7 hours ago
S2E08.1 - Rock Buddies (bonus interview)
#RockBuddies #Catlilli #Rocks #Geology #Igneous #Sedimentary #SciComm #BoardGames #Science
Summary
While at the Origins Game Fair, Brian sat down to talk with Catherine and Jonathan Croft, founders of Catlilli Games, about their new game Rock Buddies. (So new it hasn't even been Kickstartered yet.) In this interview, we get to hear all about rocks, how to make (and pitch) a interesting science game, getting into game design, and a bunch of rock facts! So grab your favorite mineral and cozy up for this bonus interview of Gaming with Science.
Timestamps
- 00:00 What is Rock Buddies?
- 04:10 Rock facts!
- 08:02 Game design process
- 14:18 Favorite games
- 17:07 Games for the classroom
- 18:34 Signoff
Links
- Rock Buddies (Catlilli Games)
- The Rock Cycle (National Geographic)
- Rocks: Basalt, Dolomite, Greenstone, Hornfels, (Meta)quartzite
Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net
Splash art courtesy of Catlilli Games.
This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
Full Transcript
(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )
Brian 0:06
Hello and welcome to the Gaming with Science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Hey, this is Brian. I'm at Origins 2026 with the founders of Catlilli Games, and I had a chance to play test their new game, Rock Buddies. Why don't you guys introduce yourselves?
Jonathan 0:27
I'm Jonathan Croft.
Catherine 0:28
I'm Catherine Croft.
Brian 0:29
So Rock Buddies. So let me just introduce. So Rock Buddies is a geology game, and I can tell you from somebody who has actively looked for geology games because you know we like to keep a good rotation of diverse science topics. I had yet to find one. Rock Buddies actually does a good job. Tell us about Rock Buddies. What does the game look like? How do you play it?
Jonathan 0:49
So the premise of Rock Buddies is that you are moving your way through the rock cycle to collect samples of rocks to create a rock collection. So the board follows the cycle, has a space for igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary, and it has spaces for magma and for sediments, and has the arrows that link them together with the processes that get you from one to the other. So, like all the core rocks, they can weather and erode into sediments, and the sediments can cement together to get into sedimentary rocks. Then they can transform from there. And the core of the game is that you are rolling these dice that give you access to those processes, and you're trying to re-roll and get the right combination of dice to get to the right spaces to collect the right rocks to make these little trios. That one of the way we incorporated the core science of the game was that as you go through the cycle, you're collecting these rocks, but the way you score them is by collecting rocks that have some kind of relationship to each other. So, like limestone, dolomite, and marble are one of these trios because chemically limestone and dolomite are similar to each other, and limestone metamorphosizes into marble. Okay. So there's that geological science link there.
Catherine 1:52
So the rock cycle is a really scary topic to make a game out of because most people find it very boring. My father was a geologist, so no offense to him, but like just the whole process of like learning it in school is very boring, and is even if we mention the word "Hey, rock cycle", people are like, "Oh no", and so it was a little bit scary. But I think with the art that we have, like I think we have the right combination to make it fun,
Jonathan 2:21
one of the big things from the design perspective early on that Catherine insisted on was we have to minimize the number of words on the board because we don't want to scare people off. And so instead of having like you know freezing and heat and pressure and all this other stuff, we relied just on these core symbols and really trying to get it just to those three keywords of igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary. Those are the ones we leave you with, and we're not trying to overwhelm you with too much science. Trying to have it. It's a game about rocks. It's not a rock lesson that is gamified.
Catherine 2:51
Yeah. So one thing that I've learned, we've been around for 11 years now with Catlilli, and in the beginning, we would pitch our games mostly as science games, using science words, and these publishers would be like, "No, absolutely not". And then I would go back a couple years later with like a slightly different version of the same game, but didn't use any science when pitching it, and they're like, "Oh, that's genius!" And so we're like, "Wait, wait a minute! It's like pretty much the exact same game."
Brian 3:21
We've talked about this before. How, unfortunately, for better or for worse, sticking educational on your game is like poison to some of these these publishers and developers. And I'm not really sure why. I I think games like Wingspan have hopefully you know wedged the door open just a little bit to let people realize that just because it is science accurate doesn't mean it's boring.
Jonathan 3:44
We have jokingly referred to rock buddies as rock span amongst ourselves multiple times, because that concept of like yes, you have these specific rocks and you're learning about their science on the back, but it's it's what are you doing with the rocks that's gamifying them? And when there's downtime between turns, you're flipping over on the back of the card and reading about why does it group with these things and that's where the learning happens. It's incidental to the game. It is a fun game even if you learn nothing about rocks, but it's a super fun game if you learn a bunch of stuff about rocks. Yeah.
