Gaming with Science

Gaming with Science Podcast

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

  1. 4d ago

    S2E08.1 - Rock Buddies (bonus interview)

    #RockBuddies #Catlilli #Rocks #Geology #Igneous #Sedimentary #SciComm #BoardGames #Science Summary While at the Origins Game Fair, Brian sat down to talk with Catherine and Jonathan Croft, founders of Catlilli Games, about their new game Rock Buddies. (So new it hasn't even been Kickstartered yet.) In this interview, we get to hear all about rocks, how to make (and pitch) a interesting science game, getting into game design, and a bunch of rock facts! So grab your favorite mineral and cozy up for this bonus interview of Gaming with Science. Timestamps 00:00 What is Rock Buddies? 04:10 Rock facts! 08:02 Game design process 14:18 Favorite games 17:07 Games for the classroom 18:34 Signoff Links Rock Buddies (Catlilli Games)  The Rock Cycle (National Geographic) Rocks: Basalt, Dolomite, Greenstone, Hornfels, (Meta)quartzite  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Splash art courtesy of Catlilli Games. 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 the science behind some of your favorite games. Hey, this is Brian. I'm at Origins 2026 with the founders of Catlilli Games, and I had a chance to play test their new game, Rock Buddies. Why don't you guys introduce yourselves? Jonathan  0:27   I'm Jonathan Croft. Catherine  0:28   I'm Catherine Croft. Brian  0:29   So Rock Buddies. So let me just introduce. So Rock Buddies is a geology game, and I can tell you from somebody who has actively looked for geology games because you know we like to keep a good rotation of diverse science topics. I had yet to find one. Rock Buddies actually does a good job. Tell us about Rock Buddies. What does the game look like? How do you play it? Jonathan  0:49   So the premise of Rock Buddies is that you are moving your way through the rock cycle to collect samples of rocks to create a rock collection. So the board follows the cycle, has a space for igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary, and it has spaces for magma and for sediments, and has the arrows that link them together with the processes that get you from one to the other. So, like all the core rocks, they can weather and erode into sediments, and the sediments can cement together to get into sedimentary rocks. Then they can transform from there. And the core of the game is that you are rolling these dice that give you access to those processes, and you're trying to re-roll and get the right combination of dice to get to the right spaces to collect the right rocks to make these little trios. That one of the way we incorporated the core science of the game was that as you go through the cycle, you're collecting these rocks, but the way you score them is by collecting rocks that have some kind of relationship to each other. So, like limestone, dolomite, and marble are one of these trios because chemically limestone and dolomite are similar to each other, and limestone metamorphosizes into marble. Okay. So there's that geological science link there. Catherine  1:52   So the rock cycle is a really scary topic to make a game out of because most people find it very boring. My father was a geologist, so no offense to him, but like just the whole process of like learning it in school is very boring, and is even if we mention the word "Hey, rock cycle", people are like, "Oh no", and so it was a little bit scary. But I think with the art that we have, like I think we have the right combination to make it fun,  Jonathan  2:21   one of the big things from the design perspective early on that Catherine insisted on was we have to minimize the number of words on the board because we don't want to scare people off. And so instead of having like you know freezing and heat and pressure and all this other stuff, we relied just on these core symbols and really trying to get it just to those three keywords of igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary. Those are the ones we leave you with, and we're not trying to overwhelm you with too much science. Trying to have it. It's a game about rocks. It's not a rock lesson that is gamified. Catherine  2:51   Yeah. So one thing that I've learned, we've been around for 11 years now with Catlilli, and in the beginning, we would pitch our games mostly as science games, using science words, and these publishers would be like, "No, absolutely not". And then I would go back a couple years later with like a slightly different version of the same game, but didn't use any science when pitching it, and they're like, "Oh, that's genius!" And so we're like, "Wait, wait a minute! It's like pretty much the exact same game." Brian  3:21   We've talked about this before. How, unfortunately, for better or for worse, sticking educational on your game is like poison to some of these these publishers and developers. And I'm not really sure why. I I think games like Wingspan have hopefully you know wedged the door open just a little bit to let people realize that just because it is science accurate doesn't mean it's boring.  Jonathan  3:44   We have jokingly referred to rock buddies as rock span amongst ourselves multiple times, because that concept of like yes, you have these specific rocks and you're learning about their science on the back, but it's it's what are you doing with the rocks that's gamifying them? And when there's downtime between turns, you're flipping over on the back of the card and reading about why does it group with these things and that's where the learning happens. It's incidental to the game. It is a fun game even if you learn nothing about rocks, but it's a super fun game if you learn a bunch of stuff about rocks. Yeah. Brian  4:10   So let's see. You said that basically the game was designed with the idea of meeting specific science standards and meeting those standards, almost like the way that you reverse design a class. Like this is what we want to teach. Let's make the game fun around that. So one of those was I'm supposed to be able to name different types of different types of rock in each class, like sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous. So hey, that was one. I did that one. Okay. So let me see if I can do it. And how many did you say I'm supposed to be able to do?  Jonathan  4:35    Let's just go for one. One for right now. For Brian  4:37   one for okay. So in the you pay a lot of attention to the metamorphics since they're very important to the game. Which so it was like gneiss and marble and greenstone. Okay, all right, and sedimentary limestone and sandstone. I'm sure there was another one in there somewhere, and I'm struggling on igneous just a little bit. I remember basalts. Jonathan  5:01   There you go. I think that works fine. And like one of the things that was really fascinating about working through the game is I I started by going through a geological field guide for northern North America, and had all these different classifications, these different types of rock things, and the notion of like the nomenclature of rocks themselves have changed over time and have gotten more like scientific and rigorous about it.  Brian  5:22   That that does make sense that the that the taxonomy of even rocks would have changed as we understand them better. But I guess I never thought about it. Like we change species names all the time. That that's happened for rocks too. Jonathan  5:33   Yeah. So like you mentioned, greenstone for instance, named because they're rocks that they're they're greenish, and that that is an older, broader term. And like geologists will still use it like colloquially apparently, but there's better ways of classifying those rocks now. And the guidebook was like very specific about it, and I was hesitant to use that one just because it has been eclipsed. But it worked so well with like the gameplay overlaps and things. Like, well, this is the category that fills that niche. Okay, I'm going to include it, but I'm going to put that caveat on the back of the card to make sure I don't get angry letters from geologists, being like you're using a term from the 1950s. We would call this this rock now instead. So it's in there. Brian  6:11   Well, let me just tell you, if you're getting angry letters from geologists about your science game, you should consider that a badge of honor. It means that they are paying attention to what you're doing and care enough about it that they want to send in corrections. That's just cranky people doing peer review, so don't worry about it. You should hope for that. What is one of your favorite rocks from the game? I want one from each of you, please. Jonathan  6:33   So we do try to give them art that centers on what are their usages, and some of them had to be a little like questionable with it, just because it's a rock that's like all we use it for is aggregate. We just we grind it up, we throw them into like cement piles, and we have that sort of thing going on with them. But so many of the rocks are named for what their features actually looked like, and so our artist Taylor went down that route for some of them. So like hornfels, they're named because they have these stripes to them that look like the stripes you see in certain like herds of cattle that were in the areas where these rocks were first named, Brian  7:03   I did not know that. That's crazy. Jonathan  7:05   And so he chose to go like really on the horn route. So it's this like horn charging bull that has like this one angry eye that's looking at you. But another thing we really liked about the art direction we took is we put the actual texture

    S2E08.1 - Rock Buddies (bonus interview)

  2. Sep 30

    S3E08 - SETI (Searching for Aliens)

