S1E9 - Earth (ecology) - Gaming with Science

Episode Transcript
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Jason (00:00):
Music. Hello and welcome to the gaming with science

(00:07):
podcast where we talk about thescience behind some of your
favorite games.

Brian (00:11):
Today, we're going to discuss Earth, by Inside-Up
Games.
All right, hey, welcome back toGaming with Science. This is
Brian,

Jason (00:26):
this is Jason,

Alex (00:27):
and this is Alex.

Brian (00:28):
Hey, Alex, how's it going? We've got another guest
host today. Alex Strauss, whydon't you introduce yourself?

Alex (00:34):
Yeah, I'm happy to be here. So my name is Alex
Strauss, I am an assistantprofessor in the ecology school
at UGA, and I'm a card carryingecologist, so I was happy to
play the ecology themed game.

Brian (00:49):
Yeah, we appreciate it. It's nice to get somebody who
really knows their stuff.

Jason (00:53):
And this is a milestone. This is the first time we've
actually been able to meet oneof our guests in person and
actually play the game withthem, like this is history now.

Alex (01:02):
Oh my gosh, I can't, I can't imagine having to do this
without having played the game.You know, that seems like such a
fundamental part of having thisall work.

Brian (01:10):
Not only that, you kicked both of our butts on your first
time playing.

Alex (01:15):
I had no idea what the score was, and I wasn't as
surprised as either of you.
So maybe that card carryingecologist thing actually, like,
actually paid off for you.
Well, I don't know if myecologist skills translated at
all to this particular game. Iwas struggling to keep up with,
with all the rules and ways toscore and just kind of playing

(01:35):
cards that seemed fun to me. Somaybe that's a strategy for
anyone out there who's listeningis, don't overthink it and just
play some cards. And who knowswhat'll happen?

Jason (01:44):
Yeah, we'll get into the complexity later.

Brian (01:46):
Before we get into the game, why don't we do our
science topic? Alex, I don'tknow if you had anything to talk
about today.

Alex (01:52):
Sure. I, so I looked up some statistics. These aren't
necessarily things that allecologists sort of walk around
knowing, but, this game made mewant to do a little bit of
research. So the two things Iwas trying to look up were, how
many species are there in theworld? What proportion of those
are plants? And if, instead ofjust counting species, like one

(02:15):
for each species, what if wecount how much carbon or biomass
is locked in those differentthings, like, how important are
plants in the big picture? Thisbeing a plant themed game,
that's sort of where, where mymind went. So okay, so here's
here's the numbers, here's thestatistics. And the thing that

was pretty surprising to me (02:33):
how much uncertainty there is in our
estimates of pretty much allthose things. So estimates for
total number of species in theworld ranges on the lower end
from 2 million, just like a bignumber, but that's the lower
end, and the upper end is 3trillion.

(02:54):
Oh, goodness, I was hoping wewould be at least within two
orders of magnitude,
yeah. So we're three orders ofmagnitude apart. So really, what
that means is nobody has anyidea, we're all sort of throwing
darts at the board. So that wasthe first thing that was sort of
surprising to me. The secondthing is that consensus seems to

(03:15):
be that plants, we have about300,000 to 400,000 plants. So
that's including ones that havebeen identified, and estimates
of the number of plants thathave not been discovered or are
not yet known to science. That'sa relatively small fraction of
the total species of things, sosomewhere between like 1% and

(03:39):
15%, and that's somewhat at oddswith... So the other thing I was
looking up was, how much justbiomass is there in the world?
There's about 550 gigatons ofcarbon in the biosphere.

Jason (03:55):
That's 550 billion tons.

Alex (03:57):
Yes. And if you don't know what a gigaton, if you can't
conceptualize a gigaton, I can'teither. But Google told me that
one gigaton of carbon is aboutequal to 200 million elephants.

Brian (04:12):
which is also hard to picture, I suppose.

Alex (04:14):
I'm not sure if we're getting any closer to the truth
here. Okay, so anyway, so 550gigatons of carbon in the
biosphere, and about 450gigatons of carbon are in
plants. So plants are about 80%of the living biomass of the

(04:34):
world, so big fraction of that,but only between, like 1% and
15% of the unique species

Brian (04:42):
That's crazy

Alex (04:44):
In the world.

Jason (04:45):
Yeah, now I'm gonna say I'm not too surprised about the
species part, because if theperson making those numbers did
it right, they're counting allthe microbes. Brian and I both
have extensive experience inmicrobes and those things, I
mean, there's. 1000s or 10s of1000s of them in one scoop of
soil. So, like, there's a bunchof those. And also, we don't

(05:06):
actually know how to define aspecies for most of them, so
that's why we have the threeorders of magnitude.

Unknown (05:11):
That's exactly what I was gonna say. I think a lot of
that uncertainty in those ordersof magnitude are disagreement
about, like, what even counts asa species, and probably advances
and detection methods for themicrobes in particular.

Brian (05:25):
One of the interesting things when you think about
plants is that at its core,every plant is trying to do the
same thing. They're all tryingto capture the same resources,
the same way. They're allfunda... like so it's it's a
little different than animals,where there's all this
opportunity perspective for tospecialize to different
behaviors,

Unknown (05:44):
yeah, and I know I was actually, I was thinking about
that in the context of thisgame, in the sense, like, we'll
get into that later, I guess.But like, the way you grow all
plants in this game is withsoil. Like that there's one
resource that all plants need.And I guess as an ecologist, I
took a little bit of an issuewith that, this would really get

(06:05):
into the weeds. No pun intended,but, but really, plants need
water and sunlight andnutrients, and if you want to
break down the nutrients intonitrogen and phosphorus and
other micronutrients, you know,plants have lots of special
needs. Yeah, I wouldn'tnecessarily put soil at the top
of that list, or even, like, inthe list.

