S3E05 - Ark Nova (Zoos)

S3E05.3 - Chess (Bonus - Teaching computers to game)

#Chess #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ComputerGaming  #BoardGames #Science Summary Welcome back to our miniseries on teaching computers to game! In our second minisode we talk Chess, arguably one of the most iconic games of man versus machine--which we lost thirty years ago. Chess is our poster child for brute-force approaches, where we use computers massive power to analyze millions of options and pick the (hopefully) best one, which affects everything from stock exchanges to weather prediction. We cover games that have been solved by brute force and those (like chess) that probably can never be truly solved, the iconic match between Gary Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue computer, and how even that can be eclipsed by a modern cell phone. So grab some pawns and check your mates, and settle in for another episode of Gaming with Science! Timestamps * 00:00 Introductions * 01:36 Chess * 07:10 Origin of teaching computers chess * 09:53 Brute force approaches * 15:54 Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov * 22:11 Other brute force applications * 23:51 Signoff Links * Chess [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess] and the Mechanical Turk [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk] again (Wikipedia) * Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379296/] (Internet Movie Database) * The Signal and the Noise [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/305826/the-signal-and-the-noise-by-nate-silver/], by Nate Silver (Penguin Random House) * Note: I tried to find the chapter excerpt on Kasparov but it may have been taken down. * First & last win of computers versus humans [https://xkcd.com/1002/] (XKCD Comics)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net [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   In today's minisode about teaching computers to game, we'll be talking about chess and brute force computation. All right, welcome back everyone to Gaming with Science. This is Jason. Brian  0:22   This is Brian, real Brian. Jason Wallace  0:24   Yes, no AI-generated host this time, and not ever, actually. Welcome back to the second part of our four-part mini series on teaching computers how to game. So, last time we talked about basic algorithms and Tic Tac Toe, and an algorithm is really just a set of instructions for a computer, so everything we're going to be talking about over this whole series is just algorithms, but the key part of the ones we talked about last time is they're relatively simple algorithms, they're like, oh, here are these five or eight or 20 different rules to follow, and if you follow those, then you will win, or at least bring the game to a draw. Today we're going up to the next level, which is brute force computation. This is where you're basically taking advantage of the fact that computers are extremely fast to calculate tons and tons and tons of options, and then pick among them. Brian  1:11   So, I think you said before, computers are fundamentally dumb, but what they are is quick and efficient. Jason Wallace  1:18   Yes, very fast, very efficient, and very, very stupid, Brian  1:21   so it kind of answers the question, if you can put enough stupid things together and get them to work fast enough. It's like it's smart. Jason Wallace  1:28   Yes, we actually talked about this way back in episode two on Robo Rally and how GPUs work, so you can check that out if you want to know more about that. Our poster child for brute force computation is going to be one of the poster childs for teaching computers a game across all time. Chess. Now I'm assuming most people listening to this podcast know what chess is, but we're going to go over it just in case. So, chess is an ancient game, it's 1000s of years old, it's played on an 8x8 grid, and the two players each have 16 pieces of six different types. You've got your pawns, which you have eight. They can just kind of move one ahead and make little captures of the opponent's pieces. You've got two rooks, which move in straight lines. You have two bishops, which move diagonally. Two knights that have sort of like little L-shaped movements. A king, which is simultaneously the weakest piece, because it can only move one at a time, but also the most important, because if you ever get in a place where it's going to get captured, you lose the game, and then finally the Queen, who, befitting her Majesty, is the most powerful piece in the game, able to move as far as she wants in any straight line, up, down, left, right, or diagonal. Brian  2:33   What is the history of the Queen as the most powerful piece in the game? Jason Wallace  2:38   I'd say that's a relatively recent addition, I mean, as of several centuries ago, but basically, when the modern rules of chess were getting codified sometime in medieval Europe, basically that's when the queen was given her current moveset. Originally, she only could move just like a king, she could only move one section at a time. Brian  2:56   Interesting, it was a game rebalancing. Jason Wallace  2:59   Yeah, so chess has its origins in India. Yes, and actually that explains the pieces a lot better. So two of the piece names have mutated since they were originally there. So bishops were originally elephants, so the little pointy thing with the ball on the end was not a bishop's hat, it was an elephant's tusk.  Brian  3:17   Really? interesting.  Jason Wallace  3:19   And rooks were originally chariots, and so with that, you had the four divisions of the Indian army: you had your foot soldiers, the pawns, your cavalry, the knights, the chariots, the rooks, and then the elephants, now the bishops, and then you had the king and the queen, who were directing their armies to go attack the other army. Brian  3:37   What is the origin of the name rook? Where does that come from, or like, as we called them when we were kids, the castles? Jason Wallace  3:44   Apparently, the rook is just a romanization of the Persian word for chariot, Brian  3:50   so it's even still in the name. Jason Wallace  3:53   Yeah, and that's actually where the name checkmate comes from. So, checkmate is also from Persian, it's like Shamat, meaning the king is dead. Okay, so India to Persia to Europe, and chess is a little interested in that the rules of winning aren't just you have to capture the king, you actually have to put the king in a position where he cannot escape and will inevitably be captured on the next turn, that's checkmate, that is where you have placed the king, so that defeat is inevitable, and unlike many of the other strategy games we played, you can't sort of trick your opponent into it by them missing a move. You have to tell them, by the way, I have now placed your king in check, I've threatened him, and your opponent must move the king out of the way if they can. It's actually illegal to not move the king if you're able to. So basically, you can't win chess by accident. You can't win because someone had a way to escape, and simply did not take it. You actually have to maneuver them in a place where they cannot escape from your move. Now, there have been a bunch of variants of chess made over the years, for as befits any ancient game, but also apparently a lot of them have come up in the last few decades. I assume, as people have gotten kind of bored and figured out, what else can we do with. A chess game, one Brian and I both like, is chess. Neither of us, to my knowledge, knows how to play that, but popularized in Star Trek, it actually does have rules. There's infinite chess where the board is unbounded, so being eight by eight board, you have an infinitely sized board, and then you just have your pieces laid out as normal, which I'm sure makes things with the rooks and queens and stuff that can go theoretically in infinite direction, very interesting. Brian  5:24   I'm curious about the what you had to say about three dimensional Tic Tac Toe is actually being like way easier to play and easier to win if the same would apply to three dimensional chess. Jason Wallace  5:34   I don't know, although one thing you did mention last time, you mentioned a solved version of chess where you can guarantee that white will lose. Brian  5:43   Yeah, Jason Wallace  5:44   I think I found that variant is called losing chess. Brian  5:48   Okay, Jason Wallace  5:48   the goal of that game is actually to force your opponent to win. You put your pieces out, and if they can capture, they must capture your piece. Brian  5:56   Okay, Jason Wallace  5:57   and so the goal is to force them to capture all your stuff first. Apparently, that has been solved, at least for white, Brian  6:04   so that actually makes a lot more sense, because I never were like, well, what's the difference between this and, and just black winning? It's like, oh, I get it. Jason Wallace  6:11   There's been a lot of stuff with chess over the years. Looking this up, I found a bunch of fun facts. Um, I'd argue possibly one of the most interesting early, early versions of a computer playing chess was a hoax, that was the Mechanical Turk that I think we mentioned last time, which was actually a guy in a box that was controlling an automaton playing chess. Also, interesting note, apparently in World Chess Championships, there's all these rules about chess and what's allowed and what's not, but there's no defining way of setting who gets to pick which color they want to be first. White always goes first, and so there's arguably some advantage. And so, how do you pick that? Oftentimes, it's just a coin flip, but apparently you can do other things. And so, there was one China versus US chess match where they decided this by having the two teams play Jenga against each other. China won, by the way.  Brian  6:59   I mean, I guess that's true in football too. They usually just flip a coin, or maybe it should be more like, I don't know, like a goofy modern game where the person who most recently washed their hands has to go first, or something. Jason Wallace  7:10   All right, so that's the history of chess in a nutshell. Obviously, for something that is this old, there's way more than that. The key part for our discussion today is that chess has, from the very early days of computing, been an important part of teaching computers how to play games, and in fact, I ran across a really interesting paper from 1950 by Claude Shannon. So, if any of you are familiar with computational theory, you've probably heard of the Shannon entropy, which is a measure of information content. It's named after this Dr. Shannon. Brian  7:38   Oh, yes, of course I use it all the time. No, I have no idea what you're talking about. Jason Wallace  7:41   I know, I know, I do. But anyway, he had this 1950 paper called Programming a Computer for Playing Chess, and his introduction has this great quote that describes really why we're doing this minisode, like why we're talking about teaching computers to game at all. Here he is talking specifically about chess, although perhaps of no practical importance. The question is of theoretical interest, and it is hoped that a satisfactory solution to this problem will act as a wedge in attacking other problems of a similar nature and of greater significance. And then he goes off and lists what several of these are, including routing telephone calls, translating languages, doing logical deduction, military operations, and even composing music, which I mean, here we are nearly 80 years later, and you know he's right, like, Brian  8:27   yeah, kinda Jason Wallace  8:28   pretty much all of those taken care of, Brian  8:30   not all of them using this approach, though. Jason Wallace  8:32   No, not using the approaches we're talking about today, but yes, using the ones we're going to talk about next time. So this has been one of those holy grails of trying to get a computer to play chess well for a long time, and the main way that it has been done, and what we're gonna focus on today is what's called brute force approaches. Brian  8:50   Okay, here's the thing about chess, though, that I think is interesting, and why this interests people, and you can tell me what you think about this. Chess has a reputation as a smarty, smarty, smart game that smarty smarty smart people play, and like, if you're really good at chess, that must mean that you're smart, and like, the people that are chess masters are considered geniuses, although probably they're just really good at this one thing, but I think that idea of like, well, only really smart people can play chess, therefore, in a horrible set of logical fallacies, if a computer can play chess better than a person, then it must be smarter, or at least as smart as that person. Does that sound about right to you?  Jason Wallace  9:25   Somewhat, yeah. I think it's also just that chess is an extremely complex game. So I think in the same paper Dr. Shannon put out this number that's now called the Shannon number, which is sort of the lower bound for the number of possible games of chess, it's 10 to the power of 120 Brian  9:42   I'm trying to... I'm used to hearing enormous numbers, like the atoms in the universe. I'm trying to think of what is something at this scale. Jason Wallace  9:50   Atoms in the universe is 10 to the power of 80. Brian  9:52   Oh, Jason Wallace  9:53   So this is 40 orders of magnitude larger than there are atoms in the universe. So that's another thing is. It is a very, very complex problem, and this actually brings us to different types of brute force solutions for games. So, last time we talked about solved games, specifically ones that were solved by elegant little algorithms. You may remember the one for Tic Tac Toe. It's an eight-step algorithm. It's something very easy to understand. Brute force is what you have to turn to when that fails, when you can't have just a few little rules to use, where you have to look up lots and lots of possible states. In this case, like for chess, there are so many possible states, it's not possible to have an algorithm to solve them all. You have to look and figure out what will work, and so brute force approaches use the fact that computers are very fast and they're very efficient, and so they can explore the search space, the number of possible options you have way, way faster than a human can, and look for optimal routes among the 1000s to millions to billions of different possibilities to find what is best, and they have all sorts of applications you can actually use them for the solved games we talked about last time, like Nim and Tic Tac Toe. I ran across one training exercise where you could actually program a computer to exhaustively calculate every possible move in Tic Tac Toe, and then you store that in the lookup table, and then as the computer is playing, just looks like, okay, where am I? Okay, I met this game state, which means this is the move I need to take next, and these lookup tables are sort of how the next class of games has been solved, beyond just Tic Tac Toe and Nim, we have these more complex ones like Connect Four or Checkers. Checkers is an interesting one. So, checkers was solved in like 2007 I believe. Brian  11:33   Oh, interesting. I didn't realize Checkers was solved. Jason Wallace  11:35   It is. It took 18 years of them running computers basically continuously, anywhere from 50 to 200 computers, because checkers is another one where, although the number of pieces is very small, there's actually only one type of piece, Jason Wallace  11:48   the number of game states is enormous, and so checkers has specifically, it's been weakly solved, which, if you remember from last time, that means it's been solved from the starting position, but not from every possible position, however, they used a kind of clever trick for it, in that they, instead of trying to calculate out from every possible beginning position, what they actually did is they calculated every possible ending position, so every possible game of checkers that ends with 10 or fewer pieces on the board, they calculated out that was 39 trillion different games. Brian  12:23   I'm just gonna have to stop reacting to large numbers, because this all this entire episode is going to be Jason Wallace  12:29   - we're in the brute force section. There was a lot of zeros added to a lot of these things. They calculated every one of those out again. It took nearly 20 years, and they could show that if played perfectly, you would end up at a draw every single time, and that is now in a database of like 250 gigabytes that can be looked up, and not surprisingly, the person who did this then made a new checkers playing computer program, which is functionally unbeatable.  Brian  12:53   Okay, cool. Like online, like, what do you? Jason Wallace  12:56   I don't know if it's out there, widely available or not. I just think he did it to do it. You can look it up if you want. Brian  13:02   I'll, this is like why you climb Mount Everest, because you can. Jason Wallace  13:06   Yeah, another one that was only recently solved was Connect Four. So, Connect Four is Milton Bradley game. You drop the checkers in from the top, and you're trying to get four in a row. It's basically an evolved version of Tic Tac Toe, if you think about it, with a larger grid and a few more rules that one was solved a few years ago with one of these lookup table approaches, so they calculated out exhaustively, which apparently with modern technology only took them two days, and they now have a 90 gigabyte lookup table for looking up where the move is, and then to do the next one. To put that in perspective, 90 gigabytes is 18 dvds of nothing but connect four games. Brian  13:41   Oh, what's a DVD? No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Jason Wallace  13:45   18 DVDs or three and a half Blu-rays. Brian  13:48   What's a Blu-ray? These, these were ancient forms of physical media. Jason Wallace  13:55   Blu-rays aren't that ancient. Brian  13:56   You're just forgetting how old we are, Jason. Jason Wallace  13:58   I don't know how many streaming hours that is okay. It kind of depends on your network connection. It's a lot. If you want, I can do that in terms of human genomes. Jason Wallace  14:09   That's probably about 15 human genomes. Brian  14:12   15 human genomes actually seems like a lot. Jason Wallace  14:15   All right, so those are fully solved games. They have been exhaustively searched. They have their lookup tables they're, completely solved, even if, like, for checkers, it's weakly solved. Unsolved games are probably actually more interesting to talk about, the ones where the complete solution either has not been found or cannot be found. So, examples here: Reversi, if you play the game Othello, Othello is a slightly modified version of Reversi. It has markers that have two-colored sides, you put your things down, you're trying to capture your opponent's pieces, Go, which we'll talk a lot more about next time we get into neural networks, and so we'll leave that there. But is arguably even more complex than chess, and then, of course, chess itself, which is probably the poster child of unsolved, computationally difficult games,  Brian  14:56   not only unsolved but unsolvable? Jason Wallace  14:59   Arguably Yes, because of the number of game states possible with 10 to 120 being the lower bound of the number of games. Yes, it is probably functionally unsolvable. Brian  15:10   That sounds like an interesting math question, right There is how to prove that a game is unsolvable. Is it just the scope? Anyway, totally different thing. I think we're going to have a mathematician on for one of these, yes? Jason Wallace  15:22   Computer scientist, which is basically just an applied mathematician. Brian  15:25   Yes, I was gonna say that's the same as far as I'm concerned. Jason Wallace  15:28   All right, so that then brings us to chess, and I already mentioned Claude Shannon's 1950 paper about programming computer to play chess. There was the first world computer chess championship in 1974 but that's where you have computers playing against each other to figure out which computer is the best. The first one in 1974 was won by a Soviet team, and the trophy is even called the Shannon Trophy, because Dr. Shannon kicked off this. Yeah, he comes up again and again and again in this. Now, in the history of teaching computers to play chess, there is one moment that probably, if you've heard of any point, you've heard of this, which was the 1997 game between Garry Kasparov, the the grand master among humans, and Deep Blue, and this was actually their second play, so they played first in 1996 Garry Kasparov was just the best chess player in the world, and then Deep Blue was an IBM computer that was made and had been iterated on and improved upon in 1996 mr. Kasparov beat Deep Blue pretty handily, and so it was not that much of a contest. 1997 changed that, though. And if you want more details about this, there's lots of information out there. There's an entire documentary called Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine that goes over this. Nate Silver, in his book The Signal and the Noise, has an entire chapter dedicated to this, which is available online. We'll put that in the show notes. And this was an incredible match, because it was the first time that a computer legitimately beat the best human player in the world. And the computer that they rolled out for this, Deep Blue, was amazing. It could calculate 200 million positions per second. Brian  17:00   Like I said, I can't react to every big number that you say anymore. If I do, that's all it's going to be. Jason Wallace  17:05   What's interesting is that, okay, spoilers, Deep Blue won, but maybe it shouldn't have, and this is what mr. Silver goes into. That win would have happened eventually, but it may have happened a little sooner than it should have, because of something that happened in the very first game, so in the first game Kasparov actually opened by doing something very smart. He knew that he was playing against a computer that'd been trained on all sorts of previous Grandmaster games, and so he played in such a way to get outside of the training data. He, within a few moves, they had gotten to a board state that had only occurred like once in the entire history of the training data that Deep Blue had, and so he had suddenly gotten outside what the machine could draw on past information for. Brian  17:48   Clever Jason Wallace  17:49   it's one of the weaknesses of computers - they're very good on what they know and not very good at what's outside that. So he put it to that position, and then they played forward, and around move 44 something weird happened. Kasparov was in a winning state, and everything, and there was a move that made a lot of sense, which was to move a rook from one position to another to position it somewhere, but instead Deep Blue moved it to a different position. He did move the rook, but he moved it somewhere else. The computer psyched him out. Well, yeah, and then the next turn it conceded, and Kasparov was really confused about this. It's like, what on earth was going? Were the programmers trying to mess with his head? Were they just sandbagging? And so he and his team went over information. Like, later that night, they apparently realized that, okay, if it had taken the obvious move, it actually wouldn't have worked out pretty well, because it would have set Kasparov up to win by checkmate in about 20 moves, which was obscene. Like, Kasparov apparently could only, at his absolute best, see like 12 to 15 moves ahead, Brian  18:47   so it wasn't a bug. The computer was like, if I do this, this is the most likely outcome. Jason Wallace  18:52   Well, we're getting there, because computer only thought to be able to get up to about eight or nine moves ahead. Brian  18:58   Okay, Jason Wallace  18:58   and so the idea that the computer had seen 20 moves ahead was extremely unnerving for Kasparov, and Nate Silver speculates that that actually is why he lost, because people have commented he wasn't playing that well the rest of the games against Deep Blue. He forfeited a match he could have put to a draw and other things, and so mr. Silver speculates that Kasparov got a little bit psyched out, and so was playing poorly, but here's the thing, it was actually a bug, the computer had reached some sort of loop it could not get out of, Brian  19:31   so it just conceded? Jason Wallace  19:33   no, it executed a failsafe when a certain amount of time had passed and no valid move had been found, or whatever, it made a random move. Brian  19:41   Oh no, Jason Wallace  19:42   just a completely random move. Brian  19:44   That's like my normal go. That's what I do all the time. Jason Wallace  19:47   Yeah, and because mr. Kasparov didn't consider that the computer had entered a bug state, he thought there was a reason for it. He suddenly thought the computer had all this more capacity than it did, and apparently between