    #SETI #Aliens #Astronomy #BoardGames #Science Summary Today we're talking aliens! Or at least potential aliens, with SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, by Czech Games Edition. We are joined by Dr. Seth Shostack, the director of the real-life SETI Institute, which tries to scientifically answer the question: Are we alone? We talk about why and how we search for aliens, what makes SETI actually scientific, number crunching, screen savers, the Drake Equation, and how the most unrealistic thing in the game is that you actually find aliens. So grab some Reece's Pieces and your favorite blanket and settle in for this out-of-this-world episode of Gaming with Science Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:22 A universal universe and far-flung probes 03:05 SETI game overview 15:42 Science at the SETI Institute 21:50 The Drake Equation 27:46 Active and signal crunching 37:42 How do you verify a signal? 42:31 WOW! 46:29 Nitpick corner 48:36 Final grades 52:11 Signoffs Links SETI (Czech Games Edition) The SETI Institute  News articles (Earthsky.org) : Voyager 1 reaches 1 light-day from Earth  Europa Clipper radar test Hard to pronounce objects: Oumuamua (Wikipedia, NASA ) Eyjafjallajökull (WIkipedia) Bernard M. Oliver (Wikipedia) Philanthropic gift to SETI (SETI Institute) Frank Drake and The Drake Equation (Wikipedia) The WOW! signal (SETI Institute) Big Picture Science podcast (SETI Institute)  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 the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason Wallace  0:12   Today we'll be talking about SETI by Czech Games Edition. All right, welcome back, everyone. This is Jason. Brian  0:19   This is Brian. Jason Wallace  0:20   And today we're joined by Dr. Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, and probably the best qualified person on Earth to talk about this game today, given what his job is. Seth, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and what it is you do? Seth  0:35   Yeah, I'm sorry that you limited, by the way, the expertise to only this planet, because might find people on other planets that might be better. Jason Wallace  0:44   Well, that's your job. Seth  0:45   Well, yes, but you can't talk to them very easily. Even if we find them, they're going to be far away. You don't want to hear about that right now. And let me just give you sort of a short summary of my background. This shouldn't take more than I don't know 45 minutes. My academic background is in physics and astronomy. I used to study galaxies for a long time, and then I moved here. Here being Northern California, where by a series of happenstance, I guess it was, I ended up at the SETI Institute, whose brief is to try and find some cosmic company. So that's sort of what I've been doing for many years now. Jason Wallace  1:17   And we are going to be talking a lot more about that today. I'm actually really looking forward to this episode. But before we get into that, we have our fun science fact area. So, Seth, as our guest, we give you first opportunity. Do you have something fun about astronomy or about SETI that you'd like to share with our audience? Seth  1:34   I mean, there are a lot of things in astronomy that I'm not sure I'd say that they were fun, but they're certainly a little bit interesting. Whenever I talk to the general public about astronomy, I usually tell them something that many of them may not know. One of the greatest accomplishments of astronomy in the past two centuries or thereabouts is to learn that the entire universe is made out of the same building blocks, the same junk. It wouldn't have to be like that, right? It could be that you know you go into another galaxy or something. It's made out of different stuff, but it's not. So the benefit to the listeners is that if you study, I don't know, chemistry in school, you won't have to study it again if you move to another galaxy. So you know that's a benefit. Jason Wallace  2:15   That is good to know. I'll make sure to cross that off my moving list. All right, Brian, your turn. What do you got to top that? Brian  2:22   I got two things. I don't. We don't really need to talk about two, but I did just hear that I think it was Voyager One has just reached one light day away from Earth in terms of distance. The Voyager probes were some of the fastest objects ever produced by humans. I don't know if they still have that record. I think the New Horizons might have them beat, but all that time and it's just now reached one light day away is kind of insane. There was also a thing about Europa Clipper, which just made a flyby of Mars and had a chance to test its impressive radar device that it's going to be able to use in 2030 to look under the ice of Europa, which is also very cool. Jason Wallace  2:57   Also appropriate, I'm pretty sure Europa Clipper is  actually a card in the game. Brian  3:01   I'm sure it is. I'm sure SETI Institute is as well. Jason Wallace  3:04   Oh, it is. I've got it right here, actually. Well, let's jump into this game then. So this is SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by Czech Games Edition, who's probably best known for the game Code Names. It was designed by , who I have never met, but after researching this game, I really want to. And we'll talk about a bunch of this stuff later. But he seems like he really cared about the core of this game. He listened to the old Cosmos TV show while preparing it, which was done by Carl Sagan, who's apparently one of his childhood heroes. There's just all sorts of stuff in this where he cared about making the game accurate and right, and he sounds like a cool guy to hang out with. Brian  3:43   He's kind of like a method actor for game designs. He's like playing background music and stuff while he's designing his game. Yeah, Jason Wallace  3:50   yeah. He wanted to make a gamer's game, and he wanted to make it about SETI, and I think he dramatically succeeded. So, basic stats about this game: it's for one to four players, so obligatory single player mode. The game estimates about 40 minutes per player, so you're looking about one to three hours to play, and ages 14 up, which is definitely true. This is a very complex game. There are a lot of moving parts. It took Brian and I at least an hour to mostly figure out what was going on, so it is definitely complex. But probably because of that, it is also highly rated on board game geek, it is number 16, and so very popular. Probably because there are a whole bunch of different things that you can do. It's never really clear which one is the best thing to do, and so there's a bunch of different strategies, and there's a lot of strategic depth to knowing what is the right thing to do given my current situation. It's also a very expensive game with an MSRP of $80, which is probably due to the very large number of high-quality components. So they've got a bunch of either cast or 3d printed meeples that represent different things. So there's these generic little discs that are your markers you put around. There's special ones that are shaped like satellites that are your probes. There's one that's a microphone that tracks your publicity. Another one that tracks your victory points that. Like some sort of trophy, they didn't have to be different. They could have all been the generic markers, but they made them different. Or the player boards, which could have just been a flat sheet of cardboard that you put things on top of, but instead it's chipboard that you punch things out of and then fold in half. So you have all these little depressions that you then slot later things into Brian  5:18   little insets where you can put your little upgrades, right? Jason Wallace  5:21   Yes, like so. The quality of the game, the workmanship is very high, and probably as a consequence, it is quite expensive. The game itself, when you lay it out, is massive. It does not pass the "bowl of chips" test that we oftentimes do. It actually has three main components just to the board. The first is a central area that basically shows the solar system, and this has probably the most fun thing in the game, which is that the solar system actually rotates over the course of the game. And the way it's set up is that it's a set of stacked disks, so that you can rotate the inner solar system or the middle solar system, which will also rotate the inner, or the outer, which will rotate the other two. And so the inner solar system with Earth and Mars and Venus actually rotates faster than stuff like Jupiter and Saturn and the outer planets. Brian  6:03   Yeah, it's like three times as fast, right? Because it's like every time you move one, it's literally got to be moving three times faster than the outer. Jason Wallace  6:10   Yeah, so that's the main central areas where you're tracking the movement of the solar system, and you launch your space probes, and they are traveling from one place to another to another. Another area is a sort of zoom in on all the places you can send those probes, so the various planets and moons and such, and that you can explore in order to get various benefits. This is also when you finally do discover aliens, which in this game is basically inevitable. They're attached to this part of the board upside down, and then they get flipped over when you discover them because it's random which of them you get so that's the second part, and then the third part track

    S3E08 - SETI (Searching for Aliens)

  3. Sep 16

    S3E07.1 - Elizabeth Hargrave (bonus interview)