Brian 4:10
So let's see. You said that basically the game was designed with the idea of meeting specific science standards and meeting those standards, almost like the way that you reverse design a class. Like this is what we want to teach. Let's make the game fun around that. So one of those was I'm supposed to be able to name different types of different types of rock in each class, like sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous. So hey, that was one. I did that one. Okay. So let me see if I can do it. And how many did you say I'm supposed to be able to do?
Jonathan 4:35
Let's just go for one. One for right now. For
Brian 4:37
one for okay. So in the you pay a lot of attention to the metamorphics since they're very important to the game. Which so it was like gneiss and marble and greenstone. Okay, all right, and sedimentary limestone and sandstone. I'm sure there was another one in there somewhere, and I'm struggling on igneous just a little bit. I remember basalts.
Jonathan 5:01
There you go. I think that works fine. And like one of the things that was really fascinating about working through the game is I I started by going through a geological field guide for northern North America, and had all these different classifications, these different types of rock things, and the notion of like the nomenclature of rocks themselves have changed over time and have gotten more like scientific and rigorous about it.
Brian 5:22
That that does make sense that the that the taxonomy of even rocks would have changed as we understand them better. But I guess I never thought about it. Like we change species names all the time. That that's happened for rocks too.
Jonathan 5:33
Yeah. So like you mentioned, greenstone for instance, named because they're rocks that they're they're greenish, and that that is an older, broader term. And like geologists will still use it like colloquially apparently, but there's better ways of classifying those rocks now. And the guidebook was like very specific about it, and I was hesitant to use that one just because it has been eclipsed. But it worked so well with like the gameplay overlaps and things. Like, well, this is the category that fills that niche. Okay, I'm going to include it, but I'm going to put that caveat on the back of the card to make sure I don't get angry letters from geologists, being like you're using a term from the 1950s. We would call this this rock now instead. So it's in there.
Brian 6:11
Well, let me just tell you, if you're getting angry letters from geologists about your science game, you should consider that a badge of honor. It means that they are paying attention to what you're doing and care enough about it that they want to send in corrections. That's just cranky people doing peer review, so don't worry about it. You should hope for that. What is one of your favorite rocks from the game? I want one from each of you, please.
Jonathan 6:33
So we do try to give them art that centers on what are their usages, and some of them had to be a little like questionable with it, just because it's a rock that's like all we use it for is aggregate. We just we grind it up, we throw them into like cement piles, and we have that sort of thing going on with them. But so many of the rocks are named for what their features actually looked like, and so our artist Taylor went down that route for some of them. So like hornfels, they're named because they have these stripes to them that look like the stripes you see in certain like herds of cattle that were in the areas where these rocks were first named,
Brian 7:03
I did not know that. That's crazy.
Jonathan 7:05
And so he chose to go like really on the horn route. So it's this like horn charging bull that has like this one angry eye that's looking at you. But another thing we really liked about the art direction we took is we put the actual texture of the rock in the cartoon itself. And so I really think that comes through nicely on the Hornfel Rock in particular, because you really do see those stripes on him as he's charging at you, or her, or it, or they. I don't. I don't think the rocks are
Brian 7:29
no. The rocks are probably not gendered.
Catherine 7:31
I really like metaquartzite. Because they're cooking, and so it's like a little chef's hat, and they're chopping up vegetables, and I think it's adorable.
Brian 7:41
What's the what's the tie into Metaquartzite in cooking?
Catherine 7:44
Apparently, like if you have a fancy kitchen, you can get your countertop in Metaquartzite. Oh,
Brian 7:49
I see.
Jonathan 7:50
It's an alternative to like using marble, where it's not as expensive. I think it also still looks pretty good, and I think it's also very durable. Yeah, and that's why they like it for kitchen countertops. If you drop a pot on; it's not going to shatter. Okay.
Brian 8:02
What was an idea that you wanted to include and dropped, or like where did you feel like you had to make compromises on the science to make the game work?
Jonathan 8:12
So one of the key things early on is when we when Catherine was looking at the earlier rock games that they wanted to have the rocks themselves morph into things that were part of their family. So in order to get to marble, you have to start from limestone, and then you can go through your metamorphic processes to get there. And looking at trying to navigate around the board, we felt that that was just too constricting on the player, and so we chose to then change it up to be like you're just going through the rock cycle, you're collecting examples of these rocks, but if I'm I'm on my sedimentary rock, I can move to the metamorphic rock to collect whatever metamorphic rock is there, and so that was one where we definitely toned down the science a little bit, because we really wanted to focus on the core aspect of can you name rocks from these different categories? Can you see the processes to get from one to the other, and then the trios when you're scoring that's where we try to get that notion of like no limestone goes with marble. You should know that linkage.
