S3E02 - Finspan (Fish)

#Finspan #StonemaierGames #ElizabethHargrave #Wingspan #ScienceCommunication #Oceans #Fish #BoardGames #Science

Summary

In this episode we discuss the game "Finspan" by Stonemaier Games, and are joined by Emily Melvin, a PhD candidate in marine science at Duke University. In a game that's basically "Wingspan but with fish", we talk about the game differs from its predecessor, all whole bunch of different fish, what IS a fish, deep-sea nightmares, lovely bioluminescence, ecosystems, invasive species, and just how much we still don't know about our oceans. So take a dive with us into the undersea world of fish and Finspan, and let's have fun playing dice with the Universe.

Timestamps

• 00:00 - Introductions
• 01:41 - Fish bones and flatfish
• 04:17 - Overview of Finspan
• 10:02 - What is a fish?
• 13:41 - Fish eating fish
• 17:31 - Ocean dimensionality
• 23:31 - Young and schools
• 29:14 - Deep-ocean nightmares
• 32:46 - Bioluminescence and venom
• 36:35 - Threats to the ocean
• 43:46 - Nitpicks and constructive criticism
• 50:14 - Final grades
• 55:05 - Sign-offs

Links

• Finspan (Stonemaier Games)  and on Tabletopia
• Single origin of flat fish (Nature Genetics)
• Seas the Day (Marine podcast from Duke University)
• Emily Melvin's professional website and Bluesky profile

Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net 

This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Full Transcript

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

Brian  0:06  
hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about science behind some of your favorite games.

Jason Wallace  0:11  
Today we'll be talking about finspan by Stonemaier games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason. This is Brian, and today we are joined by a special guest, Emily Melvin from Duke University. Emily, will you please introduce yourself for our audience?

Emily  0:27  
Yeah, hi. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Emily Melvin, and I am a PhD candidate in the marine science and conservation program at Duke's Marine Lab, which is in Beaufort, North Carolina. And I study issues of policy and governance. So broadly speaking, my work focuses on the relationships between humans and the marine environment. And I also am an avid scuba diver. I'm a licensed open water scuba instructor, so a lot of my knowledge relating to this game comes from my experience as a diver as well.

Brian  0:57  
Oh, that's extra cool. 

Jason Wallace  0:59  
Yes, you got hands on experience.

Brian  1:01  
That's right. You can talk to us about how when we use the divers to represent the actions. 

Emily  1:05  
Oh, I have thoughts about that. 

Brian  1:06  
I'll bet you do 

Jason Wallace  1:10  
all right. And one thing we've started asking guests recently, do you have a favorite game you like to play?

Speaker 1  1:15  
It is really hard to pick a favorite game, because I There are so many different categories, but lately, I've been really into playing Ark Nova on Board Game Arena. So I don't have the physical game because I don't know that I have anyone who will play a game that long with me, but I like to play that one online

Brian  1:32  
Ark Nova is on our list for this season, so we've never played it. I'm looking forward to it. We don't have a copy of it yet, do we? 

Jason Wallace  1:37  
No, so we'll probably be doing Board Game Arena too. 

Brian  1:40  
Oh, okay, okay, 

Jason Wallace  1:41  
all right. So we like to start off with a fun science fact. And Emily, we always give our guests first choice. Do you have some fun science fact that you know or that you picked up recently you'd like to share with our audience?

Speaker 1  1:52  
Sure, one thing that I came across as I was preparing for this podcast was thinking about the fact that actually fish, bony fish, like a salmon, for example, are more closely related to humans than they are to a shark. So we can talk a lot about that a little bit more later, if you'd like, 

Brian  2:06  
Isn't it like, technically, phylogenetically, we are fish. If you there's no way to draw a grouping around fish that doesn't include us?

Jason Wallace  2:13  
The word fish is a pretty tough word to define, because of that phylogeny, they're not necessarily grouped together in a way that scientifically makes a lot of sense So 

Jason Wallace  2:22  
yes, this is one of my questions for later. So we will get into that. 

Brian  2:25  
Fantastic. So I found out a thing about flounders or flat fish. So these are in the order, you'll have to tell me how I said this wrong. It's Carangiformes.

Unknown Speaker  2:35  
I am not great with pronunciation, so it sounds right. 

Brian  2:37  
Well, whatever, you can look at it on Wikipedia if I said it wrong. So this is a diverse group of fish that actually has some members that you might not expect. So it also includes Remora. It has barracuda. It has Archer fish, which are very cool in that they actually like spit, little jets of water to catch, prey all of that's in the same family. So you can get the diversity here. But it also has the flatfish, the flounders. So if you've ever seen a flounder, if I can describe them, they have a very flat body, and both of their eyes are on one side of their head, so their eyes point straight up, both the left and the right. So they undergo a pronounced metamorphosis. During development, they start as symmetrical, very fish looking fish, and at a certain point, the eye slowly moves over to one side of the head. There's no other way to describe that, except for metamorphosis. Interestingly, there was a long considered that that had actually independently arose multiple times in that group of fish. So that very unusual body plan had popped up several times independently. But what I saw was a study in 2024 where, based on genetic evidence, actually it does look like sanity prevails, and there was a single origin of that very unusual body plan. So all the flatfish have sort of a common origin of having one of their eyeballs move to the other side of the head,

Jason Wallace  3:45  
yeah, and they're all basically swimming sideways along the bottom, aren't they? 

Brian  3:48  
Yeah, they got a lot of weird adaptations, and some of them do active camouflage, like an octopus or a chameleon. And if you have one with a damaged eye, it actually doesn't do a good job of camouflaging anymore.

Emily  4:00  
When you're scuba diving, you will not see them until they move. It's crazy. They they're very camouflaged,

Brian  4:06  
and it's just burying themselves. They literally change their appearance, right? They're really good at it.

Jason Wallace  4:10  
So they've got, like, chromatophores, so little color changing cells in their skin, 

Brian  4:14  
yep. And they actually do have to look around at their environment to do that.

Jason Wallace  4:17  
Very cool. All right. Well, talking about fish. Let's make a transition now to the game finspan. So finspan, as you've probably guessed from the name, is a sort of not only sequel, but spiritual successor to wingspan, both of them by Stonemaier games. It came out in 2025 and its basic stats, so one to five players. So it comes with a single player mode, ages 10 plus due to complexity, runtime of about 45 to 60 minutes, which seems right, once people know what they're doing. I've taught this game several times at conventions and such, and it's definitely closer to an hour and a half to two hours when you have like, five brand new people to it, but once people figure it out, it can go a lot faster. Pedigree of this it was developed by Elizabeth Hargrave, although reading through the designer diary, it seems like she had more. An executive producer role. So the frontline developers were David Gordon and Michael O'Connell. They brought in some artists who had also worked on wingspan in order to do all the beautiful watercolors that it has. And Hargrave was sort of consulted at multiple times, and was doing play testing and such. So she had more of a higher oversight part bit of the layout of this game. It has these actually very large player boards that you play on. These things are pretty massive, at least two sheets of printer paper stuck like fat wise together, maybe larger. So this game, if you have all five players, takes up a lot of space. It has a bunch of fish cards that you draw and that you play out and that have various abilities you're trying to put together. You've got fish eggs, fish young, and then schools of fish, which in the base game are just little cardboard tiles, but with Kickstarter upgrades or some fancier options, which my copy has because I bought it secondhand, and I guess whoever had it firsthand bought those, but they have actually, like slightly squishy plastic eggs and little wooden meeples for the fish and the schools, which are nice.