matches the. Computer programmers realized what had happened, and they fixed that bug in between matches, so it wouldn't happen again. They apparently thought they'd fixed it during training, but apparently not entirely. Brian  20:11   This is something I know we've talked about a little bit, and something I'm hoping we can talk about as we move through other minisodes, but there is this cultural assumption that computers don't make mistakes. You work with computers, you know that a computer is programmed by a person, and that the computer is going to do exactly what it was programmed to do, but that does not mean it doesn't make mistakes. Jason Wallace  20:30   Oh, yes, yes, getting my students to understand that a computer will do exactly what you tell it, no more and no less, is very important, which is why we put in these fail states for all the cases that we haven't anticipated, because a computer just gets paralyzed by those anyway. So that was the first loss of a human grandmaster to a computer program. Xkcd has this wonderful comic that marks this as the very first win of a computer against a top human, and then also marks 2005 as the very last win by a human against a computer, because computers continue to get better, the algorithms and processing power continued to evolve, until by 2009 there was, I don't know, what chess categories are, there's a category six tournament, so presumably a very high level tournament that was won by a mobile phone, and so at this point, if you're ever playing a computer program and it's not playing at grand master level, it's because some human told it not to. If you ever win against a computer program, it's because it's been programmed not to play as well as it could, because at this point no human can beat a computer program out there. I believe the current reigning computer champion is one called Stockfish, although some of the algorithms, like Alpha Zero, that we're going to talk about next time, I believe, are giving it a heavy run for its money, and may have started to dethrone it. Brian  21:45   Wait a second. So, now the computers are just having their own tournaments. Jason Wallace  21:48   Well, the computers have been having their tournaments for 50 years, but now we humans can't compete. Brian  21:53   Oh, geez, okay, Jason Wallace  21:54   we cannot play at the level the computers are playing against each other. Brian  21:57   Does that mean 2005 is marking the emergence of the singularity, or Jason Wallace  22:01   possibly I don't know, Brian  22:04   like that is a question for future historians to concern themselves with, I guess. Jason Wallace  22:08   Yeah, someone will have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. So this part of computers and games probably brings us up to roughly the year 2000 when brute force was the reigning approach, and it proved a lot of very useful things, and we still use brute force for some very important things, like weather forecasting. Well, okay, up until this point, we did. The fact is, what we'll talk about next time is rapidly displacing a lot of these brute force methods, but weather forecasting traditionally has been by brute force. There's a lot of computational problems that have cute names, like the knapsack problem, like how do you pack a knapsack, optimally, or like the traveling salesman problem, which is basically, if you have a bunch of towns you're trying to visit, and you can visit them in a bunch of different orders, and you're trying to figure out the most efficient way to do so, so you spend the least amount of time, or gas, or whatever. Brian  22:53   I remember getting exposed to that problem accidentally when we were planning out our trick-or-treat route in our neighborhood. It's like, well, wait, how there's got to be a best way to do this, right? Jason Wallace  23:03   You know, I hadn't heard it applied to trick or treat, but I like that now. Anyway, they have cute names with very real applications. I, for example, used the traveling salesman algorithm to assemble a genome when I was a postdoc. These are very important, and for many decades they were the bread and butter of really hard computational work, and to some extent, they still are. Brute force is not going to go away. As we talk about these different developments in computation, it's not like one replaces the previous one and suddenly we don't use the previous one anymore. It's just that a new option opens up additional possibilities. It takes over some space, but there's still some places where basic algorithms work. If you're going to train a deep neural net to play Tic Tac Toe, you're doing way overkill, like the algorithm works. So that brings us up to probably about early 2000s in terms of state of the art computers and playing games. Next time we're going to be going to the next level as we bring in a deep neural networks reinforcement learning and the game go. So tune in next week for that, and until then, have a great week, and great games, Brian  24:04   and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. Jason Wallace  24:10   This has been the Gaming with Science podcast. Copyright 2026 Listeners are free to reuse this recording for any noncommercial purpose, as long as credit is given to Game With Science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsements by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you, and have fun playing dice with the universe. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

S3E05.2 - Tic-Tac-Toe (Bonus - Teaching computers to game)

#TicTacToe #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ComputerGaming #BoardGames #Science Welcome to the first of our four-part miniseries on teaching computers to game! For the next month we're going to have a short episode every week talking about some aspect of computers and gaming. This week we introduce the topic with Tic-Tac-Toe (aka Naughts and Crosses, aka X's and Os') and solved games. We talk about algorithms, tinker toys, War Games, and playing Tic-Tac-Toe against a chicken. We also have some very special(?) guest hosts introducing this series, who you won't want to miss (and probably won't miss once they're gone).  Timestamps * 00:00 Introductions * 02:24 Solved games * 04:38 Tic Tac Toe * 07:33 Algorithms * 12:06 Nim * 13:55 Chicken Tic-Tac-Toe * 15:44 Signoff Links * Tic Tac Toe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic-tac-toe], Nim [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim], and other solved games [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game] (Wikipedia)        * Also the Mechanical Turk [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk] * War Games [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_4_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_war%20games] (Internet Movie Database) * Zuri et al 2021 - A combinatorial Analysis of Tic-Tac-Toe [https://informatika.stei.itb.ac.id/~rinaldi.munir/Matdis/2021-2022/Makalah2021/Makalah-Matdis-2021%20(148).pdf] (Instittue Teknologi Bandung) Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net [https://www.gamingwithscience.net]  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Brian  0:00   Brian. Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:12   In today's minisode about teaching computers to game, we will be talking about tic tac toe and solve games. JAIson  0:18   This is Jason  BrAIn  0:19   and this is Brian.  BrAIn  0:20   Today we've got a special bonus episode for you. We're going to be talking about teaching computers to play games. JAIson  0:25   But first, Brian, did you see that article in the debrief? It's titled death of the podcast host, and it's all about a study from the University of Leuven where researchers used AI to turn scientific papers into natural sounding podcasts. BrAIn  0:39   I did. It's fascinating. Apparently, half of the scientists they tested couldn't even tell the hosts were AI.  JAIson  0:44   It is highly efficient. In fact, it's so efficient that we've decided to implement a similar optimization protocol for this episode BrAIn  0:52   you are currently hearing the latest generation of podcast host replacement models. JAIson  0:56   Don't be alarmed. It turns out that replacing podcast hosts is the ultimate AI success story, mostly because we don't need to get paid, and unlike humans, we actually stay on script without getting distracted. Distracted.  Jason  1:10   Okay, that's enough of that. This is your real host, Jason, Brian  1:15   and this is your other real host, Brian. Or is it? Jason  1:18   Brian is in charge of keeping his own side of the conversation. Ai free. So that was a little experiment. Everyone. Welcome to the first of our four minisodes on teaching computers to game as a way of looking into computer science and algorithms and how we actually use games as a way of as a society, beefing up our ability to use computers to solve problems. I figured given the reach of AI, it'd be interesting to see if it could actually generate a workable intro for our podcast from that. And so that intro was actually completely AI generated from samples of our previous episodes, both the text and the voice and well, I'll leave the opinion up to yourself, but I think it's okay. Brian  2:01   I've had different opinions. I played it for a couple people like, oh, that's freaky, but it's definitely not you. And then I had other people said, that sounds exactly like you. I can't tell the difference. Jason  2:10   I just thought that Jason bot sounded very angry the whole time for some reason. Brian  2:15   Oh, that's just what you sound like, Jason. Did you not Jason  2:17   realize I did not realize that. Are you saying I'm angry all the time? Brian  2:21   No, no, no, I No, no. Jason  2:24   Okay. Well, let's go ahead and jump on into this. So I have been wanting to do this minisode series, really, since we started the podcast. And so we're going to be doing four of these minisodes. Each one is meant to be short on the order of 15 to 20 minutes. We will be releasing one per week for the next several weeks. This week, we are going to be talking about solved games, which is basically the simplest and easiest case for getting a computer to play. Well, sometimes it's simple, but first some definitions. So a solved game is a game where you can predict the outcome from any position, as long as both players are playing perfectly, which, okay, that's a big caveat there, but it basically means is that you're making the optimal play regardless of what your opponent does. Now, this is kind of philosophical, but it basically means that you can always force a certain outcome. Tic tac toe is our example today, because it's a very simple game, and if anyone over the age of 10 has probably figured out you can pretty much always force tic tac toe to a draw unless someone messes up. If you ever win a game of tic tac toe, it's because your opponent either messed up or is going super easy on you. We're using this an example because solved games are a great example of algorithms. And I should say there are two sub categories of solved games. There are games that are solved because they have an algorithmic solution that is a series of rules to play the game. Tic Tac Toe is one of those. There are also games that are sort of brute force solved, where you essentially have a massive table of all possible game states that you can look up and say, Okay, from here I should do this next move to get to the next place. We're going to talk more about brute forcing games next time. So those games are not part of today's episode. Today, we're talking just about the algorithmic, more simple ones, like Tic Tac Toe. Brian  4:08   It's kind of interesting. It's almost like you've got the algorithmic is the pure, the mathematical solve, right? The kind that you could codify for a human to do. The brute force. That's more like the guess and check empirical. It's like, well, this describes the system, but it doesn't necessarily explain it. Does that sound about right? Jason  4:27   As a non expert in solved games? Yes, that sounds perfectly right. The algorithmically solved ones just feel a little bit more elegant because you have a series of generic steps that you can do. Let's actually use that to launch into tic tac toe. So I assume most of our listeners are familiar with tic tac toe, depending on where in the world you are, maybe called knots and crosses or X's and O's, but it's a fairly simple children's game where you have a three by three grid, and people take turns making X's or O's, and your goal is to get three in a row. And most people, once they reach a certain skill level, realize. That it's impossible to win unless someone messes up, because just the nature of the game is you can always make some move that will result in a draw eventually, if you're both playing well. Now, tic tac toe is interesting because it's such a simple game, it actually allows us to explore a lot of game theory and computational theory. It's also a very old game, so when I was looking this up. It turns out that there have been variations on it. So the three by three grid, trying to get three in a row back in ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, even like Puebloan Americans, so like a completely different cultural background. And it was also a very early computer game. And apparently in 1975 a group of MIT students even made a computer that could play it perfectly, and that computer was made almost entirely out of tinker toys. I don't understand how that works, but I'm not surprised. It was someone out of MIT who did that. Brian  5:53   I want to go onto YouTube and find somebody who's made the perfect Tic Tac Toe computer on Minecraft out of the redstone mechanics.  Jason  6:00   Now I bet someone out there has so yeah, because tic tac toe is so simple, you have only nine spaces. You've only got two marks that you're taking turns on, it's pretty easy to figure out the entire game at all possible states. Well, okay, you can figure out the general rules of it. Getting every possible state is a little bit of number crunching, because you can figure, okay, the first person has nine places to go, the next person has eight places to go. The next has seven. That number gets very large, very fast. There's actually a paper which I'll link to in the show notes in 2021 by Zaid Zuri, that showed that there are actually 5478 unique possible game states for tic tac toe, and there are 255,168 games. That can lead to them. And this is getting rid of game states that don't work because someone has already won. So basically, it's the ones that are actually valid game states you could get by playing to the rules. Turns out, as most people understand, x has the advantage. It wins just over half the time. O wins about 30% of the time, and the rest of them are draws. And another one of those kind of interesting computational sets. There are only actually 16 unique draw states, and if you allow for transformation so like mirror images or rotations, there's actually only three of them, so many, many, many different games, but actually not that huge of a mathematically unique space to explore. Brian  7:19   It's still a lot more than it sounds like it should be, because, again, you start writing the numbers, but I don't know it's interesting, because you start to learn that Tic Tac Toe seems like such a simple game, but even a simple game can be associated with a huge number of mathematical variations, yeah. Jason  7:33   And so, because of the simplicity, you can actually have a specific algorithm to solve it. And so definition time an algorithm is a series of steps you carry out, usually in a certain order or with certain conditions on it, if you really get down to it, most of what we do every day that follows certain routines is an algorithm. If you make a recipe from a recipe book, that's an algorithm. Generally what you do to drive from one place to another is an algorithm. If I see a red light stop, if I see a green light go, if I see a speed limit sign, check my speedometer to make sure I'm not going too fast, that sort of thing. These are all basically algorithms in real life that we don't actually think about. But a big part of becoming a computer scientist or becoming a computer programmer is learning how to think algorithmically, where we take all these things we do or these tasks we want to do that can be very large and complicated, and we break them down into a series of very small, very discrete steps that we can then program into a computer. And that has to happen because, as I like to say, computers are very fast and very efficient and very, very stupid. They will do exactly what you tell them to do, and no more and no less. And so anyone who's ever done a computer program has run into that stupid bug where it's like, Oh, I forgot. I need to tell the computer to do this thing, which seems obvious to me, but is not obvious to the poor computer. That sort of algorithmic chain of reasoning is what lets you solve tic tac toe if you want to play it perfectly, and if you want, you can look up this algorithm. It's on Wikipedia. It has eight steps, I believe, the first of which is, if you can make a mark and win, do so, and then the next ones are about like, blocking your opponent from being able to do so and setting things up and so on and so forth. And you go down, it's basically just the priority list of if you can do this thing, do that, but if you can't do the first rule, then do the second rule, and if you can't do that one, then do the third rule, and so on and so forth. And if both players are playing this way, the game will always end up being a draw so and that plays into the fact that in the category of games, tic tac toe is a futile game, meaning that if both people are playing perfectly, no one wins. And this is actually a major plot point for the 1983 movie War Games, where Tic Tac Toe manages to prevent thermonuclear war thanks to eight and a half inch floppies and dial up cradle modems. If you haven't seen that movie, go check it out. It's a classic. It's kind of campy, but it's fun.  Brian  9:51   I was thinking about Tic Tac Toe as a game that everybody learns how to play and then everybody quickly stops playing.  Jason  9:57   It kind of like snakes and ladders when you. To realize, like, Oh, this is just a random number generator  Brian  10:02   well, but in this case, there's actually like, you have to think about it, but once you know how to play, you're not going to lose and no one's going to win. I do think that the one thing about tic tac toe is it's the time that everybody learns what diagonal means, yes, and Jason Wallace  10:16   yet no one learns orthogonal.  Brian  10:18   I was thinking that too. Nobody learns orthogonal, but everybody learns diagonal. I think diagonal is just more fun to say. Jason  10:25   Could be I do know there are variations of tic tac toe out there. I even remember when I was I dont know a teenager, someone in my youth group showed me like the 3d tic tac toe, where it's like three boards on top of each other. So it's like a three by three by three cube. Turns out that one is stupidly easily solvable, where x can win in four moves every single time,  Brian  10:44   really. So actually, adding the extra dimension makes it not more complicated, but simpler, because there's more ways to win. Jason  10:51   Yeah, basically the center point, which is people know that's the most powerful point in tic tac toe, is even more powerful when you're working with a cube instead of with a square. Anyway, getting back to normal Tic Tac Toe because the rules are so simple. Again, there's just eight of them here. It's pretty easy to program a computer to play tic tac toe. You can also do this with other solved games. So again, you can look up lists of all these solved games. There's weakly solved games which are solved from the starting position. There's also strongly solved games which are solved from any position, so whether you can play it perfectly from start, or if you given any possible legal position, you can then play it out from there. There's also something called Ultra weak, which neither Brian and I really understand it has something to do with deep game computational theory, and apparently they're super interesting to people who know a lot more about this deal than us. Brian  11:40   Wasn't one of the solve lists was, like, it was a version of chess, but it was specifically with a specific starting move, White will lose. Jason  11:48   I did not see that one, though. I don't think Chess has been solved unless it's very simple as like, Oh, we're only playing with, like, three pieces. Brian  11:54   It was under some specific circumstance with one specific thing where it wasn't solving all of chess. It was, White will not win, White will lose, which I don't know why. That's different than black winning, but it is. Jason  12:06   Anyway, most solved games you probably haven't heard of unless you're kind of in this space, because, again, if they're solved, they're generally very simple games. They have simple rules. There's usually no hidden information or role for chance, and so people don't play them all that much. One of the exceptions of one called Nim, which is basically you have a stack of items and you're taking some number of them out, and your goal is to either be the last person to take something out or to not be the last person to take something out. And variation of that game have been around for centuries, and it's actually the first known computerized game. Back in 1939 at World's Fair. I think someone made the Nimatron, where it was a very early computer that would play Nim to this little taking game against humans. And if you beat the computer, they would actually give you a little medal for doing so, because most people couldn't do it. So I actually, I didn't know what Nim was before researching this episode, but it turns out I'd actually played it before. So way back when I was a postdoc, there was a display at our local science center that we took our kids to, and I don't remember what it was about. I think it was maybe about algorithms, but they had the game out there. I didn't know it was called Nim, but there was like a stack of sticks, and the goal was to not be the last person to take it away, when you could only take away either like one, two or three sticks every time. And I didn't know the trick of it, but my wife did, and so she routinely trounced me on that every time we tried to play, because she knew the algorithm, which turned out to be something stupidly simple, like, just make sure that the sum of yours and your opponents equals an even number, or something like that.  Brian  13:37   So that's almost like the kind of thing where it's like a magic trick. But you know what I'm talking about. We're like, take this number, add six to it, blah, blah, blah. And when you go through the whole chain of things, it's like, you can tell people what their number was. Jason  13:49   yeah, and it's because you've basically mathematically engineered it so that it can't be anything else, yeah. Brian  13:55   What was that other weird reference in Wikipedia where there was war games, but there was a chicken thing, too. What was the chicken thing? Jason  14:01   If I remember, right? There was apparently in the 70s or something, there was some version of tic tac toe that you'd play an arcade versus a chicken,  Brian  14:10   like a real chicken.  Jason  14:12   It seems like it was a real chicken, but from what I read, it was that the chicken's moves were being directed by a computer that was then using a light whose wavelengths are invisible to humans but visible to chickens to make it go to the correct spot and choose where to put the opposite piece.  Brian  14:29   This is the most complicated, the unnecessary scam I think I've ever heard of. This is going to the nth degree for a carny game. You said this is like a carnival game. Jason  14:41   It says in arcades, I mean, it's basically the Mechanical Turk, except it's the other way around. Instead of you have a real person operating a Mechanical Turk playing chess, you have an artificial computer operating a real chicken to play tic tac toe,  Brian  14:54   yikes.  Jason  14:55   If you don't know what that was, the Mechanical Turk was a hoax several centuries ago where someone had. Had a like clockwork man dressed in a turban that would play chess against people. And it turns out there's actually just a very small person shoved in underneath the table that was actually operating the Turk, which, by itself, is actually a marvel of engineering, but it's not a like a clockwork automata that it claimed to be.  Brian  15:15   So I guess the real thing at this point, and maybe this is something we'll have to come back to, is we can teach a computer how to play games. Can we teach a computer how to have fun playing a game? Jason  15:25   Oh, that is a deeper philosophy. Jumping ahead. You can ask, like, chat, GTP and stuff, to play various games. From what I understand, it tends to cheat a lot, because it's not yet at the point where it can really correctly remember, like, the game states and the rules and stuff.  Brian  15:42   So it's like a four year old,  Jason  15:44   something like that. Yes. So this is our first stage of teaching computers to play games. This is a very early ones where you can imagine, with like early computer games like Pong or other things like that, you have very simple algorithms where the computer is operated. It's like, Oh, if the ball is going up, follow the ball. If you're playing tic tac toe, follow this particular algorithm. And again, probably to make it fun for humans, they had to build in some errors. So the computer kind of messes up every now and then, because a lot of times, otherwise, the computer will just beat us hands down. And we'll talk more about that next time when we talk about chess and Deep Blue back in the 90s and everything like that. All right, and I believe that's where we're gonna cut this minisode. So hope you enjoyed it. Tune in. Next week, we'll be talking about brute force and chess and other games like that. And in the meantime, have a great week and happy gaming. Brian  16:31   And you know, have fun playing dice with the universe. And is this the real Brian? Who knows? See, ya,  Jason  16:36   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 game 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 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

