S3E05 - Ark Nova (Zoos) | Gaming with Science

#ArkNova #CaptstoneGames #Zoos #Zoology #AnimalGames #WAZA #AZA #BoardGames #Science #SciComm

Time to run a zoo! In this episode, we're joined by Ellen Weatherford (of Just the Zoo of Us) to talk about Ark Nova and all things zoos. Learn why running a zoo is probably best left to game imagination, what it takes to get accredited, how you can tell good zoos from bad ones, the enclosure preferences of tree kangaroos, and tons of other fun facts. So grab some peanuts (but please don't feed the animals), and join us for a zootastic episode of Gaming with Science.

(Also, we promise this episode was not sponsored by Board Game Arena; Brian just likes it a lot.)

Timestamps

00:00 Introductions
05:20 Rabbit faces & zero-g mice
10:33 Ark Nova gameplay
23:47 Zoo origins and operations
32:40 Ark Nova versus reality
38:45 Designing good animals enclosures
45:06 How can you tell a good zoo?
50:35 Nitpick corner: Poop and merch
53:45 Final grades
1:04:56 Goodbyes

Full Transcript

(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )

Jason 0:06
Hello, and welcome to the Gaming with Science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Today, we're going to talk about Ark Nova from Capstone Games.

Brian 0:17
Hey, welcome back. This is Brian

Jason 0:19
this is Jason

Brian 0:20
and we have a very special guest with us today, Ellen Weatherford. Ellen, can you introduce yourself?

Ellen 0:27
I have to make sure that I add in the sounds I'm expecting the audience be making.

Brian 0:32
The crowd goes wild.

Ellen 0:35
Hi everybody, it's so nice to talk to you, Brian and Jason. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited.

Brian 0:41
Yeah, so Ellen, tell us about yourself.

Ellen 0:43
Yeah, I am a science communicator, I'm a podcaster and a writer, and I have been the host of Just the Zoo of Us, which is a podcast reviewing animals on the Maximum Fun Network. We've been at that for about seven years now.

Brian 1:00
Could you just explain, because I know this is like the entire schtick. The what is the rating scale for just the zoo of us?

Ellen 1:08
So we have different categories, because we realized very quickly that it's hard to give an animal just one score. So we have effectiveness, which are physical adaptations, things built into the animal's body out of 10, and then ingenuity, which is behaviors, things that the animals like doing, ways that they're like navigating the world or solving problems, and then just aesthetics, which is just how nice they are to look at, which that can also often be the most contentious category, that is usually what people have the biggest feelings about.

Jason Wallace 1:39
So, do the nightmare fuel animals get high on aesthetics or low on aesthetics?

Brian 1:43
We had some big discussion with Brynn Devine, who loves deep sea horrible fish.

Ellen 1:49
Yeah,

Brian 1:50
as like, oh, they're so cute and wonderful. It's like, no, they're full of knives, they're not wonderful.

Speaker 1 1:56
I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Tom Linley, who is a deep sea biologist who actually got to like discover and scientifically describe the ethereal snail fish, which is he mentioned as like the deepest fish ever found, and he described a very interesting phenomenon where there's this sort of uncanny valley effect, almost like the deeper you go in the ocean, where that you go deeper and deeper, and they get spookier and spookier and spookier and spookier and spookier, but then once you hit a certain point it loops back around and they stop being spooky and they go back into being like cute, because then you get like blob fish and snail fish and like flapjack octopus like little Dumbo octopus and stuff, like they swing back around because like you get that layer so deep in the ocean where things just become very flabby and blobby and pink and like that's when they're cute again, so there's this sort of like buffer zone of nightmare creatures, but once you pass that, it, everything's adorable down there.

Brian 3:04
I mean, I really can't argue with the Dumbo octopus as being absolutely adorable.

Speaker 2 3:08
They're very cute.

Jason 3:09
Agreed,

Speaker 3 3:10
there's also a lot of animals that I find to be like nightmare fuel, but I also find them really like endearing and lovely in their own way, and some of them also grow on you. Sure, them are acquired tastes,

Brian 3:19
literally,

Speaker 4 3:21
yeah. some of them can be an acquired taste, like I personally think that, like, wasps are beautiful. I think they're gorgerous,

Brian 3:29
they definitely

Brian 3:30
can be terrifying, but I mean, so is a tiger.

Ellen 3:34
Yeah, I think they're really beautiful in their own way, so that can be a contentious category.

Brian 3:38
Ellen, one more thing, and I don't want to forget this. What do you have a favorite game? It doesn't have to be a board game or a science game, but it's cool if it would be.

Ellen 3:48
I am a big video game person.

Brian 3:50
Yeah,

Speaker 5 3:50
I'm currently in the trenches of a Pocopia addiction. I am cripplingly addicted to Pocopia right now. I'm a lifelong Pokémon fan. OG picked it up. Learn to Read on playing Pokémon, so I've always been a Pokémon fan, but when people ask me what my, like, favorite video game is, or my favorite game, I have the most experience playing video games. Two things come to mind. Number one is Horizon Zero Dawn, very cool. Ever played Horizon Zero Dawn? Love that game, like such a great blend of, like, a very interesting story, beautiful graphics, and also really fun and satisfying gameplay. Like, it's so rare that you get all three, but they were firing on all cylinders. So, Horizon Zero Dawn is definitely one of my favorite. I have the tall neck Lego set.

Brian 4:32
Oh yeah, me too.

Ellen 4:34
I love that set, it's so cool. But my other one is Outer Wilds.

Brian 4:39
Oh dude, we are hitting you, so you need to, you need to talk to Jason's better half, because these are literally.. this is also one of my very favorite games. Okay,

Ellen 4:47
Are we same braining?

Jason 4:48
Yes, definitely. We have so both of us actually have wooden Nomai masks that I laser cut out and assembled, so as a gift to my wife, and then a gift to Brian and his wife.

Ellen 5:01
Wow, how do I get on this list?

Jason 5:05
You're on it now, apparently.

Ellen 5:07
Yes,

Brian 5:08
let's switch up our science facts to talk about Horizon Zero Dawn and Outer Wilds instead. Jason, go. Actually, no. Let's transition into our science banter topic. So, let's talk about some cool stuff that we learned about science recently, so you know, a an interesting fact, a story, a news article. You know, I am sure Ellen has a deep well of weird animal facts that she can pull from.

Ellen 5:31
Deep, a deep one.

Brian 5:33
Ellen, we usually let the guests host go first. Would you like, what would you like to share with the class today?

Ellen 5:38
Yeah, so I was doing notes on jackrabbits recently, and I was kind of reminded of something that I had heard about jackrabbits a very long time ago, and hares in general. If anyone doesn't know, hares are different, hares and rabbits actually distinctly like different groups of lagomorphs, and the thing that I found really interesting that I had never really noticed about it is that if you look at the three sort of groups of lagomorphs that are in existence right now, there are rabbits, hares, and pikas, and if you look at them, they all have sort of differently shaped heads, where the pikas, their snout goes sort of straight out, almost like in line with their eyes, like along their sort of line of sight, and rabbits, they're sort of tilted down a little bit, their snout sort of slopes down a little bit, like 45 degrees. In hares and jackrabbits, it is like, like a straight drop off, almost like their snout points down from their line of sight, like eyes looking out at the horizon, this snout is pointed down significantly. So, in all three of these groups, you see this sort of like increasing degree of facial tilt, and that's also correlated with their speed, because pikas are very slow, they don't really move very fast. Rabbits are kind of quick, like they can, they can get little bursts of speed. Hares and jack rabbits are very, very fast, so like the faster they go, the more their snout is tilted down at the ground, and the idea is that it gets their snout out of the way, so that they can see the ground in front of them when they're running. Okay, and it, like, their whole skull shape is like completely modified to accommodate their field of view, while they're running, which I think is really interesting.