Brian  5:59  
Yeah, Jason, you managed to find the ultimate copy at the lugcon swap meet, right? You got the Kickstarter thing with all the pretty extra things, and you didn't have to do the kickstarter backer 

Jason Wallace  6:08  
Yes, it was Southern Fried, actually, Southern Fried Gaming Expo in Atlanta. And then you have these little cute diver meeples that represent your actions each turn, and then are also showing you like going down through the ocean depths as you play. So what does this game look like, or what does it play like? It's just like wingspan. It's an engine building game. So you are trying to play fish into your ocean in order to set up combinations that get you the most points at the end. And you get points from the points that are printed on the fish. You get points for eggs and for young. You get extra points for schools. So if you get enough young in one spot, they become a school, and they're suddenly worth twice as many points. So that's part of the in game strategy. Interestingly, there is no food in this system. If you've played wingspan, you know, there's the bird feeder, you get the different foods. Apparently, an early version had that, but the final version does not. Instead, your fish are the food, so all these eggs and youngs and stuff that are worth points are also what you use to fuel your cards. So discarding cards, discarding young and eggs, is an important part, and having the resources to fuel, putting things down is an important part of it. And then there's mechanics to get cards back and such. So it's very much a resource management and engine building game. And I think location is more important than this than it is in wingspan, because in wingspan, you have your three habitats that you can place birds in, and they go from left to right, and that's kind of it. Here you're working in the ocean, you have three different depths that you can get, most of which have multiple rows within them. You have three different columns, and some fish can only be placed in some columns and not in others. And those locations matter, because that's what gets you your little bonus abilities as your diver goes down, is if you have a fish in that location, then you're able to score some sort of bonus. You get to draw a cart, or you get to put an egg on a fish somewhere, or you get to hatch an egg into a young if there are no fish in that location, you don't get that bonus. And so you're encouraged to fill out your tableau so there are fish not everywhere, but in lots of places. And then, of course, some of them have abilities that give you bonuses so you can string things together in order to get the most points possible. That's kind of it in a nutshell. There's no way we can not compare this to wingspan. They are definitely sister games. It plays, I would say, a bit more streamlined than wingspan, and that was a conscious design choice. They reduced the number of things people would have to keep track of.

Brian  8:19  
Well, it also reduces aquatic drag. 

Jason Wallace  8:21  
Yes, that as well.

Jason Wallace  8:24  
I would say it's more fiddly in terms of the engine, just because there's more places you can put stuff. But overall, you can see that it is, it is a similar game, but it's also different enough, at least to a very different play experience. This is not just a re-skin of wingspan, but underwater. This is actually a different game engine that has similar roots, but is different enough you can tell it's a distinct theme and gives a distinct play experience.

Brian  8:48  
I mean, again, if wingspan is played horizontally, Finspan is played vertically, right? 

Jason Wallace  8:52  
Yes, that's definitely it. 

Brian  8:54  
It's vertical wingspan with no food. 

Jason Wallace  8:57  
That is a gross oversimplification, but we'll go with it.

Jason Wallace  9:00  
One thing I also want to throw out here, this has nothing to do with the gameplay. And in fact, it's possible to play this game and never even notice it. So there are five player boards, and like I said, they're huge, and they have this beautiful artwork on the front of like this island with mangroves at the top and like a coral reef, and then going down into the deeper ocean. If you flip them over and you actually put them next to each other, they're this gorgeous watercolor of the of the globe. It's the entire globe from left to right. It's, it's gorgeous watercolor map that they never point out and that you can play an entire game and never even notice is there. So that's one of those little details that I really liked in there, because it shows that they care about the quality of the game overall, even though it has no mechanical effect. When I first discovered that, I was like, Oh, this is awesome. Okay, so that is the game finspan in a nutshell, or oyster shell, as the case may be. Now let's go on to the science behind this being Elizabeth Hargrave game, I would say the bar is set pretty high. She has shown herself repeatedly. To be involved in some very good, hard science games. So Emily, this is where we need you, someone who actually has experience with fish, to talk to us, to plant people and let us know how it worked out. And the first one I want to mention is what Brian already talked about, what is a fish?

Emily  10:16  
What is a fish that I saw that question and I thought, Oh, wow, that's actually really hard to answer, because there is no single evolutionary group that defines a fish. So one of the most challenging things about defining a fish is that for just about every definition, you could say, Well, what about and give an exception, because there are fish that violate any of the general definitions we use for what is a fish. But generally speaking, we think about fish as an aquatic organism that is generally a vertebrate. Most of them are cold blooded, and they're breathing through their gills, as opposed to something like a marine mammal, which is still breathing air through a blowhole. They need to come to their surface. Fish are breathing through their gills. So not everything that lives in the ocean is a fish. There are exceptions to any of those things, but generally speaking, those are the kind of categories,

Brian  11:01  
okay, but let me ask so you you gave a couple things, an aquatic organism that breathes through gills and is cold blooded and is a vertebrate. So is there anything that breaks the vertebrate rule?

Emily  11:12  
 I think yes, 

Brian  11:14  
because, like, hagfish don't have a skeleton anymore

Brian  11:16  
I think hagfish is one of the main exceptions that breaks the vertebrae. There's definitely fish that break the cold blooded rule. Tuna and sharks are warm blooded. so not all fish are cold blooded. So there are definitely exceptions to all of those so yes.

Brian  11:33  
there's quite a few different things that like, gave up on gills and used lungs at this point, right? Or maybe have both.

Emily  11:40  
Yeah, one of the things that's most confusing is there are things with the name fish in them that are not fish, 

Brian  11:45  
like starfish, jellyfish 

Emily  11:47  
starfish are not fish at all. So starfish are any echinoderm. They are not closely related to fish, really. So that's one of the reasons that typically now we're referring to them as sea stars, as opposed to starfish. But it is a little bit confusing to think about. What is a fish, because it's not something like a mammal, where we have an evolutionary group defined by really specific things. It's more of a characterization, a grouping of convenience.

Jason Wallace  12:10  
And this game is very definitely about the fish. Like we know that there are coral and sea stars and jellyfish and stuff all there in the environment, but all the cards are fish. 

Brian  12:19  
They're all vertebrates, 

Jason Wallace  12:21  
Yep. And they even said in the designer diary, they made the choice whereas wingspan, the birds are sort of geographically grouped. You have your North America base game, you have your European expansion, your Oceania expansion. For finspan, they intentionally chose some well known and some really weird fish. Is what their selection criteria was. So they're not some geographically limited swath, I think they went for, I guess, more photogenic ones, like ones people would know about, and then ones also that are just kind of weird and out there. 