Jason (06:28):
Last episode was Terraforming Mars and
hydroponics was top of the listof things to do there. So,

Alex (06:34):
yeah, there you go. And like, there's plants in the in
the desert, there's, yeah,there's, there's orchids that
don't even need soil

Brian (06:42):
interesting. So we should definitely, well, we'll come
back to that in the nitpickcorner, because I think we're
all going to be picking at thisone a little bit.

Jason (06:50):
I've got one fun science fact I wanted to throw out, just
because this was really cool. Astudy came out in nature human
behavior that shows that videogames are actually good for your
mental health.

Brian (07:02):
I agree.

Unknown (07:03):
Yeah, that's a huge relief to me, personally. That's
great.

Jason (07:06):
Well, the thing is, this is actually a really cool study,
because the problem withstudying human behavior, it's so
hard to make good experiments,especially something like this.
But they took advantage of thefact that during the COVID
lockdown, that there was ashortage of video game consoles
that were in high demand, likethe Nintendo Switch and the
PlayStation 5. And in Japan,stores implemented a random

(07:29):
lottery. People would enter toget a system. They would
randomly draw when they got somein, and people whose name came
up would get the system. And sosome scientists looked at the
people who entered and got thesystem, and the people who
entered and did not get thesystem, and compared their
mental health over the severalmonths after they got the game
system, and found that, yeah,for the people who got it, their

(07:50):
mental health generally went up,up to about, like, one to three
hours of gameplay per day. Morethan that, it sort of leveled
off. Presumably, there arelimits. I mean, there's caveats,
like this was in the middle ofCOVID, like pretty much anything
would get people's mental healthgoing up from that point,
because lots of people were inbad spots. But it's really cool
to actually see this sort ofdata. I now want to see the same

(08:11):
thing with board games, but Idon't know how we're going to
get that.

Brian (08:15):
I mean, I guess we have to find the right natural
experiment to occur,sociological experiment. No,
Animal Crossing was a lifesaverduring early lockdown,

Unknown (08:24):
I logged so many hours of Splatoon 2, which is, yeah,
we can probably cut that.

Brian (08:35):
Probably not.

Jason (08:35):
We are not cutting that!

Brian (08:41):
Okay, so you guys want to talk about Earth?

Jason (08:43):
Sure.

Brian (08:44):
So let's get into it. Earth is a game by Maxime
Tardif. He's a Canadian boardgame designer, and it's
published by Inside-Up Games. Itis for one to five players.
We've seen a lot of games now,having a solo mode almost seems
to be a prerequisite for amodern game that's coming out in
2024. It's for players 14 andup, takes about 45 to 90

(09:04):
minutes. What do you think aboutthat time, Jason and Alex, Is
that about right?

Jason (09:09):
Yeah. I guess if you got two people who knew the game and
were playing pretty rapidly, youcan get down to 45 minutes.

Brian (09:15):
Earth is an engine builder game. So what's a good
description of an engine buildergame? I suppose it's when the
abilities on individualcomponents of the game start to
stack up and reinforce eachother in interesting ways. Does
that seem like a reasonabledefinition of an engine builder?

Jason (09:32):
That works for me.

Brian (09:33):
The idea of engines and interactions as a metaphor for
ecology, I think this isrelatively common in the board
game sphere. It's somethingwe've seen before. Notably, I
would say that Wingspan doesthis. Yes, we're talking about
wingspan already. I apologize. Iwould say that Earth definitely
is pulling from a similaroverall playbook to Wingspan.
But I would also say it'ssubstantially more complex and

(09:55):
fiddly. It is a victory pointdriven card game. There's 429
unique cards in earth, and yourgoal ultimately is to create a
four by four grid of terrain andflora cards. Flora is including
plants and fungi. All of thesecards use photographs rather
than illustrations, and everycard has its own little factoid

(10:16):
flavor text at the bottom, whichI know Alex said he didn't even
notice when we were playing.

Alex (10:21):
I was so focused on just understanding, remembering all
the rules and all the way toscore points that I like, I
didn't even notice that all thecards had little factoids, like
Wingspan, since you alreadybrought it up,

Brian (10:34):
How do you play the game? There is a common central play
mat, and on that mat you've gotfour fauna cards for animals,
basically, as well as twoecosystem cards that these are
going to comprise public victorypoint goals that anybody can get
if they've met certainconditions. But each player has
their own player mat, and thatplayer mat's going to have a
little island card thatrepresents a real island out

(10:57):
there in the world, as well as aclimate card and their own
ecosystem card that represents aprivate goal. Every one of these
cards is double sided. So whenyou get an island card, there's
actually two different islands.You get to choose which one you
want. There's a place on yourplayer mat to keep event cards.
These are different types ofecological disturbances like
fire or tsunamis or there's somekind of unexpected ones. I think

(11:20):
rainbow is on there?

Jason (11:22):
Yeah, the rainbow that makes the plants grow. Still
don't get that one.

