall mechanics and also having some some fun gimmicks associated with them, you actually have a science fact. So, you know, it's a bonus episode, but what's your science fact?  Jason  1:08   This was some research that came out about trees in the Panama rainforest. Relevant, because this is all about ecology and plants competing well. So it turns out that tall trees in the rainforest get struck by lightning a lot, and it's actually thought to be one of the major contributors to tree mortality, to killing the tall trees and then opening up space. Well, turns out there's this one species of tree called a tonka bean tree, that apparently just survives lightning unscathed.  Brian  1:35   What?  Jason  1:36   but lightning strikes kill all of the parasitic vines on it, or most of them, and a lot of it's nearby competitors, and so it may actually be using the lightning strikes as a way of gaining a competitive advantage. They did research over time, looking at looking exactly where lightning struck, looking at the trees before and after, looking at long historical records. And apparently, for other trees, being next to a tonka bean tree is actually a very high risk for mortality. You are likely to die next to one of them, presumably because getting struck by lightning and kind of using that to kill you. Brian  2:06   This is the strangest thing to imagine, having a selective advantage. This is so bizarre.  Brian  2:06   Well, think about it, though, like lightning generally strikes the tallest thing, and in a rainforest, it's always a game of trying to reach the light, and so lots of trees are benefited from getting really tall, but if a lightning strike comes by and hits you, then you're dead. And so I don't know, I think there's actually a decent selective advantage of like, Hey, if you can survive lightning, great. And then, because presumably, if you get struck by lightning, a lot of that current is going through whatever is nearby to you as well or touching you, then it may be able to clear off some of your competitors or parasites that aren't so adapted.  Jason  2:23   But? but how do? how do? How survive lightning? Jason  2:49   So the article I read, which I will link in the show notes, I think it's a hypothesis. I don't think they have the mechanism yet, but they hypothesize that the interior is like highly conductive, and so it conducts the electricity without really building up a lot of heat, which the heat happens because of resistance?  Brian  3:07   Yeah Jason  3:07    So if it conducts it well, then it's almost like an insulated wire, where the it's essentially grounding itself out. And so the heat that actually caused the damage to it doesn't build up, Brian  3:18   yeah, because it would like boil the sap and cause the tree to explode. So that doesn't happen, Jason  3:22   apparently, not now this is from the high level summary I read. So now that this is out, I'm sure that there will be lots of follow ups. They're already talking about looking at this in other systems where you have tall trees that dominate the ecosystem and all. So I'm sure there'll be much more data on this in the future. But for now, like they seem to have solid data that these things survive lightning strikes and other things that are nearby them, don't, holy Brian  3:42   holy crap. In Pokemon terms, this is now a lightning grass type,  Jason  3:47   apparently, yes, Brian  3:49   that's nuts. Wow, that's a great thank you for finding that. Fact  Jason  3:52   that's too cool to skip  Brian  3:53   Absolutely. Okay, so let's talk about these games for a little bit. We're going to try to keep this brief. I'm going to talk about harmonies first, and then Jason's going to talk about planet, and then we're going to kind of compare and contrast, talk about some things we like, maybe some things that we don't like. Harmonies sort of just fell out of nowhere. Last year. It wasn't on Kickstarter or anything like that. It just showed up in stores. My wife and I bought it on a whim. Also, did you know harmonies is ranked 85 on Board Game Geek? I did not. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's literally in the top 100 I think it has become my favorite game. I have probably played this game more than any other game on my shelf, and it is a French game. It's a French publisher. It is a French designing team. I usually try to do a little bit of research on these games to sort of get some context for this. I could not find an interview, except for some interviews in French to try to do research for this, I took the transcript of the French YouTube video which put that through Google Translate, and then got one of the generative AIs to try to clean up all of the translation artifacts to the point where I could actually read it. Jason  3:55   So at this point, you're reading more of an AI than you are the actual original transcript.  Brian  4:04   I mean, presumably, like, we do have one friend who speaks French, but I didn't get a chance to get her to, like, tell me how. Right or wrong. This was so I am kind of assume. I mean, it sounds okay, like, you know, it's, it's, it makes sense to me, and it seems like it's consistent with what's there. There wasn't, as far as I can tell from this interview, any specific intentionality in terms of reflecting particular biomes or or composition, or anything like that. Let me just talk about the game, because I haven't done that yet. So what you have is a little placement in front of you with a little hex grid. It's a 3d landscape building game. There's five different color these nice little chunky wooden tokens, and they're going to represent trees or mountains or rivers or water or Plains or cities. Take these little tiles and you kind of stack them up. So you're building little mountain ranges, or you're building little rivers or little planes or trees. Your trees actually come in two sections. There's both trunks and canopies, kind of like reminiscent of Earth. And what you're trying to do is create patterns on your little landscape that will fit these beautifully illustrated animal cards. So you'll draft an animal card and try to create the habitat that it needs. So for instance, it might need, like, a two tall mountain next to a river or something like that.  Jason  4:04   That's two, as in, t, w, o,  Brian  6:08   yes, two little mountain tiles on top of each other next to a river or a tree or something like that. You're building habitats for these little animals, and what you're trying to do is sort of fit them all together harmoniously to try to maximize how much habitat you can create for your different things. It's like turn based open drafting game. The cards are absolutely gorgeous. And actually, the one thing that did come out from the interview was that in some early phases, they were it was going to be much more abstract. It was just going to be a picture of the animal with maybe some sort of vague frame representing its habitat. But they didn't do that. They are these wonderful full color illustrations with these beautiful landscapes, with the animals sort of existing in its environment. So it's very evocative. There's 32 different animal cards. And then they also have these things called animal spirits, special animals, so like a mountain goat with some ridiculous, crazy horns or something like that. And those will sort of like change the way that the point system works. Like you'll get bonus points for building extra tall mountains if you're working with that particular animal spirit