Emily  12:48  
Yeah, and another thing about the geographic piece of it is that the ocean is a very fluid place. And, of course, fish fly as well, but it's a lot of these are highly migratory species, right? So whale sharks, for example, are present all over the globes, and we also have things like a lionfish, for example, is in the game and lionfish, of course, are endemic to the South Pacific. They're also present in the Caribbean, where they're an invasive species. So it's very easy for fish to move around in the ocean, not only through their own movements, but for example, lionfish may have been introduced through the ballast water of ships coming throughout the ocean. So it's very easy for fish to move around the ocean in a way that's not necessarily as easy for terrestrial animals. That's not to say it doesn't happen, but fish do move around a lot.

Brian  13:33  
Well, I can already imagine what expansions for finspan would be, not that if any are planned, but the mollusk expansion and the crustaceans expansion,

Jason Wallace  13:41  
which actually brings us into the next one I wanted to ask about, which is about food. So I mentioned how there is no food in finspan, not in the final version of the game. Instead, your eggs and your young and even your other fish cards all serve as food for the cards you're playing out. And they're all the costs you have to play to get them there. And one thing they say in the rule book is that there's hardly any fish that are really pure herbivores, like almost all of them will eat other animals if given the chance. And my question for you, Emily is, is that the case? Is it really that much of a fish eat fish world out there? Or are there things that, okay, these are generally herbivores, and then they'll, like, snap up some little fry if it happens to get in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Emily  14:22  
There are definitely fish that are primarily herbivores. Something like a parrot fish comes to mind that you see them all the time chomping on the algae on the reef down there when you're scuba diving. So there are definitely fish that are primarily herbivorous. Algae is a hugely important food source for a lot of fish. And then there are, you know, if we think about in the game, as you mentioned, it's all fish. There are a lot of fish that eat things like crustaceans, echinoderms, things like that, that are not technically fish, but there are other species in the ocean. So it is a fishy fish world, but not quite to the extent that it is in the game, I would say.

Brian  14:58  
So that's a simplification for the game.

Brian  15:00  
It's definitely, I think a lot of the mechanisms in the game are for simplifications, especially regarding the eating mechanic. For example, in the game, I think for simplification, a bigger fish can always eat a smaller fish. And that's certainly not true in nature. There are fish that prey on fish that are larger than them, as well as large fish that don't eat. For example, a whale shark would not eat a tuna. In reality, that just wouldn't happen. But in the game, you could do that again. I think, as you mentioned, there's a lot that I think they've simplified for purposes of a more streamlined mechanic.

Brian  15:29  
Which fish eat fish that are bigger than they are? 

Emily  15:31  
That's a good question, because now that I realize it, I'm realizing the example I'm thinking of is not a fish. Because what is it? Killer Whales are known to prey on larger whales, such as Blue Whales, not fish. Of course, they're marine mammals. So that's not a great example, because it's not fish.

Brian  15:46  
I'm thinking about, like, I'm thinking like, deep sea things, like the Pelican eel or something, or a swallower.

Emily  15:51  
say some of those weird deep sea and I don't know as much about those deep sea critters, other than, you know, some basic facts, but yeah, I imagine that they're out there. Because, as I said that I realized, Oh, the example I'm thinking of isn't fish at all. 

Brian  16:02  
That's okay,

Jason Wallace  16:03  
quick definition. So this is cycling back of it. You mentioned echinoderms. And can you define for audience, what you mean by that? What are these things that fish are eating and they're elsewhere in the ocean?

Emily  16:14  
Oh, I'm gonna get in trouble now, because

Brian  16:19  
not from us, 

Emily  16:20  
I know not from you, but my colleagues in the invertebrate department, which I am not in, are going to be disappointed in me that I don't have a definition. 

Jason Wallace  16:27  
can you give us some examples of that echinoderms then? 

Brian  16:30  
The name means spiny skinned, right? 

Emily  16:32  
Yeah. so something like a sea star is a great example of an echinoderm. And then we also have a of course things like crustaceans. It's a little bit easier an example to think of things like shrimp, lobsters, crabs, things like that.

Brian  16:44  
The things that everything is trying to evolve into, except not really. but a echinoderms, so radial symmetric, spiny skin, so sea stars, sea urchins and I think sea cucumbers too, if I remember, they're not spiny. But maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. They're super weird. So whatever we can figure that out later.

Emily  17:02  
Yeah, hopefully my friends in it who teach inverts won't listen to this

Brian  17:08  
Invertebrate people don't listen to podcasts, It's fine.

Jason Wallace  17:11  
Hey everyone, this is editor, Jason from the future. Just to clarify, we looked it up. And yes, sea cucumbers are echinoderms. And also, going back a bit, hagfish are vertebrates. Even though they don't actually have any vertebra, they do have a notochord, which is sort of like a elastic neural rod, but no actual spinal column. So with those clarifications out of the way, let's get back to the show. 

Jason Wallace  17:31  
So one other thing in the game, so the board is laid out with this. We call it three dimensionality in the game, it's just two dimensionality. So you have your depth in the ocean, and then you have your distance from shore. And so technically, there's actually like 15 different zones in the game, if you count every way you can. So you have your sunlight zone at the top, then you have your twilight zone in the middle, which I think only has one row of cards. The sunlight zone has three, and then your midnight zone in the bottom, that has two rows for cards. But then also the very, very top row is the estuary row, and the very, very bottom row is, I don't remember what the name before it is like the deep, 

Brian  17:58  
the deep, deep, dark, 

Jason Wallace  18:07  
yes. And there are some things that can only be played in, like that very top or very bottom, even though there are subsets of the other zones. And then on top of the up and down layer, we've got the far from shore layer, so our island is on the left, and we have the things close to shore, and then kind of middle away, and then very far away. And the game structures these mechanically. So like the close column is drawing cards, the middle one is eggs, and the far one is hatching things and movement. But my question is, how much does this structure the actual ocean? I imagine depth is very important. How about distance from land? Does that also structure things a lot?

Emily  18:39  
It definitely structures things, and it's not only distance from land, but it's the nature of the land itself, the vegetation, the habitat. Like you mentioned, there are the beautiful illustrations on the player boards. There's mangroves, there's coral reefs. They're all kind of together for purposes of the illustration, but you may have one area that is a mangrove area, and there's a mangroves are extremely important areas for nursery habitat for a lot of fish species, you may have rocky intertidal areas. Those are very common. For example, on the west coast, there's a lot of that kind of rockier shoreline. And there are certain species that really thrive in those environments and are adapted to those environments. There are Sandy habitats that different species are adapted to. So you definitely have different species in different areas of the ocean, and you have a lot, as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of movement. So you can have fish that migrate to one area for spawning. You'll have spawning zones, and then they may live out the rest of their lives in other areas of the ocean. So that geography is definitely a hugely important part, as well as depth. As we mentioned, another thing that's really important is salinity. So for the game, they list the top row. They call it the estuary. But estuary isn't really about depth. An estuary is an inland area, kind of an isolated area where you're having a mixing of fresh water and salt water zones. So those are typically a lower salinity area. So you'll have certain species that are more acclimated to a lower salinity than others. You know, that was one of the things, I think, for simplification of the game, they've called that top row in estuary. But estuary isn't really about depth. It's more about that salinity aspect. 

