S3E07.1 - Elizabeth Hargrave (bonus interview)

#Wingspan #ElizabethHargrave #Interview #Designer #BoardGames #Science

Summary

After 3 years of comparing every game to Wingspan, we finally get to talk with the designer herself, Elizabeht Hargrave! We talk about her design process, favorite games and memories as a designer, current and future projects, and all sort of other fun stuff. And about birds, of course. (And butterflies, foxes, seashells, and other wonderful things.) So if you, like us, have been waiting years for this moment, please pull up a chair and enjoy this special bonus episode of Gaming with Science!

Timestamps

00:00 Introductions
01:42 Wingpan and spinoffs
08:23 Game inspirations
18:08 Thoughts as a game designer
26:12 Inclusivity, gaming, and science
32:14 Parting advice and favorite games

Full Transcript

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

Brian 0:06
Hello and welcome to the Gaming with Science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.

Jason Wallace 0:11
In today's episode, we're going to be interviewing Elizabeth Hargrave. All right, everyone, welcome back to Game with Science. This is Jason.

Brian 0:19
This is Brian,

Jason Wallace 0:20
and today we are joined by a very special interview guest, possibly one of the people we've wanted to have on here for the longest time since basically day one of the podcast, Elizabeth Hargrave, who you may recognize from some titles we've done on here, like Wingspan and Undergrove, and most recently the Fox Experiment. So, Elizabeth, for people who haven't already figured out who you are from listening to prior episodes. Could you give us a quick introduction about who you are and how you got into game design?

Elizabeth 0:46
Yeah, my name's Elizabeth. I designed all those games and some others too.

Brian 0:51
Mariposas is on our list. Don't worry.

Elizabeth 0:54
Fantastic. I'll try and stay ahead of you guys.

Brian 1:01
Appreciate that. Thank you.

Elizabeth 1:02
I am doing game design full time. I started back in 2013. Wingspan was the first thing I worked on. It looked nothing like Wingspan when I started on it. I mean, it had birds, but I didn't know what I was doing, and it evolved a lot over time. And now here I am.

Jason Wallace 1:20
If I remember right, you were doing policy work before that, weren't you?

Elizabeth 1:24
Yeah, I had a decently long career as a health policy analyst. I live outside of Washington D.C. and I came here to work for the federal government many, many years ago.

Jason Wallace 1:35
Well, that is a hard switch, but we are all very grateful for your contributions to the board game community. I actually have a question there about Wingspan itself. So it was your first game, and it's an amazing game, but it sounds like it was a long and torturous road to get there. You say it looked nothing like it does now from originally. How many different iterations did it go through? My original question was, how did your first game become so good? And it sounds like the answer is a whole lot of work. Like, what was that work?

Elizabeth 2:02
Yeah, and it was iteration, and I did not count. My first cards for Wingspan were literally like written in pencil on cardstock, and I play tested it a lot with just friends and family for a while. Eventually, I got hooked up with a playtesting convention up in Baltimore called Unpub.

Brian 2:24
Oh yeah, I know Unpub.

Elizabeth 2:25
for unpublished games. Which is awesome for anyone on the East Coast. Really, people come from all over now. If you're anywhere near the Baltimore area in the spring, you can just go and play test people's games all weekend. It's amazing. Anyway, I got hooked up with that, and through that, sort of started meeting more designers in the DC area. Started play testing more regularly with people who are thinking harder about games instead of just my friends, which makes a difference. And sort of settled into a regular weekly play testing pattern with some other designers here in the D.C. area, which definitely started to move me forward more quickly.

Brian 3:08
Do you still have some of those original pencil-on index cards, cards kicking around somewhere?

Elizabeth 3:13
I took a picture of some of them and I gave a bunch of my stuff to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

Brian 3:21
The Strong Museum of play. We're gonna have to drop that in the show notes for sure.

Jason Wallace 3:26
I think that's a field trip, Brian.

Brian 3:27
Yeah, for sure to make a field

Elizabeth 3:29
trip.

Brian 3:29
Cool.

Jason Wallace 3:30
So we love games, but on this podcast especially, we love games that we call hard science games. So the games that are not only fun to play, but that include a very strong like real-world scientific component, and it's become the joke that we practically can't get through an episode without mentioning Wingspan as being the poster child of what does this really well because it's a very fun game, but there's so much of real-world science and biology reflected in it-not just the good illustrations, but like the nest types, or the number of eggs, or the distribution maps, or genus and species names. Now, some of these I know have mechanical components to them, and they make sense, like the different types of nests, the egg sizes. Those are resources in the game you can use to get points. Some of them, though, are, for lack of a better word, decorative things like putting the genus species name on there, the little maps that show their range. And I guess my question is, what inspired you to put that many layers of actual ornithology, actual birding information on these cards? And at any point, did you get pushback from people, from your play testers or from your publisher about things that are on the cards that don't actually have to do with the mechanics of the game?