    #Wingspan #ElizabethHargrave #Interview #Designer #BoardGames #Science Summary After 3 years of  comparing every game to Wingspan, we finally get to talk with the designer herself, Elizabeht Hargrave! We talk about her design process, favorite games and memories as a designer, current and future projects, and all sort of other fun stuff. And about birds, of course. (And butterflies, foxes, seashells, and other wonderful things.) So if you, like us, have been waiting years for this moment, please pull up a chair and enjoy this special bonus episode of Gaming with Science!  Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:42 Wingpan and spinoffs 08:23 Game inspirations 18:08 Thoughts as a game designer 26:12 Inclusivity, gaming, and science 32:14 Parting advice and favorite games Links Elizabeth Hargrave (official website) Unpub.org The Strong Museum of Play The Fox Experiment (New York Times) Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (Wikipedia) Monarchs are not avoiding an ancient mountain (Michigan Enjoyer) Monarch butterfly migration (Wikipedia) Argan oil from goat poop (CBS news) Ambergris from sperm whale intestines (Wikipedia)  Portrait photo by Matt Cohen; background photo by JunBo Sun/Unsplash 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 the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason Wallace  0:11   In today's episode, we're going to be interviewing Elizabeth Hargrave. All right, everyone, welcome back to Game with Science. This is Jason. Brian  0:19   This is Brian, Jason Wallace  0:20   and today we are joined by a very special interview guest, possibly one of the people we've wanted to have on here for the longest time since basically day one of the podcast, Elizabeth Hargrave, who you may recognize from some titles we've done on here, like Wingspan and Undergrove, and most recently the Fox Experiment. So, Elizabeth, for people who haven't already figured out who you are from listening to prior episodes. Could you give us a quick introduction about who you are and how you got into game design? Elizabeth  0:46   Yeah, my name's Elizabeth. I designed all those games and some others too. Brian  0:51   Mariposas is on our list. Don't worry. Elizabeth  0:54   Fantastic. I'll try and stay ahead of you guys. Brian  1:01   Appreciate that. Thank you. Elizabeth  1:02   I am doing game design full time. I started back in 2013. Wingspan was the first thing I worked on. It looked nothing like Wingspan when I started on it. I mean, it had birds, but I didn't know what I was doing, and it evolved a lot over time. And now here I am. Jason Wallace  1:20   If I remember right, you were doing policy work before that, weren't you? Elizabeth  1:24   Yeah, I had a decently long career as a health policy analyst. I live outside of Washington D.C. and I came here to work for the federal government many, many years ago. Jason Wallace  1:35   Well, that is a hard switch, but we are all very grateful for your contributions to the board game community. I actually have a question there about Wingspan itself. So it was your first game, and it's an amazing game, but it sounds like it was a long and torturous road to get there. You say it looked nothing like it does now from originally. How many different iterations did it go through? My original question was, how did your first game become so good? And it sounds like the answer is a whole lot of work. Like, what was that work? Elizabeth  2:02   Yeah, and it was iteration, and I did not count. My first cards for Wingspan were literally like written in pencil on cardstock, and I play tested it a lot with just friends and family for a while. Eventually, I got hooked up with a playtesting convention up in Baltimore called Unpub. Brian  2:24   Oh yeah, I know Unpub. Elizabeth  2:25   for unpublished games. Which is awesome for anyone on the East Coast. Really, people come from all over now. If you're anywhere near the Baltimore area in the spring, you can just go and play test people's games all weekend. It's amazing. Anyway, I got hooked up with that, and through that, sort of started meeting more designers in the DC area. Started play testing more regularly with people who are thinking harder about games instead of just my friends, which makes a difference. And sort of settled into a regular weekly play testing pattern with some other designers here in the D.C. area, which definitely started to move me forward more quickly. Brian  3:08   Do you still have some of those original pencil-on index cards, cards kicking around somewhere? Elizabeth  3:13   I took a picture of some of them and I gave a bunch of my stuff to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Brian  3:21   The Strong Museum of play. We're gonna have to drop that in the show notes for sure. Jason Wallace  3:26   I think that's a field trip, Brian. Brian  3:27   Yeah, for sure to make a field Elizabeth  3:29   trip. Brian  3:29   Cool. Jason Wallace  3:30   So we love games, but on this podcast especially, we love games that we call hard science games. So the games that are not only fun to play, but that include a very strong like real-world scientific component, and it's become the joke that we practically can't get through an episode without mentioning Wingspan as being the poster child of what does this really well because it's a very fun game, but there's so much of real-world science and biology reflected in it-not just the good illustrations, but like the nest types, or the number of eggs, or the distribution maps, or genus and species names. Now, some of these I know have mechanical components to them, and they make sense, like the different types of nests, the egg sizes. Those are resources in the game you can use to get points. Some of them, though, are, for lack of a better word, decorative things like putting the genus species name on there, the little maps that show their range. And I guess my question is, what inspired you to put that many layers of actual ornithology, actual birding information on these cards? And at any point, did you get pushback from people, from your play testers or from your publisher about things that are on the cards that don't actually have to do with the mechanics of the game? Brian  4:38   Did they want you to strip out the unnecessary bits? Elizabeth  4:41   I don't think I ever got pushback. No, I think, Jamey Stegmaier, owner of Stonemaier games, co-owner. When I pitched Wingspan to him, I remember him having this moment that was like, I remember sitting down as a kid with my grandma's bird field guides. Brian  4:59   Awesome. Elizabeth  5:00   He had like this core memory, and I think that's part of the resonance of Wingspan for a lot of people. They have some experience with birds that goes way back, but for him, it was field guides specifically that my prototype made him think of, which was sort of intentional. But I think because we both sort of had that touch point for how we interact with bird information, then it makes sense that the genus name is there, that the range map is there. They're like the things that you see in a field guide of birds, and it makes each card feel sort of like a page in a field guide. Brian  5:37   The illustrations are fantastic. Elizabeth  5:39   I can't take any credit for that. Just to be clear, because I had someone the other day reach out to me for a pet portrait. Oh no, that is not my part of the game. Jason Wallace  5:51   And so there's also been several spinoff games. First, Wyrmspan, which being about dragons, will never show up on this podcast, and then Finspan, which we actually did do an episode on, and we got to talk to Brynn Devine, who was the scientific consultant involved in that. How much have you been involved in that? Are you more of an executive producer role? Because I noticed when I was looking up your gameography, I didn't see those actually listed under your name. So is that you take more of a I don't know what to call it, like Elizabeth  6:16   yeah, like a consultant kind of. So Wyrmspan came first, like you said, and , who designed that, lives here in the D.C. area. We play test with each other every week now. So when she started working on Wyrmspan, she already had Apiary with Stonemaier games. I don't think it had come out yet, but that's how Jamie knew her and wanted, you know, had thought of her to work on Wyrmspan, and I thought that was a great idea. He offered it to me, but I did not have any interest in working with dragons, and I was busy on other stuff. So I sort of helped get Connie going in the sense that I set her down with my spreadsheet of how I think about structuring wingspan cards in terms of what are the moving pieces of how to do the score versus the powers versus the requirements and things like that. We play tested it along the way and had a lot of very interesting conversations about like what makes something feel like it's in a family with wingspan but its own thing. And it went a little bit too far in both directions on on that in terms of like so far away that it didn't feel like a wingspan game, and then so close that you know we wanted to differentiate a little bit more. So that was a super interesting process to me. But Connie was doing all the hands-on, like designing every card, designing how it works, all of that stuff. And then similar with finspan, although that was second and sort of even learned a little bit from that wyrmspan

    S3E07.1 - Elizabeth Hargrave (bonus interview)

  4. Aug 26

    S3E07 - The Fox Experiment (Dog Domestication)