Brian (11:26):
Sure. I mean, they're not all, they're not all ecological
disturbances, but a lot of themare. These are things that have
sort of a cost, but also abenefit of some kind the
disturbance. So like, why wouldyou play a forest fire on
yourself? Because you're goingto get some resources for do
that. You'll lose some things,which will gain some other.
There's also a place to putcompost whicih are just face
down cards. Each of those cardsare going to be worth one

(11:48):
victory point, and they canpower certain abilities. The
rest of the 282 cards are singlesided. They're shuffled into
these big draw decks that have178 flora and 104 combined
terrain and event cards. Everycard for those flora is going to
have a common name and ascientific name, and again, one
of these little factoids. Theflora cards, they all have like

(12:10):
a soil cost to play. Soil isyour main currency in the game,
which is kind of a fun thing.They have a face victory point
value. And then they're going tohave all these other things.
Again, this is a fiddly game,right? So your cards are going
to have these little places forsprouts, which are your little
green cubes and spots forgrowth, where you stack up a
number of sort of trunk sectionsand canopies. They also have

(12:30):
some kind of color codedability, so your sprouts and
your trunks are worth victorypoints. And then they've divided
up the flora into these four bigcategories of trees, herbs,
bushes and mushrooms. They canaffect other abilities in
scoring. There's a habitat codesignal that goes for sunny,
cold, wet and rocky those canaffect abilities in scoring.

(12:50):
Your terrain cards also have asoil cost and victory point
value and habitat code. Theyalso have color coded abilities
that can affect scoring orinfluence other things. These
are the ways that you'rebuilding your engines, like one
card will affect something elsebased on its characteristic, its
climate, its column or row inthe grid, things like that. On
your turn, you get to choose oneof four actions. Green, planting

(13:12):
lets you play cards into yourgrid. Red, composting gets you
soil. Blue, watering lets youplace the little sprout cubes.
And yellow growth lets you drawcards and place the little trunk
sections, and then the otherplayers will do some kind of
similar but reduced versions ofthose actions when they're
chosen. And then choosing thataction also activates all of the

(13:32):
same colored abilities on allthe cards in your tableau or on
your player mat. And the gameends once one player has
finished their four by fourgrid.

Jason (13:41):
That makes it sound so much simpler than it actually
is. That's it.

Brian (13:45):
Did it sound simple? Because it doesn't sound simple
when I'm reading it. It soundslike a lot to manage.

Alex (13:51):
It was a lot to manage. Okay.

Jason (13:54):
Well, the main thing for me is that there are, like,
eight different ways of scoringpoints, and my, I'm an
optimizer. I try to optimize.And so I try to keep all eight
of those things in my head atthe same time so I can do all of
them as much as I can and maketrade offs. And it's just hard.

Brian (14:10):
And this, this game would take a lot of practice to play
optimally.

Jason (14:14):
Yeah, I think basically my way of improving at this game
is learning which things to justignore and triage away. Say, I'm
not going to bother with that,and I'm just going to focus on
these things instead.

Brian (14:23):
If you plan on playing like Alex and I and just kind of
pick a thing and go for it, it'snot too bad.

Alex (14:28):
I mean, the other thing that I think makes it more
interesting but harder tooptimize is that there's,
there's more sort of feedbacksbased off of what the other
players do than I necessarilywould have anticipated before
playing. So when one of theother players chooses the color
type, you benefit from whateverthey choose. Being able to

(14:51):
modify your strategy based offof the way other people's boards
are developing is important too.

Brian (14:57):
it's a lot more sort of player to player interactions.
Then again, I really need tostop just comparing everything
to Wingspan. It's just hard notto. Jason, how did you describe
this? Is this wingspan?

Jason (15:08):
Well, this is, this is the game you get when someone
plays Wingspan and says, Thisisn't complicated enough.

Alex (15:14):
And also, I hate birds, but I kind of like plants and
fungi.

Brian (15:21):
Yes, it's wingspan for people who hate birds and also
hate simplicity.

Jason (15:24):
Now we're being unfair to it, like, I mean, it is top 200
on Board Game Geek. There arepeople who love this game.

Brian (15:30):
Yeah, for sure

Jason (15:31):
It's too complicated for my taste. There are too many
things I was trying to keepgoing in my head. But there are
obviously a lot of other peoplewho really love this, so we
shouldn't be too hard on it.

Alex (15:39):
Yeah, and I feel very guilty of that too. And like the
reason, the reason I startedwith those fun facts about
plants, is because plants arecritically important to global
biodiversity and just the waythe earth functions. And yet,
when people think about nature,they think about birds or other

(16:00):
animals. You know, plants don'tget a lot of attention, and so
it's nice to see a game thatshines a light on all this
amazing plant biodiversitythat's out there.

Brian (16:08):
Agreed, yeah, and just because it's not our taste
doesn't mean that you know thatyou wouldn't enjoy it. We like
to be able to play a couplegames in a day, right?

Jason (16:17):
We should talk about one of the best things about this
game is that it's beautiful.They have stunning actually,
it's not illustrations, it'sactual photographs of
everything, and they verydefinitely chose beautiful
photographs for all of it. Iwouldn't be surprised. There's a
subreddit called Earth porn,which is basically absolutely
gorgeous, stunning vistas fromaround the planet. And I almost

(16:41):
suspect that they mined that forfinding some of these shots,
because they are reallybeautiful.

Brian (16:46):
They chose a lot of beautiful imagery and very
charismatic species and places,for sure.

Alex (16:52):
Yeah, I totally agree, and again, not to keep complaining
too much, but I think that justsort of at odds with the fact
that there's so many rules thatas a player of the game, I
didn't get to enjoy the beautyand the pictures as much as I
could have if I had a littletime to sort of let my mind, let
my mind wander instead of, youknow, obsessing over all the

(17:16):
things I was trying to keeptrack of.

Jason (17:18):
Yeah, there is that. There is no downtime in this
game. Every player acts everyturn. It's just the active
player chooses what everyonegets to do, but there is no
downtime. I'm used to spendingother people's turns figuring
out what I will do on my next,my next turn. And I didn't have
that option. It was like, Okay,I've done my turn, okay, now
you're doing your turn, okay,I've got to react. Now you're
doing your turn, okay, I've gotto react. It, it keeps it moving

(17:39):
there. Like, there's no time toget bored, but it's also there's
not that much time to think.