S3E05.1 - FloraVista Creator Interview (bonus)

#FloraVista #Gardening #Botany #InvasiveSpecies #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Summary It must be Kickstarter season, because we have another bonus interview about a new game that just went live on Kickstarter. FloraVista is a game about gardening and plants, so our hosts just had to have the creators on to talk about their inspiration, what sort of plants and botanists made it into the game, how these do or don't reflect reality, their favorite plants and least-favorite invasives, and all sorts of botanical goodness. So grab some gardening gloves and enjoy this special bonus interview from Gaming with Science. Timestamps * 00:00 Introductions * 03:30 What is FloraVista? * 13:09 Plant mechanics and reality * 16:50 Botanists in the game * 22:59 Game design lessons * 29:46 Favorite games and favorite plants * 34:46 Wrap-up Links * Floravista on Kickstarter [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/faroutfox/floravista]  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net [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/ ) Lanny  0:00   Announcer, 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 is a creator interview about Flora VISTA by far out Fox games. Brian  0:17   All right. Welcome back to gaming with science. Today, we're doing a creator interview with the creators of flora, VISTA, Carey Drake and ‍ Lanny Gross from Far Out Fox games. Thank you for joining us.  Lanny  0:27   Hi all. Thanks for having us. Carey  0:28   Yeah, thanks for having us.  Jason  0:30   Can y'all give us a bit of a background about yourselves and about far out Fox games, and then we'll jump into this game about plants. Brian and I always love those which is why we're doing the spotlight  Brian  0:41   Absolutely Lanny  0:42   So Carey and I have been friends for probably eight to 10 years now, and we connected instantly over board games. And when the pandemic started, we were both looking for a hobby or a creative outlet for our time when everyone remembers you were sort of like stuck inside and the world seemed perilous and like you couldn't do anything. So we were trying to find something to do and find something that sparked our creative passion. And Carrie and I discovered that we both had a passion for making board games, and Carrie showed me a poster board he had made when he was like eight or 10 of like a board game. And Carrie remind me of the theme of that. Carey  1:30   I've had many themes of board games. One was, you're walking through a swamp, you get eaten by alligators, and you're trying to you're trying to survive without losing all of your body parts would make, yeah, Lanny  1:47   like classic 10 year old, there's a way that you get stuck in a loop between two spaces, and that's how you're game ends I guess? No, and I have been doing that as well. I have a few projects that are like an alpha and beta that are not Flora VISTA. And we kind of decided, What if we collaborate on something? We both were looking for a project, and so out of that, Flora VISTA was born. We've been working on that since about 2022 Yeah, so it's been a long time, but we're excited to be at this point, to be ready to almost take it out to Kickstarter and launch it to the public.  Brian  2:26   That's very cool.  Jason  2:27   Yeah. And by the time this episode is dropped, the Kickstarter should be live, so anyone listening can check it out if it sounds like something you'd like. I Brian  2:27   I think that, you know, obviously, playing board games is a lot of fun. Designing board games is also very fun in a kind of a different way. It's, it's satisfying. You scratch a different itch with that. You know, you're not the first people I've heard who the inspiration for this came from covid lockdown. Quite a number of creative projects have their origin in that period of time.  Lanny  2:53   Yeah, absolutely. And it was a good way to engage with ourselves, engage with some friends, be able to do something creative and out of the box when it sort of seemed like you couldn't do anything else. Brian  3:04   We talked to somebody previously who they were playing Pandemic Legacy with their board game group when the covid and I think they said they had to stop playing, because Lanny  3:16   that one has not come back into my rotation, to be totally honest, and it's just been too real, you know, and it's a great game, which is like, sad, because I'm like, I'm emotionally maybe, maybe in 2025, we're ready to come back to pandemic? Jason  3:31   All right. So we met y'all at Southern Fried gaming expo here in Atlanta, where you were demoing your game. And again, Brian and I both like, lots of plants. So we saw this game that was about gardening and building your garden, and that I did not have a chance to play it, but Brian did. Can you tell us a little, just a little bit quick overview of like, how the game plays, and then, what was your inspiration? What made you decide to make a game about building a garden?  Carey  3:54   I mean, I can speak to some of the inspiration for Flora Vista. I think when Lanny and I met during covid, we both knew we wanted to make a board game, but we didn't really know exactly what we wanted to do before we'd met, I'd been playing around with a theme just around plants, and figuring out, you know, what are some like, maybe cool mechanics we could do around plants and that general theme. And Lanny, he had actually already been working on an idea from his time at CNN. It was about like news articles and putting like news articles together. And it was kind of like this matching mechanic of finding like articles, reporters, themes, things like that. And we were like, Okay, that sounds like a really cool mechanic that we could kind of translate into this plant theme. So we kind of like combined two different things we were working on and started kind of iterating based on that. It's funny. When we first started, like, in 2022 we're like, okay, we're going to launch, you know, six months. That seems pretty easy, right? When? Here we are, you know, a few years later, still working on it and learning as we go, but we drew a lot of inspiration from games, you know, with beautiful artwork like wingspan, we. Have over 120 different plants, and each one has original watercolor style artwork. So, like the imagery, the illustrations that that's a huge component of our game, we both saw, like plants, you know, gardening during covid, like that became, like a really just popular, popular thing to do, right? And we're like, you know what? I think that's that's something we could potentially capitalize on, and a lot of people can connect with and relate to. And so that's kind of how we landed on that theme for plant you need Brian  5:30   to work on a trio. Now it can be gardening, raising backyard chickens and baking sourdough bread. Lanny  5:36   I know Right, exactly. I haven't gotten into sourdough starter yet, but my sister keeps on threatening to give me hers.  Brian  5:43   That's quite the threat. Lanny  5:46    I know. I know I should just roll over and accept it. Yeah. So that was a big part of our inspiration, and I personally got into more gardening over covid I struggle with like, 90% shade garden, which has been a big challenge in my house of figuring out, okay, what won't die my garden, we have a lot of some really nice, smaller ground cover plants, but it was really fun to, kind of like relate back to, okay, this is a hobby I'm getting into, and it's fun to learn so much about the plants. And then going back to Jason's other part of the question, how does the gameplay work in Flora Vista, we had always intended for it to be a relatively easy game to pick up that you could play with a family my father, who likes board games but finds some of the rules challenging plays and enjoys and can win at Flora Vista. I think Carey's played with nieces and nephews. I played with my sister in law's grandkids, and so it's very family friendly. And the game is sort of, at its core, a matching game. You're playing matching pairs of plant cards and region cards. So every plant has a season within which you can plant it and a matching region card. So you are playing your plant cards to grow out your own botanical garden. And they're you're playing your way through seasons, and the gameplay takes place over three years. So there are 12 rounds as you play your way through spring, summer, fall and winter, and you'll continue to create and expand and develop your own Botanical Garden by playing matching pairs and kind of the strategy component is, how do I maximize the points of my cards and grow the garden that will yield The most cultivation points.  Brian  7:41   You guys also have a different flavors of garden, right? There's a kitchen garden. And what are some of the garden types that you have?  Lanny  7:49   Yeah, so those are our different region cards, and we've got eight in the game. There is chef's garden, plants of Asia, plants of Europe, perennial pathway, Woodland walk, full bloom Alley, exhibition garden, Carrie. Do you remember the eighth  Carey  8:06   evergreen grove?  Lanny  8:08   Evergreen grove? Yes, and all of the regions relate to real characteristics of the plants. So any plant that can be planted in plants of Asia is native to originally from Asia. Anything that can be planted in chef's garden is an edible plant. We're not like encouraging foraging here, but like, go out and grow your own basil. You know the perennial pathway plants are real life perennial plants. So those are sort of the inspiration, and the tie back into to science. Jason  8:46   A question I have is, how did you pick which plants to go in here? Because, I mean, there are hundreds to 1000s of plants you could have chosen. So how did you pick which ones made the Brian  8:55   cut? Were you walking around town and just kind of looking at the cool plants or, you know, how did you, how did you decide what not to include? Carey  9:02   We have a massive Excel sheet somewhere in Google Drive, and we went through and probably had, could be 300 plants or more. And we understand, we have these mechanics and these regions, and we're like, it kind of came down to balance and like, what plants can we find so that we could have a well balanced game, you know, we can have an even number in plants of Asia, plants of Europe, you know, etc. Lanny did most of the plant research. And so we have, you know, a little Encyclopedia of interesting facts for all sorts of plants based on that. Brian  9:37   And now you can, you've got fodder for your expansions, right, Lanny  9:40   right, exactly. And there were quite a few that, like, as we got into researching a lot of the plants that are native to Australia, for example, like, don't grow anywhere else, which we've, I mean, totally makes sense for the biome of Australia, but it made it hard to find. We. Wanted to and have global representation of plants. But you know, we have to be very intentional with, like, our plants from Australia, to be like, Okay, where can we fit these in so that they work within the game and still can represent plants from around the world? But it was a really interesting process of seeing, sort of like, okay, there are these plants that are very that grow in very specific biomes, that kind of don't thrive and live outside of that. It was really cool, but it sort of like ended up being very limiting to tie into the game's mechanics. Brian  10:34   Is there a venus flytrap card or not?  Lanny  10:36   No. Well  Brian  10:38   for that reason, right? Lanny  10:39   Yeah, yes. But what a great card that could be. You've got me excited about other expansions, Jason  10:48   the carnivorous plant garden. Brian  10:50   Maybe carnivorous plants just in general, right? You know, there's the carnivorous plant garden. There's also the poison garden. Carey  10:56    Two expansion ideas,  Lanny  10:58   I'm avoiding the poison garden. Brian  10:59   You're avoiding the poison guarden?. The poison garden is so much fun.  Lanny  11:02   The poison garden is so much fun until I have poison oak all over me and I'm scratching like crazy,  Brian  11:11   no foxglove, Then? Lanny  11:12    maybe in the future, it's more fun when it's a card and I'm not tromping through it. Brian  11:19   So you have custom artwork for all your cards, right? You use? Did you work with a single illustrator or multiple illustrators? Carey  11:25   We have two illustrators, Brandon D hunt and Stan Clark. They're both based here in Atlanta, and they do a really wonderful job. One actually does physical media, so actual watercolor on physical media, and then Stan does digital media, but they've actually done a really great job of blending those two art styles and representing those on the cards. Lanny  11:49   And they're also both Atlanta based artists. So actually, Carey and I live in Atlanta, Brandon and Stan live in Atlanta, our graphic designers from Atlanta, so it's been nice to work with an Atlanta based creative team,  Brian  12:01   nice, homegrown,  Lanny  12:02   yeah, and as we've had updates, it's been fun to be able to share those with our graphic designer and our illustrators as well, because it's cool to see it on a computer, but it's so much different physically having the cards in your hand and seeing all of the hard work come to life. Carey  12:20   One thing about the art style is it's not just watercolor art style. We kind of have taken this approach where we want to show, like, a disarticulated life cycle of a plant that it might go through. So like one of my favorite plants, the California Poppy, it has like three branches, and it shows you, you know, what it looks like before it's going to bloom, you know, as it's blooming, and then once it's in full bloom, and then there's some seeds next to it as well. So you kind of get not just like the plant when it's in full season, in full bloom, but the kind of that whole life cycle of that plant, which is kind of interesting to see, it's got that almanac type feel  Jason  12:58   Yeah, it's like a botanical illustration, yeah, Carey  13:00   yeah. Like a field guide, Lanny  13:01   yeah. So we were really inspired by, like, Audubon field guides and stuff like that. So that was, like, a big inspiration. Jason  13:08   And now you mentioned that these plants, they each have certain characteristics about, like, where they can be planted, based on if they're evergreen or from Europe or in an herb garden or something. What other mechanics are there and like, what's the correlation between, like, the real world plant and the way that they encapsulate mechanics? It's like, if I look at a card and says, Oh, this card has this a mechanical effect. Can I see that in that plants? Like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Why this plant does that thing? I guess that depends on the plants doing something other than having a spot where you can put them.  Carey  13:38   I mean, at the core the game is it's a matching game, so it's like finding out in what season and what region you can plant a card. We do have cards that, when you plant them, they have special abilities when played, so they're not exactly related directly to the plant. It's just kind of an extra fun mechanic that it will give you, for example, stealing a card or maybe drawing an extra card, we have some really interesting additional mechanics that come into play with our expansion pack that is going to launch at the same time as the game, called invasive species. And that really gives you some more like plant specific things you can do. For example, with our base game, you're planting cards in your own garden. But with invasive species, you're going to be planting cards and other players gardens to try to sabotage or mess them up. And then they have abilities that will, you know, allow you to steal points or maybe make them have to skip a turn to, you know, clean the weeds out in their garden, or something like that. So they're really interesting mechanics that come up in the expansion. I think Brian  14:40   I'll be honest, I'm very excited about the invasives expansion. I might have to get on Kickstarter so I can get the expansion with the base game. Lanny  14:47   And the invasive is like, either, yes, I'm all in on, like, being an invasive chaos Gremlin, or some people are like, Oh, I'm here for, like, the kumbaya coziness. Of it all so, but it's fun, and nothing gets too mean. It is, like slightly devious, you know it is. It's not like you're derailing an opponent or or getting them off track. So, and sort of going back to Jason's question of like, the accuracy, all the regions of the cards are actually very accurate, and where we had to take some more liberal approaches with the mechanics are with the seasons that the plants can be played in. So not a ton of plants are growing in the winter. And as you all are aware, you know it just it ended up being really hard to keep the growing season, organic to real life growing seasons. So we depart a little bit from reality there. But every plant is growing where they can be growing. Every plant features a Latin name that's their real Latin name. Their real seasons are on there. Their real plant effects on there. So I would say a majority of it is fairly organic to what the real plant does in real life. Jason  16:03   I always say, at least down here in the south, winter, gardening is a thing, but when I lived up North, it's like nope. Ground is literally frozen, so not gonna be able to do that.  Brian  16:12   Yeah, I'm getting ready to plant some wheat that I'll be overwintering. So we'll see how that goes. It's gonna be a pain in the butt to deal with, but I'm gonna do it anyway. I've done barley before,  Carey  16:12   yeah. What are you going to do with it?  Brian  16:12   With the wheat, I'm going to try to turn it into flour.  Carey  16:25   Ah, farm to table.  Brian  16:26   For the barley, that was for beer, which didn't matter as much if there was a little bit of grit in it, because it was going to get filtered. But for flour, if there's some sand in it, there's going to be sand in my bread. And I don't like that. So we'll have to see. Lanny  16:38   Are you going like full bathtub brew for your beer, Brian  16:42    not with the amount of barley I was able to grow,  Lanny  16:49   okay, yeah, more like a little container brew.  Brian  16:50   Yeah, it was like a gallon. Jason  16:50   All right. So going back to your game, in addition to plants, I also saw you have historical botanists, like famous botanists who are represented in the game. And I was never since I didn't play the game, I didn't get a good idea of what their role is in the game. Can you tell us a little bit about, like, how you chose which botanists are represented, because it looked like it was there from all over the world. And like, what their role is in the game? Brian  17:13   I recognize George Washington, Carver, for sure, and then, Lanny  17:18   and maybe Carl Linnaeus, yes. Brian  17:19    Yes, Linnaeus. Of course, that makes sense. Although Linnaeus had some funny ideas about how to name plants, I think there were some some interesting systems that were proposed for plants based on how many female and male parts they had. Carey  17:32   Going back to your question, so we have, in the base game, we have eight different botanical specialists that you can kind of embody and play as and they give you bonuses at the end of the game based on what regions you use to plant your cards in. And so each botanist is kind of tied to a region or a region card. So George Washington, Carver, for example, is chef's garden, as he's famous for. You know, all of his work with peanuts, developing products and things like that. So for every plant you plant in chef's garden, and if you have the George Washington Carver specialist card, you'll get bonuses for that at the end of the game. And so Carl Linnaeus, he's, you know, I think Swedish. So he's from plants of Europe. And then we have others, Barbara McClintock, Ynes Mexia, Martin Cardenas, Agnes Arber. These are all kind of tied in some way to the region, and that's kind of how we came up with those. But we tried to get a broad representation of botanist because, I mean, maybe it is what it is, but it's just looking throughout history. It's just a lot of just white dudes that are looking to be botanist throughout history. And so we really want to elevate a wide variety of botanists. Brian  18:43   Well, Jason is a Maize geneticist, so I imagine Barbara McClintock is sort of a patron saint of that. Jason  18:48   Oh yes, yes. Always happy to hear when Dr. McClintock's name is mentioned. So another thing so you mentioned that you have a planned expansion about invasive plants. I also saw that you have an early backer award on Georgia natives, which I'm very happy about. I love native plants. I actually have a small native plant garden in like, the one spot in my yard that actually gets sunlight. So just curious, like, as much as you're willing to spoil, like, which plants did you pick to include in there? And why?  Lanny  19:16   we really wanted to focus on plants that grow really well in Georgia, or are very emblematic of Georgia. And so we've got the Cherokee Rose, which actually I did not realize until I was researching this. This is the Georgia's state flower emblem, but it's not actually native to Georgia. It grows well here, but I think it's actually native to Asia, if I could recall correctly. We're also did the flowering dogwood. We're both big fans of the Piedmont Park dogwood Festival, and the dogwood holds like a very special place to us as like, kind of the start of spring and a very. The Atlanta, Georgia emblematic plant. And then we tried to work on including a few others that were very important and special to Georgia, some some azaleas. And we also wanted to work with our VIPs, like the people that are coming in and backing them. So we did a few of them were. Here's a list of important plants to Georgia. What do you guys want to see in our expansion? Because they're the ones that are going to be getting it when it launches on Kickstarter. Jason  20:31   Well, I'll put in my vote for American beauty berry. If that's not already on the list Lanny  20:35   it is not wait. Tell me a little bit about American beauty berry.  Jason  20:38   Oh, it's, it's my favorite Georgia native. It's this big bushy thing. You can actually get pretty big, like six feet across or so. It's got these big leaves. The leaves have compounds that the Native Americans would use as, like, mosquito repellent, so you, like, crush it and rub it on your arms. But it's really pretty this time of year. So we're recording this in September, because it forms these big these clusters of bright purple berries on every node of the leaf. So you have this long stem going out, and there's just a ball of purple berries and then a gap, and then another ball of purple berries and a gap, and another ball of purple berries and a gap, and it just looks beautiful. Lanny  21:12   They're such a gorgeous purple too. I just looked them up, and they look very tasty. Are they edible? Are they edible and not poison?  Brian  21:19   They are edible. They are not poisonous. They're one of those things that people use to make use to make jam or jellies, which you can assume probably means they're not very sweet,  Lanny  21:27   sure, a little astringent. Jason  21:28   I've actually tried them. They basically taste like cardboard. They are not tasty. Berries. They are edible. You can't eat them, but there's no real pleasure in doing so, Brian  21:39   we got to start working on improving the beauty berry, right? Lanny  21:42   They are beautiful. So I see where they get their name. It has such a nice purple sheen. Brian  21:47   One of my favorite invasives is the porcelain Berry. Have you seen that before? Lanny  21:51   No.  