Brian 7:25
So, you got to have that quake pro view, where it's just..

Ellen 7:29
I can't think of any other, like, because usually when you think of animals adapted for speed, you think of them being very streamlined. And,

Brian 7:37
well, yeah,

Brian 7:38
I would say, like, why do they have their face be like that, so it's not about supposedly it's about their sensory systems, not about,

Ellen 7:45
yeah, the eyes, like their perception, which I think is really interesting, and I can't think of any other animal that, like, the skull is adapted like that.

Brian 7:53
Can we just glue a bunch of stuff to the front of a rabbit's face and see if it screws him up?

Jason 7:57
Like, I think the answer that is probably yes.

Brian 8:00
Okay. All right. Well, I'll get on that with the IACUC, and we'll see what we can do.

Ellen 8:05
I do appreciate the immediate experimental design.

Brian 8:08
I'm an

Brian 8:08
experimentalist. I'm just like, well, that's cool. Is it true? Let's test it.

Ellen 8:13
Yeah,

Jason 8:14
I'm now imagining you 3D printing a bunch of prosthetics for rabbits faces. Oh,

Brian 8:17
yeah. Oh, that's a really good idea. Yeah, I'll start working on that.

Ellen 8:21
The Jackalope DLC,

Brian 8:23
that's

Brian 8:23
right, you get the rabbit and I'll print out the things. Jason, what do you have to share with the class?

Jason 8:29
I was looking, and recently I read a new story about sending mice into space. Okay,

Brian 8:36
nice.

Jason 8:36
But alas, this paper has no pictures of mice in zero g, which is vast failing,

Brian 8:41
that

Brian 8:42
is why. Do you even do it if you're not going to take pictures? Pictures or it didn't happen.

Ellen 8:47
send it back.

Jason 8:48
But what they were doing here is they're actually trying to figure out how much gravity do you need to maintain muscle mass, because this is an issue with any astronauts that go up into microgravity, zero g. It's definitely going to be an issue if we actually send people off to Mars. Is that in zero G, Your muscles don't have to work so hard, and so they start atrophying. Your body's very efficient. You don't use something, it starts reclaiming it. No need to spend energy on something you're not using. And so they had mice, and they apparently put them at four different gravity levels by basically having them grow in centrifuges in the space station, where there was microgravity, so no additional, just free floating, free fall, 1/3 g, 2/3 g, and then full g. And the idea is that, okay, full g is basically as if they were on earth, everything should be fine, but can we get muscle mass sticking around and working okay at lower levels? And what they found is that a third g was able to maintain part of the functionality, but not all of it, but two thirds g was so, if you stick it around like two thirds g, then that, at least for mice, was enough to keep their musculature working, is able to keep the strength and such up, so that was seems to be the take home from that is that if you keep if. Presumably, astronauts at about two thirds g, then you could, in theory, maintain most of your muscle function.

Brian 10:05
That's about Mars's gravity, isn't it? About two thirds, is that right?

Jason 10:08
Oh, I think it's a lot less than

Brian 10:09
that.

Jason 10:09
It is 38%

Brian 10:13
Okay, so, but that's that's in the not complete atrophy zone, right?

Jason 10:17
Yes. And let me check this here. So, kept muscle mass at 1/3 g, and muscle function was preserved at two thirds g.

Brian 10:26
Okay, so okay, that's weird to think about. All right, interesting. Do you guys wanna talk about a board game? So let's talk about the board game Ark Nova, which we all did get to play, although not to the point where we actually finished the game. I have been playing this game a ton. This is my new favorite game of 2026 Harmonies was 2025

Jason 10:47
and those are so different games.

Brian 10:50
Well, there might be more connective tissue than you think, because it's very reactive to what's going on on that round. Ark Nova is the number two ranked game on Board Game Geek. It is played for one to four players, 90 to 150 minutes. This definitely is a lengthy game, ranked on Board Game Geek as a 3.8 out of five on complexity, which means it's, it's definitely up there on the complexity, way higher than I would typically go for. But I really loved this game. Designer by Mathias Wigge, a German board game designer, his very first game, and as far as I can tell, his only game, which, if your first game is number two on Board Game Geek, I think maybe you can rest on your laurels just a little bit.

Jason 11:31
It's like he hit the top, had to retire.

Brian 11:34
I mean, I don't think he's retired, but I just like, where do you go from there? Like, there's nowhere else to go but down, right?

Ellen 11:40
Oh yeah, it sucks to peek so early.

Brian 11:42
Yeah, for sure. So, the goal of Ark Nova is to plan and build a modern, scientifically managed zoo to support conservation projects. That's what they describe Ark Nova as, from the publisher. I didn't really find too much about the designer diary, or like, how this game was made. I'm sure there are wonderful interviews in German that I couldn't find, like, I don't know what inspired this game. I don't know what made Mathias want to make a zoo game. You know, it said that the designer and the publisher have made every effort to be accurate to the actual science. There are notable exceptions that they make, and they say we know that they're there. Some things that get the bear tag are not bears. We know raccoons are not bears, but they're close enough.

Ellen 12:25
Let them be bears.

Brian 12:27
Yeah,

Jason 12:27
don't koala bears also have the bear tag for that?

Brian 12:29
They use, and they point that out as well. For the same thing, it's like we know it's not really a bear. It bear is just a thing that we're.. it's vibes. There's some vibes here. Yeah, but even though they say that they don't really show it, like I couldn't find anywhere where they're really specific on sort of what principles they were using to make these simplifications, but that's okay. We'll come back to this conversation, this topic later. Okay, now let's talk about what does this game look like. Ark Nova, in front of you, you will have a hex grid that is where you're going to be building your zoo. Certain spots are blocked off with either rocks or water. There's also multiple different map setups, you know, from first game up to advance, with different layouts, different structures, different bonuses. You're also going to have these multiple point tracks that you're keeping track of. There's like so many little tracks on this game, and a place to display five cards. There are three types of cards in the game. There are animal cards, sponsor cards, and conservation projects. So, what are you going to do in this game? Well, the goal of this game is to build enclosures to house your animals and attract visitors. As you bring animals to your zoo, you'll raise your appeal, more people will want to come to your zoo. You'll also secure sponsors, recruit employees or build special structures. You'll also use workers, because embedded within our hackspace strategy game, there's also it's a worker placement game, sort of a little tiny one that happens in the middle of this larger game. You use your workers to form associations with partner zoos and universities and support those conservation projects. You will also increase your reputation to get rewards and draw some of those cards that are sitting up on the display. So, how do you actually play? Each round You're going to choose one of your five action cards, so those are build, animals, cards, sponsors, and association. Each of those lets you do a different thing. The five action cards have more powerful abilities based on their position from one to five, whichever card you use, then gets moved down to position one and will bump up any other cards that were below it to a more powerful spot. There's also four different places on those tracks, or on the board, or doing different things that let you upgrade your cards, so your action cards can be upgraded to a more powerful form. You can only ever upgrade four of them, so there's always going to be at least one action card that's not upgraded. So, there's, you know, lots of interesting choices to make in this game. The other major mechanic in the game is that you have breaks, so instead of having, like, well, everybody does this and it's the end of the round, you've got this little. Break tracker, another tracker that's marked with a little coffee cup. There are certain cards, like the cards action, will always add two to that break tracker. And then there are other ways that that break tracker goes up. When that fills up, everything resets. You have to discard down to your hand limit. You can have as many cards as you want until you hit the break. This is also when you earn more money and other aspects of the game get reset, like all your workers go back to their available spots again, so you can do new things with them. So, how do you win Ark Nova? Your score is based on a combination of your appeal, which is like your ticket prices, and your conservation points, so you kind of want to keep those in balance. How popular is your zoo. How good are you at sort of supporting conservation efforts? These are being tracked on two separate point tracks, and they each start on opposite ends, so they're kind of going in opposite directions. And when your markers cross each other for conservation and appeal, that triggers the end of the game. And yeah, at that point, there's like end game scoring, and you just kind of look at what everybody's got, and you know, most points wins. That is the basics of Ark Nova. Again, it's always fun to try to describe a visual board game in an audio medium, but it's.. it looks intimidating. I am glad that we played this on Board Game Arena, because it's doing all the bookkeeping for me. It's fantastic.