Brian (17:43):
Yeah. That's really true. Again, that's, again, very
different from something likesome of these other games where

Jason (17:49):
Evolution! I'm going to say Evolution instead of
Wingspan.

Brian (17:53):
I want to get in a little bit to the development of this
game. How is the sciencerepresented? What's the sort of
origins of Earth, the boardgame? There's a very detailed
designer diary for Earth, fromthe designer Maxime up on Board
Game Geek, which is amazing. Itprovides a lot of detail about,
sort of, all of the choices thatwent into this, or, well, not
all, but a lot of them. So whydid he decide to make a game

(18:17):
about plants? Because hisgirlfriend Isabel asked him to
make a game about plants. Thatwas the inspiration. Basically.

Jason (18:24):
Well, that's sweet.

Brian (18:25):
Yes, it is sweet. This literally, she said, Could you
make a game about plants? Andthat, that was the fundamental
inspiration. This game reallydoes give plants and fungi, and
fungi their due. We do focus onanimals. We really do. And in
games like Evolution, the plantsare just food. We even talked
about that. Like, plants arejust the green thing that the
interesting things go and eat.So no, I that it's great to have

(18:47):
plants at the center, plants andfungi at the center. And I
actually really liked soil beingthe main currency of the game.
There's some nitpicks, Isuppose, associated with that,
but that's another thing thatcompletely gets overlooked. All
of modern society is sort ofdependent upon the soil. Right?
In this extensive detail of thegame design and the designer
diary, there's really nodesigner notes in the game on

(19:11):
how, or to what degree thefunction of the cards was
influenced by either biology orecology. So I kind of had to do
a lot of reverse engineering andguesswork to try to sort of
infer how much that influencedthe design of the game. So it
was very clear that balance andgameplay choices were the top
priority. The theming of thegame? There's a list of like 20

(19:34):
things that were considered indesigning this game. Theming was
like 13th or something, butthere was extremely detailed
effort at card balancing with awhole Excel sheet and an entire
formula to calculate how thevictory point value was balanced
by the power of the card. Sothey even, he even specifically
says, this is a game, not anencyclopedia, so the balance and

(19:57):
gameplay were definitely alwaysgoing to be prioritized over the
accuracy of the metaphor or thescience.

Jason (20:04):
Didn't you say this is the first game we've had that
actually has a scientificdisclaimer in the rulebook?

Brian (20:09):
Yes, it is. We've had some games where we've actually
said, Oh, they're citing theirsources. That's wonderful. This
actually had a, has a safetynote disclaimer. They said to
not use the cards as a fieldmanual or identification guide.
They said we're not botanists. Imean, essentially, this is a
cover their butts. Please don'tpoison yourself, because you've
paid too much attention to ourboard game.

Alex (20:31):
Yeah, it's about the mushrooms.

Jason (20:33):
It's about the mushrooms, yeah.

Brian (20:34):
It's 100% about the mushrooms. But, I mean, there
are poisonous plants too, right?I'm glad they put mushrooms in
the game, but it also meant theyhad to include a safety note. So
the specifically the flora. Sohow were they chosen? Again, I
I was, I was looking for it, andwas a little disappointed. There
think I already mentioned this.These are charismatic. They are
things that photograph well, andthey do. There's a distinct
effort to combine some wellknown and some lesser known

(20:57):
plants and fungi. So forinstance, there are a ton of
crop plants included. It's alsoa European game. So it just said
soya bean instead of soy. But Isaw onions, wheat, most of the
major crops and vegetables, Ithink, are in there. Lots of
trees. There weren't really alot of designs on how the
individual Flora was influencingthe way that the card
functioned. So there were a fewnods, I would say. So tall

(21:19):
plants would often have theability to add more trunk
sections. Parasitic plants oftenhad some kind of an ability that
involved removing sprouts orgrowth to fuel their abilities.
So, so there was some there.It's just you kind of have to,
you kind of have to go lookingfor it. Did any stick out to you
guys? Whereas, like, Oh, this isa clever way to incorporate the

(21:39):
biology of this organism.
were some interactions with thecompost pile that seemed like
decomposers were using compostin ways that seemed clever.

Jason (21:54):
So that's something I noticed, where several of the
mushrooms had abilities whereyou'd pay some sort of resource,
usually like they're sprouts, orthey're something's sprouts, or
something's trunks, and youwould get compost out of it, so
they're decomposing it back downto soil, basically. The one
individual card I remember wasthe strangler fig, which you
could pay its cost instead of indirt, you could pay it in the

(22:16):
growth of another plant.

Brian (22:17):
So you would take growth away from something else. That's
what I'm saying, like theparasites. So I guess even then,
oh, not every plant needs soil,and that is kind of reflected in
the way that the game isdesigned. Not every plant does
require soil. Some are stealingfrom other other sources.

Alex (22:33):
Yeah, that's fair.

Brian (22:34):
I wanted to come into sort of the deeper concept here
of the idea of biomes andecosystems, and this is where
I'm hoping Alex can kind of fillin some of my weaknesses. Biome
is a very old concept datingback to, I think I saw the first
sort of use of it was 1916. It'sthis idea of trying to develop
categories based on theobservation that the temperature

(22:56):
and precipitation of a regiondetermine the community of
plants and animals that livethere and their adaptations. I
mean, biome is definitely partof even elementary school
biology at this point. I mean,it's in the video game
Minecraft, the areas withdifferent plants and creatures,
they call them biomes.

Alex (23:15):
Yeah.