Brian  20:17  
Interesting. I have heard that there is less mixing in different parts of the ocean, so you can have large differences in salinity or exchange of temperature, more than you'd think. In a body as large as like an ocean or sea,

Emily  20:31  
you can have really large differences. And one example I'll give is I do my work in the Bahamas, and there are these amazing ocean blue holes, and you can actually be out in the middle of the ocean, and these blue holes are connected through limestone to inland areas. And you actually will have these pockets of fresh water that come out. And you can actually see it. There's a halocline, you can see the mixing of the fresh water and the salt water, and where they come together, and they come together, and they produce this slimy stuff we call whale snot or mermaid hair, depending on how how you know what your personal aesthetic is. Whale snot or mermaid hair. But that actually is all because of that fresh water and salt water mixing.

Brian  21:14  
I prefer mermaid snot. 

Emily  21:16  
There you go. 

Brian  21:17  
Is that like a biofilm? Is it like a microbial thing, or is it a chemical thing? 

Emily  21:22  
I'm actually not exactly sure what it is. it smells like sulfur, so 

Brian  21:26  
probably bacteria then.

Emily  21:27  
So it's probably bacterial.

Brian  21:29  
I don't know how to Google that safely.

Emily  21:31  
Yeah, that's a good question.

Jason Wallace  21:33  
We will leave that as an exercise to our listeners

Emily  21:39  
googling whale snot.

Jason Wallace  21:42  
Yeah, the one I'm familiar with is the Baltic Sea up around like the Nordic countries, Sweden and Finland and such, because it's basically this very long, very bottlenecked Bay up into inner Europe. And so it's all fed by rivers and rainfall at the upper end. So it's very low salinity there. And then there's this huge gradient as it gets closer and closer and closer to the actual Atlantic Ocean that the salt is mixing more. And so you have a large geographic variation in terms of how salty the water is. And I know this because of genetic studies where they found that fish that live in certain parts of that have genes adapted for specific amounts of salinity. And so you can actually sample fish from all over here and do an association study and find what are the genes important for salt tolerance based on where you pulled the fish from. 

Brian  22:29  
Interesting. So in Halocline, "Halo" meaning salt, and I guess "cline" meaning variatio?. What's a good? cline is between two things?

Emily  22:38  
Yeah, gradient, gradient. Okay, so you think about a thermocline being the temperature gradient that's often warmer water at the top and colder water at the bottom, saltier water and fresh water have different densities. So you'll have the salt water will be on the bottom and the fresh water will be at the top, because salt is heavier.

Brian  22:55  
The other weird thing I've seen are these, like undersea lakes, the brine lakes or something, and what causes those to have I'm sorry, we're talking too much about ocean chemistry. It probably should be talking more about fish. We maybe we could skip this part. But there are, like, you could find lakes of hyper saline brine under the ocean. They look extremely strange, like they literally have like ripples on the surface. So it looks very SpongeBob. You've got underwater lakes.

Emily  23:19  
Yeah, it's very cool. The ocean is a fascinating place. And, yeah, probably don't want to talk too much about oceanography, because, again, I'll get in trouble with my colleagues in oceanography.

Jason Wallace  23:31  
All right. So moving back to the fish part of it, an important part of the game, is the production of young and then turning them into schools. The game actually has, at the last page of its rule book, it has a little half page listing of basically the simplifications they took, and they mentioned this specifically, and that, okay, the eggs and the young you're hatching are not necessarily related to the fish that they are put on. That's just a thing of convenience, a mechanic that they're doing. But they talk about these young coming together, forming schools. My question here is twofold. Is like, Why do fish school? And the second one is, do they only school with their own species, or do you get, like, multi species schools happening at some point,

Brian  24:10  
like mixed herding on the Savannah? Do you get mixed schools in the ocean?

Emily  24:13  
Yeah, I think you'll see some mixed schools. I think traditionally, when we think of schooling fish, though, I think the most prevalent examples are going to be single school fish. And you think about things like sardines and bait fish, for example, where you see these just incredible balls of fish that almost seem like an organism, like a giant organism in and of themselves. We don't really know entirely how they communicate, but they move together. They move as one. Those are typically single species schools, but we do see fish schooling together. Often. Schooling is just as it is on land. It's a defense mechanism. So if you're part of a big school of fish, the likelihood that any predator is going to come by and snap you is less than if you're swimming along by yourself. So it can be a defense mechanism, but you also do have. Have examples of fish that will school for predatory reasons. You know, a school of fish that may come together to hunt other fish that are smaller. Do sharks do that? Some sharks school, I'm trying to think of if they school to hunt. I know, like I've seen, schools of tuna that are going after smaller fish. I know Hammerhead school. I don't know if they school to hunt or if they're schooling for social reasons. I mean, some schooling is social. One of the things is, you know, we can't ask fish why they do what they do. So not all of the behaviors that they do are fully explained. So we don't necessarily know why all of these things occur. But primarily, I would say it's a defense mechanism is the most common reason for schooling. And so in those cases, you can have, you know, you'll see mixed groupings of fish in schools, but it's not really, you know, in the game, it's very much the young are off schooling. You have adult fish that school as well, right? There are fish that spend their entire lifetime in a school of fish. So it's not necessarily as simplified as is in the game. I would say

Brian  25:58  
Hammerheads are just the gossips of the shark world, that's all, 

Emily  26:00  
yeah, and they don't always school, but they come together in schools at certain points first, 

Brian  26:06  
yeah, when there's some hot gossip to share, 

Emily  26:07  
yeah, exactly

Jason Wallace  26:10  
with the school. So an important part of the game is moving them around, because there's some movement restrictions on them, so you want to get them out of the way, so you can put things together and make new ones, and they can just go as high or as deep as they want. Is that typical for fish? I mean, we've already talked about these are sort of abstract representations, but like, is it typical that young fish, or certain fish will be able to go to any depth? Or do they mostly have a pretty set location, depth wise, at least where they stick?

Emily  26:36  
It's kind of depend on the fish. There is kind of an amazing not so much with fish, but with invertebrates, there's this amazing vertical migration that happens out in the open ocean where things will come up from the deep, and some of those species that live most of their lives, perhaps near shore. As adults, the juveniles are really going up and down with the light in the open ocean at night. But that's not really so much true with fish. So there may be some vertical movement, but I think for the most part, you're not going to see like you do in the game, where you have fish hatch and get together and then they can go kind of wherever they want. I don't think it quite works that way.