Jason 16:22
Yeah, there have been several games we've talked about on this podcast where it's like this would be great on the computer to handle all the fiddly math. This is one of those, like, there's a lot of components, a lot of moving parts, and I can see why it's so popular. There are so many decision points, you can't have everything, you have to choose, do I want A or B, do I want C or D, and so there are real decisions you have to make that will definitely impact your game. The game is relatively easy to grasp at a high level, but it also rewards deep strategy and understanding how the parts connect together. But there is a lot of bookkeeping involved, and so having a computer to delegate that to does make it a lot nicer.

Brian 17:02
It seems like it would be really easy to forget some act like, because you can have these sponsor cards that are like, oh, anytime anybody plays a predator icon in any zoo, gain some money, cool. I'm gonna forget that. The game's not gonna forget that. The game's gonna do it for me. It's just accurately keeping track of all the tags. It's this is not about board game arena, but oh man, it was really nice to play on board game. This is why I like this game so much, because it's so easy to play on board game arena.

Ellen 17:29
I do personally benefit from physically interacting with, like, information, so I feel like now that you know, I've looked up some pictures of what the actual like game pieces look like, and I feel like I might benefit from playing this, like, in person with, like, actual pieces and stuff, but God, it looks like tracker hell to me. It is

Ellen 17:50
just.. it

Ellen 17:51
is a little bit of..

Brian 17:54
I'll tell you what, Ellen, if we're ever going to all be in the same place at the same time, we will buy a physical copy, and we'll let Jason take care of the bookkeeping, and it'll be fun.

Jason 18:03
Oh, thank you.

Brian 18:04
You're welcome.

Jason 18:04
Yeah, no, I found on Board Game Geek, there's an image where someone composed all the bits, all the zoo pieces, all the cards, all the meeples and cubes, and everything, and it is beautiful, and so incredibly intimidating, because this thing takes up an entire table when you lay it all out like that,

Ellen 18:21
it's a lot of information.

Brian 18:23
Yes, for sure. One of the metrics that Jason, I informally use when we're ranking games, is the bowl of chip factor. Is there room on the table for a bowl of chips?

Ellen 18:34
Oh, that's

Brian 18:34
funny. Having played only on my.. I actually play on my phone, believe it or not, I don't even play on my laptop. I really severely doubt that there's much room for chips.

Ellen 18:45
This game does not seem like phone activities; this seems like big screen activities.

Jason 18:50
I am shocked that you can play this on your phone.

Brian 18:52
I love playing it on my phone. I'm just used to it at this point. Does anybody else have anything they want to point out about Ark Nova? Anything they feel like I missed, or anything that they want to bring up. I mean, obviously, we've got like 130 animal cards in this game, which is really cool. And, obviously, we're going to talk more about that. I guess one thing I'm going to mention now is that all of the animal cards have a sort of all of the cards have a tag system on them of some kind. So, let me go over those. So, we've got the continents, Antarctica doesn't get to play, and they have compressed the Americas into south and north as just the Americas. It is a European game, so they have kept Europe and Asia separate, which, to be fair, very different animals live there. So, I think that that's legitimate. That's also true for North and South America, but whatever, the animal types - we've got birds, reptiles, primates, and then predators and herbivores, which really more specifically is mammalian predators and mammalian herbivores. I did check everything fits into those categories. There is a weird subclass called bear, which includes bears and a few other things like raccoons, coatis, and weirdly the wolverine,

Brian 19:59
which. Again,

Brian 20:00
just, just based on vibes, I suppose.

Ellen 20:02
Yeah, that's a mustelid. Okay, that's a, that's a weasel. That okay,

Brian 20:06
it is a weasel. And it's like, well, if you're gonna put the wolverine on, like, I don't know if you have a honey badger, but you should also get, let that be a bear. And, like, European badger doesn't get to be one, though. So it's like they balanced bears in a strange way.

Ellen 20:20
Yeah,

Jason 20:20
I am beginning to think that there was some sort of like bear lobbyist that was a friend of the game designer or something, or maybe they just like bears, because this bear category sounds excessively broad.

Ellen 20:34
Big bear got to him.

Brian 20:37
The other thing that I'm thinking about is that bears don't - you're never just a bear, it's always bear plus something else. Bear is a subcategory. There's also petting zoo animals, which covers a huge range of like the cute and the things that will let you touch them. And then there's not bears, there's no bear in that category, as far as I'm aware. There's research, and then there's also icons for like ones that need water and ones that need rocks, so like when you build your little enclosure next to something, like, oh, this animal requires its enclosure to be next to water, for instance, or next to a rock, you can't just play the animals willy nilly, some of them have pre requirements, right? So if you want to play a lion, that's cool, it's kind of the metaphor of the game, I think, is a lion. You have to have other predators in your zoo already before you're gonna get a lion. I think it's the idea of, like, you gotta have, you gotta know what you're doing with predators before they let you have a lion.

Ellen 21:33
You can't go straight to lion.

Brian 21:35
No, you don't go straight to lion. You can go straight to cheetah, though. For some reason,

Ellen 21:39
cheetahs do are quite like built different cheetahs, are like the chillest big cat.

Brian 21:47
Oh, is that right? They do need a lot of space, though. They need a huge

Brian 21:49
enclosure.

Ellen 21:50
Yeah,

Jason 21:51
yeah. And I think there is a bit of a story in what these prerequisites are. I mean, the rock and the water requirements are the most obvious, but like one of the cards I played was a shoe bill, and I had to have two research icons already in my zoo, so I don't know what the story behind that is, but apparently you need to have a pretty good research program in order to actually be able to keep and maintain shoe bills.

Ellen 22:12
I've heard that they're very difficult to breed in captivity, so it could be that it could be that, like, because I know that there has been some difficulty in getting them to like successfully breed in zoos, so maybe it's something to do with that.

Brian 22:26
Could be there were some other ones that are similar, like Galapagos turtles, were the same way. You got to have some research representation in your zoo, right?

Jason 22:33
Yeah, and another way they do it is that some animals can only be played after you have upgraded your animal card, so if you don't upgrade it, you simply can't play an African elephant or other similar animals,

Brian 22:43
you have to have a partner zoo in Asia before you can even have a giant panda, that is true,

Ellen 22:48
right? Yeah, I found the partner zoo requirement interesting because it reminds me a little bit of how, like, for the AZA, like one of the AZA requirements is often that, like, you have to be actively participating in some sort of, like, species survival plan, yeah, which usually involves having, like, some sort of affiliation with, like, on the ground research or conservation, like, you have to, in some way, be partnered with actual conservation, where that animal is from, and be working towards the overall long-term benefit of the species, whether that's like breeding them for, you know, genetic diversity

Ellen 23:29
or bringing

Ellen 23:29
them for better fitness for sport, like you have to be like participating with actual conservation for to like get AZA accreditation,

Jason 23:41
and the AZA is the what the American Zoological Association?

