S2E05.1 - Harmonies and Planet (Ecological Niches)

#Harmonies #PlanetGame #Ecology #NichePartitioning #BoardGames #Science

We have a short bonus episode today, going over two science-inspired games, Harmonies and Planet. Both of these games touch on ecology and what animals need in their environment, but in a very science-light manner. We talk about niche partitioning, compare and contrast the games, and even have a cool science fact about trees using lightning to kill their neighbors.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Introduction
• 01:06 Trees weaponizing lightning
• 03:54 Harmonies overview
• 08:31 Planet overview
• 12:25 Compare and contrast
• 17:24 Humans and vertebrate bias
• 19:39 Niche specialization
• 22:53 No science grades
• 24:18 Fun grades

Links

• Harmonies official site (Libellud)
• Planet official site (Blue Orange Games)
• Tonka bean trees survive lightning (LiveScience.com)
• Interview with Harmonies creator (Youtube, French)
  • Translated and cleaned transcript

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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

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Brian  0:05  
Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.

Brian  0:11  
In today's bonus episode, we're going to discuss harmonies by Libellud

Jason  0:15  
and planet by blue, orange games. 

Brian  0:18  
hey, I'm Brian. 

Jason  0:19  
This is Jason.

Brian  0:20  
It's just the two of us. Welcome to a bonus episode anyway. So we're supposed to take a break midway through the season, and we have this is  gonna be a bonus episode. It's gonna be a little weird. We're talking about two games today, harmonies and planet. These games are similar. I've decided that these games are, instead of being based on a true story, they're inspired by a true story. Both of these have a strong nature theme, but it you know, they weren't really trying to directly model anything in science. They just sort of did it by accident. 

Jason  0:52  
and they're both completely coincidentally French,

Brian  0:56  
and have a lot of other similarities too, in terms of overall mechanics and also having some some fun gimmicks associated with them, you actually have a science fact. So, you know, it's a bonus episode, but what's your science fact? 

Jason  1:08  
This was some research that came out about trees in the Panama rainforest. Relevant, because this is all about ecology and plants competing well. So it turns out that tall trees in the rainforest get struck by lightning a lot, and it's actually thought to be one of the major contributors to tree mortality, to killing the tall trees and then opening up space. Well, turns out there's this one species of tree called a tonka bean tree, that apparently just survives lightning unscathed. 

Brian  1:35  
What? 

Jason  1:36  
but lightning strikes kill all of the parasitic vines on it, or most of them, and a lot of it's nearby competitors, and so it may actually be using the lightning strikes as a way of gaining a competitive advantage. They did research over time, looking at looking exactly where lightning struck, looking at the trees before and after, looking at long historical records. And apparently, for other trees, being next to a tonka bean tree is actually a very high risk for mortality. You are likely to die next to one of them, presumably because getting struck by lightning and kind of using that to kill you.

Brian  2:06  
This is the strangest thing to imagine, having a selective advantage. This is so bizarre. 

Brian  2:06  
Well, think about it, though, like lightning generally strikes the tallest thing, and in a rainforest, it's always a game of trying to reach the light, and so lots of trees are benefited from getting really tall, but if a lightning strike comes by and hits you, then you're dead. And so I don't know, I think there's actually a decent selective advantage of like, Hey, if you can survive lightning, great. And then, because presumably, if you get struck by lightning, a lot of that current is going through whatever is nearby to you as well or touching you, then it may be able to clear off some of your competitors or parasites that aren't so adapted. 

Jason  2:23  
But? but how do? how do? How survive lightning?

Jason  2:49  
So the article I read, which I will link in the show notes, I think it's a hypothesis. I don't think they have the mechanism yet, but they hypothesize that the interior is like highly conductive, and so it conducts the electricity without really building up a lot of heat, which the heat happens because of resistance? 