    #Domestication #TheFoxExperiment #ElizabethHargrave #Dogs #Evolution #BoardGames #Science Summary Foxes, wolves, and corn, oh my! We're talking domestication today, all revolving around The Fox Experiment and two Russian scientists' attempt to understand how we turned wolves into dogs. We're joined by Dr. Angela Perri, an expert in dog domestication, and cover what domestication is, how wolves became dogs, how that probably kickstarted a lot of other domestication, how much a domestic fox costs, and a surprising amount of about corn. So grab any furry friends you have and settle in for this canine-focused episode of Gaming with Science. Timestamps 00:00 Island foxes and ancient corn 09:35 The Fox Experiment (the game) 15:48 The Fox Experiment (the actuality) 23:31 How did all this happen? 26:20 Dog domestication 34:58 How relevant is the fox experiment still? 40:30 Domestication across species 43:31 Plant domestication 48:22 Nitpick corner 53:20 Final grades 58:50 Signoff Links The Fox Experiment (Pandasaurus) Big brains for Channel Island foxes (PLoS ONE) Two teosinte ancestors for maize (Science.org) Teosinte vs modern corn (Wikipedia) Domesticated Silver Fox (Wikipedia) (Includes descriptions of the experiment) Dogs as gifted word learners (Science.org) Italian brown bears evolving to be less aggressive (Smithsonian Magazine)  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  0:06   Hello and welcome to the Gaming with Science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:10   Today, we're going to talk about the Fox Experiment by Pandasaurus. Hey, welcome back to Gaming with Science. This is Brian. Jason Wallace  0:20   This is Jason, Brian  0:21   and we've got a fantastic guest for us, Dr. Angela Perry. Can you introduce yourself, please? Angela  0:26   Sure, thanks. My name is Angela Perry. I am an archeologist by trade, and a specialist in the human canine relationship, ancient DNA, and the archeology of the human and dog existence, Brian  0:42   this is super cool, and again, is super perfect for this game. Thank you, David Muscato from the Common Descent, for pointing us in your direction, and thank you for agreeing to come on and talk to us about a nerdy board game. Angela  0:54   Of course. Brian  0:56   Okay, so before we get into the game, we usually start with a science banter topic. We usually let the co-host go first if they have one. If you have something you want to share with the listeners, that's great. If you don't, I'm sure Jason has one waiting in the wings. Angela  1:10   I thought, what better topic to talk about than foxes, since we're here, and I'm really interested in not only canids but in understanding kind of island theory, island domestication theory, and I was reading something recently talking about the Channel Island foxes off of the California coast on the Channel Islands. They have a special fox that lives on the Channel Islands that is a lot smaller than mainland foxes. We always think of you know a smaller fox, smaller animal having a smaller brain across the board. Dwarfism that goes along with living on islands, but they actually found that the brains of the Channel Island foxes are bigger than their mainland gray fox counterparts, which they think more research to come is related to the mental stamina needed to figure out kind of complex living on this difficult, rigorous location on on the islands off of off of California. So I thought that was pretty cool. Usually we would think like smaller animals, smaller brain, but they actually have a bigger brain. Pretty cool. Brian  2:18   That's really cool. I don't think we've have we had a chance to really talk about island evolution yet? How it seems to make small things get bigger, big things get smaller, and everything gets weird. Jason Wallace  2:27   We have not yet. No, Angela  2:28   it's a good one. Brian  2:29   I'm gonna have to like actively go out and look for a game about that, or maybe this is just what we talk about when we talk about when we do a Darwin Day game. We can talk about it then. What about you, Jason? Did you bring something? Jason Wallace  2:39   I did. So we're probably not going to come back to this at all the rest of the episode, but I want to talk about plants, and of course my favorite plant, maize, corn. So there was a study.  Brian  2:49   You're doing the thing that I used to do, where I just make everything about onions. So now we're just going to make everything about corn for the rest of the season. Okay, fair. Jason Wallace  2:57   So, but this is a study that came out about two years ago, now out of the Ross-Ibarra lab in California, someone I know through the maize community, looking at the domestication of maize, and they're using a lot of the whole genome sequences where you can get the entire genomes of 1000s of maize lines, where you can get ancient DNA out of archaeological sites to sort of reconstruct the history of domesticating corn. They found something that was really surprising: is that there was actually a two-wave domestication. So you initially got maize domesticated out of a a precursor named Teosinte and a specific variety of it called Parviglumus, which is in sort of like the lowlands of southern Mexico, and apparently about 4000 years after that initial domestication, it hybridized with a different teosinte called Mexicana that is in the highlands. So it's up in the higher. It's colder, shorter growing season, kind of rougher environment, and apparently that hybridization was super important because that hybridized maize then spread throughout the Americas and basically either displaced or hybridized with all existing domesticated maize. And so, pretty much all the maize, all the corn we have today, is descended from this sort of two-step hybridization, where you had your initial domestication, and it was like that for 1000s of years, and then you had an introgression, a hybridization with this related cousin species that suddenly, I guess, supercharged it because it was whatever it gave it gave it such an advantage that it then spread everywhere. Brian  4:35   This new maze is so hot right now. Angela  4:37   Also, mirroring the story of gray wolves. Gray wolves also have a similar path of like a single stock population of gray wolves taking over the world, and now being the kind of all gray wolves being the descendant of a of a population like that. So, oh, is Brian  4:55   that right? Oh my goodness! So they have like a severe bottlenecking event, like humans did too, right? Yeah. Angela  5:00   Yeah, Brian  5:00   Jason, can you describe Teosinte for those people who would not be familiar with it? Because I don't know what you're thinking of, listener. If it Jason Wallace  5:08   looks like corn, you're probably not thinking about it. Yes. So Teosinte is the wild ancestor that gave rise to maize over many, many centuries of domestication. It took a good chunk of the 20th century for us to figure that out for sure, because teosinte does not look like modern corn. So modern corn, you have this nice big ear, hundreds of kernels on it. The plant is like tall and erect, and it's got like the the the male anthers that shed pollen at the top and the female ear down at the bottom. Teosinte is basically a bush that has like little bits of flowers everywhere, and its ear is a single row of like these like trapezoid-shaped kernels that are stacked on top of each other that are literally surrounded in a rock-hard fruit case. It's called. Like I've heard of people having to get these things open with a sledgehammer. It was one of those things where it looks so different from modern corn. It actually took several decades of work for people to decide that oh no no no this is this actually is the variety not some weird thing that went extinct that we no longer know or some weird hybridization of it it actually is this and people have now tracked down the handful of large effects genes that are important for that for getting rid of the fruit case for making more rows of kernels for making them bigger and such, for changing it so that instead of having a bush, you have mostly a single central stalk. And then there's hundreds and hundreds of smaller genes that kind of feed into that process. Actually, the lab that did this domestication paper I mentioned, they have done a lot of the work identifying a lot of the the smaller effect genes, the big effect ones, were identified several decades ago, but the small effect genes have been only been identified more recently because they're much harder to find. Angela  6:48   Sounds like Jason is ready for the farm fox experiment. We're on trend here. Brian  6:55   So, like domesticated wheat still just kind of looks like a grass, right? But like maize is a grass. It doesn't look like that, and I think that's because the wheat breeders are lazy. I want wheat that is the size of an ear of corn. Like, come on, breeders, let's get on it. Angela  7:09   Do people still like indigenous populations still use like native teocente? Jason Wallace  7:14   To my knowledge, no. I think teosente is mostly considered a weed that's kind of on the edges of the cornfield. Okay, there. I mean, there is some gene. They are interfertile. There is some gene flow, but the things that's kind of halfway between is neither really good at being tiacente or good at being corn, and so it's not like the the initial hybrids are not great. But you do have some gene

    S3E07 - The Fox Experiment (Dog Domestication)

  5. Jul 31

    S3E06.1 - Endangered Rescue (bonus interview)

