S1E9 - Earth (ecology)

#Earth #Biome #Biodiversity #Terrain #Flora #Tableau #BoardGames #Science #SciComm #InsideUpGames Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Overview Welcome to the wonderful (and complicated) world of Earth, a tableau- and engine-building game by Maxime Tardif and Inside-Up Games. In this episode we talk with Dr. Alex Strauss about ecology, ecosystems, biomes, and just how complicated things can get with a handful of cards. Timestamps 0:00 - Introduction and Guest Introduction 0:58 - Initial Game Experience and Strategy 1:52 - Science Topic: Biodiversity and Biomass 8:35 - Discussion on Game Complexity and Rules 9:53 - Game Mechanics and Strategy 15:09 - Development and Theming of the Game 22:34 - Biome Concept and Ecosystem Interactions 32:55 - Nitpick Corner and Gameplay Experience 45:00 - Final Grades and Closing Remarks Links Earth, by Inside Up Games Earth Designer's Diary IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology Köppen Climate Classification OneEarth.org Navigator (Bioregions) 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 Jason  0:00  Music. Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:11  Today, we're going to discuss Earth, by Inside-Up Games. All right, hey, welcome back to Gaming with Science. This is Brian, Jason  0:26  this is Jason, Alex  0:27  and this is Alex.  Brian  0:28  Hey, Alex, how's it going? We've got another guest host today. Alex Strauss, why don't you introduce yourself? Alex  0:34  Yeah, I'm happy to be here. So my name is Alex Strauss, I am an assistant professor in the ecology school at UGA, and I'm a card carrying ecologist, so I was happy to play the ecology themed game. Brian  0:49  Yeah, we appreciate it. It's nice to get somebody who really knows their stuff.  Jason  0:53  And this is a milestone. This is the first time we've actually been able to meet one of our guests in person and actually play the game with them, like this is history now. Alex  1:02  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 this all work. Brian  1:10  Not only that, you kicked both of our butts on your first time playing. Alex  1:15  I had no idea what the score was, and I wasn't as surprised as either of you. So maybe that card carrying ecologist thing actually, like, actually paid off for you.  Well, I don't know if my ecologist skills translated at all to this particular game. I was struggling to keep up with, with all the rules and ways to score and just kind of playing cards that seemed fun to me. So maybe that's a strategy for anyone out there who's listening is, don't overthink it and just play some cards. And who knows what'll happen? Jason  1:44  Yeah, we'll get into the complexity later. Brian  1:46  Before we get into the game, why don't we do our science topic? Alex, I don't know if you had anything to talk about today.  Alex  1:52  Sure. I, so I looked up some statistics. These aren't necessarily things that all ecologists sort of walk around knowing, but, this game made me want to do a little bit of research. So the two things I was trying to look up were, how many species are there in the world? What proportion of those are plants? And if, instead of just counting species, like one for each species, what if we count how much carbon or biomass is locked in those different things, like, how important are plants in the big picture? This being a plant themed game, that's sort of where, where my mind went. So okay, so here's here's the numbers, here's the statistics. And the thing that was pretty surprising to me: how much uncertainty there is in our estimates of pretty much all those things. So estimates for total number of species in the world ranges