Brian  3:07  
Yeah

Jason  3:07  
 So if it conducts it well, then it's almost like an insulated wire, where the it's essentially grounding itself out. And so the heat that actually caused the damage to it doesn't build up,

Brian  3:18  
yeah, because it would like boil the sap and cause the tree to explode. So that doesn't happen,

Jason  3:22  
apparently, not now this is from the high level summary I read. So now that this is out, I'm sure that there will be lots of follow ups. They're already talking about looking at this in other systems where you have tall trees that dominate the ecosystem and all. So I'm sure there'll be much more data on this in the future. But for now, like they seem to have solid data that these things survive lightning strikes and other things that are nearby them, don't, holy

Brian  3:42  
holy crap. In Pokemon terms, this is now a lightning grass type, 

Jason  3:47  
apparently, yes,

Brian  3:49  
that's nuts. Wow, that's a great thank you for finding that. Fact 

Jason  3:52  
that's too cool to skip 

Brian  3:53  
Absolutely. Okay, so let's talk about these games for a little bit. We're going to try to keep this brief. I'm going to talk about harmonies first, and then Jason's going to talk about planet, and then we're going to kind of compare and contrast, talk about some things we like, maybe some things that we don't like. Harmonies sort of just fell out of nowhere. Last year. It wasn't on Kickstarter or anything like that. It just showed up in stores. My wife and I bought it on a whim. Also, did you know harmonies is ranked 85 on Board Game Geek? I did not. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's literally in the top 100 I think it has become my favorite game. I have probably played this game more than any other game on my shelf, and it is a French game. It's a French publisher. It is a French designing team. I usually try to do a little bit of research on these games to sort of get some context for this. I could not find an interview, except for some interviews in French to try to do research for this, I took the transcript of the French YouTube video which put that through Google Translate, and then got one of the generative AIs to try to clean up all of the translation artifacts to the point where I could actually read it.

Jason  3:55  
So at this point, you're reading more of an AI than you are the actual original transcript. 

Brian  4:04  
I mean, presumably, like, we do have one friend who speaks French, but I didn't get a chance to get her to, like, tell me how. Right or wrong. This was so I am kind of assume. I mean, it sounds okay, like, you know, it's, it's, it makes sense to me, and it seems like it's consistent with what's there. There wasn't, as far as I can tell from this interview, any specific intentionality in terms of reflecting particular biomes or or composition, or anything like that. Let me just talk about the game, because I haven't done that yet. So what you have is a little placement in front of you with a little hex grid. It's a 3d landscape building game. There's five different color these nice little chunky wooden tokens, and they're going to represent trees or mountains or rivers or water or Plains or cities. Take these little tiles and you kind of stack them up. So you're building little mountain ranges, or you're building little rivers or little planes or trees. Your trees actually come in two sections. There's both trunks and canopies, kind of like reminiscent of Earth. And what you're trying to do is create patterns on your little landscape that will fit these beautifully illustrated animal cards. So you'll draft an animal card and try to create the habitat that it needs. So for instance, it might need, like, a two tall mountain next to a river or something like that. 

Jason  4:04  
That's two, as in, t, w, o, 

Brian  6:08  
yes, two little mountain tiles on top of each other next to a river or a tree or something like that. You're building habitats for these little animals, and what you're trying to do is sort of fit them all together harmoniously to try to maximize how much habitat you can create for your different things. It's like turn based open drafting game. The cards are absolutely gorgeous. And actually, the one thing that did come out from the interview was that in some early phases, they were it was going to be much more abstract. It was just going to be a picture of the animal with maybe some sort of vague frame representing its habitat. But they didn't do that. They are these wonderful full color illustrations with these beautiful landscapes, with the animals sort of existing in its environment. So it's very evocative. There's 32 different animal cards. And then they also have these things called animal spirits, special animals, so like a mountain goat with some ridiculous, crazy horns or something like that. And those will sort of like change the way that the point system works. Like you'll get bonus points for building extra tall mountains if you're working with that particular animal spirit. 