    #EndangeredRescue #EndangeredSpecies #PuzzleGame #GenCon #BoardGames #Science Summary In this special just-in-time-for-GenCon bonus episode, we sit down with Marc Specter and Ace Ellett to talk about their "Endangered Rescue" puzzle game series, including both the Lemur Leaf Frog (which we played) and Chambered Nautilus (which is coming out as this drops). We talk about this series's origins as the hybrid of a traditional board game and one person's annual holiday gift, the challenges of meshing puzzles and science, and the joys of cephalopods. So sit back, contemplate your favorite endangered species, and enjoy this bonus episode of Gaming with Science. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 03:25 What is Endangered Rescue? 07:06 Penguins, Frogs, and Devils, oh my! 12:13 Mixing science and puzzle game 18:15 Talking with the experts 23:02 Game recommendations 25:58 Wrap-up Links Endangered Rescue (part of the Endangered World series) Grand Gamers Guild website and facebook page Bluefish games  Science Friday and Cephalapod Week Dorian Noel (science illustrator) Game recommendations: Scythe, Gorinto, & Bier Pioniere  (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  0:06   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 talk about the Endangered Rescue series by Grand Gamers Guild. Hey, welcome back to Gaming with Science. We're doing a creator interview today. This is Brian, Jason Wallace  0:23   and this is Jason. Soundy little froggy because I either threw my voice out yesterday giving an outdoor lecture, or I have finally developed an allergy to corn pollen, and I'm not sure which it is. Brian  0:31   Anyway, we are joined by two guests today. Mark, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself? Marc  0:35   Sure, I'm Marc Specter of Grand Gamers Guild. I consider myself the largest of the small indie publishers, we are entering into our 10th year of publication. If you can believe it, I started out in 2016 with one little title, and these days I'm kind of amazed. And I'm juggling about 10 titles at a time in various stages of development, and I work with amazing creators, both designers as well as artists, I fire emails and build relationships around the world, and the journey's not even close to over yet. Brian  1:08   So I was at Origins, and I ran into Marc and he introduced a game to me that I thought would be interesting for us to talk about. So we've got somebody else with us today, the designer or one of the designers of that game. This is Ace Ellett. Ace  1:20   Yeah, hi. My name is Ace. I'm like you said, one of the designers of the whole Endangered Rescue series right now. My wife Anna is the other designer. Been playing escape rooms together for about 10 years now, and that's kind of where we come from with the background of all this. But designing tabletop games for the last six or seven years since about 2019, we do some of our own designs, but through a friend, we got paired up with Marc about two or three years ago now. Brian  1:45   So, Ace, I want to ask you a question because I've been curious about this. Were escape rooms really a thing before the Saw movie franchise? Ace  1:54   They were certainly a thing. I think in Asia is is most commonly the agreed upon a location of where it started, but it would have been early 2000s, I believe, and I think that saw movie probably would have been like 2004, 2005 here in the states. So we we really saw a a huge surge of that, and especially during pandemic time later, to get a little even further ahead of that, a lot of games being played at home, being played digitally or online, I don't have to go to to a location and have them lock me in a room in order to really experience the the fun, the sense of just awe when it comes to solving all these puzzles  and getting that hit of like feel goods from realizing how smart you are,  Jason Wallace  2:43   is calling it an escape room game? Is that basically branding over like a puzzle game, or is there a separate genre of puzzle games? Ace  2:51   That's a very good question. We say escape room games. Anne and I run Bluefish Games outside of working with Marc, which is sort of a separate puzzle game endeavor. We would say puzzle games when we describe what we do. But the public at large, they're usually more familiar with escape room games. So, in the sense that you're taking, you know, somewhere between half an hour to some games last 3, 4, 5, hours, and you're you're kind of working through a narrative and getting to an end where you have an answer, yes, it's an escape room because that's going to follow that same path. Brian  3:25   Okay, so tell us about the Endangered Rescue series.  Marc  3:28   Ah, sure. So I'll I'll start if you're okay with that, Ace. Endangered Rescue is kind of the baby that came out of Holiday Hijinks and Endangered. So back about five years ago, I got wind that Jonathan Chaffer was making a small escape room game. Now Jonathan has an annual tradition of building an accessible, small, portable, inexpensive game that he can send to friends and family, gamers and non-gamers to as as a cute little Christmas gift, and he's done all sorts of different things for I want to say at least a decade. But he could give you the specifics. Jason Wallace  4:10   It is like the world's most awesome Christmas card. Marc  4:13   Yeah, seriously, literally. Sometimes it is on a card or or postcard, and so I got wind. He did an interview that he was doing a Christmas-themed mini escape room game. I reached out to him and I said, "Jonathan, we got to do this thing. Let's make this a real published game. And it was great. And then I said, "Well, can you do it again? And can you do it again? And now we've done that 16 times. I also do a game with another designer called Endangered, it's a cooperative game about saving endangered species, about convincing the United Nations that an animal is worth saving. One of the chief variations comes in the animal scenarios. While of course every board game is an abstract of reality, we work really hard. Or let me just say Joe works really hard to make sure that any every animal feels different, and that they are as reflective on the board as they possibly can be of the real life animal. The primary scenario in endangered is the tiger scenario. It's the first one, and in the real world, tigers are territorial, and so after they mate, they split up. And so in the game, we represented that that after tigers make a baby, they split up. The mom and the dad-they're just bits. They're not actual mom and dad pieces. And the baby all end up in separate areas, which creates other confounding things as to progressing your success in the game. So now, after we had a very successful set of what we called holiday hijinks, but now we've backed up and to have a larger title called 18 Escape, and we had Endangered going really well and successfully, I think I just kind of was looking at one day what we could possibly do with the system, and I loved the idea that we might be able to build an animal rescue adventure around those two things, and I talked to Jonathan, and so he went to put out feelers, basically introduced them to me, and I pitched Ace and  Anna on what I wanted to see happen, and we were off to the races. And the very first endangered rescue was Galapagos penguin, and then that was followed by the Lemur Leaf Frog, and now we have two more coming. One is Tasmanian Devil, which was done hand in hand with the Endangered Australia expansion. The newest one will be will be Chambered Nautilus, which is done in partnership with Science Friday, a radio show turned podcast that has been on the air for forever. Gosh, I want to say at least three decades, doing science, entertainment, and reporting, and in support of their annual Cephalopod Week. Brian  6:54   So the Endangered Rescue 18 Card Escape series is part of the Endangered Expanded Universe, the the Endangered Cinematic Universe. Yes, Marc  7:01   there you go. There you go. Like I said, it's like endangered. It's like endangered. And 18 escape had a baby. Brian  7:06   How have you chosen which animals to focus on? You said penguins, lemur leaf frogs. Tasmanian devils are really cool. We wait. We didn't do our interesting science fact because this isn't a normal episode. But the the contagious facial cancer of the Tasmanian devil, is that part of the game? Ace  7:24   Yes, it is. Marc  7:25   When I the little I know about Tasmanian devils, that's one of the chief threats to their existence. So, I mean, I don't really inform what Ace and Anna do in terms of content. I trust them implicitly to research and vet the substance, along with the consultation of our subject matter experts. Hope to hope hope to enjoy that in the not too distant future. Brian  7:45   Ace, are you the are you and Anna? Have you been the ones who've decided which animals to focus on, and how have you chosen? Ace  7:50   Yeah, a lot of the times we will do research across several different animals. We've got some sort of broad requirements that we use. Usually, we use the IUCN list to To look at endangered species, we we try and make sure that they're classified into all the way into endangered, and I think the Nautilus actually is the the first one who might be slightly on the edge of that, just because of that group trying to actually get enough of a sense of the p

    S3E06.1 - Endangered Rescue (bonus interview)

  6. Jul 29

    S3E06 - The Royal Game of Ur (Ancient Games)