Brian 4:38
Did they want you to strip out the unnecessary bits?

Elizabeth 4:41
I don't think I ever got pushback. No, I think, Jamey Stegmaier, owner of Stonemaier games, co-owner. When I pitched Wingspan to him, I remember him having this moment that was like, I remember sitting down as a kid with my grandma's bird field guides.

Brian 4:59
Awesome.

Elizabeth 5:00
He had like this core memory, and I think that's part of the resonance of Wingspan for a lot of people. They have some experience with birds that goes way back, but for him, it was field guides specifically that my prototype made him think of, which was sort of intentional. But I think because we both sort of had that touch point for how we interact with bird information, then it makes sense that the genus name is there, that the range map is there. They're like the things that you see in a field guide of birds, and it makes each card feel sort of like a page in a field guide.

Brian 5:37
The illustrations are fantastic.

Elizabeth 5:39
I can't take any credit for that. Just to be clear, because I had someone the other day reach out to me for a pet portrait. Oh no, that is not my part of the game.

Jason Wallace 5:51
And so there's also been several spinoff games. First, Wyrmspan, which being about dragons, will never show up on this podcast, and then Finspan, which we actually did do an episode on, and we got to talk to Brynn Devine, who was the scientific consultant involved in that. How much have you been involved in that? Are you more of an executive producer role? Because I noticed when I was looking up your gameography, I didn't see those actually listed under your name. So is that you take more of a I don't know what to call it, like

Elizabeth 6:16
yeah, like a consultant kind of. So Wyrmspan came first, like you said, and , who designed that, lives here in the D.C. area. We play test with each other every week now. So when she started working on Wyrmspan, she already had Apiary with Stonemaier games. I don't think it had come out yet, but that's how Jamie knew her and wanted, you know, had thought of her to work on Wyrmspan, and I thought that was a great idea. He offered it to me, but I did not have any interest in working with dragons, and I was busy on other stuff. So I sort of helped get Connie going in the sense that I set her down with my spreadsheet of how I think about structuring wingspan cards in terms of what are the moving pieces of how to do the score versus the powers versus the requirements and things like that. We play tested it along the way and had a lot of very interesting conversations about like what makes something feel like it's in a family with wingspan but its own thing. And it went a little bit too far in both directions on on that in terms of like so far away that it didn't feel like a wingspan game, and then so close that you know we wanted to differentiate a little bit more. So that was a super interesting process to me. But Connie was doing all the hands-on, like designing every card, designing how it works, all of that stuff. And then similar with finspan, although that was second and sort of even learned a little bit from that wyrmspan experience by the time it got going. And then at some point, I had my own prototype of fin span that I had made, and I got to go play it with a marine biologist that I knew. I participated in that part of it too, in terms of the scientific checking.

Brian 7:59
So obviously, wingspan sort of the theme is very obvious, and at least from we we understand from your biography is like a personal connection. But then looking at these other three games, and I'm sorry if I'm missing one: Mariposis, Undergrove, and The Fox Experiment are the three that I'm thinking of. Is there what I'm missing?

Elizabeth 8:14
Well, I have Tussie Mussie, which is not really science based.

Brian 8:17
Okay, which I'm sure is very fun, but again,

Elizabeth 8:20
yeah, and now I have Sanibel, which is about seashells.

Brian 8:23
Oh, that's a so what I was going to say is like the Mariposas, the Fox Experiment, and Undergrove. They're like these very inspirational scientific stories. There's a narrative there. How do you get inspired to choose what topic you want to make a game about?

Elizabeth 8:39
I have at this point, a very long running list on my phone of like, oh, this would make this seems like you could do a game about it. This would be an interesting, or like this is a fascinating thing, or this is a cool piece of art, even or funky animal or whatever. But the thing that really gets me to start working on something is having a flash of inspiration that is okay. Here's this cool thing in the world, but this is how you would actually express that in a game mechanic.

Brian 9:11
Gotcha. That's like finding the fun of like, what is the metaphor of this going to be? How are we going to abstract this?