    28 min
  8. S2E05 - The Search for Planet X (Planetary Science)

    05/28/2025

    S2E05 - The Search for Planet X (Planetary Science)

    #PlanetX #PlanetaryScience #ExtrasolarPlanets #SolarSystemEvolution  #Telescopes #Observatories #ScienceGames #BoardGames #Science Overview We're going back into space this episode with The Search for Planet X, by Foxtrot Games and Renegade Game Studios. Join us with our guest, Addie Dove, planetary scientist and co-host of the Walkabout the Galaxy podcast, as we search for the mysterious Planet X while juggling the issues of scheduling telescope time, publishing papers, and attending conferences.  Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 03:02 - Space smells and asteroid threats 07:28 - Game overview 16:46 - What is Planet X? 20:22 - Hunting for things in our solar system 27:14 - What do we learn from planetary science? 31:56 - Extrasolar planets 38:03 - Logic rules and real bodies 43:39 - In-game publishing & real-world controveries 47:18 - Nitpick corner 50:17 - Final grades 55:49 - Wrap-up Links The Search for Planet X (Renegade Game Studios) Walkabout the Galaxy Podcast  Article on Planet X history (The Planetary Society)  Citronaut Dave (Addy's instagram) 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/ ) Unknown Speaker  0:00   Music. 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  0:11   Today, we'll be talking about the search for Planet X by Fox Trot games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason,  Brian  0:20   this is Brian, Addie  0:22   and I'm Addie Dove.  Jason  0:23   All right, we have the inestimable, incorrigible Addie Dove, who told us just before recording, that she comes from the best podcast walk about the galaxy. Addie  0:33   I have the shirt on today too. Brian  0:35   Oh, cool,  Jason  0:36   which, sorry, listeners. We can't show you that. It's an audio podcast. You can look it up. I'm sure they have it for sale somewhere. Anyway, Addie, can you introduce yourself to our audience, let them know who you are and why you're on the show about finding Planet X. Addie  0:48   Happy to Yeah, hi. I'm Addie Dove. I'm a planetary scientist and physicist at the University of Central Florida. So My day job is that I do research understanding planetary surfaces. I study dust in space, so dust, specifically on the moon and asteroids, and how it behaves and how we understand it. I'm involved in a number of experimental projects and missions, and my favorite part about my research is that I've done things on on orbital assets, so on the ISS, on cube sats and on the vomit comet. So I've actually flown on the parabolic airplane flights.  Jason  1:25   Fun or, well, I don't know I've heard about the vomit comet, maybe not so fun, but it's fun.  Addie  1:31   I love it so much.  Jason  1:32   So you are an astro quark. That's what the host of the walk about the Galaxy podcast call themselves.  Addie  1:36   Yes, it is.  Brian  1:38   Yes. Are you bottom quark or charm? You are. Charm. Quark, Jason was right, He's right, Addie  1:45   Yeah. So we have strange and charm, and then we also have bottom. And lately, our newest Astro quark is down. So this is a, this is a clever name that we have because we're mostly astronomy folks, and it's astronomy podcast, and quarks are sort of like the fundamental units, right, of matter. And so there's strange charm, top bottom or truth and beauty, if you like those names a little bit better, instead of top and bottom, and then up and down. Brian  2:11   Truth and beauty are substitutes for which ones then? Addie  2:14   top and bottom.  Jason  2:15   Yeah, same initials, but more poetic, yes.  Okay, one of our quarks enjoys being beauty, not bottom.  Brian  2:22   So are you allowed to have more than six hosts? Then do you just have to nominate people on and kick people off?  Addie  2:29   We've had two tops technically. So as we've had people iterate through,  Jason  2:34   well, you can get someone to be the gluon, holding them together.  Addie  2:37   Yeah, exactly. And some quirks have lasted longer than others. So we've, we've had a couple of replacements, Jason  2:43   All right, well, I think that's already given us one fun science fact is the quarks in matter, but let's go on.  Brian  2:48   I guess it is.  