    #Archaeology #AncientGames #Ur #Senet #Mehen #BoardGames #Science Summary We're looking deep into history today as we talk about the oldest board game with a known ruleset: the Royal Game of Ur. Joining us is Dr. Walter Crist, an archaeologist and expert in ancient games. We cover ancient dice sets, the meanings of games, centuries-old games made with graffiti, how Walter and colleagues are using AI to decipher now-lost rulesets, and why you should play some ancient games. In addition to Ur, we talk about Senet, Mehen, Hounds and Jackals, and several others, so grab your fedora and hand brush, and let uncover some of the oldest ways we have to play dice with the universe. Timestamps 0:00 Introductions 2:04 Ancient dice and Egyptian honey 5:26 The Royal Game of Ur 9:15 Decyphering the rules 15:41 Who made the gameboards? 19:46 Why did people play these games? 23:38 What do the symbols mean? 25:29 Senet, Mehen, 20 Squares, and other games 32:35 Games in and out of civilization 36:08 Gaming archaeology in practice 39:54 Using AI to decipher ancient rules 47:36 Why YOU should play ancient games 51:00 Final grades Links Royal Game of Ur (Wikipedia) Print-at-home version we used (New York Times) Dr. Irvine Finkle versus an Influencer (YouTube) Walter's BlueSky account and recent articles: Deciphering which game was played on a board  Book chapter in Sports and Games in the Ancient Near East (Archaeopress)  Senet Households (Steam)  Note: We couldn't find a primary source for King Tut's honey, but did fine this one about fossilized honey in Georgia (the country, not our home state)  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 the science behind some of your favorite games.  Jason Wallace  0:11   Today we'll be talking about the royal game of Ur. Jason Wallace  0:17   All right, everyone, welcome back to Gaming with Science. This is Jason.  Brian  0:20   This is Brian, Jason Wallace  0:21    and today we are joined by our special guest, Dr. Walter Crist, who's going to tell us about the Royal Game of Ur and ancient games. So, Walter, can you please introduce yourself? Walter  0:30   Yeah, hi, I'm Walter Crist. I am an archeologist working at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Basically, I study ancient games. Mostly, my area of expertise is in the Bronze Age, so around four to 3000 years ago, mostly in the Eastern Mediterranean, so like Egypt, Cyprus, Turkey, places like that in Greece. Lately, I've been studying that along with computer scientists, trying to find ways to use AI to understand ancient games a little bit better. I've been doing this for quite a long time now, and I think it's a really interesting and new way to talk about ancient lives that have kind of been ignored in the past. So I'm excited to talk about it with you guys.  Brian  1:11   I recently got fascinated by the Bronze Age collapse, and I think just because it is such a crazy mystery. Walter  1:18   Yeah, yeah, and I think it has some interesting effects on the ways people play games too, which I don't know. Maybe we'll talk about it here. I haven't published on it yet, though. Jason Wallace  1:26   And do you have any favorite modern games? We'll talk about ancient games later. But do you enjoy any modern games?  Walter  1:31   The modern games that I usually play are: I usually play video games. I mean, I do play board games, but mostly video games. My favorite game of all time is Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I love that, and I'm so excited for the the re-release and the remake that's happening later this year. Jason Wallace  1:46   My wife is also very excited about that. Although we determined that the biggest quality of life improvement that there needs to be is the ability to turn off Navi. Walter  1:54   Yes, I think that is also true. Jason Wallace  1:57   For those who don't know the game, Navi is your annoying fairy companion who won't shut up? Walter  2:01   Yep. Hey, hey! All the time. Brian  2:04   Listen.  Jason Wallace  2:04   All right. Well, let's go on to some of our fun science facts. So, Walter, as our guest, we'd like you to go first. What do you have to share with our audience? Walter  2:12   So, there was some really, really cool research that came out just a couple of months ago by an archeologist working in somewhere in Colorado who did a study of objects that came from ancient sites going back 12,000 years in North America, mostly in West and Southwest North America, and found that there's a continuous tradition of making these artifacts that look like dice. He traced them back from the 19th century, from ethnographic collections, all the way back 12,000 years. So it seemed like people were using dice in the Americas for at least the past 12,000 years, and that's really the the earliest that we can see games in the ancient record. And I think that's really cool and exciting new news. Brian  2:52   Are those like the six sided cube dice, or were they different shapes?  Walter  2:55   No they're not. So they use binary dice. So basically, a bunch of like objects that are marked on one side, and they're usually you know different shapes, but they're marked on one side and blank on the other, or maybe marked differently on two sides. And you take a bunch of them and throw them, and based on what side lands up, it gives you a number. So it's kind of like if you like threw five coins and then you count every time there's a head that lands up, it gives you a number. Brian  3:20   A bunch of D2s. Walter  3:21   Exactly. Yeah. Brian  3:23   What were they made out of? Are they are they made out of stone or bone? Speaker 1  3:27   bone, and I think some I think may have been clay also or stone. But yeah, a lot of bone, especially. Brian  3:33   So dice goblins went back 1000s and 1000s of years. It's a strong tradition. Speaker 2  3:38   Yes, absolutely. Jason Wallace  3:41   How about you, Brian? What do you got for us? Brian  3:44   So I was looking around and I wanted to connect this to microbiology, but also to archeology. So I'm going to talk about a fact that everybody knows and isn't quite true: is that honey never spoils. So honey is really good at staying preserved. It's got low water content. It's got high pH (*correction low pH), and those are good things to keep bacteria and mold from growing also supposedly produces hydrogen peroxide. Well, it does produce hydrogen peroxide, but that was the like. Well, that can't be it because hydrogen peroxide is pretty stable, but it's not 1000s of years stable. So I think a lot of this goes back to oh, people have found edible honey in in Egyptian tombs, and it's kind of true. There were clay jars that I think were found in the tomb of Tutankhamen. Hopefully, I'm getting this right. Like again, this is one of these stories where like the facts sound almost too good to be true, so I'm trying to track it down. They did find clay jars that were marked with honey, inside they found sort of a slight caramel trace that a chemical testing then confirmed would have been edible honey. So you're not going to an Egyptian tomb, cracking open a jar, and pouring it out on your pancakes or something. Jason Wallace  4:41   I think probably for most people's pantries, we can assume honey is going to stay relatively edible until it crystallizes. Yeah, but don't plan on putting in your like honey 5000 year time capsule and having it still be good. Speaker 3  4:55   No and especially if you're not in Egypt, like the preservation in Egypt is very particular because. It's very hot and very dry. So if you're doing that anywhere else, it's definitely going to get weird.  Brian  5:04   I think that was something they said too. Sealed jars in a tomb is a very different condition than your pantry. Jason Wallace  5:10   I guess nowadays, if you really want to preserve honey that long, you're going to have to like vacuum seal it and launch it into space, and that's about the only place you'll be able to keep it that long.  Brian  5:18   Space honey,  Jason Wallace  5:21   you know someone would pay for that space.  Brian  5:23   Oh yeah, for sure. People will pay for all kinds of crazy stuff. Jason Wallace  5:26   Okay, all right. Well, let's wind this back then to ancient times. So we're going to talk about the Royal Game of Ur today. So this was one that I didn't know about until about a year ago, when someone we had over for dinner pointed me at it, and when I started looking into it, like, oh, we've got to do an episode on this. The reason we're doing the Royal Game of Ur is because it's the oldest board game with a known rule set. There are traces of it going back 4,500 years or so, back to about 2500, 2600 BC. And so you may have realized that our introduction was a little different. We didn't list a publisher. That's because there is none. This is way in the common domain Brian  6:00   from "The Bronze Age", Jason Wallace  6:02   yes, from our Bronze Age forbearers. But basic idea: this is a fairly simple, simple in air quotes game because I looked up one paper that had a mathematical analysis and was saying that in some respects it has as many like choice options as chess does, which seems strange for such a simple game. What the game is is it's a board. The one that we played on and that is most commonly shown is like two rectangles that are connected by a small thin bridge. There's a total of