Elizabeth 9:16
Yeah, I

Brian 9:17
was just thinking how each of those fox experiment, undergrowth, mariposas, each of those, I think, have been covers of National Geographic at some point or the other in terms of the story.

Elizabeth 9:28
That's interesting. Yeah, for Wingspin, it was really like let's do a tableau builder where you just get to like have your birds laid out in front of you. And the fox experiment was, you know, the idea of the genetics of these foxes and like such an interesting story of the selective breeding and like obviously for genetics I wanted there to be like dice rolling and some way to pass genes down through generations and so the piece that like my brain latched onto was like how can I create. Information getting passed through generations for that game, and so that's like the core little spark of inspiration that the whole thing then spiraled out from there.

Brian 10:09
Plus, you get to name your fox pups.

Elizabeth 10:11
Yes, which was in and out depending on how we were going to do the actual component of tracking the information, right? Like it wasn't always dry erase. At some points, it was little cardboard chits, and you couldn't write on them. And part of the reason the dry erase won because people like get so much pleasure out of names of foxes. Like really, an unexpected bonus of that game, for sure.

Jason Wallace 10:36
Yes, although we did the boring ones. Oh, this is F 123.

Brian 10:40
That was fun for us. No, we did. It was fun for us. Well, eventually, Jason did start giving him names, but like we liked. Oh, because you wanted because we're big dorks where they

Elizabeth 10:48
like actually fit in the family.

Brian 10:49
Kinda, yeah.

Elizabeth 10:51
Yeah, we did a little bit of that in the actual experiment. Apparently, by keeping the first letter consistent.

Brian 10:58
Oh, interesting. Parents

Elizabeth 11:00
to offspring.

Brian 11:01
Okay,

Elizabeth 11:02
I think from the mom, they passed down the first letter of the mom's name.

Brian 11:05
Very nice. They must have gone through a lot of variations of those names then.

Elizabeth 11:08
I'm sure they also had a numbering system. But it was I read that the foxes have names.

Brian 11:15
Cool.

Jason Wallace 11:16
And I guess one question I have is, how did you hear about these things? Like, okay, lots of people are into birds, but like the fox experiment is a fairly obscure like animal evolution thing, and then mycelial networks for undergrowth. These are not things that most people run across. Like, how do you run across these particular things? Was it National Geographic or

Elizabeth 11:38
I don't think because the National Geographic article, I think, was too long ago for it to have been that. I don't remember how I heard about the Fox experiment. It might have been Radiolab.

Brian 11:47
Oh, that makes sense.

Elizabeth 11:48
There was also a New York Times article about it at one point. I don't remember which was the first, but like it was multiple things that I heard about it, and it's just such a great story. What was the other?

Brian 12:00
So there's Mariposas about the monarch migration

Jason Wallace 12:03
and Undergrove.

Elizabeth 12:04
So for Undergrove, I am a mushroom collector, a member and past president of the Mycological Association of Washington D.C. Oh, that's great! I'm just a mushroom geek. Like I know mycelia, I know lots of mushrooms.

Brian 12:18
So I am in the Department of Plant Pathology. So I am surrounded by mycologists, although I am not one myself.

Elizabeth 12:25
And you know, Mariposas, which is about migrating monarch butterflies. One of the ways that I heard about that was Barbara Kingsolver has a novel called Flight Behavior. No, but I read that after. So okay, maybe it was just a guidebook for Mexico because I went to one of the monarch sanctuaries in Mexico.

Brian 12:45
That's cool.

Elizabeth 12:45
Way back in the early 2000s, and then several years later, I read Barbara Kingsolver's book *Flight Behavior* and my brain started going about this should be a game where you're actually moving the monarch butterflies on the map

Brian 12:59
from place to place. Is it the monarch butterfly where they still have this pattern in their migration, where they like take this weird loop, and the assumption is that there used to be an obstacle there, and the obstacle is not there anymore?

Elizabeth 13:09
I am not aware of that, but that would be amazing.

Brian 13:12
I'll double check to see if that's true. I'm pretty sure that's the monarch.

Jason Wallace 13:16
Hey there, this is editor Jason from the Future. Just with a quick update here, we looked this up afterwards, and it turns out that while monarchs do veer east on their migration back up towards the northern part of the United States and Canada, it is not due to some missing mountain. The monarch migration is probably only at most 10,000 years old because all of Canada was covered by glaciers at that point, which is not really great monarch habitat. And some sources even think that the migration may only be a few centuries old and might even have been triggered by deforestation once Europeans came over and started clearing forests for farmland. Short answer is that people don't seem to actually know what causes it. We'll link some sources in the show notes so you can look up more if you want. And with that, we'll head back to the show.