Brian (23:15):
The term's been around since 1916 and there have been a
ton of attempts to develop biomedefinitions and classification
schemes.

Alex (23:23):
Can I, can I tell you, like a quick story example of
So okay, so I mostly work in aquatic ecosystems, but I do
where the biome concept reallylike, hit home for me?
some work in terrestrialgrasslands. I was a postdoc at

Brian (23:29):
Please.
So there have been all of theseefforts to try to develop and
University of Minnesota workingon this grassland project. And
then when I started my facultyjob here in Georgia, I tried to
set up, well, successfully setup, but with some challenges,
categorize, basically categorizenature, find these natural, try
the same version of thisgrassland experiment, but in a

(23:51):
very different biome. InMinnesota, where it is
substantially drier, moretemperate. At this big, famous
field station, they try really,really hard to do tree
to define what these naturaldivisions are, but it's biology,
biodiversity experiments, andthey have to water these trees,
just huge amounts of water everysingle day, and most of the

(24:14):
trees still die. On the flipside, there are several really
right? These things never fitperfectly. There's always these
famous grassland like grassesand forbes biodiversity
experiments, and the nativeecosystem is tall grass prairie,
and they do great. Down here inGeorgia, I tried to set up this
exceptions, these places whereit doesn't quite work. That
grassland experiment, and itkeeps on getting invaded by

(24:37):
blackberry and sweet gum andother trees, and it's really
hard to maintain a grasslanddown here because we're in a
doesn't mean it's not useful. Itdoesn't mean it's not important.
different biome. We're in abiome here that's conducive to
trees, whereas up in Minnesota,the biome was much more
conducive to grasses. So mypoint is just that, yeah, these,

(25:00):
these sort of big scalegradients and temperature,
So why do we bother with this? Ithink that, as near as I can
precipitation have a huge impacton the types of plants that are
going to thrive under those conditions.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, also,we're just as humans, we like to
categorize things. It helps usmake sense of the world. But,
tell, one of the ways that thisis important is it's really

(25:31):
helpful for focusingconservation efforts.
yeah, you're totally right that,that nature is messy and

(25:51):
complex, and sometimes thingsdon't fit neatly into
categories. But Brian, youmentioned that, like, the biome
concept is really old, thatthat's absolutely right. And
it's, I mean, I think it'spretty consistent, like the
edges, like the boundarybetween, you know, two
particular biomes. Maybe peoplecould disagree about a specific

(26:13):
definition, but yeah, thegeneral idea that different
abiotic constraints affect thethe plant communities that
thrive under those differentconditions. Like ecologists
aren't going to argue with that.

Jason (26:28):
Yeah. So quick definition
Can you tell us what that is?

Alex (26:34):
Yeah? So like, not enough rain, gets too hot, something,
something in the environmentthat affects the ability of an
organism to reproduce and grow.Probably the main ones that I
think about are temperature,precipitation

Jason (26:52):
rain, snow

Alex (26:52):
Seasonality, nutrients. Yeah.

Brian (26:57):
So why am I bringing this up? I mean, if you remember how
we play Earth, effectively,while they don't sort of point
it out, you're kind of buildinga biome because you're choosing
plants that work with yourclimate and the terrain of your
island. That is kind of at thatlevel. That is kind of what a
biome concept is, the climateand the terrain defining the

(27:21):
plants that can be there andwell, and to some degree, the
animals. Again, Earth is notthat focused on animals, which I
don't hate, right? It's reallyabout the plants. I actually
found a very cool andinformative recent effort to
sort of organize and classifyall the biomes and ecosystems
across the planet, and includingthe human made, anthropogenic
ecosystems like cropland, fromthe International Unit for

(27:43):
Conservation of Nature. I am, Iwould like to drop that into the
into the show notes, because Ireally enjoyed reading it. It's
in parts, very technical, butthey also have a great glossary
and really beautiful photographyas well. It's a hierarchical
organization, so a series ofnested terms. They defined five
realms, terrestrial,subterranean, freshwater, marine

(28:06):
and atmospheric. They thendivide that into 25 biomes and
108 ecosystem functional groups.And this is based on assembly
theory, so the idea that it'sthe abundances and limitations
and other features drive how anecosystem assembles. So things
like, in a rainforest, you'vegot an excess of water, high

(28:29):
temperature but limitednutrients, or other things, like
in in marine ecosystems, thelimited availability of light or
energy, or in some ecosystems,how fire, it drives the assembly
of what can and can't livethere. It was really cool,
actually,

Alex (28:47):
Can I piggyback off the biome idea?

Brian (28:49):
Yeah, please.

Alex (28:50):
So great. So in the game you have this island. You
randomly get an island. At thebeginning. I had, like, Jamaica.
I think? I had some tropicalCaribbean island. One of the
cards that we flipped over atthe beginning, one of the things
that we were competing for thefirst to get, you know, whatever
fulfill whatever conditions got15 points. That condition was

(29:13):
having eight or more tundraspecies. So I just like put all
these tundra plants on mytropical Caribbean island and
got lots of points for it. Andthat was cool, I guess, to get
lots of points. But theecologist in me was kind of
screaming out, but, but, butthat doesn't actually work. And

(29:35):
so, okay, this is just mecomplaining again, while I I do
really like this theme of, likebuilding the biome, I guess, I
wish that there were a littlemore sort of biology behind the
decisions about which plants canthrive under which conditions.

Brian (29:53):
Yeah

Alex (29:53):
Instead of, and maybe I'm missing something, but I think,
like any any card can get playedon any Island, right?

Brian (29:59):
Oh, yeah. For sure, you can build just a bad ecosystem,
I guess, that doesn't get you alot of points.