Ellen 23:44
I think it's the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Jason 23:47
Okay,

Brian 23:47
which used to be the American that transitioned from another name. Hey, wonderful transition. Let's talk about zoos. Okay, I have a little thing of just like, so where did zoos come from? Why does zoos exist? The tradition of zoos really gets born out of menageries, nobles for kings, for queens. I think you could probably also get the impression from that that it is difficult, expensive, and challenging to maintain a zoo. Right, this is something that really only the rich and the powerful were doing. Now, those original menageries really weren't anything about, well, obviously they weren't about science, but they weren't even really about animal welfare, right? These were trophies, these were treasures, these were things that were put on display, they were maintained just for that, of like to show how cool and rich you are, right?

Ellen 24:35
They were decorative, yeah,

Brian 24:37
decorative, right, like a museum piece, like anything else that you would capture and display from a far off land. The first really public zoo. Actually, does anyone want to guess what was the origin of the public zoo? This is not you. I don't usually do quizzing, but I'm just curious.

Ellen 24:52
Yeah. No, I'm trying to think of where the first one might have been. It does seem like something they do in the UK. Okay, it does seem like maybe London, maybe

Brian 25:04
that's a really good guess. It was actually during the French Revolution.

Jason 25:08
I should have said that.

Brian 25:09
Basically, it was the reappropriation of menageries and reformation of those into a public zoo. My friend Tara is going to rip me over this pronunciation. The first public zoo was the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes during the French Revolution in 1794 So, we'll see how well I did my French there. Now, even then, the first public zoos, this idea of zoos as things for the public, they still were not for the animals, really. Attitudes about that didn't change until after World War Two. A lot of zoos were sort of destroyed during World War Two, and people started just having different thoughts about that. Also, studies about animal cognition were kind of right around that time. And then this idea of zoos having this mission of conservation, that really comes out of the 1970s environmental movement. So it really hasn't been that long, even though those sort of zoo moments are older than that, this idea of zoos having a mission of conservation is sort of a 1970s and forward thing.

Ellen 26:09
Yeah, when ethics were invented,

Brian 26:13
when environmental ethics were invented, anyway. But yes, you're right.

Jason 26:17
Well, when environmental ethics in the West were invented. If you look in other traditions, they go back much, much further.

Brian 26:23
Let's talk about this now. How do you actually.. let's say you want to open a zoo. Ellen, do you want to open a zoo?

Ellen 26:30
My blood pressure just rose thinking about it, because, like, I feel like I've read through enough, like, handbooks on care and, like, enclosure development and stuff like that, that, like, I know a little bit too much about what has to go on behind the scenes to make it, like, possible, and make it work, and just the thought of having to do all that myself, or even think about it, just immediately made me stressed out.

Brian 26:53
Oh yeah, for sure, which I think is why there are games about this, because something that people love to think about doing, and nobody actually wants to do it.

Ellen 27:02
Love it as a concept.

Brian 27:03
Yeah, so it is, as you can imagine, an exceptionally expensive thing to take on. So we can kind of go into it. What does it actually take to open a zoo? The first thing is just legal permitting, right? You cannot display wild animals. You need to talk to the USDA. You need to have permits from the endanger, based on if you're going to have endangered animals by the Migratory Bird Act. There's all these different legal requirements that cover it, not to mention purchasing the land, developing all of the enclosures that are going to be there. There's no good way to really give a universal estimate for what it costs, but I did do a little bit of research that says it is not atypical for a zoo to have to have a daily operating cost of 10 to $20,000

Jason 27:47
and we should say all those regulations and stuff are of course US-based, because that's where we're based, and we have easy access to all the regulations,

Brian 27:54
very true,

Jason 27:55
presumably there are very different ones, depending on which country you're in, and local regulations, and such,

Ellen 28:00
even within the US, they vary a lot state to state, so like in some states their rules on that are much, much, much chiller, and on some states they're much more, so like I'm from Florida, and Florida had notoriously lacks laws on exotic, even just pet ownership, right, like not even for a zoo, but like, it was the barrier to entry was, in my opinion, too low. A lot of people were basically having private exotic pet collections and calling them a zoo, so that they could sort of justify being allowed by the USDA to keep, like, you know, lions and tigers and whatever weird stuff they wanted to have, even if it was basically just like glorified, like their own private collection, they would like be able to call it a zoo, and like it was just I feel like from state to state, you know, the laws are very, very different,

Jason 28:55
so they were basically recreating their own menagerie,

Brian 28:57
yeah, yeah, just calling it a zoo, continuing with that, okay, great. So you can meet that minimum legal requirement to have a zoo. You've spent an enormous amount of outlay of funds to secure the land, build your enclosures, and everything like that. Now, let's say you want to be accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Now that is a very different process, so you can open a zoo legally, is it a zoo, like Ellen was saying, where it is animal welfare is important, where you are contributing to conservation, where you are doing all of those things that we think of when we think about zoos, all of the positive things that they bring, so you have to be in operation for five years before you are even eligible to be considered for operation, you have to be operating well above the legal standards with animal welfare. First, you have to be participating in conservation. A three-person team of evaluators is going to come to your zoo for multiple days. That's going to include a veterinarian, an animal welfare specialist, and like an experienced zookeeper. They're going to go through your zoo, look through all of your records, then they are going to take their report, as well as probably a ream of paperwork, to the AZA, where a panel is then going to determine if you have qualified for AZA accreditation or not, and then that has to be renewed every five years, right? With all of that, so that's just to become accredited. Now, I also learned, so this game in particular, Ark Nova, they talk about WAZA instead of so in America, it's the Association for Zoos and Aquariums. WAZA is the world association for zoos and aquariums, which actually is an umbrella organization that every one of these.. so there's CAZA in Canada, right? There's EAZA in Europe, they all have wonderful logos, by the way. Actually, you should get little patches of every one of them.

Ellen 30:43
AZA, my inbox is open. Please, please send me merch, AZA. I would love it.

Ellen 30:48
I advertise for you guys all the time for free. Give me some merch, please.

Brian 30:53
And I was very happy to hear that the AZA in the United States is, in fact, part of WAZA. I would not have been surprised if it was not the other way around, where like everybody else is all into this umbrella organization, but the, the US version, no we do our own things in our own accreditation, we're not going to talk to anybody else. So

Ellen 31:09
I think that when you get into like AZA is very like conservation global, like they have that vibe, like they would definitely be like linked up with all the other worldwide organizations, they are definitely, they seem very like, because they are focused on, I guess, global conservation. That doesn't super surprise me.

Brian 31:26
No, no, no, no, no, that's true. So, let's see. So, what are they going to look for? Species-appropriate habitats and enrichment programs, qualified veterinary care. Man, what does it take to be a zoo vet? That seems like that's a very special thing.

Ellen 31:40
Yeah, I have heard some people that have like exotic pets that have said that they had to like take their pet to the zoo because like the vet at the zoo was the only one who could see their like weird pet.

Brian 31:50
Trained professional staff, conservation education, and research programming as a key part there. This is one of those things we're going to come back to later. How much do they spend on conservation and how much does it impact? That's one of those things that occasionally people talk about, and that's someplace where we might see some differences between Ark Nova versus the day-to-day operation of a zoo. So, another thing that I thought was interesting to me, looking this up, of the AZA zoos, just over 50% are nonprofit, so they are presumably receiving funding from cities, from the government, from the state, things like that, but like almost 50% of zoos are for-profit enterprises, and yet they are AZA accredited. So that's kind of a brief overview of the history of zoos. What does it take to be one of these like we consider ideal zoos where conservation is at the core of what you do? So yeah, what do we talk about? Like, what do we think about how zoos are represented in Ark Nova? Do we think that they're doing a good job? And then I also want to talk about the animals, because I think that the animals are a little vibe-coded, rather than like pure accuracy. When you're playing Ark Nova, the things that you're really trying to balance are your appeal, which is basically like how many people are coming to your zoo right versus your conservation, like these are the two things that you're supposed to be doing, and I know that zoos participate in conservation, but I don't really know if that direct interaction with conservation is really what that is part of what zoos do, but I don't think that's really the majority of what zoos do, I definitely don't think it's a 50/50 balance, the way that it's kind of being portrayed in Ark Nova,

Jason 33:23
I mean, we'd really need someone from a zoo to come on and tell us, like, what percentage of time, what percentage of energy, what percentage of money is going to one or another, and probably most of the money is just going to maintenance, it just costs a lot of money to feed the animals, hire the staff, all that sort of stuff, so, but the fact is, like, the good ones are probably still putting significant numbers in. I mean, I'm sure many of them have partnerships with universities and veterinary schools and such to have people come get training, to have internships, all sorts of stuff like that.