Elizabeth 13:53
There's a few other migratory species of butterfly, which is just-it's wild. They're such tiny little creatures to go so far.

Jason Wallace 14:00
You wonder how they have the energy to do that.

Brian 14:03
I mean, they they don't, right? They die halfway, and it's a multi generational,

Elizabeth 14:08
which is even more mind blowing.

Jason Wallace 14:09
True, true. Now you just said you've got a phone full of ideas of possible themes. Is there any theme that you've just had forever and you just can't figure out how to make it stick. He's like, "Oh, if only I could make something about paramecia, that would be I would have reached apotheosis. Like, is there anything like that? Just nags that you've never managed to figure it out,

Brian 14:32
or like you pick up off the shelf and you put it down, and you pick it up and you put it down.

Elizabeth 14:36
Yeah, I kind of work on things one at a time, so it's like I start working on something, and I bang it into submission. Yeah, I have a lot of things on my list. I'm just looking at my unfinished prototypes that I have set aside. I would love to do a game about the fact that argan, like argan oil, you know, that's used in lots of cosmetics. Is harvested by these goats that climb up in the trees and eat the fruits of the trees, and then poop out the seeds. And people collect the seeds out of the goat poop.

Brian 15:13
That's I'm aware of civet coffee. I'll be honest. I've never heard of argan oil. That's that's crazy.

Brian 15:21
That's like the weird, like red pigment you get from beetles or something. That's even weirder.

Jason Wallace 15:25
Or ambergris, the sperm whale poop secretions or whatever that people collect for fragrances. Apparently, there's a lot of things that come out of other things rectums that we find very well. Okay, there's not a lot, but there's a few things that come out of other things rectums.

Elizabeth 15:40
More than you would think.

Brian 15:42
Oh man, I don't know what you were thinking, but with the argan oil, you can almost see the worker placement with your little goats,

Elizabeth 15:48
right? And little trees

Brian 15:53
and little piles.

Elizabeth 15:54
Theres a game there I just haven't figured it out.

Brian 15:56
Probably not turds, but some kind of seed emoji.

Jason Wallace 15:59
I don't know. You were saying that Ark Nova needed to have the little poop icons to indicate that the zoo was getting there.

Brian 16:04
So they have the break tracker, and I get that, and I know it's a cup of coffee. Which look, zoology is all about poop, right? If you are a zookeeper, your life is dominated by moving poop from one place to another. Which actually, I did want to mention somebody on our Discord username Kredal did point out to us that you have a cameo in Ark Nova.

Elizabeth 16:23
I do. Yes, I am the ornithologist card.

Brian 16:28
Now, how is that?

Elizabeth 16:29
It's pretty great. I kind of forgot that that was happening. So the company Feuerland, who's the publisher of Ark Nova originally, they are also the German translator for Wingspan, so they publish Flügelschlag, which is the German name of Wingspan.

Brian 16:49
I love German,

Elizabeth 16:50
and so they had like press materials from the rollout of Wingspan, and when they were working on Ark Nova, you know how all the cards have photos on them. Apparently, a lot of those photos are people that they know, and they reached out. They didn't really tell me that much about the game, but the graphic designer who I kind of knew and had hung out with a little bit was like, "We're working on this game. Can I use this photo that we had that we had sent to this German magazine, and can I put this in the game? It's one I think you'll really like. That's like the extent of what I do. Then, like a year later, this game shows up in the mail, and I had completely forgotten about that conversation.

Brian 17:33
It's like it is hugely popular, right? I mean, you probably have shown up in debates and ranking lists of like what the best sponsors are for Ark Nova on YouTube,

Elizabeth 17:42
but then when I play Ark Nova and that card, there's this whole thing over like, well, we have to play Elizabeth's card.

Jason Wallace 17:55
We can't be playing with Elizabeth and not play Elizabeth on the table.

Brian 18:00
You should get a discount if you play that card.

Elizabeth 18:02
Right.

Brian 18:03
You should get to do it for one less cost. It's like, come on, I'm already here. I should just have that ability.

Elizabeth 18:08
Right.

Jason Wallace 18:08
So, and you're still actively designing games. So, among all of this, do you have some favorite memory from the process of putting one of your games together? It's like some little magical moment or something where it just stands out as like you look back on it and it just makes you smile.