Catherine 9:04
Yeah, and then like a small change we made was like where you start in the game because we wanted you to start in magma because that seemed more natural to the theme, but it wasn't fun if you started magma. It just the game started really slowly, and so we were like, okay, we should start at another place, like maybe sediments, or maybe even somewhere else, where like, okay, Earth doesn't start off like this, but like for the game's sake, we have to to do this.
Brian 9:33
One of the things that's fun about rock buddies, it's actually a very quick moving game. Like you're just sort of racing around the rock cycle, but of course, it's like that actually takes a long time to go from magma to all the way to sedimentary and then back to metamorphic or whatever you're going to do. How much time do you estimate it's you're taking in each round of the game?
Jonathan 9:51
I know like the processes themselves take very widely different windows, so eroding something away takes a lot longer than say like the metamorphic. Process of compressing these things into each other, like if you're going from magma into your igneous rocks, well, you can watch basalt cool, and you can see it forms its outer like layers and starts to grow black. Like the middle takes forever to do because rock is a bad conductor of heat. Like one of the goal cards in particular is actually talking about rock formations, and you have to collect dolomite, and you have to collect basalt because basalt is the easiest rock to observe its formation. You can see it happening when lava is cooling when it hits water, but then dolomite has this weird thing that they haven't found it in any deposits that are less than I think like 60 million years old.
Brian 10:37
Is this right where we don't even technically know how dolomite forms, and it's like it doesn't seem to respond the way that you'd expect based on its chemistry. Is that yes?
Jonathan 10:46
So like every deposit of it's at least 60 million years old, and they're like, well, why doesn't it form in any other ones? And so for that one, we wanted to group those two together on a goal card because like this is the easiest rock to explain its formation, and then this is the hardest rock to explain its formation.
Brian 11:01
So it's like the ying and the yang. It's basalt and dolomite.
Jonathan 11:04
You can go on a dolphin watching tour in Hawaii and watch, you know, basalt cool. You we even our best geologists are still like, we're not really sure what's going on with this other rock.
Brian 11:15
You could probably literally make basalt in a laboratory. You can get a furnace hot enough to melt rock and just make some, right?
Jonathan 11:21
My training's in civil engineering, so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna commit to that. But I would imagine yes, you could get a rock hot enough to then watch it cool.
Brian 11:30
How long have you guys been working on this game?
Jonathan 11:32
This game about a year at this point. I want to say yeah. We're we're both teachers, and for a long time, every time we saw the board or the map of the rock cycle, we thought this is an amazing game board. All the way that these arrows in different states are, and so we've been kicking ideas around for quite some time. But Rock Buddies itself, I think, has finally come to head in about a year.
Catherine 11:53
So a few years ago, we tried to have like a very different kind of rock game based on the rock cycle, and it just wasn't fun, and so we just tabled it, and then like I don't know how it came back up to be honest. Oh, it was Taylor because Taylor Taylor Bock is our artist, and they're such an amazing artist that we thought okay we can if we personify the rocks we can make it really engaging and accessible.
Brian 12:20
The design of the rock buddies is very cute. They all have a little single eye. They have a lot of personality for what are basically just rocks, right? I mean, they they are your rock crew, your rock band.
Catherine 12:30
Yes.
Brian 12:32
So tell me, how did you guys get into game design? You said you're both teachers.
Catherine 12:36
Yeah. So I'll tell my part. So I've always been obsessed with board games since I was little, and I would collect them and go to yard sales and just like stock the house full of them. And then it wasn't until later on in life when I met John, we were both teaching together at a science center. He had actually made a game, so like I knew he liked games, but like he had a prototype of a game that he like printed out the cards and sleeved it. I'd never known anyone to actually like take that step, and I was like, "That's the coolest thing I've ever seen. And then he played it with me. I was like, "This is so fun, and I was just blown away. And so we, I can, I told him he had to go to this game night in D.C. because the National Academies of Sciences used to have a museum in downtown D.C. and they had a like local game designer night. So I was like, okay, obviously you have to go, and he was like, no. And I was like, what? So then I was like, I'll just I'll do all the talking. You just bring your game, and then he's like, fine. And it was a smash hit that night. It was an engineering card game, and then it was so popular that they asked him to come back for his own special night, just for his game. Basically, then I was like, I want to make games too. So I started making games, and he would help me. And then it just kind of took off from there.
Jonathan 14:01
We both really liked incorporating games into our classrooms and into our learning environments. And the notion of well, we have this thing where we have come up with it to help teach something to these 12 kids in the room. Is it possible to turn this into something that would have you know appeal outside of this individual classroom?