Brian 33:55
Yeah, I think that's right. I think that some of the reports say, you know, it's like less than 5% of their gross budget, but that's the gross budget, like a zoo is not like I said, it's very, and like, okay, another thing in Ark Nova, you build your infrastructure, and that's it, it's built forever, you buy your animal one time, and that's it, and that's forever,

Ellen 34:14
right?

Brian 34:14
So they're not really accounting for maintenance costs, or like just upkeep, like at all, it's all put a bundled into that single cost. I have no idea what these credits are, either. I wouldn't be it. We often try to figure out what is our analogy here for costs. I kind of feel like one of those has got to be somewhere between 100,000 and like a million dollars or something,

Ellen 34:34
right? Because these are assets that you're not just like, it's not just a, you're not just like acquiring an asset that's just yours forever. These are like assets that, first of all, will require a lot of maintenance. You'll basically just be having to like continually upkeep this asset, but also the asset will naturally expire, you know? Like, it's just gonna get old and die eventually, so like it's not like you're gonna have it forever, and also. In a lot of zoos, sometimes they don't have that animal, you know. Sometimes they'll have an animal, and then, you know, something happens, maybe it passes away, or you know, gets transferred to a different zoo, or something like that. And then they've got this enclosure, this exhibit sitting there with nothing in it, like, because they just don't have anything to put in it. And then it could be like a way long time later, that finally they get some other animal that then they're like, well, we have an empty enclosure, and they put a new animal in there, so like I have seen that happen like in zoos a lot, so it's yeah, it's not as permanent, but I can't think of any way for them to do that in Ark Nova without adding another tracker.

Brian 35:39
Well, I would routinely have empty enclosures, or they were, you, we didn't get to do this, but they're one of the conservation programs, our release program, and you would actually take an animal, you would take an occupied enclosure, you would get rid of that animal, and you would turn it over to its unoccupied side, so it changes your tags and everything, so there is a yes, this enclosure is now empty, of course, you're only emptying things by releasing it into the wild, which,

Brian 36:02
right,

Brian 36:02
in reality, captive breeding programs definitely an important part of what zoos do. You know, there's a, a small but critical number of success stories. The, the California Condor, being like the big one, right? Like, brought back from what was it, 23 individuals or something horrible,

Brian 36:19
that

Ellen 36:20
it was like in the double digits, yeah.

Brian 36:21
Okay, to actual breeding populations in the wild, but a lot of times the problem these release programs can be really difficult for certain animals, like particularly animals with a lot of complex behavior, complex mental process, animals with culture. It's very hard to take something like that and expect to be able to rear it in a way that it can then survive in the wild, right. So, but sometimes you can do it. Sometimes it's really important, and, and I feel like the real value of zoo is is the inspiration quotient, and I don't know if it's necessarily a captive animal's job to do that, but like the education that that inspiration of the next generation of people who want to work with and preserve animals. I feel like that's a value that's very hard to put an actual number on,

Ellen 37:04
right? I do, and I do think it does make an actual, like, impact on ideology, like I think getting to see, for kids, especially for young people, getting to see, you know, real these very impressive animals, very charismatic animals, especially, and being able to see them in person and perceive them as being like actual living, living, breathing things right in front of you, sharing a space with you. I think is going to make you care more about the world, and also like understand the world outside of your neighborhood, right? If you like are growing up in the USA, you and you get to see giraffes and rhinos at the zoo, right? Like, I think that will inspire you to like actually visualize the world outside of your immediate surroundings, and so I do think it is really important just for like broadening a worldview, I think, was which is valuable in itself, and and also like inspiring young people to care about their environments and teach them about conservation and things like that. I don't know about you guys, I, as a kid, I was always at the zoo. I was not a sign reader. I'm sorry, guys, I'm not

Brian 38:11
really.. you're not a

Brian 38:12
sign reader, you're not a sign

Brian 38:13
reader,

Ellen 38:14
not a big sign reader. I was there, I was not.. I was not reading all the signs, I was there for the vibes, I was there to look at the animals and watch, and, and yap at the zookeepers. I was always talking to the zookeepers, so the zookeepers would talk to me. That's how I'm learning, but, like, I'm not a big stand there and look at the sign person. But, but, yeah, I do feel like I was a kid who grew up going to zoos, and it hugely affected, like, the trajectory of my life. So, I do think it makes a real impact. It's not really a money-making impact, but it's there.

Jason 38:45
Playing off that a bit, I think the quality of the zoo also plays into that, where if you see animals in a more rich environment, something where they can really engage with it, it's better. Whereas, like, I remember when I was a kid, we were going.. I don't even remember which zoo this was that, but most of it was fine, but then we got to like the one thing where it's like this enclosure for a crocodile or something, where the enclosure was completely bare and only just slightly larger than the animal itself. I'm really hoping it was just a temporary housing while it was this real one's being prepared, but I don't know, I was like 10, and like that it can have the opposite effect, and so along those lines, like what are the sort of things that are needed to do a high quality animal enclosure, like what does an animal need for that enclosure to provide stimulation, or whatever it is that the animal is looking for in its environment.

Ellen 39:37
I do think that, like, exhibit design is very interesting. I actually just a few weeks ago had got a chance to talk to Dr. Lisa Daybeck, but she got to - she's a researcher who has worked with research in Papua New Guinea, and she helped design the new sort of like tree tops, like cloud forest to. Exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo here in Seattle, which is close to where I live, and I got to ask her about, like, what kind of thought process went into, like, designing exhibits for tree kangaroos, because she was a tree kangaroo researcher, and you know, she talked about the fact that, you know, tree kangaroos live in, obviously, trees, so they need a lot of climbing structures, but she said that you can't just do vertical structures, because they don't just climb straight up and down, and that's it. They need a lot of like diagonals, they need a lot of horizontal space, they need a lot of like, you know, sort of catwalk style, like trees that they can walk across. So she talked about how they need that sort of structure. Whenever I look at exhibits for things I'm always trying to look at, like what are the containment, like how are they trying to like hide their containment, like I'm trying to think of like how are they not, how are they making it so this animal can't escape, and also doing that in such a way where they're not just like behind iron bars, right, like finding the balance between like security and aesthetics, because aesthetics are important, like what humans are perceiving is very important in the zoo, right? Like, it has to look nice, and also it has to photograph well, you know? Like, if you've got like an enclosure that's like surrounded by a chain link fence, then all of the pictures are going to be seen through a fence, right? And then all the pictures are going to come out kind of like, you know, people. it doesn't look as impressive, so I do think that that, like, exhibit design is very interesting. I just got to go to a few months ago, I got to go to the San Diego Zoo. They invited me, I was so excited to go see their new - they have a brand new elephant exhibit, and this exhibit is huge, like when you are in, yeah, they better be right, like they need a lot of space, and so it's like the sort of thing where, like, from the walkway you can't see the other side of, like, the enclosure, like you really can't even see, like, where the enclosure ends, and some of that, I think, is like clever, like putting the sort of fencing on the other side of a hill, right, so that, like, you really can't see where the fence is, but it is just a massive exhibit, and they had, I want to say, like, eight elephants in there, and we could not see all of them. There were, we could only see probably, like, four of the elephants, and they were like, "Oh, yeah, there's a bunch more somewhere. So,

Jason 42:17
I'm sure they have cameras tracking every single one of those elephants.