Alex (30:05):
And I'm not, to be clear, I'm not suggesting that the game
needs to be any morecomplicated, but it was just, it
was just something that that wasdragging to me as you know, as
I'm building up my my islandplant community.

Brian (30:20):
Do you happen to remember what climate card you got when
you played Alex to go with yourtropical Jamaican Island?

Alex (30:27):
Oh gosh, I might have. So I had one card that gave me
extra points for fungi. So Ikind of went to town on the
fungi like any fungus I tried toplay. I was, I was going for
Arctic plants and fungi. Andthere was, there was surprising
overlap there. I thought it wasgoing to have to be either or,
but there were a bunch of, abunch of fungal cards that had

(30:48):
that little frost sign on it.That meant that they counted for
the counted towards cold,towards cold. That what so was,
that was the fungal one? Wasthat? What you just asked me?

Brian (30:58):
I think so. I mean, I assume that if you had something
on your player mat thatinfluenced fungi, that was
probably your climate card.

Alex (31:05):
Okay, yeah

Brian (31:06):
Okay. But again, this is just one of these places where I
wish that there was just a fewmore notes on how these rules
were designed, right? How thesechoices were made. So
interestingly, the climate cardsthemselves were selected
directly from something calledthe Köppen climate
classification scheme. There'slike 20 of the 32 climate codes
are right there, or sometimesthere are simplifications of

(31:28):
those. So in that case, they'veliterally just lifted a real
world climate classificationscheme and just pulled it into
the game. How they translatedthose climate codes to the
function of the game, that I'mnot really sure about. What
keyed me on to this was, some ofthese seem really like, oh,
tropical wet, or monsoon,something like that, or hot
desert. But then some of themwere kind of weird. It was like,

(31:52):
what was the the Mediterraneanwarm summer? It's like, well,
that's awfully specific. So whenI Googled it, pointed me back
towards the Köppen climateclassification scheme. So that's
the only reason I even foundthat, because, again, that's not
really in the designer notes oranything.

Alex (32:05):
So for listeners who maybe haven't had a ecology class in a
while, ecology is the study ofhow organisms interact with each
other and how they interact withthe environment. So before I
mentioned abiotic constraints,that that's an example of
organisms interacting with theirenvironment. And then, you know,

(32:27):
earlier in the conversation, wetalked about plants just being
food for animals in Evolution,in the other game, you know,
that's, that's a example oforganisms interacting with each
other. Of course, I'm biasedhere as as the ecologist, but I
feel like just the fundamentalnature of ecology that's built
on these interactions, ought tolend itself really well to board

(32:50):
game play, just because of thenature of things interacting
with each other in a, in a waythat works with the engine
building type of framework.

Brian (32:59):
So like, fundamentally, conceptually, it works well,
right? It's just the devil's inthe details, right?

Alex (33:05):
Exactly. Yeah, well, the devil's in the details if you're
an ecologist, and maybe, maybeif you don't spend, you know, 40
hours a week thinking aboutecology, maybe, maybe it
wouldn't bother you as much.

Brian (33:17):
I was wondering if anybody would be okay if we kind
of move on to our nitpickcorner, because I think there's
going to be some nits to pickhere. Is that all right? Is
there anything else we wanted totalk about?

Jason (33:26):
Well, I do want to say we were talking about how close the
decision was for how the thething the card represents
inspires or is related to itsmechanics. And I've got to
figure some of them have to beendirectly inspired. It can't just
be that they built this enginegame and then pasted other stuff
on top, because some of themseem pretty specific, like when

(33:48):
we played, I got a card that waslike a mountain range, and I got
points for how many cards in arow I could draw a line through
that had the rocky terrainsymbol without doubling back,
which is basically tracing out amountain range across my little
tableau that I was building. Andthat seems like something that

(34:08):
would not just come out ofnowhere while building a game.
So it seems like they maybethere must have been some
feedback in terms of like, oh,let's come up with some
interesting terrains. How can werepresent that mechanically? And
yes, I'm sure there was a lot oftweaking and massaging it to
make it fit and be balanced, butthere does definitely seem to be
at least some level ofinspiration from what the card

(34:29):
is showing down to themechanics.

Brian (34:32):
I think you're right. I think that that's definitely
true. I just wish that it justgiven just a little bit more
information about how thosechoices were made so I didn't
have to guess all the time.

Jason (34:41):
I was gonna say, so they made your job easier, basically.

Brian (34:44):
Well, yeah.

Jason (34:44):
Yeah. I do wish they would explain side of, sort of
the themes. It's like you said,the tall plants tend to be able
to make a bunch of trunks. ThatI can kind of get. I don't
really understand what makes abunch of sprouts. Like, when
some plants have small and somebig, maybe they make clumps, or

(35:04):
they make little thickets orsomething. I don't quite know
how the mechanics of the gameare supposed to reflect general
properties. Or the colors. Sothere's, there's probably, like,
six or seven different colors,but really there's only like,
three main ones and then a bunchof minor ones. And I'd like to
know if there was some themingfor that. Like, oh, all the
cards that have blue abilitiesthey relate to this. All the

(35:25):
ones with yellow abilities have,relate to this. And I wish there
was some sort of key for that.I'd really like that first,
because, I mean, there's a bunchof cards I'd like to know, oh,
this tells me something aboutthe thing I'm looking at, more
than just mechanics. And Iagree. Like, we don't have that.
And I wish they did, because Ithink it would enrich my
experience of the game.