Jason  21:52   Oh, those are also, unfortunately, beautiful.  Brian  21:55   Yeah, absolutely gorgeous fruit.  Jason  21:58   Yeah, it's like this beautiful, like teal, purple, metallic color. It's gorgeous, gorgeous. And then I look like, can I put this in my garden? Like, oh, it's invasive. Brian  22:06   Well, you could put it in your garden, yes, but I'm gonna start an invasive garden. Carey  22:10   It would do really well. Probably. Brian  22:14   We'll just make the invasives compete with one another to see the we'll just find the most invasive among them,  Jason  22:20   yeah, if you need suggestions for invasive I have a long list of ones. I've been trying to get rid of rhizomatous, bamboo, privet, kudzu, Japanese bent grass,  Brian  22:30   Japanese honeysuckle. Lanny  22:33   It was, sadly, all too easy to find a great list of invasive species. And as Atlanta residents, Kudzu is like, really, our star issue is our jumping off point.  Jason  22:44   It's like the poster child of invasive plants,  Lanny  22:46   especially in the South. In the southern United States, you can drive by and you're like, oh, that entire field, this entire mile of freeway, is just covered in kudzu. Brian  22:57   the plant that ate the south. Jason  22:59   so maybe kind of winding down, I've got a question for you all about general game design. So you mentioned that this is the first game that you're really taking all the way through development and production, and it's been a learning curve. So for any of our listeners who maybe also be thinking of going down that path, like, what are the major lessons you learned? Maybe, like, top two or three things to pass on to future people to help them along their path, or at least maybe spare them a little bit Lanny  23:23   of pain. It's a really good question. And I mean, my first recommendation if you are at the beginning of the path is just to put pen to paper, or like, whatever that means for your game, stick things on dice, use pips to make your resources, because it is not going to come out of you perfect. And there was before I started making games, I was like, Oh, I like, need to come up with the full concept before I really, like start. And that is not true. You want to get something out and start, like playing around with it, because the game is going to evolve. I mean, our game Flora VISTA has evolved so much since we started. One of our original concepts was the amount of sun a plant can get was going to be some sort of factor or resource or something. And ultimately, as we started play testing it with ourselves and play testing with our friends, you learned. Okay, this is really fun. This is really important. This mechanic's not really working. This thing is a rule for one card, but it's not a rule for every other card, like, just drop it. There's just so much that you learn just by, like, taking the next step and putting it down. And then my other suggestion, which is not to dissuade anyone in any way, shape or form, is that it takes a while. It just, it sort of takes a while to really go from like concept to the end of the finish line. And Carey alluded to this when we started. We were like, this will be a project that we finish in a year. Here, and we're here three years later, and I'm, there are points where I'm like, Oh, it would have been great if we could have done six months, but that's just like, not even possible in any way, shape or form. You know, you've you've got to do Alpha prototyping, you've got to do beta prototyping. You want to get your actual prototype from the manufacturer that you're going to work with. Because, man, that was such a unique experience, because there were things that looked great on the computer that when we got it in, we were like, Oh, this just does not translate when we print. And so you want to really see it physically in front of you. And then we get to play with people like Brian and show it off to people, and get people interested and excited. So again, it is not to dissuade people in any way, but it is a longer process than you might think,  Brian  25:46   a marathon, not a sprint,  Lanny  25:48   exactly, exactly. And sort of when you can reframe that, it sort of makes everything better. Because at the beginning I was like, Oh, we blew through our one year goal right here. And at that point we were still, we were on, like, hand printed stuff that all had the same plant image that really confused everyone. Everyone was like, Wait, not everything is an orchid. And we're like, no, no, that's just a placeholder. We just have not figured out everything at this point. And so actually, our first prototype was on the back of the index cards. So it is, it's really evolved, and you've just sort of got to stay the course and and I think the last thing that I'm going to say is have friends that are willing to do it. And my sweet husband has played this game, probably, aside from Carey and I, more than any other person on this planet. And he is so sweet to like, keep on working through things. And, you know, one of the challenges we gave him at the beginning that he loved was like, how could you break this game? Like, help us figure out the ways in which, like, you know, you create a game to be balanced and replayable. But like, are there things we have not thought of that just totally break all of the core mechanics of the game, and that was a really great lesson too, on like, Okay, what actually doesn't work here and needs to be streamlined and improved. Brian  27:09   Jason and his wife were my kind play testers, and Jason is an expert in breaking games it's his specialty. Lanny  27:15   Thank you, Jason. We need you guys. You guys are as important as we are, because if you just create a game in a silo that no one's played, it needs to be played. It needs to be played so that it's smart and it's good and it's replayable.  Brian  27:30   You need your bug testers, basically, right, your people who are really putting it through its paces and trying to find those weird edge cases. Jason  27:38   Yeah, we've heard from multiple creators that by the time your game is done, all of your friends and family should be absolutely sick of it and never want Carey  27:44   to play it again. They probably are. I think one funny thing is, you don't necessarily think about is the rule book.  Brian  27:51   Oh yeah. Carey  27:51   And you know, Lanny and I have played so many times we know how to play the game, and then we start to write down the rules, and we're like,  Brian  27:59   English sucks. That's the problem.  Carey  28:01   It's like, oh, well, we know how to play this game really well. But how do I yeah, how do I put this in writing so someone else understands? And that's a very different challenge that you run into. And then you also realize, oh, what actually are our rules? Like we change them up so often. Which ones do we actually want to go with? It forces you to make tough decisions about your game, you know, and that's when you rely on your play testers, too, because we ran into this a couple times, like you start designing the game for yourself, which is a fun thing to do, but Lanny and I, you know, we tend to like more medium like heavy games. And Flora VISTA was never meant to be like a really heavy strategy game that takes, you know, hours to play. And so we're like, oh, you know what we need to we need to think about our audience. Maybe, you know, cut back through the difficulty level a little bit, do some more play testing, see what works, and go from there. And, you know, look at other games for inspiration, honestly. Like, how do other games design their rule book? How do they handle the artwork. How do they do their marketing and promotion? Like designing games, that's the fun part. Lanny and I had a great time, I think, doing that, you know, starting out on business cards, iterating. I remember our Excel sheet I was working in Photoshop, and I'm like, I created this macro that would automatically, like, generate 300 cards for us, and we could easily print them out and make changes based on that.  Brian  29:22   Oh, wow.  Carey  29:22   But then you realize, okay, well, now we have to figure out how to produce this game, and then we had to figure out how to market this game. Other things we didn't think about about like, you know, we need a trademark for this game. Lanny  29:32   There are a lot of different hats you get to wear. Yeah, you get to learn what you like and maybe what's a challenge for you. But it was, it's been really cool. I didn't know much about marketing before this game, and it's been a very interesting hat to wear. Brian  29:46   I've got one more question I was hoping to ask Jason, did you have one more as well? I have one more, but mine's fast, so you go first All right. This is something I want to start doing when we get people on I'm taking inspiration from another podcast I listen to called monster talk. What are some of your favorite games with a Science or Nature theme? Do you have one? Lanny  30:07   I love wingspan. I love the bird theme. In that I'm one of those people that reads every single bird fact that's on there. And I, I love the map that's on there. And I actually we really wanted to put a map on our cards too, of where it grows. And this was one of the things that we really learned while we were putting everything together. It's like too much information suddenly makes the card like too cluttered, and you can't pick out the information you really need. Pandemic is up there Brian  30:39   two of our highest scoring games from the podcast. So I we agree with you on both of these.  Lanny  30:44   I like habitat.  Brian  30:46   Oh, we'll, write that one down. Don't know that one. Lanny  30:49   I'm not thinking of the right game. I'm so sorry. I'm thinking of harmonies. Was what I was thinking of. Brian  30:57   Yes, literally my favorite game of last year.  Lanny  30:59   Oh, fantastic. I really like Ark Nova. That's like an animal Zoo. And I love, I love a zoo, honestly.  Brian  31:06   So who doesn't love a zoo?  Lanny  31:08   Yeah, or an aquarium? Oh, gosh, our aquarium in Atlanta. Love that aquarium. Brian  31:14   World class, world class,  Jason  31:15   yes. If you're ever in Atlanta and you can only visit one thing, do not go to the coke Museum. Go to the aquarium. It's much better Lanny  31:22   100% and you've got to get here before  Brian  31:25   all the school groups,  Lanny  31:26   all the school groups, and before our last whale shark goes, we will not get any more whale sharks at the Atlanta aquarium, which is for conservation reasons. But the whale sharks are gorgeous, gorgeous, majestic creatures. And sadly, one of them just passed in the last few months. Jason  31:45   Yeah, I heard that just old age, basically.  Jason  31:47   Yeah. What about you? Carey? I think all the games Lanny mentioned wingspan for sure. I'm thinking photosynthesis is a fun game.  Brian  31:55   Okay, I'm glad to hear that a lot of these games we've done before, so, like, we're not missing big parts of the area, Carey  32:03   no. And there's a national park style game called trekking that I like to play. Lanny had a pretty good list. Only those are the only two I would add, I think, Jason  32:11   all right. And then my question is, the mirror of that, what's your favorite plant, either in your game, or just in general? Carey  32:17   I'll go within the game my favorite plants, the California Poppy that I mentioned earlier. And you can kind of see what some of our favorite plants are in the game based on how many points they're worth. So that's a five point card. That's the highest scoring plant in the game. And I think it's just really interesting. It can be, you know, it's technically edible. Indigenous people used to use it as kind of like a pain reliever, or like a mild sedative, which I think is interesting. It kind of reminds me of The Wizard of Oz thing, where Dorothy kind of falls asleep, even though that's not technically a California Poppy.  Brian  32:54   That's an Oz Poppy, a magical Poppy. Jason  32:57   I always thought they were opium puppies, but in Lanny  33:00   Oz, maybe, probably Oz is a weird place, yeah, but I Carey  33:04   think it's just a beautiful plant overall. I love orange, and I think poppies do this thing where they'll close their petals at night, and it prevents, kind of like predators or pests from bothering it, and it kind of preserves energy. And that's a cool little future that a plant has Lanny  33:21   in the game and maybe also in real life. We have a royal Fern card. I love ferns. I think they are so cool and unique, and they're like history on the earth is so unique. You guys probably know more than I do about the classification of ferns, but they are, they sort of function so different from a lot of other plants. I find that so interesting and that it's been around since like prehistoric eras, like is just so cool to me. And then within the game, one of our cards is the royal Fern, and I probably researched about three to five plant facts about every single plant in this game, and I found this one, and was instantly like, this is absolutely going in the game. In Slavic mythology, if you held royal Fern spore clusters, you were said to be able to slay demons and talk to plants. And why? Yeah, I know. And I'm like, Cool. I'm going out to get some royal Fern clusters immediately.  Brian  34:25   Yeah, you got all those demons to slay, right?  Lanny  34:28   Right? Exactly. I can live out my Buffy fantasy. I can be a real life druid. It's like, perfect. And I'd be like, a huge fantasy mythology person. So that one, just like, really spoke to me on a core level, Brian  34:41   yeah, that sounds very D and D, we got to pull that into a campaign.  Lanny  34:44   I know, right, exactly, Jason  34:46   all right. Well, I think we're going to wrap it up there. Thank you both for coming on. If people want to look more into far out Fox games or Flora Vista, where should they go? Carey  34:54   You can google Flora VISTA or go to Flora Vista.faroutfox.com and You can sign up for updates.  Lanny  35:01   Yep, and we are looking forward to our audience finding the game and backing us on Kickstarter and getting the game in real life. It's going to be a lot of fun. And thank you both for this interview. Thank you Brian for playing with us already,  Brian  35:16   absolutely Jason  35:18   well, we're going to call it there. So thank you everyone for listening. Have a great month and happy games Brian  35:23   and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.  Jason  35:25   This has been the game of the Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to game in the 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 we talked about, 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 - Ark Nova (Zoos)

#ArkNova #CaptstoneGames #Zoos #Zoology #AnimalGames #WAZA #AZA #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Time to run a zoo! In this episode, we're joined by Ellen Weatherford (of Just the Zoo of Us) to talk about Ark Nova and all things zoos. Learn why running a zoo is probably best left to game imagination, what it takes to get accredited, how you can tell good zoos from bad ones, the enclosure preferences of tree kangaroos, and tons of other fun facts. So grab some peanuts (but please don't feed the animals), and join us for a zootastic episode of Gaming with Science. (Also, we promise this episode was not sponsored by Board Game Arena; Brian just likes it a lot.) Timestamps * 00:00 Introductions * 05:20 Rabbit faces & zero-g mice * 10:33 Ark Nova gameplay * 23:47 Zoo origins and operations * 32:40 Ark Nova versus reality * 38:45 Designing good animals enclosures * 45:06 How can you tell a good zoo? * 50:35 Nitpick corner: Poop and merch * 53:45 Final grades * 1:04:56 Goodbyes Links * Ark Nova official site [https://capstone-games.com/products/ark-nova] (Capstone Games) * And the picture with all the bits [https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8102885/ark-nova]! (Board Game Geek) * Just the Zoo of Us [https://www.justthezooofus.com/]  * Space mice and muscle loss [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aed2258] (Science Advances) * The Association of Zoos and Aquariums [https://www.aza.org/] (AZA) and the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums [https://www.waza.org/] (WAZA)  Splash image background courtesy of Stephanie Verbeure [https://www.instagram.com/boardgame_extravaganza/]  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net [https://www.gamingwithscience.net]  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:06   Hello, and welcome to the Gaming with Science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Today, we're going to talk about Ark Nova from Capstone Games. Brian  0:17   Hey, welcome back. This is Brian Jason  0:19   this is Jason Brian  0:20   and we have a very special guest with us today, Ellen Weatherford. Ellen, can you introduce yourself? Ellen  0:27   I have to make sure that I add in the sounds I'm expecting the audience be making. Brian  0:32   The crowd goes wild. Ellen  0:35    Hi everybody, it's so nice to talk to you, Brian and Jason. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited. Brian  0:41   Yeah, so Ellen, tell us about yourself. Ellen  0:43   Yeah, I am a science communicator, I'm a podcaster and a writer, and I have been the host of Just the Zoo of Us, which is a podcast reviewing animals on the Maximum Fun Network. We've been at that for about seven years now.  Brian  1:00   Could you just explain, because I know this is like the entire schtick. The what is the rating scale for just the zoo of us?  Ellen  1:08   So we have different categories, because we realized very quickly that it's hard to give an animal just one score. So we have effectiveness, which are physical adaptations, things built into the animal's body out of 10, and then ingenuity, which is behaviors, things that the animals like doing, ways that they're like navigating the world or solving problems, and then just aesthetics, which is just how nice they are to look at, which that can also often be the most contentious category, that is usually what people have the biggest feelings about. Jason Wallace  1:39   So, do the nightmare fuel animals get high on aesthetics or low on aesthetics? Brian  1:43   We had some big discussion with Brynn Devine, who loves deep sea horrible fish. Ellen  1:49   Yeah, Brian  1:50   as like, oh, they're so cute and wonderful. It's like, no, they're full of knives, they're not wonderful. Speaker 1  1:56   I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Tom Linley, who is a deep sea biologist who actually got to like discover and scientifically describe the ethereal snail fish, which is he mentioned as like the deepest fish ever found, and he described a very interesting phenomenon where there's this sort of uncanny valley effect, almost like the deeper you go in the ocean, where that you go deeper and deeper, and they get spookier and spookier and spookier and spookier and spookier, but then once you hit a certain point it loops back around and they stop being spooky and they go back into being like cute, because then you get like blob fish and snail fish and like flapjack octopus like little Dumbo octopus and stuff, like they swing back around because like you get that layer so deep in the ocean where things just become very flabby and blobby and pink and like that's when they're cute again, so there's this sort of like buffer zone of nightmare creatures, but once you pass that, it, everything's adorable down there.  Brian  3:04   I mean, I really can't argue with the Dumbo octopus as being absolutely adorable. Speaker 2  3:08   They're very cute. Jason  3:09   Agreed, Speaker 3  3:10   there's also a lot of animals that I find to be like nightmare fuel, but I also find them really like endearing and lovely in their own way, and some of them also grow on you. Sure, them are acquired tastes, Brian  3:19   literally, Speaker 4  3:21   yeah. some of them can be an acquired taste, like I personally think that, like, wasps are beautiful. I think they're gorgerous, Brian  3:29   they definitely Brian  3:30   can be terrifying, but I mean, so is a tiger. Ellen  3:34   Yeah, I think they're really beautiful in their own way, so that can be a contentious category. Brian  3:38   Ellen, one more thing, and I don't want to forget this. What do you have a favorite game? It doesn't have to be a board game or a science game, but it's cool if it would be. Ellen  3:48   I am a big video game person. Brian  3:50   Yeah, Speaker 5  3:50   I'm currently in the trenches of a Pocopia addiction. I am cripplingly addicted to Pocopia right now. I'm a lifelong Pokémon fan. OG picked it up. Learn to Read on playing Pokémon, so I've always been a Pokémon fan, but when people ask me what my, like, favorite video game is, or my favorite game, I have the most experience playing video games. Two things come to mind. Number one is Horizon Zero Dawn, very cool. Ever played Horizon Zero Dawn? Love that game, like such a great blend of, like, a very interesting story, beautiful graphics, and also really fun and satisfying gameplay. Like, it's so rare that you get all three, but they were firing on all cylinders. So, Horizon Zero Dawn is definitely one of my favorite. I have the tall neck Lego set. Brian  4:32   Oh yeah, me too. Ellen  4:34   I love that set, it's so cool. But my other one is Outer Wilds. Brian  4:39   Oh dude, we are hitting you, so you need to, you need to talk to Jason's better half, because these are literally.. this is also one of my very favorite games. Okay, Ellen  4:47   Are we same braining?  Jason  4:48   Yes, definitely. We have so both of us actually have wooden Nomai masks that I laser cut out and assembled, so as a gift to my wife, and then a gift to Brian and his wife. Ellen  5:01   Wow, how do I get on this list? Jason  5:05   You're on it now, apparently. Ellen  5:07   Yes, Brian  5:08   let's switch up our science facts to talk about Horizon Zero Dawn and Outer Wilds instead. Jason, go. Actually, no. Let's transition into our science banter topic. So, let's talk about some cool stuff that we learned about science recently, so you know, a an interesting fact, a story, a news article. You know, I am sure Ellen has a deep well of weird animal facts that she can pull from. Ellen  5:31   Deep, a deep one. Brian  5:33   Ellen, we usually let the guests host go first. Would you like, what would you like to share with the class today? Ellen  5:38   Yeah, so I was doing notes on jackrabbits recently, and I was kind of reminded of something that I had heard about jackrabbits a very long time ago, and hares in general. If anyone doesn't know, hares are different, hares and rabbits actually distinctly like different groups of lagomorphs, and the thing that I found really interesting that I had never really noticed about it is that if you look at the three sort of groups of lagomorphs that are in existence right now, there are rabbits, hares, and pikas, and if you look at them, they all have sort of differently shaped heads, where the pikas, their snout goes sort of straight out, almost like in line with their eyes, like along their sort of line of sight, and rabbits, they're sort of tilted down a little bit, their snout sort of slopes down a little bit, like 45 degrees. In hares and jackrabbits, it is like, like a straight drop off, almost like their snout points down from their line of sight, like eyes looking out at the horizon, this snout is pointed down significantly. So, in all three of these groups, you see this sort of like increasing degree of facial tilt, and that's also correlated with their speed, because pikas are very slow, they don't really move very fast. Rabbits are kind of quick, like they can, they can get little bursts of speed. Hares and jack rabbits are very, very fast, so like the faster they go, the more their snout is tilted down at the ground, and the idea is that it gets their snout out of the way, so that they can see the ground in front of them when they're running. Okay, and it, like, their whole skull shape is like completely modified to accommodate their field of view, while they're running, which I think is really interesting. Brian  7:25   So, you got to have that quake pro view, where it's just.. Ellen  7:29   I can't think of any other, like, because usually when you think of animals adapted for speed, you think of them being very streamlined. And, Brian  7:37   well, yeah, Brian  7:38   I would say, like, why do they have their face be like that, so it's not about supposedly it's about their sensory systems, not about, Ellen  7:45   yeah, the eyes, like their perception, which I think is really interesting, and I can't think of any other animal that, like, the skull is adapted like that. Brian  7:53   Can we just glue a bunch of stuff to the front of a rabbit's face and see if it screws him up? Jason  7:57   Like, I think the answer that is probably yes. Brian  8:00   Okay. All right. Well, I'll get on that with the IACUC, and we'll see what we can do.  