Brian  27:11  
So it's so interesting to think about fish speciation, because we're kind of like spoiled on land. We think about things physically separating, but these separations in the ocean are very different. They're not real boundaries, but they are boundaries. They're boundaries based on amount of light, on depth, on salinity, on all these things that are like, not super obvious at a glance, but they're definitely there.

Emily  27:33  
I mean, and habitat. There are fish species that spend their entire life on a single coral head, talking about speciation, maybe subspecies, but they will adapt their coloration to the specific coral that they're living on, because they need that for camouflage. So there are fish that really are restricted in how far they can move, because they're really adapted to this specific habitat. You know, we've talked about things like salinity, things like debt, but really, habitat is one of the most important things, and it's why, when we think about conservation, we think a lot about protecting Fish's habitat as well.

Brian  28:08  
That's like crazy co evolution, but really just driven by one partner. 

Emily  28:09  
I don't know that's a good question. Is it driven by one partner? Because there's so much symbiosis in the ocean that happens as well. Coral, for example, compete with algae. So they do benefit from fish who eat that algae living on or near them, because they kind of keep some of that competitiveness in check. 

Brian  28:31  
Yeah. I guess if you're a coral and you get covered with some kind of algae, you you can't photosynthesize anymore, your symbionts can't photosynthesize anymore. So that's bad.

Emily  28:39  
yes, So as we see coral degrading throughout the world, we do see often them becoming covered by algae. And that can be caused by a lot of things. It can be caused by ocean acidification. It can be caused by temperature rise, and it can be caused by reduction in fish population and reduction of those herbivorous fish on the reefs.

Brian  28:59  
We learned about ocean acidification and temperature rise in the game Daybreak that we did last season. It's all connected.

Jason Wallace  29:05  
I want to get back to the the ocean conservation. That's kind of what I want to end on. So I want to circle back to this fish habitats and places where they live. And I've got a very directed question, why are so many fish from the deep ocean? Like out of the worst nightmares of HP Lovecraft. Like I was looking through these cards, you've got the Pelican eel, whose mouth looks like it's like a third of the size of its body just to gulp things down. Anglerfish are sort of the poster child for this. We see one in Finding Nemo as this is horrific monster trying to eat our protagonists. 

Brian  29:35  
Viper fish are just as bad. 

Jason Wallace  29:37  
Spiny sea devils was one of the cards I saw where it's just a mouthful of knives. And then, of course, there's the hagfish, which is just like the world's best slime producer. So like, why? What is it about the deep ocean that manufactures nightmares?

Emily  29:54  
It really is nightmare fuel, that's for sure. But I think they're cool. I don't know. I think they're cool. Maybe I'm strange. But, I mean, the main reason is, if we think about everything occurs for an evolutionary purpose, right? And so in the deep sea, you don't have light. So a lot of what we see in a coral reef, for example, all these brightly colored, beautiful fish, that's for reasons like camouflage, like attracting mates. Just like birds, fish are often brightly colored to attract mates that is just not necessary in the deep sea because there's no light and they can't see each other, so they're relying on other forms of communication. And then there's also a functional piece of these fish have to withstand huge, huge amounts of pressure and an extremely hostile environment, so every 10 meters adds an atmosphere of pressure in the ocean. So basically, you go down 10 meters in the ocean, you've doubled the pressure on yourself. So you think about these extremely deep habitats, the amount of pressure is insane. So that's why, first of all, you wouldn't have a scuba diver going down to that depth like they do in the game. But second of all...

Brian  31:01  
I mean, you could just not alive, 

Emily  31:03  
not alive, they would be very dead, all dead. But you have a lot of kind of these blobby cartilaginous fish, because that's more able to withstand pressure than something like a bony fish.

Brian  31:16  
You'd think like, oh, you need a really tough body to live down there. But actually they're very delicate, right?

Emily  31:21  
Yeah, I think they're goopy for lack of a better, They just look, that's not a scientific term, but, you know, they just kind of look like blobs. And there's a few reasons for that. One is, again, the ability to just kind of withstand, you know, you think about the kind of, yes, you think about strength, but it's easier to break a bone and more harmful to break a bone than it is. You know, if you're made of cartilage, it's a lot easier to heal. That's kind of a bad example, but

Brian  31:49  
okay, I know this wasn't the intention. I know this isn't what you mean, but it almost sounds like the reason they're so hideous is because they can't see each other

Emily  31:56  
 pretty much. Yeah, like, if we didn't have video cameras, we'd all be a lot, you know, would we get ourselves? I mean, not that I look nice now, but if this was a video

Jason Wallace  32:10  
that's okay. It's an audio podcast, 

Emily  32:11  
exactly if This was a video recording, it would have looked much different. So, yeah, I think it's the same for fish, yeah, no, it is. They can't see each other. So, you know, and it's not just the attracting a mate piece, but it's also it is the camouflage piece, although some fish do use light for camouflage. So that bioluminescence, there are some fish, because if you think about the light filtering down from above, if you have a predator below you, they can actually see your shadow. So there are actually some fish that use bioluminescence on their underside as a form of camouflage. So that's one of the purposes of that kind of bioluminescence that we see in the game as well.

Jason Wallace  32:46  
That is actually a great transition to my next question, which is about a bunch of these fish abilities we see on the cards. Most of them come into play in terms of the weekly bonus goals, but we've got, like, bioluminescence, electrolocation, also electric discharge, predation, camouflage, that sort of thing. So you just mentioned bioluminescence, and I love bioluminescence like I love anything that glows. I owned a glowing Petunia for a while, until it got infested with spider mites. You already told us why things glow. Well, part of it camouflage. Why else do things glow in the ocean? And how do they do that?

Emily  33:21  
Yeah, so there is actually a chemical reaction that occurs. And I'm forgetting the names of the chemicals involved. 

Emily  33:28  
It's luciferin and luciferase. 

Emily  33:30  
Thank you. Yes. So it's a chemical reaction that occurs. So some of the fish actually produce that chemical reaction themselves. Others have bacteria that, again, it's a symbiotic relationship. So an example is the angler fish that you mentioned already in Finding Nemo. So they're kind of famous because they have this lure dangling out in front of them that glows to actually lure their prey. So that's a different reason for that bioluminescence. But those angler fish don't actually produce that bioluminescence themselves. They use a bioluminescent bacteria, whereas some fish actually will have a chemical reaction in their own bodies, 

Brian  34:04  
huh, I didn't know that the angler fish use symbionts to do that, 

Emily  34:07  
yeah? So it's symbionts.

Brian  34:08  
 So like, inside that little bulb, there's just a little bacterial, well, not a little a very large bacterial colony,

Emily  34:14  
yeah, I'm not sure exactly of the like, where it is, if it's in the how exactly that works, but I do know they don't produce it themselves,

Brian  34:21  
but some of them do, yeah, some fish do, so some of them use symbionts. Some of them do it themselves. 

Jason Wallace  34:26  
All right, so what about Venom then?