Alex (35:45):
Yeah, I was gonna mention that we had one of those
categories where, if you had foreach column or row, I can't
remember, in your tableau, thathad, you know, unique versions

Brian (35:56):
You know, they didn't show their work.
of each type of card. And therewere, there's trees, the
grasses, fungi, there aredifferent categories. So clearly
they put a lot of effort into,you know, doing those, that
categorization. But yeah, itwas, there was a little it was
unclear whether, in general,trees had some defining

(36:18):
characteristic that made playingthem more valuable in a certain
situation, or, you know, ifthere was a grass strategy or
things like that. I guess I'vegot another one I can add in,
which is, you know, back to thethe definition of ecology and
how important interactions amongspecies are for, for what

(36:40):
ecology is and for the mostpart, when you play a new plant
in your tableau, it doesn'tinteract with the other ones.
Like, there are special cardsthat create interactions, like
the mountain range one that,that Jason mentioned, and, you
know, the getting things linedup in columns or rows. But you

(37:02):
know, I could imagine a waywhere the soil cost, for
example, might be higher ifyou're trying to plant something
next to something that's also astrong competitor or something.
But like, there are ways I couldimagine layering in more
interactions among the plants,in ways that I think could also

Jason (37:19):
So you wish they'd peel back the curtain a little bit
relate to more of the biologythat we were kind of looking for.
and just let you in on the, thebehind the scenes. Basically,
you want the behind the scenestour of the game.

Brian (37:37):
A little bit because it's what ties the game to the
underlying biology and ecology.I think they did it. But as a
player, I don't get toexperience that part as much. I
can't see why the choices weremade, just that they were,
right? So and from theperspective of kind of to learn

(37:59):
about the natural world from agame, knowing why the choices
were made would be reallyhelpful. My nitpick, okay, I
hope this doesn't come out astoo much of a nitpick, because I
really don't think it is. Ithink it's really worth
mentioning. Fungi are notplants.

Jason (38:16):
Well, that's why they call them flora.

Brian (38:18):
Which is an old term. Again, it's a nitpick, because I
think most, I would assume, mostof the people listening to this
are fully aware of that, thatplants and animals and fungi,
are the three different kingdomsof macroscopic life, and that
fungi definitely are not plants.So some people don't realize
that. I think most peopleprobably do.

Jason (38:36):
And yet, we have several fungal colleagues in the
Department of Plant Biology,so...

Brian (38:42):
And we have several fungal colleagues in plant
pathology, because they're plantpathogens. My other nitpick, the
ecosystem cards are notecosystems.

Jason (38:49):
So, examples?

Brian (38:50):
They're eco regions. So for instance, things like the
Himalayas, the Serengeti, theNile Delta, these are not
ecosystems. These areinteresting regions in the
world. I think that there was alot of choice of these. They're
very charismatic places. Therewas an active effort to select
them all over the globe,including well known places and

(39:12):
maybe places that are less knownto your average North American
board game player, like the Suddswamp or the Yagishiri island.
But these are definitely notecosystems. They're eco regions,
and a lot of them actually comefrom this effort by the World
Wildlife Foundation to divide upglobal eco regions, again, for
conservation concern. Anotherthing I want to drop into the
show notes is really cool,OneEarth.org navigator, where

(39:35):
you can look at eco regions allover the planet, see which ones
are in your area, or, really,anywhere. It's very cool. Also,
there's this kind of extremesquishiness to what is a terrain
card, right? Because most ofthe, I don't know what to call
them, features terrain that areon the terrain cards? Really
would be under traditionalcategories of biomes or more

(39:56):
ecosystems. For that matter.These are where the actual
biomes and ecosystems would befound. You've got a rainforest
card, plains, savanna, taiga,classic biome divisions, or
ecosystems like a bamboo forestor a redwood forest. Actually,
it's interesting. There is aterrain card for redwood forest
and an ecosystem card forRedwood National Park. So it's
actually both. I think there,there's sort of a, an

(40:19):
inconsistency in the applicationof terminology here.

Jason (40:23):
I think my only one involved some of the event
cards, because some of them makesense. You have a forest fire,
you lose a lot of growth, youget a lot of compost, great. But
a rainbow doesn't make plantsgrow. I'm sorry. I mean, maybe
it's supposed to be the rain ismaking the plants grow. Maybe
that's it. But then we alsohave, like, comets and meteors.
And I swear one of them was,like, a really bad thing, so
maybe it's supposed to be a, animpactor, like, oh, the comet

(40:46):
hit your island and it's causingall sorts of stuff. Like, I
guess that's my thing. I liked alot of them, but I wish that
they all just made sense,because I just, my tree seeing
the rainbow doesn't make it growtaller, but yet it does. That's
mine, I guess.

Brian (41:03):
I think we're sort of running out of time here. So
maybe we should go ahead andgive this our grades, if that's
okay. So we grade our games on aletter grade scale, and we'll
grade on two things, the sciencecontent and then the fun content
of the game. Alex, would you bewilling to go first and give it
your science rating? How good isthe science in earth?

Alex (41:21):
Okay, so at, since we're all professors here, is this
like a normal, like, gradeinflation thing where if we give
less than a B, the game's gonnahave its feelings hurt?

Brian (41:31):
Like, a little bit, yeah, actually.

Alex (41:34):
Okay, well, I mean, an F sounds harsh, so I'm not going
to give it an F. I don't know.I'd give it, I'll give the
science a B-minus. I really didappreciate that it's
highlighting this amazing plantbiodiversity, showing it with
these beautiful pictures, andmaybe just educating some people

(41:59):
about the plant life that's outthere. So I like that. And then,
you know, all the, all thenitpicks that, that I've brought
up and that we've beendiscussing, there are places
where I felt like the connectionto the underlying biology could
have been stronger or moreintegrated within the gameplay.