Elizabeth 18:23
Oh, there's too many because that feeling of when you change something and it just works and you know that's the way it's meant to be. That's such a good feeling, but it happens like over and over and over in the process of game design. Like I can't think of a specific one really, but God, there's nothing better than that feeling.

Jason Wallace 18:43
It feels like me after I've been wrangling code for several hours, and it suddenly works. So it's that solving that problem, that thing that was difficult, and you managed to make it work.

Elizabeth 18:51
Right, like I've tried five different approaches to solving this thing that's not working, or like, and then it suddenly will come together.

Brian 18:59
I'm thinking of the you know when you're sculpting right you're removing all the things that are not this game

Elizabeth 19:05
right sometimes it is that sometimes it's taking a thing out that's what you need to do

Jason Wallace 19:10
what about sort of the real world parallels so is there something you've managed to get into a game that you're just especially proud of like some bird in wingspan some mushroom in undergrowth or just something's like that was my pet thing, and I managed to get it into the game.

Elizabeth 19:25
I mean, there's a bunch of birds and wingspan. There cause I want them there?

Jason Wallace 19:30
That's fair. I mean, you're designing the game. You're allowed to do that.

Brian 19:33
Well, and I mean, you had to cut the list down. You couldn't do everything. I can't remember. Yeah. So like some things hit the cutting room floor, right?

Jason Wallace 19:41
Yeah. Is this instead of murder your darlings? It's murder your starlings. Yeah.

Brian 19:45
Oh God, Jason, did you have that one written down, or did that just come to the top of your head?

Jason Wallace 19:49
That was spontaneous. Thank you very much.

Brian 19:51
Okay. All right. Well, you're welcome. That's impressive. Okay, I'm going to ask you a silly question. Do you have a favorite end goal card for Wingspan?

Elizabeth 19:59
A favorite. Goal card. No one's ever asked me that question before.

Brian 20:03
Yay!

Brian 20:03
They always ask me my favorite bird. No, now I have to remember my favorite goal card. I don't know.

Brian 20:10
I have two that I really enjoy.

Elizabeth 20:12
Okay.

Brian 20:13
I like the one where you you're combining all the bird color names. Those are fun.

Elizabeth 20:18
Yeah, I definitely like looking at the names of the birds. I like the ones from Australia, where it's which ways are they facing from the issue of expansion.

Brian 20:25
Oh, really?

Elizabeth 20:26
Yeah.

Brian 20:27
Okay. Interesting.

Elizabeth 20:28
Oh no, is that a card or is that no? I think maybe that's the end of round goals.

Brian 20:33
That would make sense. Like which birds are facing left versus right?

Elizabeth 20:36
Yeah.

Brian 20:36
And my other favorite is "the planner", where you get points for having a huge handful of cards that you haven't played yet. Yeah,

Elizabeth 20:44
I don't love those because it kind of encourages you not to play efficiently.

Brian 20:48
It's good for someone like me.

Elizabeth 20:50
Yeah.

Jason Wallace 20:52
So, how often do you play your games after they're released? We've talked to several designers where by the time a game gets released, they are so sick of playing their own game, that like it just collects dust on the shelf for years. Like, do you play your own games with other people?

Elizabeth 21:05
Sometimes, I think. Also, my friends are like scared to ask me to play my games because

Brian 21:12
do they just think you're gonna kick their butts?

Elizabeth 21:15
And they think I'm sick of them, which I often am when it first comes out.

Brian 21:20
So it's very considerate,

Elizabeth 21:21
but there's a decent amount of time between the time that I'm pencils down on the design and it actually comes out. Like the time that it takes to like really finalize it and then get it actually manufactured and across an ocean is like six months-ish often. So by then I've had a little break and I'll do it. And I like I'll play the Wingspan app sometimes just for fun, especially if I'm like trying to get my head back in the game before I start working on the next expansion. I'm always play testing the next Wingspan expansion. I play a decent amount of Wingspan, but it's like Wingspan that no one else is playing. It's a weird little setup. I don't know.

Jason Wallace 21:59
You're playing future wingspan. Playing

Elizabeth 22:01
future wingspan.

Brian 22:02
What are the expansions at this point? So it's Asia, Oceana. Is Europe out yet? There's

Elizabeth 22:07
Europe, and then okay.

Brian 22:08
So then we're running out of continents.

Elizabeth 22:09
I did the Americas.

Brian 22:11
Okay. Which,

Elizabeth 22:12
if you haven't seen, it has hummingbirds that are their own deck of little mini cards.