Brian 14:18
So, what are some of your favorite games? Often, I ask, like, what is your favorite? And then everybody freezes up. So just like, what is one of your favorite games? It doesn't have to be a science game. It doesn't even have to be a board game. But it would be cool if it was those two things.
Catherine 14:31
So I adore anything by Matt Leacock. So we're big on cooperative games. So obviously, like Pandemic and the Forbidden series. One of his absolute best, in my opinion, is Mole Rats in Space, which is now called Space Escape. I yeah, I think it's like the most perfect children's game. Honestly, it just has all the elements that you would want. It's like anchored to like chutes and ladders, but it's a new twist, and it has. Little tokens and like it's just everything about it is it's just genius.
Jonathan 15:05
So one of the biggest ones I really love to use, especially in the classroom, is Just One, where for those of you don't know, it's a person has a card with the word on it. They're trying to guess the word. Everyone else has a whiteboard and they write down exactly one word to give them as a clue for it. But before the guesser gets to see their clues, they have to reveal their clues to each other, and if there's any duplicates, those are eliminated. So cooperatively, you're trying to give a specific enough word that's not so obvious that everyone else is going to eliminate off of it, and it leads to a lot of really deep thinking about connections and things. And it's such a simple game; it takes you know five minutes to explain. And one of the things I really like about is you can use it very easily in the classroom, in any classroom, that from my geometry class, I give them geometry vocab words, so their word will be point, and so now it's like, well, how do I give you a one-word clue that's going to make this person say point? But I don't want to say dot because someone else is probably going to say dot.so. what else can it be? So I'd be like vertex, intersection, crossing, and then when they have those collection of words, now they're building that deep connection of like points are intersections of lines, they're vertices of shapes, they're crossing points.
Brian 16:07
That's great. Both of you gave name games that I have never heard before, and that nobody else has mentioned, which is fantastic. I'm excited to track down and find and play both of these.
Catherine 16:16
Can I give another shout out? I have to mention Organ Attack. Have you played Organ Attack? So this is kind of where the inspiration for Rock Bodies also comes from.
Brian 16:24
Really,
Catherine 16:24
where it's it's absolutely wonderful game where it's made by the awkward Yeti, who's a comic, and they basically you have a set of organs and you're killing each other off with different diseases, which sounds terrible, but it's so cute. Like the art is adorable, and he personifies all of the organs, and it's very much like in the the style of rock buddy. We kind of mimic that because I like I play that in my anatomy class for almost 10 years now, and I've gotten so many high school students hooked on this game. It's so addictive and it's so fun, and it's just so scientifically accurate. They learn so much like medical knowledge as they play.
Brian 17:07
I'm really excited to hear that you guys are actively using your games and these games in your class. There's there's really not enough people doing that. I assume you're working on lesson plans for Rock, but I mean you literally designed it to work against the standards. So do you need to design additional lesson plans, or do you just play the game?
Jonathan 17:23
So, the key with games in the classroom is that the reason why most people dismiss it is that they think it is just a fire and forget. So, it's just a bunch of kids throwing dice in the room. When a really well integrated game will have an introduction, and it will have the execution of the game, and then it will have the debrief, and that's where the learning really happens, where the kids can make the connections between what did they choose as players and what are the actual concepts these are doing in the classroom, and so that's why a lot of teachers run into that as a stumbling block of like now I'm giving up three days for a game to try to teach a concept, and so that game that juice has to be worth the squeeze. If you're giving up three days of instructional time, it has to be something that is so engaging and dynamic that it grabs the kid and lets them learn it in a way that they would not normally be able to. So, having those lesson plans is actually incredibly important. It's not just play the game; you'll learn rocks. It's you've played this game. Now let's talk about what the rocks do and make those connections between what you did as a player and what nature does with these things in the wild.
Brian 18:22
That's very cool. It's nice to see the sort of rigor being brought to the design and the education at the same time. Not as an afterthought, but like from the jump. Like that's very very cool. Where can people find out more about Rock Buddies?
Catherine 18:37
It actually has a website right now. So we have a Catlilli.com website c a t l i l l i.com, and then if you put rock buddies on the end, it's catlilli.com/rockbuddies. So that's where the current information is.
Brian 18:54
Thanks for letting me play your game and playtest it. I really enjoyed it. I'm excited to have like a fun geology game to finally talk about, as everybody knows, I'm terrible at ending interviews, so I'll let you end.
Jonathan 19:05
Rock on!
Brian 19:08
All right, thanks so much. 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
No comments yet. Be the first to say something!