Emily  34:27  
So, I mean, venom is a classic, you know, it's the same reason as creatures on land use venom. It can either be for protection or for predation. If we think about something like a lionfish, you know, they have these amazing spines that come out of them, and those are primarily a defense mechanism. That's one of the reasons they're such a problem as an invasive species. Is, in the Caribbean, they don't have any natural predators, because they have these spiny venomous spikes. But you can also have, I'm trying to think of an example, but you do have fish that will use venom to stuff. One and immobilize their prey as well, but you'll have both of those.

Brian  35:03  
Yeah, I'm thinking about mollusks. I was just reading about cone snails. And I mean, they're impressive with it, but they're not fish, so they don't count.

Emily  35:09  
So a lot of mollusks, like octopus, use venom, so the blue ring octopus is actually one of the most venomous creatures on earth. So that's a great example. Thank you for giving me one, because the blue ring octopus does use venom to immobilize its prey. They're tiny, tiny, tiny, little octopus, and they're one reason that if you're ever scuba diving, of course, they're only in certain places of the world, but you don't ever stick your hand down into the sand, because you never know what is under there. And a bite from a blue ring octopus could be deadly. Pretty quickly.

Jason Wallace  35:41  
They're in like, Australia, right, 

Emily  35:43  
yeah, yeah. Australia, Indonesia, yeah. Australia has all the dangerous critters are in Australia, but yeah, primarily that area, the Philippines. They're found, I've seen them in the Philippines, Indonesia, that kind of South Pacific area. Yeah. They're not in the Caribbean, the Atlantic, unfortunately for us, well, fortunately, if you you know, like sticking your hand in the sand, but unfortunately, because they're really cool to see

Brian  36:07  
Australia, where the venom has been taken to the ultimate biological art form,

Emily  36:12  
indeed, and other forms of killing also, like kangaroos, aren't venomous, but They sure are scary,

Jason Wallace  36:20  
but they're so cute, yeah, but they are also not fish. So let's go back to fish. 

Brian  36:25  
Well, I don't know are they, because I thought we No, it's fine.

Jason Wallace  36:29  
There's an entire podcast called no such thing as a fish like, I think they have the monopoly on that particular discussion.

Brian  36:35  
 Fair

Jason Wallace  36:35  
 So we talked earlier about ocean conservation and ocean habitat, and it's like, okay, yes, we get like our human population is doing a lot of stuff all over the world, including to the ocean, and we hear about some things, acidification, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. What are the major threats to fish in the ocean right now?

Emily  36:53  
There are a lot. Unfortunately, one of the biggest ones, of course, is climate change. Climate change in terms of both rising temperatures as well as ocean acidification, as we've talked about, a lot of this is about the ecosystem, right? It's not just about the fish themselves. Climate change can have both direct and indirect impacts. So climate change affects coral reefs. It's causing degradation, massive loss of coral reefs worldwide, which are one of the most important habitats, as well as food sources for fishes around the world. But then you also do have direct impacts on fish as a result of climate change. So we are seeing some species of fish move more and more northward as a result of rising temperatures, because they are so adapted to these environments. So if you think about something like, you know, a two degree Celsius warming of the ocean, it may not sound like that much, but think about if you walked around with a fever of 103 104 degrees all the time, that would not be a way to live. And so we're having some really rapid changes that are affecting fish. So that's one of them. Another, of course, is habitat loss, habitat degradation, both from climate change, but also from physical impacts as well things like developments, things like eutrophication, runoff from things like farm and agriculture can be really problematic.

Jason Wallace  38:14  
So eutrophication, can you define that for us?

Emily  38:17  
So eutrophication is essentially excessive nutrients in the water, so a lot of nitrogen, a lot of phosphorus, and that's often run off from things like agriculture. It can also be from wastewater, things like that. And it can be really problematic, both to the fish themselves, as well as, again, to habitat.

Brian  38:35  
That's when we get, like, the algae go crazy and, like, consume all the oxygen, right? 

Jason Wallace  38:40  
This sort of, like that big dead zone that shows up in the Gulf of Mexico every year, right? 

Emily  38:44  
Yeah, yeah, something like a red tide that we hear about, yeah.

Jason Wallace  38:48  
And so these are really big problems, obviously. And it's one of those things that are, they're so big, it's hard to get a grapple on, like, I can't stop climate change, like we talked about this with Daybreak, like it's a big problem. Are there things that individual people can do that have some sort of measurable impact to make things better, even if it's just like, picking up a bits of trash or something

Emily  39:06  
absolutely I mean, one of the best things I always say you can do is, especially if you live in a coastal environment like I do, is shop local try to support local small scale fishers. For one thing, those small scale fishers tend to I mean, of course, fisheries management is extremely complicated, and so I can't simplify it in a quick these fisheries are good and these are bad. However, small scale fisheries tend to be more sustainable than some of the larger imported commercial fisheries. But there also is just the carbon impact. You know, if you're able to eat local, the more we're reducing our carbon impact. Of course, I realize that that's easier said than done. You know, we all are in a system where it's very difficult to access affordable local foods, and certainly in some places more than others. But to the extent we can choose local producers and kind of reduce our carbon footprint, that's helpful as well as just generally. You know, we always hear Reduce Reuse, Recycle, and I would put reduce and reuse as far, far far above recycle. So the more we can reduce our consumption in general, reduce the amount of stuff we purchase, reduce the amount of stuff we use, and try to reuse and make do with what we already have, the better it is for our environment.

Brian  40:17  
Is there an equivalent to farm to table for fisheries?

Emily  40:20  
So there are some locally supported fisheries. So I would encourage you to look and see if there's one in your community. There used to be one here in coastal North Carolina, unfortunately, it was a victim of the pandemic, so it no longer exists. But there are some community supported fisheries around the world and around the country, similar to like how you would have a CSA, a community supported agriculture. There are some local community organizations that will have ways that you can support your local fishers, as well as check in with local fish markets. You know, check a local fish market. Ask where places are getting their fish. Where did this come from? One of my favorite things to do when I eat fish, because I do eat fish, is I just go into the local seafood market, and I ask, what's fresh? You know, what's freshest and what's best, and you know, what's sustainable? You know, I come across some of my new favorite fish. I love Trigger Fish. Trigger Fish is not something I'd ever eaten until I moved here, because it's not something that's really marketed at a mass scale. So you might find something that you really love just by going into your local fish market. You know, the people who work in this industry, both the fishers as well as the people who sell the fish, care a great deal about maintaining their livelihoods and maintaining their industry. So they tend to be really well connected. So if you just go in and strike up a conversation at your local fish market and ask them, like, what should I be eating? I'm sure they'd be happy to talk to you about that

Jason Wallace  41:39  
related to that. Can you say anything about, like aquaculture? So farmed fish? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it, as with all the other things complicated,

Emily  41:47  
as with all other things, it's complicated. One of the things I focus on for my work is that it's so important to think not just about what we are doing as individual consumers, but as a policy standpoint, because a lot of the challenges that we face as individual consumers is that it's simply impossible for us to know whether a given aquaculture product is from a sustainable practice or not. So the more we can kind of talk to our representatives about Fisheries Policy and aquaculture policy, the more impact we can have, because aquaculture can be really great. There are plenty of sustainable aquaculture practices, but there is also a lot of really problematic aquaculture that happens in some places in the world. Sometimes they're using tremendous amount of fish feed that can actually have an even more detrimental impact than wild fisheries, because the fish feed comes from some really unsustainable sources themselves. You know, it's not a cure all to say we can just farm fish, because those fish still have to eat something. But there are aquaculture facilities that are increasingly trying to use things like algae. We have some folks at our marine lab who work on that, trying to use algae as feed to kind of increase the sustainability of those aquaculture systems. So the answer is, it's complicated, and it certainly can be a really important supplement to the seafood industry. But as with anything, sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad, 

Jason Wallace  43:06  
all right, last and final question, arguably most important one, what is your favorite fish not necessarily to eat.