Brian 22:17
Interesting. Oh, that's so cute. Talk about abstraction. You make the the tiny hummingbird cards. That's great.

Elizabeth 22:24
They work in a whole different way.

Brian 22:26
Do you need to do the oversized, like tarot size ratite cards for ostriches and emus and stuff like that? They're just extra big.

Jason Wallace 22:34
I'm just waiting for the Antarctica mini expansion.

Jason Wallace 22:37
Yeah, yeah. With just penguins,

Brian 22:39
just penguins. It's the penguins. Penguins all the time.

Elizabeth 22:42
Yep. So I have Africa and I have Antarctica left. That's and I'm sort of working on both of them at once. Okay. As separate expansions, but just one came together faster than the other.

Brian 22:51
And then what comes after that? You're out of continents. Do you have to start doing different themes?

Elizabeth 22:56
I mean, I've been working on other games too. Okay. Yeah.

Brian 23:01
Cool. Cool. All right. Awesome.

Jason Wallace 23:03
Yes, I'm sure there's more to Elizabeth's life than just wingspan expansions. So

Brian 23:07
yeah.

Elizabeth 23:08
For the last seven years, there really has always been a wingspan expansion.

Jason Wallace 23:13
At least you've got job security. At least until you run out of continents.

Brian 23:16
Wingspan Atlantis edition.

Elizabeth 23:20
And we haven't mentioned Wingspan Pocket. Have you guys seen that that just came out?

Brian 23:24
I have seen that making the rounds on Instagram. So what is Wingspan Pocket? I saw the the cute little nest and everything. What's that?

Elizabeth 23:30
It's a little. It's a small box $20 game. You can play it in half an hour-ish.

Brian 23:37
Oh.

Elizabeth 23:37
And instead of the big player mat that has the three rows of birds for the three habitats. There's no habitats. You just have one row of birds, and you get to activate them every turn.

Brian 23:46
Huh. Okay. So it still feels like wingspan, but it's just like wingspan redux.

Elizabeth 23:51
Yeah. And the powers are simpler. The powers are mostly icons. Let's just like draw a seed card. Oh, and the food is on cards instead of dice.

Brian 24:00
Oh, that's fun! So it's all cards then.

Elizabeth 24:03
It's all cards. There's eggs

Brian 24:05
Oh fun.

Elizabeth 24:06
I tried to do the eggs on cards, and Jamie was like, "We can have eggs."

Brian 24:13
Awesome. We have a convention coming up. We should try to get and play that while we're there.

Jason Wallace 24:17
So when you finish one of these games, your gameography is well, like eight, nine games out in the world right now. We'll look at it. We'll link it in the show notes,

Elizabeth 24:25
plus a bunch of expansions.

Elizabeth 24:26
Don't make me count

Jason Wallace 24:28
But when you finish a game and you release it out into the world, this is maybe more of a philosophical question. What are your hopes for it? What's your metric for having succeeded at a game, not just in creating the game, but after you release it, what measures whether that game has succeeded for you?

Elizabeth 24:44
That is such a good question. I can't figure out the answer to it because my first game has sold two and a half million copies, which is a thing that does not happen ever. So I mean, you know, once in a decade, a game comes out that does that well. So I don't understand. What my metrics are supposed to be for my other games, I don't know.

Brian 25:04
It's like so. Jason and I are board gamers, but we do have friends that are not, and they say, "Oh, I know the bird game,

Elizabeth 25:09
right?

Brian 25:10
Like it has entered into the cultural space in a fun way,

Elizabeth 25:14
right? And you know, there's part of me that aspires to that with every game, but there's part of me that's just like, "Well, but you can't chase that level of success. That is just a recipe for unhappiness. So I don't know. I mean, a normal board game sells like 5000 copies, and my games, I think, have all done better than that. But

Brian 25:38
I guess it's like you know, comparison is a death of joy. So what do you look at? Do they make you happy when they come out?

Elizabeth 25:44
So, a lot of it's about like, is it well received? Like, yeah, I just want people to enjoy them. I want them to be accessible. Like, I really pride myself on having good rule books and relatively easy to learn games, but that have interesting decisions. Like, that's sort of the sweet spot that I'm aiming for.

Brian 26:03
We did think Fox Experiment was hard to set up, but once it was set up, it played great

Elizabeth 26:06
lot of stuff.

Brian 26:07
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of stuff.

Brian 26:09
There's a lot of different card sizes.