    S3E06 - The Royal Game of Ur (Ancient Games)

  7. Jul 15

    S3E05.6 - Microcosm Creator Interview (bonus)

    #Microcosm #Micobiology #MicrobialEcology #NutrientCycling #BoardGames #Science Summary As the last(?) entry in our surprisingly large amount of content in our summer "break", we have a short and sweet creator interview with Dr. Fatima Foflonker about her newly released game, Microcosm. This interview was grabbed by Brian at Momocon (Atlanta), and covers a quick introduction to nutrient cycling, the importance of microbes, and how she brought this pet pandemic project to reality. So settle in for a quick field interview, and we'll see you again at the end of July! Timestamps 00:00 Introductions   00:54 Nutrient cycling 02:22 Microcosm origins & play 06:04 Living room or classroom? 07:20 Wrap-up Links Microcosm Games  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 image courtesy of Microcosm 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/ ) Brian  0:01   Brian, hello, and welcome to the Gaming with Science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Hey, welcome back to Gaming with Science. This is Narrator Brian, and I was able to do a field interview with the creator of Microcosm, it was my first time using our field recorder, so I apologize for any audio hiccups. Thank you. Enjoy. Hey, this is Brian here at Momocon 2026 with the designer of Microcosm, which is a very cool game about bacteria, environmental bacteria. Could you introduce yourself? Fatima  0:38   Hi, I'm Fatima. I'm a assistant professor at Clark Atlanta University. I teach microbiology. My research is in bioinformatics, but I do have a strong background in environmental microbiology. My PhD was from an environmentally focused program at Rutgers, and I decided to make this game about biogeochemical cycling. It gives you insights into all the microbes around us that are involved in helping to complete the cycling of chemicals in the environment that are constantly working, and we don't see them. Brian  1:19   So, see, we learned about the water cycle, obviously, and I think maybe we learn a little bit about the carbon cycle. Certainly, we're talking about it more, but all of those elements have to get cycled in the environment, right? All that's driven by really by microbes and largely by bacteria. Fatima  1:34   Yeah, that's true. So, a large part of these biogeochemical cycles are microbial. In the game, we have carbon, the carbon cycle, iron cycle, nitrogen cycle, and sulfur cycle. No phosphorus cycle yet, maybe for an expansion, maybe for an expansion. Yeah, the phosphorus expansion. And there's also a solo mode where you can play against the non-microbial elements that are cycling chemicals. Brian  2:01   Tell me the story of Microcosm. Fatima  2:02   Yeah, sure. So this is kind of my pandemic project. I had a  Brian  2:08   very common. Fatima  2:09   yeah had a lot of time on my hands. People at the time, you know, they were talking about how bacteria, viruses, you know, how scared they were of them, and I was just thinking, what about the good bacteria? There's so many of them. Brian  2:22   Just started as your pandemic project, but it's 2026 So, tell us about the story of designing Microcosm. Fatima  2:29   Yeah, so it has been a long process. I started out just very basic on an Excel sheet with just a giant list of microbes I thought were cool. Brian  2:41   This was like a personal love list of microbes? Fatima  2:43   I was personal love list of microbes, you know. The game developed from there, and honestly, the last I don't know, four years or so after you get the art working and the basic, the core gameplay going, it's been a lot of just balancing. Brian  2:58   Do you work with a design group here in Atlanta, Fatima  3:01   so I'm part of the Georgia Game Designers Association, but as a designer, I've done most of the work. I do have an artist Tristam Rossin who did the artwork. Brian  3:14   Are they also a microbe nerd? Fatima  3:17   No, they're not at all. Brian  3:19   What about now that they've done all this, Fatima  3:21   I'm not sure, actually. Brian  3:23   So, yeah, tell me about the game. Fatima  3:25   Yeah, so the game is set up with a couple different tiles, biome tiles. They each have different chemicals that are available in the environment, and your main action is you're trying to play one of 75 unique and scientifically accurate microbes into the environment to try to convert chemicals into different forms, so the idea is firstly you got to find a place where the microbe can survive, so it has to have a trait that matches the environment, for example, if your microbe is halo-tolerant, it can survive in a salty environment. Then you have to find a chemical that matches what the microbe can consume, and the microbe will convert it into a different form. Someone could play off of your card and then take that chemical back to the form in the environment, and that's completing one cycle, so that's the basic game loop. There's also some interesting doubling time mechanics, so if no one plays on your card at the end of the round, your resources double, so this represents the exponential growth of bacteria in the environment, so you're really trying to maximize your resources before closing the cycle and scoring points. It's also a little bit of a deck builder, so once you complete a cycle, you get to pick up a mutation from the environment, add it to your card, and build up your deck. Brian  4:57   You can outstrip the resources of your environment, and that's bad, right? So, how does that work? Fatima  5:03   Yeah, so if you double your resources too many times, you're going to trigger environmental collapse. So, this represents when there's too many organisms competing for the same resources in the environment, the environment will collapse in the game, and you take out that tile, you take out any cards on that tile, and you replace it with a new tile. Brian  5:27   What are some of your favorite bacteria in the game? Fatima  5:30   Well, I really like Pyrococcus abyssi, that's gonna be our mascot. We're actually getting a giant microbe, like a custom giant microbe. Brian  5:31   Oh, very cool. Fatima  5:34   Yeah. Brian  5:35   Why Pyrococcus? So, pyrococcus.. let's see.. pyro fire. So, definitely a thermo-tolerant or a thermophilic organism. What's the species name? Fatima  5:53   Yeah, so Pyrococcus abyssi. So, that gives you a clue. So, abyss is where it comes from, so it lives in the deep sea hydrothermal vents. Brian  6:04   Do you intend to use Microcosm in your classes, or is this mostly for the living room, or is it for both? Fatima  6:10   Yeah, I would say both. I'm teaching college-level microbiology courses, and I definitely want to incorporate the cards as a learning tool to help the students recognize, you know, which bacteria are involved in which biogeochemical cycles. There's ways you can simplify the game and play it at a level for middle schoolers, high schoolers. I'm also going to include, like, teachers' lessons plans on my website to help incorporate that into the classroom as well.  Brian  6:42   Is there a mechanic that you wanted to have in the game, but you ended up dropping? Fatima  6:47   So, as the, as we go through the rounds, the board kind of evolves, and we swap out some of the starter tiles for more advanced tiles, and I have this very complicated way of deciding what's the best optimal tiles to swap out, but it got complicated, and there was a giant flow chart to help you decide, and so I scrapped it, and right now I've got a round counter, and whichever tile the cube on the round counter is closest to that, that's the tile that gets swapped out. So it's streamlined, it's simplified, probably better for play. Brian  7:20   Do you have a favorite game? Does necessarily need to be a board game or a science game Fatima  7:24   I do have a very favorite. It's Terraforming Mars.  Brian  7:29   Oh, good choice Fatima  7:29   Yeah, there's just so many options. It's like resource management game. I think you know, I've definitely drawn some inspiration from that and some inspiration from Wingspan, because Wingspan, you know, every card has a beautifully illustrated bird, and I really wanted to give every microbe its own Brian  7:46   It due? Fatima  7:46    Yeah, Brian  7:48   very cool. Okay, where can our listeners find out about microcosm? Fatima  7:54   Yeah, so microcosm, you can go to microcosm/games.com for more information. We are launching on Game Found in July this summer, so if you go to our website, it'll link you to our Game Found as well, and you can follow for an update on when the campaign launches. Brian  8:14   All right. Well, listeners, keep an eye out for Microcosm. I imagine we're going to try to time the release of this episode so it will line up with the release, and with that, have a great month, and great games, and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.  Brian  8:26   This has been the Gaming with Science podcast. Copyright 2026 Listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non-commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to Gaming with Science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you, and have fun playing dice with the universe. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