Ellen 42:20
I'm sure they knew exactly where those elephants were, but we couldn't see them, which I think is like, if your exhibit is big enough that four elephants cannot be seen, I feel like that is like a good amount of space. How are you hiding four elephants?

Brian 42:34
Yes, good question. I guess the other thing is, like, but you also want your guests to be able to see the animals, so that's kind of a problem too, right?

Ellen 42:43
Yeah, I've seen some of them get kind of like clever with it at Northwest Trek, which is, which is an AZA accredited zoo here in Washington. They have, they have a lot of like little nocturnal creatures, so like they have like skunks and like American badgers and like beavers and stuff like that, creatures that would be more likely to be active at night, so what they have is they have this sort of like shaded nighttime den area that they can go that's dark, but then there's like glass that like you can see them in their little den, oh actually in San Diego Zoo, at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Park, which is like the second, like, location in Escondido, California. They have a platypus, they have a platypus exhibit, apparently only zoo in the world outside of Australia that has platypuses.

Brian 43:31
I was thinking, I've never seen one,

Ellen 43:34
right?

Brian 43:34
This is why

Ellen 43:35
I got to see them in San Diego, and they have an interesting thing, because, like, you mentioned, you have to, you want the guests to be able to see the animal. This is a nocturnal animal. Platypuses come out at night, so the platypus exhibit is actually completely enclosed. It's all in like a building, and the lights in the building are reversed in like a day-night cycle, where the lights are off and it's dark during the day,

Brian 44:02
and just like Australia, they're just keeping on local time.

Ellen 44:07
They like, they have like reversed like day-night cycle, so that the platypus will be active when the people are there.

Brian 44:14
That's cool. I've seen this in, like, bat, yeah, and like bat enclosures. You'll go in, it's all like red light, so that the bats can be,

Ellen 44:20
yeah, you were telling me a little bit about, like, the idea of, like, you know, zoos being good versus bad, and I feel like I have seen such a wide spectrum of zoos, like Jason, you mentioned seeing one that had, like, a really terrible crocodile exhibit that was just, like, you know, I'm sure it was probably with just, like, a concrete pit, probably

Brian 44:39
A concrete pit with a crocodile in it.

Ellen 44:41
I've seen a lot of concrete pit zoos, and I've seen, you know, the San Diego Zoo, and I've seen, like, honestly, I'm from Jacksonville, Florida. I think we had a world-class zoo. The Jacksonville Zoo is fantastic. So, like, I've seen great zoos, I've seen terrible zoos. So, like, I really don't think it's the sort of thing that you can say, like, blanket, like they're all great or they're all bad. Head, because, like, I've seen ones that do it really, really well. I've seen ones that I thought should be shut down.

Jason 45:06
So, aside from looking for, like, accreditation, how can people know if a zoo is good or not before they go, before they give them their money?

Ellen 45:14
Oh, there are a lot of things you can look for, because I have had people mention to me that, like, if they work at smaller zoos. If it's a small zoo, like you mentioned, Brian, AZA accreditation is a huge process. It is. It takes forever. It's also very expensive, and a lot of, especially smaller zoos, don't have that kind of budget, and maybe cannot get AZA accreditation, which doesn't mean that they're bad. Like, it doesn't mean that they're not doing the right thing, it just means that they probably don't have that kind of budget, which is, you know, fine. So you have to put a little more legwork into making sure there are some red flags that I've learned you can kind of look out for. One of them is doing paid, like hands on contact, particularly with animals that you shouldn't have hands on contact with, so like predators, right, like hands on contact with like a big cat, that's a big no no, hands on contact with a very young animal that's a big no no, like those those sort of like paid opportunities where you can like pay to stress an animal out, like, is usually

Ellen 46:22
that's

Ellen 46:22
kind of like that's kind of a red flag, you know, like, and I've seen some zoos that have, like, ambassador animals, where they can pay a little extra money and go, you know, hang out with, like, a Galapagos tortoise, is probably going to be fine, they don't care that you're there, you know, they'll have, like, or they'll have, I did one, actually, actually in Atlanta, at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, my husband surprised me with a the behind the scenes sea otter tour, where you could like go to the behind the scenes of the sea otter exhibit at the Georgia Aquarium, and you do have to pay extra for it, and you do sort of get hands on contact, but the way they do it is interesting, they have this sort of like plexiglass like barrier between you and the otters like tank, and you're basically spot training where you like put your finger up to the hole and the otter comes up and boops their nose like onto your finger, so it's a very like animal lead, it's like if the animal doesn't want to do it, they're not going to do it, so it's like it's kind of up to them and it's not stressing them out, but you do still get to like boop an otter with your, with your finger, which is very, very nice.

Jason 47:25
So, like, I know so many people that would pay extra money to boop an otter's nose.

Ellen 47:30
I did. It was worth it, was worth every penny. So, there are things you can look out for, especially like those sort of money grab opportunities, like if they're asking you to pay extra money to like stress an animal out on purpose, that's usually a red flag. I also kind of look to see, like, okay, what, where are you getting your animals from? That's a huge thing, like, are you only taking in rescued animals from other places, are you like breeding them, you know, like, I, you can look into a little bit, like, if they'll, if they say on their website where they get their animals from, that can be helpful if they're not saying it might be because they don't want you to know, usually places that, like, are getting their animals either, like, from a rescue situation, or if they're participating in a species survival program, they'll be very, like, upfront about that, that information will be, will be very available.

Jason 48:21
Yeah, we actually have a very tiny zoo here in Athens that is a purely rescue zoo. It's a small free zoo. It's, it's not gonna make anyone's list of like top 100 zoos in the nation. It's very tiny, but it's it's full of rescued animals, and they're very open about that. These are all animals that are not able to be released to the wild because they have critical injuries or whatever, and so they're kept here to have a good life.

Ellen 48:44
We had a there was a big cat sanctuary like that from in North Florida, and one thing that, like, also something that I would see in places that I consider to be red flags were like not using proper safety protocols between their staff and the animals, where like if the staff is like in an enclosure with something like a tiger or a lion or a big cat or something like that, like with the AZA, they have like what do they call it, protected contact or something like that, or like there are steps basically where they're there, they should never be like in the enclosure with certain animals, there's some where it's fine, they're not going to do anything, but if it's something like I had Marco Wendt on, who worked, who works at the San Diego Zoo, and he was talking about cassowaries, and like cassowaries are like

Jason 49:30
those are basically dinosaurs,

Ellen 49:32
yeah, so especially places will post on social media, like they'll usually tell on themselves on social media where they'll like post a lot of videos of their keepers, like in the enclosure with like a live tiger or something like that, and you're like, okay, you shouldn't be doing that, because if they're not, if they're not using good safety protocols with their staff, I feel like there's probably some other things they're not doing probably super responsibly and safely either.

Brian 49:59
Well, it also just. Makes you wonder, it's like that. If that is a wild animal acting like a wild animal, you shouldn't be around it like that, right?

Ellen 50:07
Yeah,

Brian 50:08
like, so why isn't that animal attacking them? Or anyway,

Ellen 50:13
I've seen, I've heard a lot of horror stories about like tourist traps that will, like, sit like heavily, heavily sedate animals, so that they can like take pictures with them, and have their cute little moment. Do your research, like, look into a place before you visit them. I think is my big takeaway, right? Just like, look into them, see what you can find, see if they're being cagey on their website.