Jason Wallace 26:12
So stepping a little bit away from board games per se, you've been very active in advocating for a more inclusive game design industry advocating for women, people of color, other people who are just not as represented in game design space, and a lot of these disparities are ones that we see in the sciences as well, where there's just systematic barriers where not everyone has an equal chance of getting into the system. And so, as someone who has not only been a very successful board game designer, but also someone who's been in Washington D.C. for 20 years doing policy work. What are your tactics and recommendations for trying to open up this space so it's easier for people of any background to get in to try to get rid of some of these barriers that keep people out who would be wonderful additions to the hobby, but just aren't able to get in because of the way things are set up,

Elizabeth 27:01
I mean, I think there's a lot of different levels to it. There's one level where game design is sort of fundamentally a luxury hobby. Board games are, in some ways, a luxury hobby. They're expensive, but there are ways to at least engage as a gamer. A lot of libraries have board game collections now. There's a lot of game stores that have game nights or just you know meetups that happen, so you can play lots of great games and never buy one. That is the first level barrier because then to become a game designer, generally those are people who've played a lot of games, and then game design is almost entirely done by people who are doing it as a side gig, so you need the luxury of time. And I think that one of the reasons that we see such a gender disparity historically in game design is the gender disparity in how people spend their time, and specifically around childcare and household labor. So that's a piece of it, and then at the other end of the process, once someone has designed a game, and there's lots of other things along the way that I have ideas about that I won't get into, but at the other end, you know, you've got publishers who have a strong incentive to sign games from people who already have published games because those designers already have a following, maybe, or at least sort of a proven track record, or you know relationships with people in the industry. They can get the meetings, and so at that point of a designer pitching a game to publishers and getting their game signed, I think there's a built-in bias towards the status quo.

Brian 28:43
I think that's a lot of industries, right? Publishing books or anything-it's the easiest way to publish a book is having already published one.

Elizabeth 28:52
Yeah, right. And like just thinking about 2016, I pitched Wingspan at GenCon in Indianapolis, giant board game convention. Almost every publisher comes to it, so you know you email people ahead of time and set up meetings. And I got three meetings set up before I got there, and that's one of them worked.

Elizabeth 29:10
But I knew no one at Gen Con when I went 10 years ago.

Brian 29:16
That must have been so intimidating.

Elizabeth 29:18
And now when I go to Gen Con, I can't walk down the aisle without passing multiple booths where I know someone that's working in that booth. That is just the embodiment of what I'm talking about in terms of like now I can really get a meeting. But even just from having been around for 10 years, I could get a meeting to pitch my game with most publishers. Right?

Jason Wallace 29:41
You've got the social network, the connections you need to leverage. So even if you only have a 33% chance return, you have so many more contacts. There's just going to be a lot more meetings.

Elizabeth 29:50
So in terms of what I think we can do on that end of the picture, which probably does have some parallels in STEM, I think publishers could be thinking more proactively about how they can be reaching out more, how they can be structuring their scheduling of their pitch meetings and things like that to make sure that they're getting new people in the door as well as established designers.

Brian 30:13
I know GAMA tries to do some stuff like this, but you almost need like a GAMA, like not a genius grant or scholarships is the wrong way of putting it, too-but just some way to support new designers.

Elizabeth 30:24
And I think that mentorship is another piece of the puzzle where we can help get some people who have ideas for games through that process of getting it to a pitchable state, and then through the pitching process, which is possibly the most terrifying part of the entire process. Although your first play test with people you don't know is also very terrifying. There's definitely points in the process where some handholding will help more people make it through that gate.

Brian 30:55
I guess that's what things like Unpub are for, right? Helping to build that network, build those skills, help to build those connections, right?

Elizabeth 31:01
Yeah, and Unpub has a mentorship program. There's some other ones in the industry as well where you can sort of hook up with other game designers. I'm now on the board of the Tabletop Game Designers Association, which is another organization that's like trying to just help people make it through the process.

Brian 31:19
Is that different than GAMA? Are you a member of GAMA as well?

Elizabeth 31:22
Yeah, I might have let my membership lapse

Jason Wallace 31:25
For our Listeners GAMA is the Game Association Manufacturers of America.

Elizabeth 31:31
Something like that. They are.

Brian 31:33
It's the Game Manufacturers Association

Elizabeth 31:34
They've decided to go IBM, and like their acronym doesn't have a meaning anymore.

Brian 31:38
No, it doesn't make sense.