Emily  43:15  
Well, I'm gonna go with a hammerhead shark today. That's today.  I love a hammerhead not to eat. That is one thing. Do not eat shark, please. It is not illegal to eat shark in the United States. It's not necessarily illegal to fish for shark in the United States. That is one those apex predators take so long to kind of reestablish themselves. So that is one thing. I will say, Please don't eat shark. So not to eat. But I love a hammerhead shark. They're just so cool

Brian  43:39  
and they're the gossips, right? 

Emily  43:40  
And they are. They love to spill the tea.

Jason Wallace  43:46  
We're gonna wrap that discussion up then and move on to our constructive criticism corner. So the game has a lot, I think, of science in there. Typically, they've got some really good illustrations. They apparently, when thinking of the different abilities the fish would have, they tried to look at every individual fish and figure out what of the abilities we have makes sense for this fish. And I don't necessarily understand the connection between them, but is there anything we think they could do better? With the caveat that they mentioned the most obvious ones in the rule book already about like food and other things like that, I

Emily  44:17  
think that point that you just made is actually one of the nitpicks that I had about the game is I actually don't think that the fish's abilities necessarily relate to the biology of the fish. So to give an example that red lion fish, I noted that the fish's ability is to allow you to play another fish, and that doesn't really relate to anything about the biology of a red lionfish. You know, they're actually predate on other fishes young. That would have made more sense for something like a bait fish or a sardine, because you're going to be recruiting some of those larger fish that would come into the ecosystem. So I didn't necessarily think that there was a connection. For example, the venomous fish have no particularly venomous ability, which I recognize that's partly a choice of the game mechanic. You know, there's no negative player interaction in this game, which I think it's nice and it makes it a fun gaming experience. But you don't have that kind of connection. I didn't think between the actual biology of the fish and the fish's ability, because in wingspan, I think it's a lot more closely related, you know, not to focus on wingspan, but I think they've tied in wingspan, the birds abilities more closely to what the birds actually do in nature. And I don't think that finspan necessarily did that. And I think that might be a choice of the simplification of it. You know, like you mentioned, they've chosen a more simplified mechanic. And so, you know, I don't necessarily fault them for that, but it would have been cool to see, you know, like some of the venomous fish actually using their venom in some way in the game, or something like that. 

Brian  45:41  
Are we allowed to make our nitpicks in comparison to wingspan? It feels mean it's, it's in the game. You can't, not, right? 

Jason Wallace  45:47  
Yeah, there's sibling games. You're allowed to compare them and pick favorites.

Brian  45:51  
I think there were ones maybe a little bit of a science nitpick, and one's a little bit of a gameplay nitpick. The Science nitpick was, I'm thinking that, like, sometimes it seems like you've got fish that can go across a wider variety of depths than maybe would necessarily be realistic. The one that caught my attention in particular, and maybe I'm wrong on this, was the whale shark. They're not going to go down into the Twilight Zone or deeper, because there's nothing for them to eat there, right?

Emily  46:12  
I wouldn't think so. Primarily, when we see whale sharks, we see them near the surface, because they primarily feed on some of those kind of surface schoolers. So yeah, I do think that there's been a little leniency with that. The other one is that I didn't see necessarily any biological or ecological relationship in the horizontal habitats either. You know, it was more tied to the mechanic, yeah, which I think they could have done something really cool with having, like, a mangrove habitat, a coral habitat, an open sea habitat, and having it more. But I think they, again, they made that choice for the gameplay. And I don't know that you could really do both of the things I just said, you know, you tie it to the fish's ability and to that kind of habitat piece.

Brian  46:53  
One of the things that you do get in wingspan, that you don't get in finspan is movement. There were birds that could move between habitats. And again, once you put your fish down, it's just there forever. There's no upwards or downwards movement. There's no movement between zones, and that's unfortunate. It's a simplification, but it seems like something was kind of a lot of the fish have a end game mechanic, or when played, much more so than wingspan, where I feel like a lot more of the abilities they would be activated through each round, 

Jason Wallace  47:19  
yeah. And I think that's a conscious design choice, because they mentioned that they wanted to, again, streamline the game and try to make it so that you could play it easily in like 45 to 60 minutes, and I think, be a little bit more beginner friendly. When I was reading the designer diary, they actually specifically said that, okay, they got wingspan and then wyrmspan, the fantasy version that will never actually appear on this podcast is considered their crunchier, heavier game. And finspan is actually like the lighter game out of the three. 

Brian  47:46  
interesting

Emily  47:47  
I agree with you, Brian, I think that simplification did lose a little bit if we're comparing, but I will say my parents were here for the holiday, and we can't play wingspan. It's they find it too complicated, and they did enjoy finspan. so, you know, so there's, there is a choice. And I also wondered if part of the reason they made this choice is, frankly, so many of the species in this game we know almost nothing about. So it would be really hard to tie or maybe not almost nothing. But you know, our knowledge about specific species is still very limited. We study mostly commercially relevant species, socially relevant species, so there's a lot of information we don't know, so it's much harder, and it seems like what we know is constantly changing. So if you tie a game mechanic to a fish's ability, when you don't know much about that fish, that makes it a lot more difficult. So I wonder if that's part of the reasoning as well.

Brian  48:37  
Okay, so maybe their choice was, was actually one of academic caution.

Emily  48:41  
Who knows? I'll be charitable and assume that.

Jason Wallace  48:45  
And Brian, I just looked it up. Apparently, while whale sharks spend most of their time, like in the top, you know, 500 meters of the ocean, apparently they can go down to 2000 meters. 

Brian  48:54  
Oh, wow. Okay,

Jason Wallace  48:55  
 apparently it's not common, but they can. So I think that depth thing seems to be one of the things where they if they want to get their science right, they're probably going to get it right there 

Brian  49:06  
makes sense. 

Jason Wallace  49:06  
So I'm going to guess if it doesn't make sense to us, that's because we don't know enough about fish. 

Brian  49:08  
All right, nitpick withdrawn.

