S3E03.1 - 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

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

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S3E03.1 - The Mating Game (bonus)

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