Brian 50:35
Is there anything else we want to talk about about the science that is represented in Ark Nova? If there's not, I would love to step into our nitpick corner, because during the course of our conversation I found mine.

Ellen 50:45
Oh,

Jason 50:46
all right. Do tell.

Ellen 50:46
Yeah, let me hear it.

Brian 50:47
My nitpick about Ark Nova as a zoo management game is that there's not nearly enough poop.

Ellen 50:55
I would like to see more like management Sims deal with

Brian 51:01
everything that I've seen and researched, everything that I did getting ready for this says that being a zookeeper is about 50% poop management.

Ellen 51:09
Yeah, it's mostly poop management. Yeah,

Brian 51:12
so I feel like maybe that break tracker needs to be based on it's actually the poop tracker, it should just be a little poop emoji, and when you reach a certain amount of poop, that's it. You've got to stop, clean out, and that's in between rounds.

Ellen 51:24
It should be like it's like a, it's like a flood tracker that like the poop level rises gradually.

Brian 51:32
I thought of one more nitpick, and if nobody else has one, I'm gonna list my, that my second

Brian 51:37
one as

Brian 51:37
well.

Jason 51:37
I think I would need to play the game a few more times to pull out, I mean, there's there's enough depth in this game that I don't think I can make a good saying of what I would fix until I understand it better.

Brian 51:52
Okay, that's fair. Then next time I invite you to play, you got to accept my invitation. Okay, I've got two games running right now. Anyway, my other nitpick, then, and then we can be done with nitpick corner. You can build all of these structures in the game, specialized enclosures and things, for like, there's a meerkat den, and there's all these things that give you special powers in Board Game Arena there's an arcade that actually, like, do you know what they don't have all those special structures, they don't have a gift shop, and that's crazy.

Ellen 52:24
Would like to see that.

Brian 52:26
Have you ever been to a zoo that didn't have a gift shop?

Jason 52:29
Isn't that what the little kiosks are? I mean, they generate income for you. It might be like pretzels and slushies, but it may also just be a bunch of merch.

Brian 52:36
I think they're selling pretzels and slushies. I did find an image of a kiosk from some kind of bonus tile, and it was definitely a place where they had like little tables, and they were selling like cotton candy and stuff, but no, I need, I gotta go buy a stuffed animal, and you know, a little battery-powered fan that's gonna break the next day, like that's what

Ellen 52:55
, yeah, I need, I need a carrot at the end to encourage my kid to lock in while we're at the zoo, like I need something to encourage my kid to just like chill out for a few minutes, like don't worry guys, if you, if you guys can lock in and get through this zoo trip with no ridiculousness, I mean, there could be a stupid little knickknack in it for you,

Jason 53:17
so it sounds like the love of zoos and talking to zookeepers may not have passed on faithfully.

Ellen 53:25
No, my kids are goblins, which I don't know where they got that from. I have no idea.

Jason 53:32
You say that, and I don't know exactly what it means, but it sounds like they're trying to eat the animals.

Ellen 53:41
Some of them, I catch them licking their lips a little bit.

Brian 53:45
That snake looks delicious. All right, let's.. well, then let's move on to grades. Ellen, if you don't want to grade, you don't have to. We, Jason and I, are professors, so we give two grades. We will grade on fun, and we grade on scientific accuracy, so we'll just do this back to back, and I actually would like Jason to start this time.

Jason 54:08
Okay, so I'm having to think again, like I really feel like I need several more plays throughs, which is a big ask in the game that take can take two plus hours for a single playthrough to feel this in depth. What I saw of the game, I would be comfortable giving it probably about an A minus for science. It's like they, they seem to have done a good job trying to tie things together. They have a good amount of actually, they don't have a good amount of information on the animals that they have pictures, and they have some tags.

Brian 54:39
They have tags and where they're from, that's about it.

Ellen 54:42
It's like a Yu-Gi-Oh card.

Jason 54:45
Yeah, I think there would be opportunity there. So many games like this nowadays, they have that little line of flavor text that tells you about the animal,

Ellen 54:52
I'd like to see more flavor text, for sure. Yeah,

Jason 54:54
or a genus species or something, those little things that are not necessary parts of the game, but that you let. You layer it on a little bit more, and I think that they easily could have done that, because at least most of the cards that I was looking at seemed like they had extra space available to do so,

Jason 55:10
and again, they were electronic versions, so maybe the physical versions do not have that, but it seems like there would be a very easy opportunity to just add a little extra layer of it, there, which is what I'm going to put out, an A minus, because largely I think it does what it wants to do, as far as being accurate, and the fact that the rule book says, like, they tried to be accurate, they acknowledged some of the places they, they diverged, I think that's fine, I guess going back, I do have the one nitpick, is just the bears, someone just likes bears too much, and it just wants to draw that circle wide,

Brian 55:45
but again, bear was just a subclass, nothing was a bear, everything was a bear plus x, although I don't really know what that means,

Ellen 55:52
but the fact that the bears are like the only subclass is very funny to me,

Brian 55:55
that is true, it's like bears, no, you're right, there's no reason it should just be bears, Jason, let's do fun before I, before I derail us completely.

Jason 56:04
Okay, so I will preface this by saying that I feel very inadequate to give a fun judgment on something that is number two on Board Game Geek. It's like I think the general geek culture has spoken, however, people do have different levels of fun. I can definitely see this being in the A category for fun. It definitely, there are a lot of moving parts, which will turn some people off, but for people who like a lot of moving parts, who people who like a lot of replayability, a lot of decision making, where every game is a little bit different based on what you get and what's laid out there's it has a nice mix where there are several parts that are randomly arranged, including what cards you get, how your starting actions are laid out, where some of the upgrades show up, there's a lot of that limited randomization that makes it so that no two games are exactly alike, and you can pursue a bunch of different strategies, so I can definitely see this being one that it deserved an A in fun, I think, assuming that this is the kind of game you like. I think it is a solid A. I would not mind if they had maybe the light version that was about an hour to play.

Brian 57:14
Yeah, that's fair.

Jason 57:15
But then I don't know if that would be as fun, because you'd have to drop some of the fiddly bits.

Brian 57:18
Well, honestly, all you would really need to do, if you wanted to play the game shorter, is just reduce some of those tracks. Do you know what I mean? Like, you would just, if you want to play, it's a lot of tracks, but just literally, like, your appeal and your conservation points are just going to cross in half the time. That's there's a shorter game, right? You don't get that depth of strategy. Maybe you got some crazy people who rush the game, I don't know,

Ellen 57:42
speed running Ark Nova,

Brian 57:44
speed running Ark Nova. Hey, you can do it. I have played so many. This is my new favorite game. I know that sounds crazy to you, Jason, because you know my previous favorite game was Harmonies, which is very chill, little landscape building games, where you like balancing points. The thing is, is that for me, and again I'm playing on Board Game Arena, so it's doing all of my bookkeeping for me, so I don't have to worry about setting up a game that's going to occupy an entire table and sitting down to play it for two hours. The thing I like about Ark Nova is that sort of you strategize, but only for a couple of rounds, it's very reactive, you have short-term strategies that those will change based on cards, based on what comes up, based on what you're able to optimize. Like, I don't have to think 20 steps ahead, I am fine thinking three steps ahead. That's, I can deal with that. That's the level of forethought that I like to deal with. So, solid A for fun, no question from me. For science, I think that I don't know if I want to ding it for the, they, they didn't show their work, and they didn't give me any place to see where they were going to show their work, in terms of, like, how did they, how did you make these adjustments, like, where did you simplify, the animals are all very vibe coded, in the sense that, like, they'll code the animal's abilities. There's like 20 different animal abilities. One of them is like snapping. Okay, so that's cool. What animals are going to snap? Crocodiles snap, right? And there's a couple other things, a couple under lizards in the game. Snapping is when you can just grab a card from the display anywhere, right? So the animal snaps, and they're tying that to the mechanic. It's not really accurate to the animal. Do you know what I mean? That's what I'm saying. It's like it's very vibe coded.