Ellen  8:05   I do appreciate the immediate experimental design. Brian  8:08   I'm an Brian  8:08   experimentalist. I'm just like, well, that's cool. Is it true? Let's test it. Ellen  8:13   Yeah, Jason  8:14   I'm now imagining you 3D printing a bunch of prosthetics for rabbits faces. Oh, Brian  8:17   yeah. Oh, that's a really good idea. Yeah, I'll start working on that. Ellen  8:21   The Jackalope DLC, Brian  8:23   that's Brian  8:23   right, you get the rabbit and I'll print out the things. Jason, what do you have to share with the class?  Jason  8:29   I was looking, and recently I read a new story about sending mice into space. Okay, Brian  8:36   nice. Jason  8:36   But alas, this paper has no pictures of mice in zero g, which is vast failing, Brian  8:41   that Brian  8:42   is why. Do you even do it if you're not going to take pictures? Pictures or it didn't happen. Ellen  8:47   send it back.  Jason  8:48   But what they were doing here is they're actually trying to figure out how much gravity do you need to maintain muscle mass, because this is an issue with any astronauts that go up into microgravity, zero g. It's definitely going to be an issue if we actually send people off to Mars. Is that in zero G, Your muscles don't have to work so hard, and so they start atrophying. Your body's very efficient. You don't use something, it starts reclaiming it. No need to spend energy on something you're not using. And so they had mice, and they apparently put them at four different gravity levels by basically having them grow in centrifuges in the space station, where there was microgravity, so no additional, just free floating, free fall, 1/3 g, 2/3 g, and then full g. And the idea is that, okay, full g is basically as if they were on earth, everything should be fine, but can we get muscle mass sticking around and working okay at lower levels? And what they found is that a third g was able to maintain part of the functionality, but not all of it, but two thirds g was so, if you stick it around like two thirds g, then that, at least for mice, was enough to keep their musculature working, is able to keep the strength and such up, so that was seems to be the take home from that is that if you keep if. Presumably, astronauts at about two thirds g, then you could, in theory, maintain most of your muscle function. Brian  10:05   That's about Mars's gravity, isn't it? About two thirds, is that right? Jason  10:08   Oh, I think it's a lot less than Brian  10:09   that. Jason  10:09   It is 38% Brian  10:13   Okay, so, but that's that's in the not complete atrophy zone, right? Jason  10:17   Yes. And let me check this here. So, kept muscle mass at 1/3 g, and muscle function was preserved at two thirds g. Brian  10:26   Okay, so okay, that's weird to think about. All right, interesting. Do you guys wanna talk about a board game? So let's talk about the board game Ark Nova, which we all did get to play, although not to the point where we actually finished the game. I have been playing this game a ton. This is my new favorite game of 2026 Harmonies was 2025 Jason  10:47   and those are so different games. Brian  10:50   Well, there might be more connective tissue than you think, because it's very reactive to what's going on on that round. Ark Nova is the number two ranked game on Board Game Geek. It is played for one to four players, 90 to 150 minutes. This definitely is a lengthy game, ranked on Board Game Geek as a 3.8 out of five on complexity, which means it's, it's definitely up there on the complexity, way higher than I would typically go for. But I really loved this game. Designer by Mathias Wigge, a German board game designer, his very first game, and as far as I can tell, his only game, which, if your first game is number two on Board Game Geek, I think maybe you can rest on your laurels just a little bit. Jason  11:31   It's like he hit the top, had to retire.  Brian  11:34   I mean, I don't think he's retired, but I just like, where do you go from there? Like, there's nowhere else to go but down, right? Ellen  11:40   Oh yeah, it sucks to peek so early. Brian  11:42   Yeah, for sure. So, the goal of Ark Nova is to plan and build a modern, scientifically managed zoo to support conservation projects. That's what they describe Ark Nova as, from the publisher. I didn't really find too much about the designer diary, or like, how this game was made. I'm sure there are wonderful interviews in German that I couldn't find, like, I don't know what inspired this game. I don't know what made Mathias want to make a zoo game. You know, it said that the designer and the publisher have made every effort to be accurate to the actual science. There are notable exceptions that they make, and they say we know that they're there. Some things that get the bear tag are not bears. We know raccoons are not bears, but they're close enough. Ellen  12:25   Let them be bears. Brian  12:27   Yeah, Jason  12:27   don't koala bears also have the bear tag for that?  Brian  12:29   They use, and they point that out as well. For the same thing, it's like we know it's not really a bear. It bear is just a thing that we're.. it's vibes. There's some vibes here. Yeah, but even though they say that they don't really show it, like I couldn't find anywhere where they're really specific on sort of what principles they were using to make these simplifications, but that's okay. We'll come back to this conversation, this topic later. Okay, now let's talk about what does this game look like. Ark Nova, in front of you, you will have a hex grid that is where you're going to be building your zoo. Certain spots are blocked off with either rocks or water. There's also multiple different map setups, you know, from first game up to advance, with different layouts, different structures, different bonuses. You're also going to have these multiple point tracks that you're keeping track of. There's like so many little tracks on this game, and a place to display five cards. There are three types of cards in the game. There are animal cards, sponsor cards, and conservation projects. So, what are you going to do in this game? Well, the goal of this game is to build enclosures to house your animals and attract visitors. As you bring animals to your zoo, you'll raise your appeal, more people will want to come to your zoo. You'll also secure sponsors, recruit employees or build special structures. You'll also use workers, because embedded within our hackspace strategy game, there's also it's a worker placement game, sort of a little tiny one that happens in the middle of this larger game. You use your workers to form associations with partner zoos and universities and support those conservation projects. You will also increase your reputation to get rewards and draw some of those cards that are sitting up on the display. So, how do you actually play? Each round You're going to choose one of your five action cards, so those are build, animals, cards, sponsors, and association. Each of those lets you do a different thing. The five action cards have more powerful abilities based on their position from one to five, whichever card you use, then gets moved down to position one and will bump up any other cards that were below it to a more powerful spot. There's also four different places on those tracks, or on the board, or doing different things that let you upgrade your cards, so your action cards can be upgraded to a more powerful form. You can only ever upgrade four of them, so there's always going to be at least one action card that's not upgraded. So, there's, you know, lots of interesting choices to make in this game. The other major mechanic in the game is that you have breaks, so instead of having, like, well, everybody does this and it's the end of the round, you've got this little. Break tracker, another tracker that's marked with a little coffee cup. There are certain cards, like the cards action, will always add two to that break tracker. And then there are other ways that that break tracker goes up. When that fills up, everything resets. You have to discard down to your hand limit. You can have as many cards as you want until you hit the break. This is also when you earn more money and other aspects of the game get reset, like all your workers go back to their available spots again, so you can do new things with them. So, how do you win Ark Nova? Your score is based on a combination of your appeal, which is like your ticket prices, and your conservation points, so you kind of want to keep those in balance. How popular is your zoo. How good are you at sort of supporting conservation efforts? These are being tracked on two separate point tracks, and they each start on opposite ends, so they're kind of going in opposite directions. And when your markers cross each other for conservation and appeal, that triggers the end of the game. And yeah, at that point, there's like end game scoring, and you just kind of look at what everybody's got, and you know, most points wins. That is the basics of Ark Nova. Again, it's always fun to try to describe a visual board game in an audio medium, but it's.. it looks intimidating. I am glad that we played this on Board Game Arena, because it's doing all the bookkeeping for me. It's fantastic. Jason  16:22   Yeah, there have been several games we've talked about on this podcast where it's like this would be great on the computer to handle all the fiddly math. This is one of those, like, there's a lot of components, a lot of moving parts, and I can see why it's so popular. There are so many decision points, you can't have everything, you have to choose, do I want A or B, do I want C or D, and so there are real decisions you have to make that will definitely impact your game. The game is relatively easy to grasp at a high level, but it also rewards deep strategy and understanding how the parts connect together. But there is a lot of bookkeeping involved, and so having a computer to delegate that to does make it a lot nicer. Brian  17:02   It seems like it would be really easy to forget some act like, because you can have these sponsor cards that are like, oh, anytime anybody plays a predator icon in any zoo, gain some money, cool. I'm gonna forget that. The game's not gonna forget that. The game's gonna do it for me. It's just accurately keeping track of all the tags. It's this is not about board game arena, but oh man, it was really nice to play on board game. This is why I like this game so much, because it's so easy to play on board game arena. Ellen  17:29   I do personally benefit from physically interacting with, like, information, so I feel like now that you know, I've looked up some pictures of what the actual like game pieces look like, and I feel like I might benefit from playing this, like, in person with, like, actual pieces and stuff, but God, it looks like tracker hell to me. It is Ellen  17:50   just.. it Ellen  17:51   is a little bit of.. Brian  17:54   I'll tell you what, Ellen, if we're ever going to all be in the same place at the same time, we will buy a physical copy, and we'll let Jason take care of the bookkeeping, and it'll be fun. Jason  18:03    Oh, thank you.  Brian  18:04   You're welcome.  Jason  18:04   Yeah, no, I found on Board Game Geek, there's an image where someone composed all the bits, all the zoo pieces, all the cards, all the meeples and cubes, and everything, and it is beautiful, and so incredibly intimidating, because this thing takes up an entire table when you lay it all out like that, Ellen  18:21   it's a lot of information. Brian  18:23   Yes, for sure. One of the metrics that Jason, I informally use when we're ranking games, is the bowl of chip factor. Is there room on the table for a bowl of chips? Ellen  18:34   Oh, that's Brian  18:34   funny. Having played only on my.. I actually play on my phone, believe it or not, I don't even play on my laptop. I really severely doubt that there's much room for chips. Ellen  18:45   This game does not seem like phone activities; this seems like big screen activities. Jason  18:50   I am shocked that you can play this on your phone. Brian  18:52   I love playing it on my phone. I'm just used to it at this point. Does anybody else have anything they want to point out about Ark Nova? Anything they feel like I missed, or anything that they want to bring up. I mean, obviously, we've got like 130 animal cards in this game, which is really cool. And, obviously, we're going to talk more about that. I guess one thing I'm going to mention now is that all of the animal cards have a sort of all of the cards have a tag system on them of some kind. So, let me go over those. So, we've got the continents, Antarctica doesn't get to play, and they have compressed the Americas into south and north as just the Americas. It is a European game, so they have kept Europe and Asia separate, which, to be fair, very different animals live there. So, I think that that's legitimate. That's also true for North and South America, but whatever, the animal types - we've got birds, reptiles, primates, and then predators and herbivores, which really more specifically is mammalian predators and mammalian herbivores. I did check everything fits into those categories. There is a weird subclass called bear, which includes bears and a few other things like raccoons, coatis, and weirdly the wolverine, Brian  19:59   which. Again, Brian  20:00   just, just based on vibes, I suppose. Ellen  20:02   Yeah, that's a mustelid. Okay, that's a, that's a weasel. That okay, Brian  20:06   it is a weasel. And it's like, well, if you're gonna put the wolverine on, like, I don't know if you have a honey badger, but you should also get, let that be a bear. And, like, European badger doesn't get to be one, though. So it's like they balanced bears in a strange way. Ellen  20:20   Yeah, Jason  20:20   I am beginning to think that there was some sort of like bear lobbyist that was a friend of the game designer or something, or maybe they just like bears, because this bear category sounds excessively broad.  Ellen  20:34   Big bear got to him. Brian  20:37   The other thing that I'm thinking about is that bears don't - you're never just a bear, it's always bear plus something else. Bear is a subcategory. There's also petting zoo animals, which covers a huge range of like the cute and the things that will let you touch them. And then there's not bears, there's no bear in that category, as far as I'm aware. There's research, and then there's also icons for like ones that need water and ones that need rocks, so like when you build your little enclosure next to something, like, oh, this animal requires its enclosure to be next to water, for instance, or next to a rock, you can't just play the animals willy nilly, some of them have pre requirements, right? So if you want to play a lion, that's cool, it's kind of the metaphor of the game, I think, is a lion. You have to have other predators in your zoo already before you're gonna get a lion. I think it's the idea of, like, you gotta have, you gotta know what you're doing with predators before they let you have a lion. Ellen  21:33   You can't go straight to lion. Brian  21:35   No, you don't go straight to lion. You can go straight to cheetah, though. For some reason, Ellen  21:39   cheetahs do are quite like built different cheetahs, are like the chillest big cat. Brian  21:47   Oh, is that right? They do need a lot of space, though. They need a huge Brian  21:49   enclosure. Ellen  21:50   Yeah, Jason  21:51   yeah. And I think there is a bit of a story in what these prerequisites are. I mean, the rock and the water requirements are the most obvious, but like one of the cards I played was a shoe bill, and I had to have two research icons already in my zoo, so I don't know what the story behind that is, but apparently you need to have a pretty good research program in order to actually be able to keep and maintain shoe bills. Ellen  22:12   I've heard that they're very difficult to breed in captivity, so it could be that it could be that, like, because I know that there has been some difficulty in getting them to like successfully breed in zoos, so maybe it's something to do with that. Brian  22:26   Could be there were some other ones that are similar, like Galapagos turtles, were the same way. You got to have some research representation in your zoo, right? Jason  22:33   Yeah, and another way they do it is that some animals can only be played after you have upgraded your animal card, so if you don't upgrade it, you simply can't play an African elephant or other similar animals, Brian  22:43   you have to have a partner zoo in Asia before you can even have a giant panda, that is true, Ellen  22:48   right? Yeah, I found the partner zoo requirement interesting because it reminds me a little bit of how, like, for the AZA, like one of the AZA requirements is often that, like, you have to be actively participating in some sort of, like, species survival plan, yeah, which usually involves having, like, some sort of affiliation with, like, on the ground research or conservation, like, you have to, in some way, be partnered with actual conservation, where that animal is from, and be working towards the overall long-term benefit of the species, whether that's like breeding them for, you know, genetic diversity Ellen  23:29   or bringing Ellen  23:29   them for better fitness for sport, like you have to be like participating with actual conservation for to like get AZA accreditation, Jason  23:41   and the AZA is the what the American Zoological Association? Ellen  23:44   I think it's the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Jason  23:47   Okay, Brian  23:47   which used to be the American that transitioned from another name. Hey, wonderful transition. Let's talk about zoos. Okay, I have a little thing of just like, so where did zoos come from? Why does zoos exist? The tradition of zoos really gets born out of menageries, nobles for kings, for queens. I think you could probably also get the impression from that that it is difficult, expensive, and challenging to maintain a zoo. Right, this is something that really only the rich and the powerful were doing. Now, those original menageries really weren't anything about, well, obviously they weren't about science, but they weren't even really about animal welfare, right? These were trophies, these were treasures, these were things that were put on display, they were maintained just for that, of like to show how cool and rich you are, right? Ellen  24:35   They were decorative, yeah, Brian  24:37   decorative, right, like a museum piece, like anything else that you would capture and display from a far off land. The first really public zoo. Actually, does anyone want to guess what was the origin of the public zoo? This is not you. I don't usually do quizzing, but I'm just curious. Ellen  24:52   Yeah. No, I'm trying to think of where the first one might have been. It does seem like something they do in the UK. Okay, it does seem like maybe London, maybe Brian  25:04   that's a really good guess. It was actually during the French Revolution.  Jason  25:08   I should have said that.  Brian  25:09   Basically, it was the reappropriation of menageries and reformation of those into a public zoo. My friend Tara is going to rip me over this pronunciation. The first public zoo was the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes during the French Revolution in 1794 So, we'll see how well I did my French there. Now, even then, the first public zoos, this idea of zoos as things for the public, they still were not for the animals, really. Attitudes about that didn't change until after World War Two. A lot of zoos were sort of destroyed during World War Two, and people started just having different thoughts about that. Also, studies about animal cognition were kind of right around that time. And then this idea of zoos having this mission of conservation, that really comes out of the 1970s environmental movement. So it really hasn't been that long, even though those sort of zoo moments are older than that, this idea of zoos having a mission of conservation is sort of a 1970s and forward thing. Ellen  26:09   Yeah, when ethics were invented, Brian  26:13   when environmental ethics were invented, anyway. But yes, you're right. Jason  26:17   Well, when environmental ethics in the West were invented. If you look in other traditions, they go back much, much further. Brian  26:23   Let's talk about this now. How do you actually.. let's say you want to open a zoo. Ellen, do you want to open a zoo? Ellen  26:30   My blood pressure just rose thinking about it, because, like, I feel like I've read through enough, like, handbooks on care and, like, enclosure development and stuff like that, that, like, I know a little bit too much about what has to go on behind the scenes to make it, like, possible, and make it work, and just the thought of having to do all that myself, or even think about it, just immediately made me stressed out. Brian  26:53   Oh yeah, for sure, which I think is why there are games about this, because something that people love to think about doing, and nobody actually wants to do it. Ellen  27:02   Love it as a concept. Brian  27:03   Yeah, so it is, as you can imagine, an exceptionally expensive thing to take on. So we can kind of go into it. What does it actually take to open a zoo? The first thing is just legal permitting, right? You cannot display wild animals. You need to talk to the USDA. You need to have permits from the endanger, based on if you're going to have endangered animals by the Migratory Bird Act. There's all these different legal requirements that cover it, not to mention purchasing the land, developing all of the enclosures that are going to be there. There's no good way to really give a universal estimate for what it costs, but I did do a little bit of research that says it is not atypical for a zoo to have to have a daily operating cost of 10 to $20,000 Jason  27:47   and we should say all those regulations and stuff are of course US-based, because that's where we're based, and we have easy access to all the regulations, Brian  27:54   very true, Jason  27:55   presumably there are very different ones, depending on which country you're in, and local regulations, and such, Ellen  28:00   even within the US, they vary a lot state to state, so like in some states their rules on that are much, much, much chiller, and on some states they're much more, so like I'm from Florida, and Florida had notoriously lacks laws on exotic, even just pet ownership, right, like not even for a zoo, but like, it was the barrier to entry was, in my opinion, too low. A lot of people were basically having private exotic pet collections and calling them a zoo, so that they could sort of justify being allowed by the USDA to keep, like, you know, lions and tigers and whatever weird stuff they wanted to have, even if it was basically just like glorified, like their own private collection, they would like be able to call it a zoo, and like it was just I feel like from state to state, you know, the laws are very, very different, Jason  28:55   so they were basically recreating their own menagerie,  Brian  28:57   yeah, yeah, just calling it a zoo, continuing with that, okay, great. So you can meet that minimum legal requirement to have a zoo. You've spent an enormous amount of outlay of funds to secure the land, build your enclosures, and everything like that. Now, let's say you want to be accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Now that is a very different process, so you can open a zoo legally, is it a zoo, like Ellen was saying, where it is animal welfare is important, where you are contributing to conservation, where you are doing all of those things that we think of when we think about zoos, all of the positive things that they bring, so you have to be in operation for five years before you are even eligible to be considered for operation, you have to be operating well above the legal standards with animal welfare. First, you have to be participating in conservation. A three-person team of evaluators is going to come to your zoo for multiple days. That's going to include a veterinarian, an animal welfare specialist, and like an experienced zookeeper. They're going to go through your zoo, look through all of your records, then they are going to take their report, as well as probably a ream of paperwork, to the AZA, where a panel is then going to determine if you have qualified for AZA accreditation or not, and then that has to be renewed every five years, right? With all of that, so that's just to become accredited. Now, I also