(42:20):
And then the fun factor, that'sthat's a tough one for me,
because I really like playinggames, but these days, the only
game I'm really playing isCandyland with my five year old.

Brian (42:32):
We gotta get you some better games for kids, because
we know some

Alex (42:36):
I mean this, and this is like the opposite of Candyland,
terms of of brain powerrequired, I quite enjoyed it,
but I probably would haveenjoyed playing any game. So
A-minus.

Jason (42:50):
So science side, I'm probably gonna go with Alex here
and be in the B to B minusrange. There's definitely some
there, like there's definitelysome inspiration. They've got
the little science facts at thebottom of it, presumably the
photos are right. So there'ssomething there, and don't use
it as a field identificationguide, but it's probably about
equivalent to, like, Google lensor something, if you just want

(43:10):
to, like, oh, that I recognizethat plant. So it's there. It,
we've talked about how it's not,it's not super deep through
there. It's like, there's notthe multiple layers of like, oh,
there's all these different waysthat the science actually
informed the way the game comestogether, comes together. Or
maybe, if there is, they justdidn't tell us about it, so
we're not recognizing it, Idon't know. But so I put it in

(43:31):
there because there's the littlethings that seem off, like, I
don't understand why this plantmakes a bunch of sprouts, and
this one doesn't I don'tunderstand why the rainbow grows
trees and other things likethat. So there's--

Brian (43:41):
Man, that one really bothers you, huh?

Jason (43:43):
It's, it's just weird. It's like, it's like, it's an
event, it's a rain, the rainbowdoes not affect the ecosystem.
I'm sorry. It's just a bit oflight. I don't know. Yes, that,
it, that one was just reallyweird when I played that one.
Okay? It apparently made a deepimpression on me. Yes, you
people can come on Discord. Justtell me that Jason hates

(44:04):
rainbows, so on and so forth,but whatever. So I'd put science
there that the B, B minus range.For me, and when we get into
gameplay, it's definitely verysubjective. I've also put this
into the B, B range, justbecause, for me, there was so
much stuff I was trying to keeptrack of that it, it wasn't fun

(44:27):
for me. Like it, there's thatlittle, they talk about how
getting a flow state is thatbeing like just hard enough to
challenge you, but not so hardthat it becomes frustrating. I
feel it edged a little bit toofar. I was trying to keep track
of too many things that Ieventually felt like I kind of
had to give up and just startputting cards out and hope it
worked. And that just went alittle too far for me in terms

(44:48):
of complexity. So on my personalscale, I'd put it about a B. I
mean, you say, Brian, would Ipull this off the shelf and play
with it? Probably not. It's notmy cup of tea. But obviously, a
lot of other people, like it

Brian (45:00):
Well, if the game's too complicated for Jason Wallace, I
don't know what hope the rest ofus have. But anyway, for for
science, I'm also giving it a Bminus, or maybe even a C plus.
And here's my concern, I thinkit kind of presents this veneer
of scientific accuracy,including the scientific names,
and that's heightened by the useof photographs, but the problem

(45:23):
is that they kind of apply thataccuracy inconsistently across
different parts of the game. SoI just worry, if someone took
the classifications to heart,that they'd end up learning it
wrong. And if you're going tocome away from a game learning
the science wrong, that'sdefinitely how I'm going to lose

(45:43):
points on things. But Like Alexsaid, if you're not going to pay
that much attention to thescientific content, and you
definitely, the game's not setup to do that while playing. The
game's themed around science,but it's not built around it. So
I'm probably being too harsh. Iwould probably at some point
somebody would come to me andsay, like, hey, I want to get
this grade re, I want regrading,right. For fun, this is a level

(46:06):
of complexity that's just beyondwhat I'm typically going to go
for. So it's, it's a B. I knowthis is definitely somebody out
there's cup of tea. It's justnot mine.

Jason (46:14):
I'm also just thinking, I'm thinking about why we do
these, and part of it is, I hopethat maybe there's some
educators out there that can usethis for deciding, oh, if I want
to teach this in my class, whatare my good options? And I hope
that this helps them make thatdecision, basically, like, this
is not a game you should bringto your middle school to teach
them about ecology. Oh,actually, maybe in middle school

(46:34):
you might be able to work, youmight have, you might be able to
get it to work. Definitely notan elementary school one,
though. So all right, well,that's probably where we should
wrap it up. Thank you, Alex, forcoming on. Thank you for being
our resident ecologist. I'm surewe'll find other games where we
can bring you in that have thissort of theme.

Alex (46:50):
Thanks for the invitation. It was a lot of fun.

Jason (46:52):
Oh, is there anywhere you want people to be able to look
you up on social media oranything like that?

Unknown (46:56):
I have a lab website, Strauss lab, at okay, yeah,
Strausslab.ecology.uga.edu.

Jason (47:04):
Well, that's where we'll call it. So everyone have a
great week and happy gaming.

Brian (47:07):
Yep, have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya!
This has been the Gaming withScience Podcast copyright 2024.
Listeners are free to reuse thisrecording for any non commercial
purpose, as long as credit isgiven to gaming with science.
This podcast is produced withsupport from the University of
Georgia. All opinions are thoseof the hosts, and do not imply
endorsement by the sponsors. Ifyou wish to purchase any of the

(47:28):
games that we talked about, weencourage you to do so through
your friendly local game store.Thank you and have fun playing
dice with the universe.

Jason (47:37):
Do-do-doo, do-da-do-do Okay, we're done!

Alex (47:39):
Is that like your catch phrase, sign off phrase

Brian (47:42):
That's our sign off phrase. Sign off phrase!

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S1E9 - Earth (ecology)

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