Jason  7:12  
Yeah, if we were to extract these, those are basically your personal goals, yes, that you're aiming for the things that every player has one copy of this, which puts you towards something different, like when Brian I played this my my little spirit animal thing was something about mountains, and so I was just trying to get as many mountains as I could. 

Brian  7:29  
The way that you get points in the game is, again, you'll get points for creating habitats for your little animals. On your cards, you get points for your landscape itself. So for instance, you'll get points for having mountains in a chain. They have to be in a chain or they don't count. You'll get points for your little cities. They have to be two tall, and they have to be in harmony. So they have to be surrounded by at least three different types of tiles for them to count. Points for trees and stuff like that. But your tree has to have a canopy on top of it, otherwise it's a dead tree, and you don't get any points for dead trees. And then you'll get some additional bonus points based on your your animal spirit thing. And those have different you know, the extra points for usually, like a plain, you only get points for having, like, a group of two, anything more than that doesn't count. But the the lion animal spirit that sits right on the front box actually gives you extra points for having extra large plains. So that's harmonies. Uh, Jason, why don't you explain planet? by the way, planet was suggested to me by one of our listeners at Dragon Con. I'm sorry I don't have your name. If that was you, get on our Discord and let us know.

Jason  8:30  
Okay, so planet is by blue, orange games. It was designed by Urtis Sulinskas. I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that name who I could not find any information on but you can tell that this game is built around a central gimmick. It is also about creating habitat. But instead of having a flat player board, you actually have a dodecahedron, so a D12, a 12 sided object with a bunch of metal plates on each side. And you are placing these magnetic tiles on each one of those sides to build your planet up. So the game takes place over 12 turns. Each turn you place one of these little tiles. The tiles are laid out. You go in player order. You draft one. So the first player picks one out of the five available that turn. They pick which one they want, then the second player, then the third player, and so on. And as you're building it, you're trying to essentially recruit these animals. Again, very animal focused. Recruit the animals to your planet by meeting their condition. And their condition is usually either you have the biggest contiguous patch of whatever territory there is, so they have like ice and plains and desert and forest and mountain, I think so fairly similar to harmonies, you try to get the largest single patch, and usually has to be either the largest patch that is touching a specific other type of habitat or the largest patch that is not touching a specific other type of habitat, so the largest forest that is also touching some desert, or the largest ocean that is not touching ice. You can also just get ones that require the largest total little triangles that each one of these patches is in across your little world. And so as you go along, you start with a blank dodecahedron. First turn, you add one tile, then another, then another. Over the course, eventually you start recruiting animals. The animals give you points. And then there are some personal objectives where each person secretly has one of the types of territory, the water, the ice, the forest, that they are trying to get as many as they can, because that will give them bonus points. But there's this little tension in that you actually get more points for recruiting animals that are not part of your primary objective. There's a trade off. There is that if you go whole, like if I have forests, and I do only forests, as many as I can get, I'll probably actually get less points than if I diversified a bit and try to bring in some other animals at the end. 

Brian  8:31  
So you don't get as many points if you're building the forest moon of Endor. 

Jason  10:50  
No, no. Single biome. Planets don't get very far. Yeah. Anyway, the games for two to four players, they only have four dodecahedrons. You're kind of hard, limited at how many people can be part of it, and plays in about 20 to 30 minutes. It's actually a pretty fast game. It's won several awards for family games. So it's when we compare and contrast. This is definitely the simpler game, but it also seems to be aimed at a bit younger audience. This seems to be a game that is meant to be played if you have kids in like the eight to 12 range. Minimum age is eight, so something that a child could actually probably have a lot of fun with, because very tactile. You have your your little dodecedron You're putting tiles on. It's a very physical game that you're manipulating without super deep, complex rules, so that it's something that you could play as a family or with kids in a in a class, or niece, nephew, whatever, and be able to have fun with them and still have a decent amount of strategic depth. 