learned, so this game in particular, Ark Nova, they talk about WAZA instead of so in America, it's the Association for Zoos and Aquariums. WAZA is the world association for zoos and aquariums, which actually is an umbrella organization that every one of these.. so there's CAZA in Canada, right? There's EAZA in Europe, they all have wonderful logos, by the way. Actually, you should get little patches of every one of them. Ellen  30:43   AZA, my inbox is open. Please, please send me merch, AZA. I would love it. Ellen  30:48   I advertise for you guys all the time for free. Give me some merch, please. Brian  30:53   And I was very happy to hear that the AZA in the United States is, in fact, part of WAZA. I would not have been surprised if it was not the other way around, where like everybody else is all into this umbrella organization, but the, the US version, no we do our own things in our own accreditation, we're not going to talk to anybody else. So Ellen  31:09   I think that when you get into like AZA is very like conservation global, like they have that vibe, like they would definitely be like linked up with all the other worldwide organizations, they are definitely, they seem very like, because they are focused on, I guess, global conservation. That doesn't super surprise me. Brian  31:26   No, no, no, no, no, that's true. So, let's see. So, what are they going to look for? Species-appropriate habitats and enrichment programs, qualified veterinary care. Man, what does it take to be a zoo vet? That seems like that's a very special thing. Ellen  31:40   Yeah, I have heard some people that have like exotic pets that have said that they had to like take their pet to the zoo because like the vet at the zoo was the only one who could see their like weird pet. Brian  31:50   Trained professional staff, conservation education, and research programming as a key part there. This is one of those things we're going to come back to later. How much do they spend on conservation and how much does it impact? That's one of those things that occasionally people talk about, and that's someplace where we might see some differences between Ark Nova versus the day-to-day operation of a zoo. So, another thing that I thought was interesting to me, looking this up, of the AZA zoos, just over 50% are nonprofit, so they are presumably receiving funding from cities, from the government, from the state, things like that, but like almost 50% of zoos are for-profit enterprises, and yet they are AZA accredited. So that's kind of a brief overview of the history of zoos. What does it take to be one of these like we consider ideal zoos where conservation is at the core of what you do? So yeah, what do we talk about? Like, what do we think about how zoos are represented in Ark Nova? Do we think that they're doing a good job? And then I also want to talk about the animals, because I think that the animals are a little vibe-coded, rather than like pure accuracy. When you're playing Ark Nova, the things that you're really trying to balance are your appeal, which is basically like how many people are coming to your zoo right versus your conservation, like these are the two things that you're supposed to be doing, and I know that zoos participate in conservation, but I don't really know if that direct interaction with conservation is really what that is part of what zoos do, but I don't think that's really the majority of what zoos do, I definitely don't think it's a 50/50 balance, the way that it's kind of being portrayed in Ark Nova, Jason  33:23   I mean, we'd really need someone from a zoo to come on and tell us, like, what percentage of time, what percentage of energy, what percentage of money is going to one or another, and probably most of the money is just going to maintenance, it just costs a lot of money to feed the animals, hire the staff, all that sort of stuff, so, but the fact is, like, the good ones are probably still putting significant numbers in. I mean, I'm sure many of them have partnerships with universities and veterinary schools and such to have people come get training, to have internships, all sorts of stuff like that. Brian  33:55   Yeah, I think that's right. I think that some of the reports say, you know, it's like less than 5% of their gross budget, but that's the gross budget, like a zoo is not like I said, it's very, and like, okay, another thing in Ark Nova, you build your infrastructure, and that's it, it's built forever, you buy your animal one time, and that's it, and that's forever, Ellen  34:14   right? Brian  34:14   So they're not really accounting for maintenance costs, or like just upkeep, like at all, it's all put a bundled into that single cost. I have no idea what these credits are, either. I wouldn't be it. We often try to figure out what is our analogy here for costs. I kind of feel like one of those has got to be somewhere between 100,000 and like a million dollars or something, Ellen  34:34   right? Because these are assets that you're not just like, it's not just a, you're not just like acquiring an asset that's just yours forever. These are like assets that, first of all, will require a lot of maintenance. You'll basically just be having to like continually upkeep this asset, but also the asset will naturally expire, you know? Like, it's just gonna get old and die eventually, so like it's not like you're gonna have it forever, and also. In a lot of zoos, sometimes they don't have that animal, you know. Sometimes they'll have an animal, and then, you know, something happens, maybe it passes away, or you know, gets transferred to a different zoo, or something like that. And then they've got this enclosure, this exhibit sitting there with nothing in it, like, because they just don't have anything to put in it. And then it could be like a way long time later, that finally they get some other animal that then they're like, well, we have an empty enclosure, and they put a new animal in there, so like I have seen that happen like in zoos a lot, so it's yeah, it's not as permanent, but I can't think of any way for them to do that in Ark Nova without adding another tracker. Brian  35:39   Well, I would routinely have empty enclosures, or they were, you, we didn't get to do this, but they're one of the conservation programs, our release program, and you would actually take an animal, you would take an occupied enclosure, you would get rid of that animal, and you would turn it over to its unoccupied side, so it changes your tags and everything, so there is a yes, this enclosure is now empty, of course, you're only emptying things by releasing it into the wild, which, Brian  36:02   right, Brian  36:02   in reality, captive breeding programs definitely an important part of what zoos do. You know, there's a, a small but critical number of success stories. The, the California Condor, being like the big one, right? Like, brought back from what was it, 23 individuals or something horrible, Brian  36:19   that Ellen  36:20   it was like in the double digits, yeah. Brian  36:21   Okay, to actual breeding populations in the wild, but a lot of times the problem these release programs can be really difficult for certain animals, like particularly animals with a lot of complex behavior, complex mental process, animals with culture. It's very hard to take something like that and expect to be able to rear it in a way that it can then survive in the wild, right. So, but sometimes you can do it. Sometimes it's really important, and, and I feel like the real value of zoo is is the inspiration quotient, and I don't know if it's necessarily a captive animal's job to do that, but like the education that that inspiration of the next generation of people who want to work with and preserve animals. I feel like that's a value that's very hard to put an actual number on, Ellen  37:04   right? I do, and I do think it does make an actual, like, impact on ideology, like I think getting to see, for kids, especially for young people, getting to see, you know, real these very impressive animals, very charismatic animals, especially, and being able to see them in person and perceive them as being like actual living, living, breathing things right in front of you, sharing a space with you. I think is going to make you care more about the world, and also like understand the world outside of your neighborhood, right? If you like are growing up in the USA, you and you get to see giraffes and rhinos at the zoo, right? Like, I think that will inspire you to like actually visualize the world outside of your immediate surroundings, and so I do think it is really important just for like broadening a worldview, I think, was which is valuable in itself, and and also like inspiring young people to care about their environments and teach them about conservation and things like that. I don't know about you guys, I, as a kid, I was always at the zoo. I was not a sign reader. I'm sorry, guys, I'm not Brian  38:11   really.. you're not a Brian  38:12   sign reader, you're not a sign Brian  38:13   reader, Ellen  38:14   not a big sign reader. I was there, I was not.. I was not reading all the signs, I was there for the vibes, I was there to look at the animals and watch, and, and yap at the zookeepers. I was always talking to the zookeepers, so the zookeepers would talk to me. That's how I'm learning, but, like, I'm not a big stand there and look at the sign person. But, but, yeah, I do feel like I was a kid who grew up going to zoos, and it hugely affected, like, the trajectory of my life. So, I do think it makes a real impact. It's not really a money-making impact, but it's there. Jason  38:45   Playing off that a bit, I think the quality of the zoo also plays into that, where if you see animals in a more rich environment, something where they can really engage with it, it's better. Whereas, like, I remember when I was a kid, we were going.. I don't even remember which zoo this was that, but most of it was fine, but then we got to like the one thing where it's like this enclosure for a crocodile or something, where the enclosure was completely bare and only just slightly larger than the animal itself. I'm really hoping it was just a temporary housing while it was this real one's being prepared, but I don't know, I was like 10, and like that it can have the opposite effect, and so along those lines, like what are the sort of things that are needed to do a high quality animal enclosure, like what does an animal need for that enclosure to provide stimulation, or whatever it is that the animal is looking for in its environment. Ellen  39:37   I do think that, like, exhibit design is very interesting. I actually just a few weeks ago had got a chance to talk to Dr. Lisa Daybeck, but she got to - she's a researcher who has worked with research in Papua New Guinea, and she helped design the new sort of like tree tops, like cloud forest to. Exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo here in Seattle, which is close to where I live, and I got to ask her about, like, what kind of thought process went into, like, designing exhibits for tree kangaroos, because she was a tree kangaroo researcher, and you know, she talked about the fact that, you know, tree kangaroos live in, obviously, trees, so they need a lot of climbing structures, but she said that you can't just do vertical structures, because they don't just climb straight up and down, and that's it. They need a lot of like diagonals, they need a lot of horizontal space, they need a lot of like, you know, sort of catwalk style, like trees that they can walk across. So she talked about how they need that sort of structure. Whenever I look at exhibits for things I'm always trying to look at, like what are the containment, like how are they trying to like hide their containment, like I'm trying to think of like how are they not, how are they making it so this animal can't escape, and also doing that in such a way where they're not just like behind iron bars, right, like finding the balance between like security and aesthetics, because aesthetics are important, like what humans are perceiving is very important in the zoo, right? Like, it has to look nice, and also it has to photograph well, you know? Like, if you've got like an enclosure that's like surrounded by a chain link fence, then all of the pictures are going to be seen through a fence, right? And then all the pictures are going to come out kind of like, you know, people. it doesn't look as impressive, so I do think that that, like, exhibit design is very interesting. I just got to go to a few months ago, I got to go to the San Diego Zoo. They invited me, I was so excited to go see their new - they have a brand new elephant exhibit, and this exhibit is huge, like when you are in, yeah, they better be right, like they need a lot of space, and so it's like the sort of thing where, like, from the walkway you can't see the other side of, like, the enclosure, like you really can't even see, like, where the enclosure ends, and some of that, I think, is like clever, like putting the sort of fencing on the other side of a hill, right, so that, like, you really can't see where the fence is, but it is just a massive exhibit, and they had, I want to say, like, eight elephants in there, and we could not see all of them. There were, we could only see probably, like, four of the elephants, and they were like, "Oh, yeah, there's a bunch more somewhere. So,  Jason  42:17   I'm sure they have cameras tracking every single one of those elephants. Ellen  42:20   I'm sure they knew exactly where those elephants were, but we couldn't see them, which I think is like, if your exhibit is big enough that four elephants cannot be seen, I feel like that is like a good amount of space. How are you hiding four elephants? Brian  42:34   Yes, good question. I guess the other thing is, like, but you also want your guests to be able to see the animals, so that's kind of a problem too, right? Ellen  42:43   Yeah, I've seen some of them get kind of like clever with it at Northwest Trek, which is, which is an AZA accredited zoo here in Washington. They have, they have a lot of like little nocturnal creatures, so like they have like skunks and like American badgers and like beavers and stuff like that, creatures that would be more likely to be active at night, so what they have is they have this sort of like shaded nighttime den area that they can go that's dark, but then there's like glass that like you can see them in their little den, oh actually in San Diego Zoo, at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Park, which is like the second, like, location in Escondido, California. They have a platypus, they have a platypus exhibit, apparently only zoo in the world outside of Australia that has platypuses. Brian  43:31   I was thinking, I've never seen one, Ellen  43:34   right? Brian  43:34   This is why Ellen  43:35   I got to see them in San Diego, and they have an interesting thing, because, like, you mentioned, you have to, you want the guests to be able to see the animal. This is a nocturnal animal. Platypuses come out at night, so the platypus exhibit is actually completely enclosed. It's all in like a building, and the lights in the building are reversed in like a day-night cycle, where the lights are off and it's dark during the day, Brian  44:02   and just like Australia, they're just keeping on local time. Ellen  44:07   They like, they have like reversed like day-night cycle, so that the platypus will be active when the people are there. Brian  44:14   That's cool. I've seen this in, like, bat, yeah, and like bat enclosures. You'll go in, it's all like red light, so that the bats can be, Ellen  44:20   yeah, you were telling me a little bit about, like, the idea of, like, you know, zoos being good versus bad, and I feel like I have seen such a wide spectrum of zoos, like Jason, you mentioned seeing one that had, like, a really terrible crocodile exhibit that was just, like, you know, I'm sure it was probably with just, like, a concrete pit, probably Brian  44:39   A concrete pit with a crocodile in it. Ellen  44:41   I've seen a lot of concrete pit zoos, and I've seen, you know, the San Diego Zoo, and I've seen, like, honestly, I'm from Jacksonville, Florida. I think we had a world-class zoo. The Jacksonville Zoo is fantastic. So, like, I've seen great zoos, I've seen terrible zoos. So, like, I really don't think it's the sort of thing that you can say, like, blanket, like they're all great or they're all bad. Head, because, like, I've seen ones that do it really, really well. I've seen ones that I thought should be shut down. Jason  45:06   So, aside from looking for, like, accreditation, how can people know if a zoo is good or not before they go, before they give them their money? Ellen  45:14   Oh, there are a lot of things you can look for, because I have had people mention to me that, like, if they work at smaller zoos. If it's a small zoo, like you mentioned, Brian, AZA accreditation is a huge process. It is. It takes forever. It's also very expensive, and a lot of, especially smaller zoos, don't have that kind of budget, and maybe cannot get AZA accreditation, which doesn't mean that they're bad. Like, it doesn't mean that they're not doing the right thing, it just means that they probably don't have that kind of budget, which is, you know, fine. So you have to put a little more legwork into making sure there are some red flags that I've learned you can kind of look out for. One of them is doing paid, like hands on contact, particularly with animals that you shouldn't have hands on contact with, so like predators, right, like hands on contact with like a big cat, that's a big no no, hands on contact with a very young animal that's a big no no, like those those sort of like paid opportunities where you can like pay to stress an animal out, like, is usually Ellen  46:22   that's Ellen  46:22   kind of like that's kind of a red flag, you know, like, and I've seen some zoos that have, like, ambassador animals, where they can pay a little extra money and go, you know, hang out with, like, a Galapagos tortoise, is probably going to be fine, they don't care that you're there, you know, they'll have, like, or they'll have, I did one, actually, actually in Atlanta, at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, my husband surprised me with a the behind the scenes sea otter tour, where you could like go to the behind the scenes of the sea otter exhibit at the Georgia Aquarium, and you do have to pay extra for it, and you do sort of get hands on contact, but the way they do it is interesting, they have this sort of like plexiglass like barrier between you and the otters like tank, and you're basically spot training where you like put your finger up to the hole and the otter comes up and boops their nose like onto your finger, so it's a very like animal lead, it's like if the animal doesn't want to do it, they're not going to do it, so it's like it's kind of up to them and it's not stressing them out, but you do still get to like boop an otter with your, with your finger, which is very, very nice. Jason  47:25   So, like, I know so many people that would pay extra money to boop an otter's nose. Ellen  47:30   I did. It was worth it, was worth every penny. So, there are things you can look out for, especially like those sort of money grab opportunities, like if they're asking you to pay extra money to like stress an animal out on purpose, that's usually a red flag. I also kind of look to see, like, okay, what, where are you getting your animals from? That's a huge thing, like, are you only taking in rescued animals from other places, are you like breeding them, you know, like, I, you can look into a little bit, like, if they'll, if they say on their website where they get their animals from, that can be helpful if they're not saying it might be because they don't want you to know, usually places that, like, are getting their animals either, like, from a rescue situation, or if they're participating in a species survival program, they'll be very, like, upfront about that, that information will be, will be very available. Jason  48:21   Yeah, we actually have a very tiny zoo here in Athens that is a purely rescue zoo. It's a small free zoo. It's, it's not gonna make anyone's list of like top 100 zoos in the nation. It's very tiny, but it's it's full of rescued animals, and they're very open about that. These are all animals that are not able to be released to the wild because they have critical injuries or whatever, and so they're kept here to have a good life. Ellen  48:44   We had a there was a big cat sanctuary like that from in North Florida, and one thing that, like, also something that I would see in places that I consider to be red flags were like not using proper safety protocols between their staff and the animals, where like if the staff is like in an enclosure with something like a tiger or a lion or a big cat or something like that, like with the AZA, they have like what do they call it, protected contact or something like that, or like there are steps basically where they're there, they should never be like in the enclosure with certain animals, there's some where it's fine, they're not going to do anything, but if it's something like I had Marco Wendt on, who worked, who works at the San Diego Zoo, and he was talking about cassowaries, and like cassowaries are like Jason  49:30   those are basically dinosaurs, Ellen  49:32   yeah, so especially places will post on social media, like they'll usually tell on themselves on social media where they'll like post a lot of videos of their keepers, like in the enclosure with like a live tiger or something like that, and you're like, okay, you shouldn't be doing that, because if they're not, if they're not using good safety protocols with their staff, I feel like there's probably some other things they're not doing probably super responsibly and safely either. Brian  49:59   Well, it also just. Makes you wonder, it's like that. If that is a wild animal acting like a wild animal, you shouldn't be around it like that, right? Ellen  50:07   Yeah, Brian  50:08   like, so why isn't that animal attacking them? Or anyway, Ellen  50:13   I've seen, I've heard a lot of horror stories about like tourist traps that will, like, sit like heavily, heavily sedate animals, so that they can like take pictures with them, and have their cute little moment. Do your research, like, look into a place before you visit them. I think is my big takeaway, right? Just like, look into them, see what you can find, see if they're being cagey on their website. Brian  50:35   Is there anything else we want to talk about about the science that is represented in Ark Nova? If there's not, I would love to step into our nitpick corner, because during the course of our conversation I found mine. Ellen  50:45   Oh, Jason  50:46   all right. Do tell. Ellen  50:46   Yeah, let me hear it. Brian  50:47   My nitpick about Ark Nova as a zoo management game is that there's not nearly enough poop. Ellen  50:55   I would like to see more like management Sims deal with Brian  51:01   everything that I've seen and researched, everything that I did getting ready for this says that being a zookeeper is about 50% poop management. Ellen  51:09   Yeah, it's mostly poop management. Yeah, Brian  51:12   so I feel like maybe that break tracker needs to be based on it's actually the poop tracker, it should just be a little poop emoji, and when you reach a certain amount of poop, that's it. You've got to stop, clean out, and that's in between rounds. Ellen  51:24   It should be like it's like a, it's like a flood tracker that like the poop level rises gradually. Brian  51:32   I thought of one more nitpick, and if nobody else has one, I'm gonna list my, that my second Brian  51:37   one as Brian  51:37   well. Jason  51:37   I think I would need to play the game a few more times to pull out, I mean, there's there's enough depth in this game that I don't think I can make a good saying of what I would fix until I understand it better. Brian  51:52   Okay, that's fair. Then next time I invite you to play, you got to accept my invitation. Okay, I've got two games running right now. Anyway, my other nitpick, then, and then we can be done with nitpick corner. You can build all of these structures in the game, specialized enclosures and things, for like, there's a meerkat den, and there's all these things that give you special powers in Board Game Arena there's an arcade that actually, like, do you know what they don't have all those special structures, they don't have a gift shop, and that's crazy. Ellen  52:24   Would like to see that. Brian  52:26   Have you ever been to a zoo that didn't have a gift shop?  