Jason  2:49   We'd like to start with some fun science fact and Addie as our guest. You get priority. Is there something fun about science that you've learned or run across lately you want to share? Addie  2:58   Oh, man, let me go. Let me go. Second, I have to think about it a little bit Brian  3:02   more. Okay, then I will go first. But I think this is probably something you already know. So if you want to hop in, that's fine. So my challenge is always, how can I make this about onions in some weird way? So what does the moon smell like? I learned what the moon smells like from the people who have been there. And I know Addie, you definitely know this for the people who have been to the move lunar regolith smells like spent gunpowder, evidently, although it doesn't last, because when those samples were brought back to Earth, it's now odorless. So there's been some speculation about why it's like that. Now I have another question for you, Addy, I again, you probably already know the answer, so I'm going to make Jason guess we're going to do a stump question, like you guys do  Addie  3:40   a stumper, Brian  3:41    yeah, what astronomical body smells like a combination of cat urine, burnt matches, and rotten eggs? Jason  3:48   Okay, cat urine, burnt matches and rotten eggs. So cat urine is going to be like ammonia compounds, probably urea. Burnt matches is phosphorus and rotten eggs is sulfur. So we've got ammonia, phosphorus and sulfur, I'm going to guess IO Jupiter's volcanic Moon  Brian  4:05   comets stink like that, according to the organic molecule. So of the we've found organic molecules in lots of astronomical bodies in asteroids, in dust, yes, in planets, of course. But the missions that went to the asteroids picked up glycine, which is an amino acid. They also picked up hydrogen sulfide, which is one of the flavor components of onion. So if you were to have a human mission to an asteroid and go inside, it would smell really, really bad.  Addie  4:30   Oh yeah. I was trying to think, is it Titan? Is it Venus? Interesting? Okay, okay.  Jason  4:35   I mean, I guess you're protected by the spacesuit until you bring the samples inside with you, and then you've just contaminated your entire spaceship with rotten onion smell  Brian  4:44   and cat urine, Addie  4:48   which like future safe spaceships, maybe you're gonna smell like anyway, I can hope, in some ways.  Brian  4:54   So that was, that was my, that was my science fact, yeah. Comets smell bad.  Addie  5:01   I like it,  Jason  5:02   How about you addie, you come up with one? Addie  5:03   Yeah, I'm starting to think there's been a bunch of interesting JWST results out lately. So the James Webb Space Telescope, so I've been, I feel like a lot of my sort of like new science things are from that, but I don't know if they're facts. They're like new things we're seeing that are, that are sort of like blowing our mind, right?  Brian  5:19   Can I? Can I pitch something you guys were so excited about on your own podcast? Yes, you talk about here? Addie  5:24   sure. Brian  5:25    So there was that asteroid that we thought would hit the Earth, and now it's, oh, now it's gonna hit the moon, or at least there's a better chance it's gonna hit the moon, right?  Addie  5:33   Yeah. So there's an asteroid that's great. Yes, I love talking about YR4. So there's this asteroid, YR4 2024 YR4, which has to do with like when it was discovered, and what discovered it. And it's this like asteroid that has a very elliptical orbit. So it came near the earth back in 2024 and it's going to come back in 2028 and 2032 based on its orbit, we hadn't seen it before, and then we discovered it. And the predictions were that when it comes by in 2032 it was going to hit the Earth, and it was a 3% chance that it was going to hit the Earth, which is actually a staggeringly high percentage chance for asteroid encounters like we just that's the highest we've had in a really long time. But then we looked at it with more telescopes and got more data about it, and it's not going to hit the Earth, which is great in a lot of ways, but also kind of disappointing we get to study so much. Yeah,  Jason  5:36   How big is this asteroid?  Addie  5:46   It was, it's pretty small. So, like, it would, it would be something that, like, if it hit in a city, it would be really bad news. But like, statistically speaking, it would hit in the ocean, and we'd be able to, like, observe it coming in and see it disintegrating, and see the big splash. And it wouldn't be, it's not like a dinosaur killer asteroid. It was more of like a Tunguska event kind of thing, where it wipes out a big area, which is this old location that it hit. It was an old meteor that actually, like, sort of disintegrated in the atmosphere, and so it created a shock burst and leveled trees for miles, but didn't destroy anything. So probably something more like that. So now, so we don't think it's going to hit the Earth, but there's a small chance now that it might hit the moon, which is even which is kind of exciting. Jason  7:04   that I agree is going to be cool, because if we can see that and not be in any danger

    58 min
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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 - 2025
  • Episodes
    25
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0)
  • Show Website
    Gaming with Science