Jason 59:23
Yeah, some of them were though, like I played the little capuchin monkey that had the pilfering ability to let me steal stuff from you. Yeah, and that is totally true. When I was in Venezuela, that we went to a park that, where they had monkeys, and the monkeys had obviously learned that the tourists would feed them like little plantain chips from a bag, that just little like snack bag, you get like potato chips, but the capuchins had definitely learned that there were many more chips in the bag than in the tourist's hand, and so then they'd steal the bag out of your hand, then they'd run off into the trees,

Ellen 59:52
a Looney Tunes scene.

Brian 59:54
Yeah, a lot of the animals that are venomous have a venom ability that you use and you put it on your opponent, and it like depowers some of their cards, so like again, it's all there. I don't think any of it's wrong, it's just very vibe coded.

Ellen 1:00:08
I do like the idea that you are deploying your animals to like personally attack your competitors.

Brian 1:00:15
Yeah, you are

Ellen 1:00:15
that is really funny to me that you are like sending out your army, that like, because in the context of the game, you are sort of like CEO, you are like admin of the zoo, and I'm imagining that you are sending monkeys to go steal from your competitors' home,

Jason 1:00:32
release the capuchins,

Brian 1:00:33
fly my pretties, fly,

Ellen 1:00:35
yeah, like it's a very funny mental image to both like be in the role of this sort of like top down administrative position, but also still having the animals like having sort of personal like individual level powers is really funny.

Brian 1:00:53
There is actually a special sponsor card called Quarantine Lab that protects you against all of the negative effects: pilfering, venom, constriction, so at that point none of the negative effects of your opponents can hurt you anymore, because you've got a quarantine lab in place. on science, I think I think I'm gonna give it, I'm gonna give it a B, maybe I'm being too harsh, but I think that the intentions there, and that's always good, but I think that little bit of room for improvement.

Jason 1:01:20
Yeah, I guess your metric is, will people learn something wrong from this, and do you think that will happen?

Brian 1:01:26
a little bit? Mostly just this catch and release thing isn't really like true to how a lot of these programs actually work.

Ellen 1:01:34
Yeah, most of the animals in a zoo are usually not releasable.

Brian 1:01:37
No, no, they're not. So I think I'm comfortable with my B, even though I absolutely love this game, and I love what they've done. I just think there's a little bit of room for improvement there. What about you, Ellen? Do you want to give grades or do you want to abstain?

Ellen 1:01:49
I think I would like to abstain from a grade. I did find the game, once I started to get the hang of things, I did find it very fun. I did feel that that catch, like, when you're, when you're just getting this, like, the hang of a board game, and you start to feel like eager for the next turn, rather than, like, when you start to feel like, oh, like I'm excited for to be my next turn, because I have this thing I want to do, you know, the first few turns, you're kind of just like struggling to get your bearings, and you're like, oh god, it's my turn again, oh, what do I do, like, I started to like get into the groove of it, and I sort of see, like, okay, yeah, I see. Where you know someone who probably has a good grasp of the game would probably.. I was doing a lot of fumbling. I also found it difficult to remember the different categories of things because they're not very well explained. I feel like on the card, like I often would look at a card and I'd be like, I have no way of knowing whether this is association or sponsorship, and I couldn't remember which one was which. Like, I struggled a little bit with remembering, like, sort of the admin stuff behind the game. Once I started to get the hang of it, I started to get the hang of it. My only thing that I wish the game had has done a little bit more of, and this is more of a thing for my own personal, this is a personal taste thing. I actually wish they had a more unique sort of like aesthetic, like I wish they had a more clear aesthetic direction, like everything seems kind of like generic and like default and like basic in aesthetic, whereas I'm thinking of like I play a lot of very artsy games, like I play like Wingspan or something, which has this sort of like a clear aesthetic direction, everything has this cohesive like a color palette that all works well together, there's like a style that like everything is illustrated and in these, like, really like, like this watercolor illustrative style, and everything kind of like works together to make like very artistic, like game pieces and stuff, and everything in this feel in Ark Nova feels kind of like aesthetically generic, especially because they're all stock photos, right, like all the all of the cards are all stock photos, like everything, all the assets are just stock photos, and I would have liked to see illustrations, or I would have liked to see more like original art, or like an original artistic direction. Maybe I would have been a little, like, I don't know, maybe giving me a little eye candy would reel me in a little bit, but if that is not the sort of thing that matters to you, if you don't like artsy fartsy games, then you know that's fine, that's neither here nor there, that's just my own personal, I like, I like a little bit of like, I like something unique, and I like something like artsy, and I would have liked to see a little bit more of that.

Brian 1:04:43
We talk a lot about how, like, look, you play with your eyes first, right? You eat with your eyes first, and a pretty little game is totally, is totally legitimate.

Ellen 1:04:52
They do use very good pictures. The pictures are lovely.

Brian 1:04:56
All right. Well, I want to thank you, Ellen, for coming on to talk. To us about this awesome zoo game, it was really fun conversation. Uh, thank you for all the wonderful insights about animals and zoos. It just, it's great that you take the time to come to, you know, our little science communication podcast. But where should people, where should people find you? I mean, I obviously there's just the zoo of us, but how do people, how do people follow you, or your, your impacted your science communication.

Speaker 7 1:05:22
Sure, I'm on social media, I'm most active on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm also on Discord. We have a, we have a just the zoo of us server on Discord with a lot of really cool people. Some of them don't even listen to the podcast, so

Brian 1:05:38
Ow wow, how'd you manage that?

Speaker 7 1:05:39
It's just some people are like, hey, I'm, you know, a friend of mine told me this server is where all the cool animal nerds hang out, and you know, people just end up hanging out in there and having a good time. So, yeah, links are just search up just the zoo of us on any of those social media platforms, and you'll find it. My handle is usually elksneedle, all one word, and I do have, you know, some some projects coming up this year. Also, if you live in the Seattle area, we do little meetups. We've got a tide pooling meetup, we've got a Max Fun meetup, we got all, we do little stuff in the Seattle area throughout the year. So, do come follow me on social media if you live in Seattle and want to want to come meet some animal nerds,

Brian 1:06:21
absolutely, and we will definitely put that, those links in the show notes as well.

Speaker 8 1:06:24
Sweet, thank you. And thank you, Brian and Jason, for having me on and showing me this really cool game. I had not heard of this game before you told me about it, so I'm really glad that you did. All

Jason 1:06:34
right, you're welcome. I'm glad to have you on.

Brian 1:06:36
Okay, so I think we're gonna cut it there. I wanna thank all of you listeners for tuning in. I hope you have a great month and great games,

Jason 1:06:43
and as always, have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.

Brian 1:06:48
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.

Ellen 1:07:11
Do you want, do you want a dice roll for the, for the recording

Brian 1:07:15
dice roll? Yeah, why not?

Speaker 8 1:07:17
Where you say, like, have fun playing dice, rolling dice with the universe. Hold on one sec. Yeah, it does every time. Ready for

Jason 1:07:22
The mic might pick it up. Zoom might not

Brian 1:07:24
zoom might cancel it out.

Speaker 8 1:07:25
It's okay. It'll be on my.. it'll be on my local recording.

Brian 1:07:27
Ah,

Speaker 9 1:07:29
it's.. it's metal, so it'll hear. Okay, it's on my waveform. I can see it.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Comment (0)

No comments yet. Be the first to say something!

S3E05 - Ark Nova (Zoos)

Timestamps

Links

Full Transcript