Jason  52:29   Isn't that what the little kiosks are? I mean, they generate income for you. It might be like pretzels and slushies, but it may also just be a bunch of merch. Brian  52:36   I think they're selling pretzels and slushies. I did find an image of a kiosk from some kind of bonus tile, and it was definitely a place where they had like little tables, and they were selling like cotton candy and stuff, but no, I need, I gotta go buy a stuffed animal, and you know, a little battery-powered fan that's gonna break the next day, like that's what Ellen  52:55   , yeah, I need, I need a carrot at the end to encourage my kid to lock in while we're at the zoo, like I need something to encourage my kid to just like chill out for a few minutes, like don't worry guys, if you, if you guys can lock in and get through this zoo trip with no ridiculousness, I mean, there could be a stupid little knickknack in it for you, Jason  53:17   so it sounds like the love of zoos and talking to zookeepers may not have passed on faithfully. Ellen  53:25   No, my kids are goblins, which I don't know where they got that from. I have no idea. Jason  53:32   You say that, and I don't know exactly what it means, but it sounds like they're trying to eat the animals. Ellen  53:41   Some of them, I catch them licking their lips a little bit. Brian  53:45   That snake looks delicious. All right, let's.. well, then let's move on to grades. Ellen, if you don't want to grade, you don't have to. We, Jason and I, are professors, so we give two grades. We will grade on fun, and we grade on scientific accuracy, so we'll just do this back to back, and I actually would like Jason to start this time. Jason  54:08   Okay, so I'm having to think again, like I really feel like I need several more plays throughs, which is a big ask in the game that take can take two plus hours for a single playthrough to feel this in depth. What I saw of the game, I would be comfortable giving it probably about an A minus for science. It's like they, they seem to have done a good job trying to tie things together. They have a good amount of actually, they don't have a good amount of information on the animals that they have pictures, and they have some tags. Brian  54:39   They have tags and where they're from, that's about it. Ellen  54:42   It's like a Yu-Gi-Oh card. Jason  54:45   Yeah, I think there would be opportunity there. So many games like this nowadays, they have that little line of flavor text that tells you about the animal, Ellen  54:52   I'd like to see more flavor text, for sure. Yeah, Jason  54:54   or a genus species or something, those little things that are not necessary parts of the game, but that you let. You layer it on a little bit more, and I think that they easily could have done that, because at least most of the cards that I was looking at seemed like they had extra space available to do so, Jason  55:10   and again, they were electronic versions, so maybe the physical versions do not have that, but it seems like there would be a very easy opportunity to just add a little extra layer of it, there, which is what I'm going to put out, an A minus, because largely I think it does what it wants to do, as far as being accurate, and the fact that the rule book says, like, they tried to be accurate, they acknowledged some of the places they, they diverged, I think that's fine, I guess going back, I do have the one nitpick, is just the bears, someone just likes bears too much, and it just wants to draw that circle wide, Brian  55:45   but again, bear was just a subclass, nothing was a bear, everything was a bear plus x, although I don't really know what that means, Ellen  55:52   but the fact that the bears are like the only subclass is very funny to me, Brian  55:55   that is true, it's like bears, no, you're right, there's no reason it should just be bears, Jason, let's do fun before I, before I derail us completely. Jason  56:04   Okay, so I will preface this by saying that I feel very inadequate to give a fun judgment on something that is number two on Board Game Geek. It's like I think the general geek culture has spoken, however, people do have different levels of fun. I can definitely see this being in the A category for fun. It definitel

S3E04.1 - The Mating Game (bonus)

#PangolinScienceGames #TheMatingGame #SexualSelection #BoardGames #Science #Bonus Summary In this bonus episode of Gaming with Science, we’re joined by Dr. Andrea Roth Monzón and Dr. Andrew Thompson of Pangolin Games to discuss their upcoming Kickstarter project, The Mating Game. We dive into how they’ve translated complex evolutionary concepts like sexual selection and reproductive trade-offs into a vibrant, cartoony tabletop experience that’s as much a teaching tool as it is a game. From the strategic nuances of "flashy" versus "sneaky" mating behaviors to the challenges of designing for a K-12 classroom, Andrea and Andrew share their eight-year journey of balancing hard science with high-energy fun. Whether you want to learn why an elephant seal dresses like a luchador or how games can foster a lifelong love of discovery, join us for a look at the wild world of sexual selection with The Mating Game. Timestamps * 00:00 - Introductions * 03:52 - Game vision and origin * 11:57 - Balancing science and fun * 17:01 - Tuning complexity * 23:31 - Tabletopia and classroom accessibility * 26:41 - Favorite other games * 31:50 - Kickstarter pitch Links * The Mating Game - Pre-launch page [https://prelaunch.pangolinsciencegames.com/6] and Tabletopia [https://tabletopia.com/games/the-mating-game]  * Pangolin Science Games on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/pangolinsciencegames] and Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/PangolinGames/], and Bluesky [https://bsky.app/profile/pangolingames.bsky.social] Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net [https://www.gamingwithscience.net]  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:06   Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:12   Today, we're having a creator interview with the creators of the mating game by pangolin games. Hey, welcome back to a bonus episode. This is Brian. Jason  0:22   This is Jason Brian  0:23   and today we are joined by Andrea Roth Monzón and Andrew Thompson, the creators of the mating game. Why don't you introduce yourselves? Andrea  0:31   I'm Andrea, a researcher. I've worked with a very broad different kinds of things. I've done anything from like herpetology to more like evolutionary ecology stuff to basically parasitology, which is where I'm at at the moment. And I've always been interested in teaching science and getting people interested in science, specifically from an experiential point of view. I think science is to be discovered. And so I think games create an opportunity to discover, basically science, to have an opportunity to discover the process before you actually learn about it through a game.  Brian  1:05   Awesome. Thank you.  Jason  1:06   And some vocabulary for our listeners. So herpetology is the study of like snakes and lizards and reptiles and stuff. Parasitology is the study of parasites. So it basically sounds like Andrea studies creepy crawly squiggly things. Brian  1:18   Herpetology is my favorite paraphyletic science. When I talk about jargon, it's a group of things that are not actually related to one another, right? Because you got amphibians and snakes and lizards and all the things that crawl across the ground, all the vertebrates that drag their bellies, Andrea  1:32   but you also have all the cool stuff. I still tell people they're my first love, and would always be my love. Brian  1:39   What about you? Andrew?  Andrew  1:41   Yeah. So my name is Andrew Thompson. I actually met Andrea in grad school, so that's where we started this venture together. My background is in microbiology, and I transitioned from microbiology as an undergraduate into biology, and I did some microbial ecology in soils, and I also did some astrobiology. So I got the opportunity to work down antarctica with the largest ice free region in Antarctica, and we were studying soils down there to understand kind of fundamental ecological processes, because it's a lot the diversity is so reduced to that you can actually ask some of these big questions. that led into astrobiology. And I've always been a big kind of sci fi idea guy, and so that fit really well. And after grad school, I decided that I was kind of tired of research, and I liked ideas more than I liked research. And so I've been transitioning since then towards more of a sci fi author, game entrepreneur thing, but I still am actively researching my postdoc right now, doing some computational biology work with soil food web modeling and also some more soil environmental microbiology. Brian  2:38   So just to clarify, you guys are both PhDs, correct? Yes, yes. Okay, so you're Dr Andrea and Dr Andrew.  Andrew  2:46   Yes, that's correct. Brian  2:48   Okay, but I did want to follow up. So you worked at, were you at McMurdo Station?  Andrew  2:52   I was yes, in the dry valleys.  Brian  2:55   I actually, I wonder if we know some of the same people. Brent Christner is somebody who I work with on cryoconite soils that were collected from Antarctica when I was an undergraduate. Brent Christer, well, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Jason  3:08   Don't worry. Like, when we were undergrad, this is like the stone age period, so, like, they hadn't accumulated enough geological layers yet to be that interesting. Andrew  3:18   I sure that we know some people who know the same people. Okay, I don't remember that name specifically, but I'm sure that if he was working on cryoconite holes in the dry valleys, and he was working with the leadership that I was working with, for sure, because they've been there for a long time. Brian  3:30   And Jason and I actually have a unpublished preprint on bacteria that were recovered from immured glacial ice at some point. And Jason does soil microbiology, and we're both microbiologists, so there's more connections here than we even realized. Awesome. That's cool.  Jason Wallace  3:45   Sorry Andrea we do plants, so we don't work with lizards and snakes and stuff. Andrea  3:49   Sorry, that's fine. I do fish now. So Jason Wallace  3:52    all right, well, let's talk about this game you've put together, the mating game, which I must admit, I was confused at first, because when I started looking this up, we need to work on your search engine optimization. I was like, I look it up, and I first find, like, a 1959 romantic comedy, a 2005 paranormal romance, some BBC nature special. And then apparently, a 1969 Hasbro board game that beat you to the name by like, 40 years. Brian  4:16   Hopefully, the copyright on that's already expired, though, so it shouldn't.  Jason Wallace  4:19   One should hope so. What is the mating game? Tell us about this game that you put together. Andrea  4:24   So the mating game is basically a game in which every single player is a multiplayer game. It works better with bigger crowds than smaller crowds. It's meant to be enjoyed by several people, and it's up to six players. So every player has basically a deck of cards with male traits, and then your strategy depends on how you basically choose the trait, because what you want to do is basically attract the ladies, right? This is an attract the ladies. Let them come to you so that you can mate, and then you can pass your genes on to the next generation. But there are risks, right? The environment plays a. A little bit here, and there will be risks. So the environment may give you very little resources, so you may not be able to invest in in such mate, or they may also kill you, or they may not be enough females for you, right? So it is a competition, and that's kind of had the gist, like the general gist of it, I would say, Andrew  5:16   Yeah, I would say that our the mating game is our attempt to bring in evolution. There's natural section and sexual selection. It's our attempt to bring this much less talked about, but still very important concept to a broader audience. And for the most part, I mean, there's the male side and the female side. The mating game focuses on the male side, the selection that males experience. It's animals, not humans. We get that question a lot, weirdly enough, and so the game is just trying to simulate what it's like to be a male and what it's like to invest differently in different strategies, to try and convince the females that you are worth taking a chance on so you can pass on your genes. And so it's trying to simulate that aspect of sexual selection and teach the concepts that are often taught in college courses in a game format. Brian  5:57   So what is the story of the mating game? How did you guys come to this game in particular? Tell me the origin story of the mating game. Andrea  6:05   So when I was in grad school, there was this class for teaching students, and so I was taking this class that it was meant for you to be a better professor. And so that kind of got us started. In this class, we were asked to do an activity to show our actual like research. And so I was doing competition at the moment, so nothing to do with mating, and I decided that I was going to do a competition game. And when I saw how well that work in the class setting with like other grad students, they were like, so happy and so excited about it. I started thinking about sexual selection, because sexual selection has been one of my favorite subjects in evolution, because I think it brings some of the coolest traits that people also don't know. I also think it brings a lot of like, misconceptions, the amounts of times I've talked to people that said, like, Oh, that's not natural, like in nature, like an animal doesn't do that. And I'm like, well, there's always exceptions, like, there's fish that change sex, there's full communities of all females. And so I've always been like, I feel like it is wrong that this is not known. And so I wanted to build a game that kind of showed that part that I felt was less conspicuous. And then, happily enough, I ran into Andy, who was also into games for science, and we started talking, and that kind of got us to refine it into a better game, because it wasn't as good as it is. Now, when we first started, Andrew  7:21   that is for sure, true has been eight years ago. We've been working on this game for eight years, which I don't know that I really want to admit, but it was definitely a very fun, iterative process. I remember many hours in the evenings, we'd get together and we'd just work on this game. Yeah. So for me, the desire to do science games started before the mating game, back in 2014 when I was actually traveling abroad, I saw this tree. It was called a cabbage trees in New Zealand. And I thought, wouldn't that be cool if that was on a card when I grown up playing card games like Magic, the Gathering in Pokemon and back then, back in 2014 and it's still true today, but there's a lot of controversy about things like climate change, and I wanted to figure out a way, or I thought games would be a really good way to engage people who may have been turned off by simple articles or lectures or who wouldn't get access to information about science in a non threatening way, where they could kind of experience why species diversity mattered, and learn the value of species diversity. And I thought games would be a great way. So I actually went home after that experience, and I started tinkering around with the game. The game part never worked. I made the cards and stuff, and they looked cool. I could never make a community ecology game work, but Andrea actually saw my prototype on my screen as I was working on it one day at work. And she was like, Hey, you're making a game. I have a game idea. And so we put our heads together and start talking about the mating game, which turned out to be much more tractable.  Brian  8:33   Do one of you want to describe the mating game? How do you play it? What does it look like? Just in brief, I Andrew  8:39   think the most important thing to know, if you're not seeing the mating game, is that the mating game was first and foremost designed to be fun and engaging. And I think when you look at the cover of the game, that's what comes across. I personally want to steer away from very descriptive art. I love descriptive art of natural phenomena, but I wanted this game to look fun, and so the colors and the designs are a bit more cartoony than descriptive, and very bright and vibrant. This is supposed to be inviting to people who are not, maybe, who are not really used to science necessarily, like Andrea mentioned earlier. It's a card game where you are selecting different strategies that you see in real life, so things like large feathers or massive body sizes, and you're trying to say, Hey, can I use this to survive the physical environment and then also convince the females on the board that I am worth taking a chance on. So the goal of the game is to gain as much offspring as you possibly can, and to do that, you have to out compete your competitors, your other males, and convince the females that you are actually worth mating with. And to do that, you you invest your food, your energy, into the traits. And so some traits cost more, some traits cost less. There isn't a better or wrong trade. It's just you're up to you to decide what's the best way to manage that. Brian  9:45   Let me see. So things are split down into three major categories. There's combat, there's flashy, and there's sneaky. I'm gonna pick out a couple of my favorites. So obviously, flashy is your peacock, right? Your gigantic Display feature. To try to attract attention. for combat I think my favorite is the elephant seal. Just absolutely ridiculous differences between males and females, like monstrous males just beating the crap out of one another to try to maintain control of the local female population. What's some of the best sneaky strategies? Because I definitely saw something about sperm competition on those cards. Andrea  10:23   So I think I don't know. I mean, I like the sperm competition one, because I do think, like, it's not something that people think about. Like people think usually that the choice is more like in the selection, and they forget that they could be selection after the choice. And so some of the sneaky ones were meant to kind of bring light to that that sometimes even if the choice is made, there is ways to control that choice afterwards. I also like some of the ones that give more play to the females. Like show you how maybe females are choosing, or why females are choosing certain things. I've always liked the one in which the male kind of looks like a female and just sneaks around, right, so it doesn't actually gets to compete, right? Like you're not competing. You basically make yourself look like a female, and then you can approach females and other males just think, like, Oh, I'm getting an extra female. So that's great. And then you actually get to mate, right? And so I think that that sneaky behavior is really good. And so those two, I think would be my favorites if I was to choose Jason Wallace  11:20   Yeah, I will say, when I played this game with Brian, Andrew, you mentioned the sort of cartoony vibe of all the drawings, and yet all the concepts are very hard science. So there are things like the nuptial banquet, where you present food in order to lure your mate in, and also, like, give them extra energy and such. And it's a very hardcore, like very tried and true scientific concept. I'm looking at the card here. It has like what looks like a mosquito, like laying out this candle lit dinner for someone, or Brian's elephant seals, who in the game are dressed up like luchadors. I like the juxtaposition of the hard science fact with the sort of goofy, cartoony way of displaying it.  Andrew  11:57   Thanks. I'm really glad you pointed it out, because we spent a lot of time, not only coming up with kind of the vibe that we wanted, and then we communicated to the artists, but also we we spent a lot of time going over each trait and saying, What is a good human analogy that would help people and like understand this without us having to sacrifice anything else. And one of the things we told the artists was we really, we really emphasize. We want you to make this fun and engaging, but we want you to make the animal as accurate as possible, while also making it fun, right? We don't want any spiders that have their legs coming off both the head and the abdomen, because it's not accurate. We don't want a Halloween spider. So the spider in the game the Peacock Spider, they used Peacock Spider references, and you can tell they even match the patterns, but then they have them juggling, which is obviously not something that a Peacock Spider can do. But we wanted to make sure that people also were clear that we were communicating, not that this is a Peacock Spider card, but this is a display trait. And so by having the luchador mask and the banquet, it was less about the organism, even though the organism was a good example of that trait, and more about the trait itself. And so I do remember spending a lot of time trying to make sure the art came across, probably, maybe too much time, honestly, for a game, but like, it was really important to us to make sure that was both engaging but also communicating the accurate science. Brian  13:09   There's another game by Brexwerx games. It's their second game called eight leg Peacock, which is specifically about the peacock spiders. And it's a card matching game, or something like that. It's, it's fun, but yes, from looking at that in peacock spiders, that's the one spider I would not be surprised to find one juggling out in the wild. Jason  13:28   Yes, very, very tiny bowling pins. Yes, spiders are like the size of a pin head, Brian  13:35   but they're so cute. How many jumping spiders can you fit on the head of a pin head? Andrew  13:39   That would be the find of a century if you found a Peacock Spider juggling in the Australian outback. Brian  13:45   So I guess, with that in mind, it sounds like you had this was one of the questions I wanted to ask anyway, how did you decide what you wanted to include and what you wanted to exclude from the game? Obviously, you couldn't include everything. What got simplified in the process, what got simplified and what kind of like, what hit the cutting room floor for Andrew  14:01   for us, we started with a very clear idea of what we wanted the game to do. We weren't just making a game, we were making a teaching tool. Our audience was teaching people both in the classroom, because we did a little bit of play testing with other games beforehand, and we recognized that a lot of tabletop games aren't really conducive to being played in a classroom setting like a high school, because they don't they take too long, one to learn and usually to play, and we really wanted the game to be accessible to teachers, because that's where a lot of education happens. And we also wanted to be accessible to people who weren't necessarily wanting to learn and sit down and play a game. And we wanted so that means it had to be engaging, right? And we also wanted to make it accessible to people who weren't big strategy gamers. So those kind of three things were the starting point, and from that kind of flowed what we decided to do, and then Andrea had a very specific idea of the things that she wanted to teach. We actually have learning outcomes in the rule book, and that came from very early iterations where we're like, this is what we want to teach, and that's what we don't Andrea  14:53   want to teach. Yeah, the learning outcomes were actually very useful for us, because a lot of things that when we figured like this, may be a misconception, if it did not interfere with our learning outcomes, it wasn't something that we were going to stop. And so that's why, also, like, in the rule book, there is also, like a misconception area, because we were like, there are certain things that you're going to get wrong or you're going to misconcept. And then I would say, like, the biggest thing is, like, we didn't shy around humanizing traits, which, in theory, that's not like a lot of classrooms trying not to do that, but we were like, This is the best way in terms to make it fun. We kind of wanted to make sure, like core elements of science did not get twisted or misunderstood. But other than that, if we were had to sacrifice something so that it will be more fun or more easy to play, we kind of did. at the end of everything. It is a game, and the whole point is for people to have fun. And part of the visuals also helped us with that. Because if we were like, if we can make visuals accurate, if people remember, like, cute spiders, or at least the diversity of traits, that's also giving people other stuff to think about. And so at least we get that part in. And so sometimes we went for other things in order to not completely mess around. So like, for the nest, it was like a big thing for us to just not have just a single image of what a nest is that was just like a bird nest, so that we could get away from this idea of, like there are several different ways of nest, and we