Emily  49:11  
But I also think it ties to your point about the lack of movement, because even though a whale shark can dive to that deep of a depth, it could never spend its whole life at that depth. So it's one thing to make a dive from time to time, but it's another to live in that habitat. So I still think it's a valid nitpick, even though a whale shark might appear at that habitat, you know, to place it there and have it live there, I don't think is necessarily scientifically accurate, 

Brian  49:33  
all right, 

Jason Wallace  49:33  
for me, I just think that they streamlined it to try to make it a lighter game. There are times where it definitely feels more complicated, just because there are so many places I can put my fish. It's not like, oh, I have three choices. It is whatever is the most open one in my current row. It's like, no, no. This fish can go literally anywhere in my ocean. Where do I want to put it? Those sorts of choices give a lot more options. Sometimes I get a little bit of decision paralysis. I was just trying to figure out where the best one is, and then I just give up, like, Okay, I'm gonna put it here and hope for the best. 

Brian  50:04  
This is the optimizer's demise. This is the well, what is the best choice?

Jason Wallace  50:08  
Yes, yes. And that may just be my personal play style. 

Brian  50:11  
It's not just you, but it definitely is you. 

Jason Wallace  50:14  
All right. Well, let's go on to letter grades then. So Brian, let's start with you. So we've got science and fun. How would you score this game? 

Brian  50:23  
I think I'm actually gonna give it a little bit lower score on science, because it does seem a little bit less integrated into the mechanics of the game. I think that there's just as much in the card, but it feels like a lot of the way that it's sort of blended in is maybe a little bit more of an afterthought. I think for science, I'm gonna go with probably a B, but I'm gonna keep it with the A. I do like playing fin span, so you gave a B for science and an A for fun, yes, B for science and an A for fun, 

Jason Wallace  50:49  
and Emily, how about you?

Emily  50:51  
Yeah, I overall agree, but I will say there's one thing I didn't mention explicitly. I alluded to it earlier, but the fact that the meeples are scuba divers going to the deep sea, I have to take off. I'm sorry. Those should have been submersible vehicles. They should not have been scuba divers. So I think I'm going to give it a B- for science, but I will give it an A for fun. I enjoyed playing the game. Like you said, it's hard not to compare it to wingspan, where I think the science was so integrated. So yeah, I'm going to do a B- for science. 

Brian  51:22  
I really think it's fine to compare it to wingspan. It's literally named after the same mechanic with the same designer. I agree

Jason Wallace  51:28  
it's legit to compare it. I'm gonna go on the record saying I think you two are being too harsh. Because, well, think about it, if this were not a relative of wingspan, if this were just some random other science game we'd gotten, we would score this at least an A- on science, because it has real world fish, it has real world habitat stuff. It has their sizes, it has details about them that are true. There is a lot of science in this game, okay, and it is, as far as we can tell, accurate. There are strategic simplifications, but I think if this were just some other random game off the shelf, I would give it no lower than an A-.

Brian  52:01  
Okay, I think that's a valid argument. I think that I've been grading on a curve, and I've been grading it relative to wingspan, and that's probably not fair, so I will change my grade to an A-.

Emily  52:11  
 I'm not going to go into the A range, but I'll bump up to a B+. I think you're right. I think you're right, but I'm sorry, I can't give an a range where you have scuba divers going to the bottom of the ocean. I just can't.

Brian  52:23  
One of these days, I got to have you talk about the video game Subnautica. I'd love to hear what you have to say about that. 

Jason Wallace  52:27  
All right, I will say science. I will do A to A-. 

Brian  52:32  
Well, you just made a huge case for A-. 

Jason Wallace  52:35  
I said, at least an A- possibly up to an A. It's just a question. I can't quite tell how much I'm also grading on a curve, because there are some things that are present in its sister game that were dropped for this. There's no little distribution map showing. This is where this fish shows up. Maybe that's because we don't know where it shows up. Actually, I think they mentioned that in the designer diary, where they don't actually know where a lot of these fish appear. They know where they have been seen, but they don't actually know where their range of habitat is, because so much of them go unseen. I think at the end of the day, I'm probably going to go with an A on it, because, again, I think there's a lot of science here. They made strategic choices about what they would choose and what they would not and I think I'm going to go a bit with what you said, Brian, are people going to learn wrong things here? Probably not. Most of what they are going to get is probably going to be right. So I'm going to go ahead and give it an A for science.

Brian  53:19  
Okay. Oh yeah, Emily, what was your fun grade? Did you give a fun grade?

Emily  53:22  
Oh yeah, I said an A I really enjoy the game. I think it's a great game. And I think I also grade it harder because of my knowledge of these, if I didn't know anything about it, it's it's really hard. It's like, you know, when you watch a TV show that's about something that you know is your job, you're way harder on it. You're a harsher critic. I will say, the amount of work it must have taken to have the facts on all of these hundreds of fish, cars and the beautiful illustrations is really incredible. I mean, they've really done a lot of work. And I'll buy the expansions, because I want to see, like you said, I would love a crustaceans expansion. I want all give me all the octopus. I think that would be really cool. And I think there's a lot of ways to expand the game, and who knows, maybe in those future expansions, they might add some complexity, you know, kind of like wingspan did with some of their expansions as well, and add some complexity that's more tied to the biology we'll see.

Brian  54:17  
Yeah, and probably fewer banned cards, because there's fewer combinations. But Jason, what? What was your fun grade? Because I cut you off. I apologize.

Jason Wallace  54:24  
I'm gonna give it an A- for fun. Okay, it's one where I still haven't quite grokked it. Like, as I go at it, I still feel like I don't have a good strategy as the game progresses, like, oh, okay, this is how I make good strategic decisions to try to advance my board state. I haven't quite gotten that yet. It took me many times of playing wingspan to figure that out, too. So that may just be the nature of this sort of game. 

Brian  54:46  
So which would you rather play? 

Jason Wallace  54:47  
I would probably go for wingspan. 

Brian  54:49  
OK I don't know at this point. I think they're about even. For me, I'd like to play both, either. 

Emily  54:53  
I think it depends who I'm playing with, a more casual person. I think finspan is a little easier to teach and explain at least. But if you've played it a lot, I'm probably going to repeat wingspan more.

Jason Wallace  55:05  
All right, so we need to wrap up. Thank you very much, Emily. For anyone who wants to follow you or look at your work, where can they find you?

Emily  55:11  
So I have a website. It's emilymelvin.com and I also use Blue Sky to share my academic work. Which my handle there is EC Melvin.

Jason Wallace  55:19  
And you mentioned a podcast through your university, right?

Emily  55:22  
Yes. So our university, the Duke Marine Lab, we have a podcast called seas the day, S, E, A, S, the day. So you can check that out. We have a number of different series on there talking about things like PhD student life, different scientific work, as well as the one I've been involved with, which is our conservation and development podcast series. That podcast is run by my advisor, Lisa Campbell, so it's a great place to learn a little bit more about what we do at the Duke Marine Lab. 

Jason Wallace  55:49  
So we are going to call it there. So thank you again, dear listeners for being here with us. We hope you have a great month and great games.

Brian  55:56  
And as always, have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.

Jason Wallace  55:59  
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