    S3E05.6 - Microcosm Creator Interview (bonus)

  8. Jul 8

    S3E05.5 - Minecraft (Bonus - Teaching Computers to Game)

    #Minecraft #MinecraftBasalt #NeuralNetworks #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #TeachingComputersToGame #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Summary In our final minisode about teaching computers to game, we leave the tabletop behind and move on to Minecraft and even the real world. We're also back with Dr. Prithvi Akella, who helps us understand how Minecraft and other digital games provide more open-ended platforms to work on AI models, along with what an "AI agent" actually is (no, not a spy--well, _probably_ not a spy) and how they're used to run tasks in both the game and real worlds. We also talk about what large language models actually are, how they and vision-based models work, and happens when you let a thousand AIs loose on their own Minecraft server. So get ready to punch some wood in our final minisode of this series for Gaming with Science. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:04 What is Minecraft? 03:23 Teaching AIs to play Minecraft 07:18 AI agents and LLMs 10:45 Letting AI loose in Minecraft 17:49 No more games for AI? 20:54 So what about us humans? Links Minecraft official site (Mojang) Altera setting AI agents loose in Minecraft (Video 1 , Video 2 ) (YouTube) MineRL Challenge (also MineRL BASALT) (ReadTheDocs.io) 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  0:04   Jason, hello, and welcome to the Gaming with Science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. In today's minisode about teaching computers to game, we'll be talking about Minecraft and the next frontier of machine learning. All right, everyone. Welcome back to Game with Science. This is Jason. This is Brian, and we are once again joined by our special guest, Dr. Prithvi Akela, who is here to help us understand machine learning and AI and the world of Minecraft today. Prithvi, can you do a quick introduction for the people who may have forgotten since last week? Prithvi  0:36   Hello, everyone, nice to speak to you all again. My name is Prithvi. I finished my PhD from Caltech about three years ago, where my emphasis was on validation of learning enabled systems with a goal of trying to make sure that these systems function more reliably and safely in general practice. Jason Wallace  0:51   All right, and in our final episode of this four part mini series on teaching computers to games, we have left the realm of board games and gone into computer games, so we are going to be talking about Minecraft today. Brian  1:02   Finally, a real game. Jason Wallace  1:04   I don't play Minecraft. Minecraft is a game with very pixely art. I see my daughters playing, and they seem to have lots of fun building farms and villages and making artwork and rugs and stuff in it, and it looks like digital Legos, and that's about all I know about it. So I'm going to pass it to Brian to explain to us what is Minecraft. Brian  1:23   Sure, I think digital Legos is actually a great analogy for Minecraft. So, as a player, you'll spawn into a big wilderness expanse all made out of blocks. It's been around for over 15 years at this point. It was released in 2011 so that's very long legs for a video game. It's had routine updates throughout the time that have sort of kept people interested, add new things, new features. Basically, you can collect the blocks in the world, all these natural resources, craft them into other things, build structures, build castles, stuff like that. You are supposed to eat food at night time, monsters will spawn, so you have to like make yourself armor and weapons to protect yourself. It's generally a sandbox game, in the sense that, like, the player usually is the one who decides what they want to do. It's sort of very open-ended, which is probably why a lot of kids enjoy it's very creative. Again, it's like imagine you had an infinite box of Legos without having to worry about things like gravity, and also you get to fight monsters at the same time. One of the key things about Minecraft, though, is that each world is procedurally randomly generated, so based on a seed and a bunch of noise maps, as you keep walking, the world is technically unbounded. Obviously, you can't actually do infinite, because your computer will explode at a certain point, but as you keep walking in a direction, there will always be a next horizon, a next hill, a next forest, a next ocean, all based on this seed procedural number map, there is technically an end to the game, where, like, you can get to a state where the game will play its end credits. You have to do some pretty esoteric, sort of obscure things to get to the end of the game, which involves, like, building multiple interdimensional portals, collecting resources from two specific monsters, finding a rare structure underground again, using more rare resources, and then fighting the dragon boss at the end of the game. I think maybe that's one of the things that makes it interesting as a challenge is every time you spawn into a Minecraft world, unless you have artificially plugged in the exact same seed, that world will be unique and different. You can always beat it, but things will not be in the same place, the resources will not be in the same place. The way to beat the game will not be in the same place. Jason Wallace  3:23   And I think this is part of the appeal of why games like this were the next frontier after Go was mastered, is because Go and other board games have very finite states. It's all bounded in this board. You know exactly what the pieces are you can work with, and you have very clear goals. In chess, it's to capture the opponent's king. In Go, it's to capture the most territory on the board. Minecraft, as I understand it, does not have specific goals like that. There are many, many things you can do, but not really anything you have to. There's no single goal for the game, and so that makes it, to my mind, one step closer to reality, where we have this massive unbounded sphere we all live on, and we are trying to do all sorts of things, and so it seems like Minecraft is sort of like a stepping stone to being able to get these AI agents to work in the real world, is to first train them in a simpler world that has known rules, but not quite as many of them, and if someone messes up in Minecraft, no one dies, Jason Wallace  4:17   which could very much happen in real life, Brian  4:19   so when you say teaching an AI to play Minecraft, what are we trying to get the AI to do? Jason Wallace  4:24   So, there's a challenge called MineRL, so Mine RL, or MineRL BASALT, which was a sequel to it, where they had certain goals in mind. Did you have a chance to look these over? Prithvi  4:33   I did have a chance to look them over, and actually, there's been significant advancements beyond Simple RL for training these models to play Minecraft or play a lot of the Starcraft or these other types of games, which are not open-ended per se, like in the previous episode, right? We talked about how we used games as a way to train these models or figure out better ways to train these models, because as human beings it is natural for us to learn the world through these games, but granted, a lot of the tasks that we otherwise expect ourselves to achieve, or a lot of the tasks that we otherwise have to do on a daily basis are relatively open-ended, in the sense where there is perhaps at the end of the day some criterion which determines the end of either a game or a task that we're doing in our offices or a specific function we need to do in a factory, for the sake of argument, but they are a little bit more open-ended, and so then as we get to now trying to train these models in Minecraft or Starcraft, or any of these slightly more open-ended games, or open-ended sandbox scenarios, if you will. It stresses our ability to make good ways of training these models, so that they can adapt, learn, figure out optimal actions in these now more little open-ended settings. And then, to the point that you mentioned, where we started with MineRL or MineRL, we've now moved all the way to transformer-based architectures like Google Deep Minds Dreamer, or I think OpenAI also had a VPT, so a Vision pre-trained transformer that basically just by feeding a transformer architecture a number of images or a number of videos of people just playing Minecraft, Prithvi  5:56   it actually just trained the system to play Minecraft in and of itself, which is absolutely wild, Brian  6:01   which, considering how much YouTube Minecraft content is already out there. I'm sure there was a deep training set to work from Prithvi  6:08   a very deep Jason Wallace  6:09   part of the goal of some of these contests was to get that level of training where you didn't have to run the computer through Minecraft 10 million times to find a strategy, because that's not what humans do. We watch someone else play, and the article I read pointed out you can take a human child and show them a 10 minute video on Minecraft on how to mine a diamond, and they will get it. And the idea is, how can we get computers so that they can learn like this? Now, in reference to our previous conversation on Go, this does mean that you tend to copy the existing strategies, so you may not end up with Minecraft from Mars, like we did with Go from Mars with AlphaGo Zero, but it does much more efficient if someone's already found a workable strategy. You don't need to waste the resources just reinventing the wheel. Prithvi  6:50   Completely agreed, and this actually is, in my opinion, a phenomenal branch of

    S3E05.5 - Minecraft (Bonus - Teaching Computers to Game)
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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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    Gaming with Science Podcast
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