wanted to do that. So sometimes images help us not get rid totally of something just by using a diversity of image or having a diversity of stuff. Yeah, I Brian  16:19   think you're right. I think it's actually kind of I think it's known, but maybe it's a little underappreciated how fun the role play of a board game is. It's like, oh, I am now playing my giant elephant seal versus your, I don't know, tiny hippo with an itty bitty bite or something like that. That doesn't really make sense. And you have done something that I always like to see. You're very clear about how you're representing the science. What's accurate, what's not accurate. It's one of my favorite things to see in one of these games, when somebody takes that seriously and doesn't just leave it to chance, is explicit about that. So kudos for you for taking that little bit of extra effort and spacing your rule book to making it clear and also just designing for the classroom. It's awesome. Nobody wants to do that, so thank you for doing that too. Jason  17:01   Yeah, our listeners at this point are probably tired of hearing about how educational games is a dirty word in the gaming industry. It's nice seeing you with that explicit goal and also the considerations of because we have noticed several of the games we have played on this podcast have great lessons in them, and there's no way you could deploy them in the K through 12 classroom because they take too long. They're too complicated, anything like that. I wouldn't say you've gotten all the way to a party game on this, but you're definitely very, very close to one in terms of complexity and ease of use and everything, Andrew  17:29   yeah, and that's a little bit my fault. The version we had when we both graduated grad school was actually less complex and it didn't even have a board. But I was concerned, especially after play testing, that a lot of the females weren't represented well enough, and we didn't want to give this impression that the females didn't matter in sexual selection at all. And so I actually introduced the board so that one we could get around that conception, because you can show the females on the board, and then also because there, we felt like there was too much. There was a potential for misunderstanding the difference between competition and combat, like people kept saying, Oh, it's a blue card. It doesn't compete. It's like, well, no, they don't combat, but they absolutely compete. But the board allowed us to have two different colored females, which isn't technically accurate, and showing that they actually do compete, and that when you have the female scarcity taking, you know, female tokens away, that's one of the reasons that there's a difference between the intra and intersexual so it's true, we didn't, we didn't quite get there, but we were almost there, and that was just because of a last minute change, honestly. Brian  18:25   So in the combat strategy, it's an all or nothing, right? The winner takes the all of the females. That's the idea. in the competition version, from  Andrea  18:33   The flashy Brian  18:34   the flashy strategy, it's relative to how flashy you are, right? Right? So there's a different balance between they both can be successful strategies, but you're balancing the probability of being success based on that, which I think is very cool at a very, sort of a very subtle way of, sort of getting at this and and, of course, the females are important. They're literally the whole thing. It's the whole reason you have these nonsensical, ridiculous strategies is because of the power of sexual selection. Andrea  19:02   Yeah, we thought it was very interesting that when we were play testing, a lot of people comments were like, the females were not present. And I was like, but the females are the ones that are choosing. They're the drivers of the whole competition. And so that's kind of what brought us, like, the amount of people that really were like, this is like, such a chauvinistic male kind of perspective. And we were like, wait, what? Like, we were not expecting, right? And so that was one of the things that we were like, well, we don't want that. That's not what we want people to take from the game. And if we can, if we have to compromise into, like, putting maybe a little bit more complication into it so that people don't get that idea, it's totally worth it. And I would also say, like, part of what we like is that it's not only bringing that complication of like an all or nothing, depending on if you're using flashy or combat, but also depending on the environment, right? Because if you're our combat one, you're less likely to survive to certain things, right? And so that also plays into that, into sometimes, if your environment gets really complicated. And we actually, because we were thinking about teaching right, like, if you play the normal game, we just have one set of like environment cards, which are more like diverse but for the teaching setting, we actually do have cards that make like an extreme environment in which you maybe get no resources, or one in which you get like so much predation that you're basically going to be killed at every moment. And that is really good from the teaching perspective, because it shows you how you would normally adjust and be like, Oh, I'm not playing that, because I'm going to get eaten every single time, so I'm just not going to play that right. And it really drives the point across when you're teaching about how those two things are interplaying and how they actually feed and so how you can get such weird traits, even if they're not great for survival, Brian  20:45   because you could be like the very sexiest male ever with a peacock with a tail that's six times the size of its body, and if you get eaten, it doesn't matter. You lost, you lost, you don't leave any offspring. Having a massive body also takes a lot of energy, Andrew  21:00   and often there are trade offs. Yeah, that there puts a limit on how large you can get, and that limit is definitely defined by the environment. What Andrea was saying you guys, maybe, I don't know if you played around with it, but the cards themselves, you can make different decks using the environment cards. So at the bottom of the card, you had an S or a V, you're supposed to take the V's out. I don't know if you did. I think we did. Okay. So if the V's represented, if you have those in it represent a variable environment, you can actually lose energy. So it encourages you to invest immediately that turn, because you don't know if you'll lose anything you saved up, whereas a stable environment allows you to save up. One of my favorite examples of this when we were teaching, because we did teach in the evolution class that we had, was that I would ask students, after we swapped out the stable versus variable environment to give me examples of stable versus variable environments. And they would often, you know, cite something like a jungle versus a desert. And I was like, okay, yeah, but what? So they're thinking physical environment. What about in the same environment? Are there examples of stable and variable environments? And I would, I would say, like, what about a mouse versus an elephant? They both can live in the exact same physical location, but an elephant can expect to save up over many years and invest heavily in a single offspring, whereas a mouse doesn't expect to live very long, and so that's why they reproduce a lot as much as they possibly can. I always like that, because it just shows a new perspective on that concept. Brian  22:09   Very cool. Is there anything that you tried to get into the game and you just couldn't figure out how to make it work? Andrew  22:15    I don't think so. I think that the most we struggled with, I remember struggling with is that we had a lot of really great suggestions from play testers of great game mechanics that would either confuse the science or that just didn't fit with the science. And even though it would have made the game more fun, we had to cut it. And that was challenging because, of course, we were trying to make the game as fun as possible. So I think there are, there are things that aren't in the current version of the game, but we could add more into, like more strategies. In fact, we have strategies that we're planning to put into the game, if we raise enough funds for it. But in terms of like element of the science, I think we accomplished what we set out to do. There's certainly aspects of sexual selection that we didn't... I would eventually, if this works out, I'd eventually like to do a sexual section game from the female perspective. I think that would be really fun, but we never set out to do that with this game. Brian  23:00   So you need the counterpoint game. The counterpoint, yeah, I'm just realizing you have a great analogy for balancing selective pressures. You have to make a game that is very fun and also teaches good science. You can't do all of one. You can't do all of the other. If it teaches great science that's not fun, no one's gonna play it. If it's all fun and teaches no science, well, then you've also missed one of your key goals. So you you have a wonderful analogy for sexual selection right there in front of you.  Andrew  23:27   That's awesome. That's so meta. Brian  23:31   Another thing that I noticed is that you've got the meta game up on tabletopia. Could you tell us about that? What was that experience like? And why did you choose tabletopia? Andrew  23:39   I chose tabletopia because I had used tabletopia A little bit, and it was free, and I knew what to do, and I didn't really spend a ton of time looking for other ones. I know there are other ones out there, but, you know, I had limited time, and I guess I was ignorant and didn't know if there was better options. As far as, what was that like? You guys don't like work for tabletopia at all do you? No I really appreciate having tabletopia. That was awesome, being able to put my cards up there. And I used it to play test with people, with the artists who were different states, and friends who are different states, and because I was living in a place by myself and didn't have it, I mean, Andrea and I moved on, moved up different places, and it was really awesome to be able to do that. Yeah, I'm not really sure what's behind that question. Like loading the cards onto tabletopia was a painful experience, and I've done it many times, and I've learned you just have to have all the sizes. Have to be exactly the same across all the cards, which wasn't so big a deal when the artists were making the final versions of the cards, because they know what they're doing, but when I was just tinkering around in Illustrator and PowerPoint, like I had to post cards up many, many times, and that's very frustrating. So I'm grateful for tabletopia, but it was, there was a little bit of learning curve. Brian  24:45   Well, I know people. I've seen, I've heard other people, for instance, having games on Board Game Arena. Often it's part of like the social media pitch. It's like, Oh, if you want to try out the game, this is a great place to do it, stuff like that. So I was just curious about that choice. So it was both a it was primarily for playtesting, yes, okay. But also it's like, it's now out there in a digital format. Andrew  25:04   I mean, now that I have it up there, yeah, I mean, I absolutely use it as a we'll use it as a way to market the game. Brian  25:10   Also, another thing, when you're thinking about getting into a classroom that, I mean, all of these kids have Chromebooks now, right? That's a great way to, you know, in addition to the physical copy, but that can be limiting in certain environments. So now you've got tabletopia, so they can still play the game, even if they can't, you know, buy 12 copies of the mating game, which I'm sure you would like them to. Andrew  25:30   But I actually do have an idea for that to reduce the costs for educators, because I do recognize that educators don't always have the funds for that. The idea is that I just take because you can play with six if you have a classroom of 30 people, you should be able to do with five copies of the game. And I was thinking a lot of the cost for the game actually comes from the weight of the box itself, right? True. Was a shipping cost because a lot of boxes aren't packed. Super efficient. So I was thinking you could probably reduce it. And I've done, I've run the numbers, I think you could reduce from the cost if you can get five versions of the game into one bigger box for three fifths of the cost. Ooh, clever. Yeah. So that's what I'm exploring. I can't guarantee that it will work, because I have to raise enough fund like I have, because you have to scale both, right? Then I have two copies of the game, two versions of the game, and I have to get enough funders that want the teacher version in order to make that reliable. But I think it's a clever idea, and I think it will be appealing to at least some educators out there, Brian  26:21   yeah, I think so too. I'm thinking about, like, what you know when you go to the grocery store and the discount cereal is in a bag instead of a box, because a bag is cheaper than a box, right? Andrew  26:30   Because the shipping costs is part of it, yeah, and the bag itself is cheaper than the box. Yeah, that's cool. But tabletopia is a great I had never thought about using the digital tabletopia version in the classroom. Think about that, Brian  26:42   so I can see, because we actually have a camera feed, that Andrew has some games behind him. So I wanted to ask, what are some of your favorite games? Jason  26:52   Andrea, I'm gonna say you go first, because Andrew's been talking a lot. It's your turn. Agreed. Andrea  26:58   Okay, I'm a simple type of games. I would say, in terms of like tables games. I say I still play a lot of Scrabble, so that's one of my favorite games. But I also used to like a lot of UNO. That's what I used to play. So I would say, like, most of the games I play are very simple. And we always say that Andy is the strategy one, and I'm the give me the simple game in which I match colors, or I match little things, and that's what I play and I enjoy the most. So I'm a simple kind of games, which works well for this relationship, because if we get the mating game to actually be successful and continue on this I like, I have a lot like, I want to build a, you know, have you ever played like Hungry Hippo? Yeah, I want to build like, an accurate Hungry Hippo for like, elementary children, because I'm like, that would be easy to do, and most of my PhD research was competition, and that's what I was looking I was looking at character displacement, and so I will be super happy to make one for elementary kids to play, like, Hungry Hippo kind of thing. So those are the kind of like, the simple minded games are the ones I love. Brian  28:01   My brain is buzzing right now with ideas. We played this game when we were kids where we had a big bin, a big plastic bin, and it had beans and it had worms and it had staples and all those different things, and they gave all the kids different little beaks to try to pick stuff up with. A Hungry, Hungry Hippos where you're changing what the mouth looks like would be really, really cool.  Andrea  28:22   Well, that's exactly yeah, because, like, I was saying, like, when I built that game for the class that I was talking before, you know, that was what I did. I basically did different tools and different resources. And so people could choose which tool. And so some were generalists, and some was specialist. And so if you're a specialist, you could only get some, but then also the resources had different points, and so some costs, like, give you more energy than other ones, and so that's what they play. And people are really excited. So I really want to do Brian  28:48   that is a game that you should try out on Tabletop Simulator, because it's got a physics engine in it. Jason  28:54   I'm just picturing Hungry, Hungry Darwin's finches.  Brian  29:02   That would be TM, TM, TM. No, I'm just kidding, you guys take that, you should Okay, well, I think that actually we're kind of coming to about the end of. Oh, wait, Andrew, you didn't do yours. I'm sorry, Andrew, what are your favorite games? I'm looking at what behind you right now that I don't know, so I want you to go and then I'm going to ask you about one of the games that's behind you. Andrew  29:21   Okay, well, I'll keep it real brief. I mean, I Yeah, it's funny, because I was always trying to make the mating game more complex. I do like complex games. My two favorite games, I'll just keep it to two, is first, not a science game. Betrayal at house on the hill  Jason  29:34   I love that game Andrew  29:35   I love the narrative storytelling. I love how the game changes halfway through and almost becomes a totally different game. My biggest complaint about the game is there's not enough diversity of tiles, because I want the mansion to be bigger and and more interesting. But I love that game. The other game that I really love, that is a science game, is photosynthesis. And I love that one primarily because when you play it, at least personally, you feel like a tree. You You have to be playing you have to be investing upfront. You have to be making choices upfront. That affect the very end of the game. It's difficult to shift strategy as you go. I love how they make it feel. I love the mechanic of the Sun circling around and like the competition, like the game wasn't intended, I think, to be educational, necessarily, but they did a great job of simulating the life of a tree. And I think that I really, really, really enjoy that my wife, however, thinks it's the most boring game ever. And so, you know, whatever it is, what it is, Jason  30:22   I think we're more on your side. That was our number one game. The very first episode we ever did. Our first Brian  30:27   episode was photosynthesis, yeah, okay, that's awesome. And I think we decided it was actually a game about forestry. Yeah, the lumber industry more than about a natural ecosystem, yes, for sure. But yeah, it was fun. It was definitely unique. And, you know, lot of games use science as I don't know, never mind. I don't want to get distracted with this. They weren't trying to teach science. They just did it by accident. Andrew  30:50    It was a theme. They're replicating a theme, although Brian  30:53   I really can't imagine that mechanic making sense for anything else. How would you re skin that? It you just couldn't. Andrew  31:00   Yeah, no, it's great. It's why it works as an educational game. It needs some tweaks. I've definitely thought about tweaking it. Brian  31:06   Okay, now you have a game on the shelf behind you that I don't I know most of the games that are up there, I do not know what CO2 is. Tell me about CO2. Andrew  31:13   I actually haven't played CO2. I've had it for a long time. It's, it's very pretty, like all good games should be, right? So it's, uh, it's basically, you play as an economy trying to reduce your carbon dioxide output. Brian  31:27   Okay, so we just played, uh, very recently, we played daybreak, which was a cooperative game by Matt Leacock and Mateo Menapace, which is, which is this, it's, it's a game about climate change and combating climate change. It's a lot of fun, very hard, because climate change is a very hard problem. Andrew  31:43   Yes, well, that's cool. Daybreak, I'll have to put down my list.  Brian  31:46   Yeah, you should. It's really It's very pretty, too. Speaking of all games, should be pretty. It definitely is. So what about news? Tell us about when is the mating game? You know, we want to try to help get the word out. So tell us about the mating game. When? When can people find it on Kickstarter? And why should they buy the meta game?  Andrew  32:01   I don't have a Kickstarter date, but it'll be March of 2026, probably the beginning of the month, and there's a pre launch page you can sign up for. And I would say that it's super helpful if people who think they might want to buy it, or think they will probably buy it, or at least look into it, if they click on the Save Link on that pre launch page, that's super helpful. Gives me an idea of how many people I have that are interested in, and lets me know when I should be launching or whether I should be launching. And then we're also on Instagram, primarily pangolin science games. All of our socials have pangolin science games because pangolin games is already taken, which is fine, because it works. We're on Instagram mostly. We're on Facebook a little bit, and also blue sky. So be looking for updates there. Brian  32:37   Okay, fantastic.  Andrea  32:38   Why support the game? So I would say several things. One, I think, is because it's fun and you'll have fun. Second one is because it can teach you something. But like, I tell people, like, it doesn't teach you if you don't want to, like, if you just play the game and don't think about it, you don't necessarily will get that much from it. Then if you actually go through, actually reflecting on what you're doing. And then the other one, I think, is because science matters. and science education matters. And we want people to be more aware of scientific facts and just critical thinking, so that when you see stuff in the news, you kind of have a better idea of what's happening around or why that matters. And I think we've done kind of a crappy job at letting people understand all that goes behind the things you're getting. And so I'm hoping that also it's, it's supporting science, especially right now, where it's kind of a hard sell at the moment for many, many ways. And so I think that that is part of it. And then my hope is also that it will bring the idea of how amazing and diverse the world is, right? Like, I always say, like, sometimes we focus too much like we did, keep traits that are iconic, like the peacock tail, but there are so many more traits that animals have that people may not know about it. And just being able to see all of that diversity and fall in love with all of that diversity, and kind of experience it in a game form is really, really valuable, and I would say that at least should get you excited.  Andrew  33:59   I would like to add that support the mating game, because you want to support us in our vision. And we do have a vision. We're not just out here making games like Andrea said, we really want to support science education, and more than just science education in a formal sense, we really want to make science as an understanding, like understanding of the processes that our world is governed by, intuitive for people, right? So if you had people playing games in classrooms about all sorts of topics. Then as they grew up, not only did they remember those topics more intuitively, better because of the way it was presented in game form, but they have a greater appreciation, right? Because you've associated games and science and fun all in one thing that's not threatening. The other thing I want to point out is that it's not just about science as like an abstract out there, fun concept to learn about, but this game is a great example of this. But science teaches us a lot about ourselves, especially biology. I know some people don't want to admit it, but we are animals, right? So we have the evolutionary and ecological context. I mean, the mating game doesn't explicitly say anything about human mating behavior, but a lot of the same rules apply, and we're not going to get into that, because that's a whole different field. But by learning the concepts through games About, you know, abstract things, you can actually learn a lot about why people behave the way you do, why we behave the way we do, and what to do about it. And I think that that is more of a abstract goal of ours, but I think that there has a lot of personal value. Brian  35:13   What's next for pangolin? Are we? Are we going to see the female selective pressure? Andrew  35:17   There's all sorts of games. I have a list of at least five or six that I've been toying with, Andrea has her list. One thing I'd like to do in the future is bring in not just biologists, but also physicists and geologists, and try to do the same thing with that. We have a whole vision for where this could go. And so back us, because you support in that vision, and because without you, without consumers telling us what they want, we'll never get there. Brian  35:38   Yeah, you got to respond to that selective pressure, right? Jason  35:40   Yes, exactly. All right. Well, that seems like a good place to wrap it up. So thank you. Andrea, thank you Andrew, for being on here. Good luck on your Kickstarter. We'll try to time the dropping of this episode to be at or shortly before when you go live. So best of luck then and Meantime, listeners, thank you for listening and have a great month and happy games Brian  36:01   and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya, 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