Jason Wallace 31:38
Okay

Elizabeth 31:39
So GAMA is the trade organization that started as being like the publishers and manufacturers. They have created sort of branches that include designers and other creators. It costs $300 to join Gamma as an individual, and $300 if you're Asmodee, and it rubs me the wrong way.

Jason Wallace 32:01
Asmode being one of the big publishers who they're a company and they're one of the biggest distributors there. So it's like if it costs me and Google the same amount to join an organization, maybe we should rethink that pricing structure.

Elizabeth 32:13
Exactly.

Jason Wallace 32:14
So do you have any specific advice for aspiring game designers who are listening to this?

Elizabeth 32:19
My biggest advice to new designers is just you got to get your game to the table. Like thinking about it will not get you very far because there's always something you don't think about until you actually try to play it, and then realize that like the 10 hours you spent journaling about what this game was going to be was all based on a premise that doesn't work, and you need to fix this thing, and now you have to rework every card that you thought of. Just make like 20 cards and try something.

Jason Wallace 32:47
That sounds like the voice of experience speaking.

Elizabeth 32:51
Maybe?

Jason Wallace 32:53
All right. So shifting a bit, what are some of your favorite games that you haven't designed? So what are the favorite games you like playing that come from other people?

Elizabeth 33:00
I've probably played Race for the Galaxy more than any other game.

Brian 33:04
Have we played that?

Jason Wallace 33:06
We have not. I don't think so.

Brian 33:07
See, we have sort of put ourselves in this very narrow focus with this.

Elizabeth 33:11
Right, It would not fit in your narrow focus.

Jason Wallace 33:15
That's okay. Some of my favorite games don't either.

Brian 33:17
Yeah we don't just play games for the podcast. We do do things for other just for fun sometimes.

Elizabeth 33:23
I've been playing a lot of Apiary lately by Connie Vogelmann,

Brian 33:26
designer of Wyrmspan. Yes?

Elizabeth 33:28
designer of Wyrmspan. I do love Ark Nova, which we were talking about. I like terraforming bars.

Jason Wallace 33:34
Have you ever tried or heard of a game called Holotype?

Elizabeth 33:38
No.

Jason Wallace 33:39
It's one we discovered through this podcast, it is a worker placement game about paleontology, and we love it because not only does it have tons of cool like paleontology facts and stuff in there, but it's also extremely well balanced. We did a special interview specifically because one of the designers is a computer science guy. He programmed his computer to play the game 10,000 times a minute, so he could play test all the point values and make sure they were balanced.

Elizabeth 34:03
Oh my god,

Jason Wallace 34:06
that would be my recommendation. Then

Brian 34:08
it's not a game about dinosaurs fighting. It's a game about digging up fossils, classifying them, and publishing them as holotypes in a journal. It's a game about being a paleontologist. It's really good.

Elizabeth 34:20
The publishing makes me think of I love Search for Planet X.

Brian 34:25
Oh yeah, we played that too.

Elizabeth 34:26
And Search for Lost Species.

Brian 34:28
That we've not.

Elizabeth 34:29
I'm a big fan of logic puzzles in general, so that was definitely scratch and itch for me.

Brian 34:33
Yeah, we had a a notorious episode where we played Turing Machine, where I was like, how is any of this working? I think it took three full playthroughs before I understood what you're doing,

Brian 34:44
Like how it physically actually works?

Brian 34:48
Yeah, but more than that, it's like if you mess up, you're just you're boned. You're not going to fix it at that point, and that's true for Planet X as well. If you made a logical mistake, well. Tough luck.

Elizabeth 35:00
Yeah, it's true.

Jason Wallace 35:02
Okay, well, I we got to wrap up now, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been a great conversation. If people want to look up more about you or your games, where can they find you? Where should they look for information?

Elizabeth 35:13
So I have a website, which probably just comes up if you Google me, but it's Eliz Hargrave. So just the first four letters of my first name because my name is too long. So elizhargrave.com will get you to a little landing page that has links to my blue sky and whatever else. I have a couple newsletters and things like that.

Jason Wallace 35:32
All right, and we will definitely link that and a bunch of other stuff we've talked about in the show notes. So with that, we're going to wrap up. So thank you again, Elizabeth. This has been a joy to have you on! Thank you, listeners, for being with us. And go out, find some mushrooms, some birds, or some butterflies, or some seashells. And in the meantime, have a great month and great games,

Brian 35:50
and have fun playing dice with the universe. see ya!

Jason Wallace 35:52
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 Game 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 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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S3E07.1 - Elizabeth Hargrave (bonus interview)

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