Brian  11:42  
The rules are really simple, uh, the little magnetic hexes. I know that you said that they've got triangles split up on them, so you kind of, if you like, draw a line across the center of it. Each edge will correspond to, like, one biome type, right?

Jason  11:55  
 So, yeah, they're all pentagon shaped, and they're just five triangles glued, essentially stuck together into a pentagon, and some variation of things. I usually, we all know, saw like two or three different biomes on each of them, and there's definitely none that have only one, although it can be challenging late game when you have like, 80% of your planet filled up, and you're like, rotating around and trying to keep track of is this contiguous with this other part, and counting up all the triangles. And that part can get a little tricky, because I can't see all edges of my dodecahedron at the same time. So why don't

Brian  12:25  
we compare and contrast some of these games? What do you think we should do? Jason, what's the best way to start this discussion? 

Jason  12:30  
Well, let's start with what's the same so they're both drafting systems. So in harmonies, you draft the animals like the animals are out, and when it's your turn, you can choose an animal. You also get to choose which set of various tiles are out. So there's like five groups of three tiles, and you get to pick which one you want. Whereas planet, you're drafting the the ecosystem tiles. So each round there are five little pentagon tiles that you get to choose from. And so again, you go and turn order first player first, and you're picking which one. And then that rotates each time. So everyone has a chance of being first. So they've got the drafting mechanic in place. They also have you wanting to build specific arrangements of ecosystems or biomes, or whatever we want to call these things. In planet, it's usually just bigger, is usually better, although there is some stuff about what it is or is not touching. Whereas in harmonies, it's much smaller. It tends to do with like these two or three tiles that are next to each other need to have this specific arrangement. But it doesn't care about the overall shape of the of your island or your desert or whatever it is you're building on. 

Brian  13:33  
Something that's different about the games is because the difference in scale, right. in Planet, you're building an entire planet, which, you know, I mean, these planets clearly don't have, like, polar caps or whatever, but like that doesn't really matter. 

Jason  13:35  
Well, they do if you build one on there. 

Brian  13:38  
No, that's true. I mean, I guess you could try to build a polar cap, I don't think you'd do very well in terms of scoring the game if you did that, but you could do it in harmonies. The scale is a lot different. Like, it's not really clear what the scale is. One of them, it's like, you're sort of building an island. I think that's the easiest way to think about it. And it's like, it's not super clear how big the island is, but when you do think that, like one of your little tiles is supposed to correspond to a mountain, I feel like that's one of the best ways to kind of get a feel for scale. If this is a mountain and this is a section of river, then you're not putting down a tree. You're putting down a section, more like a section of forest, or like an area of forest. And one thing that we do have that's different in harmonies versus planet, is the existence of, like human structures, buildings are part of it. Then, as you're building, you're kind of building little mountain ranges and rivers. You're placing little towns or cities or forests. So you really start to get sort of a feel of, kind of like being down at the scale, sort of occupying this landscape that you're building. And in harmonies, the animals physically take up space. When you place your cube there, the animal is now in that space. And that's different in Planet, right? 

Jason  13:32  
Yeah, in planet, you're just collecting the cards. So you have the cards, you recruit it. Not sure what the metaphor is, because, like, if you look at this literally, like you're basically a bunch of nature Gods building planets and trying to recruit animals to live on your planet, as opposed to someone else's planet. So not exactly sure how that works, but eh, it's fine. That's just, we're not going to stretch the metaphor again. These are inspired by science, not actually based on science. Yeah, I guess it could be a sort of collective thing, of like you're deciding which one, which planet, the animal would be happiest on, and they get to put the animal there. Something in common, though, is the nature of the requirements. So the types of biomes and environments you have to build do make sense. So like in harmonies, like you'll say, Oh, the honeybee needs to have a plains next to a two tall tree. The honeybee actually lives on the tree, which was a little odd at first, but then you think about, like, Oh, 

Jason  15:03  
that's its hive. 

Jason  15:18  
The planes are like the opens area. Yes, it put the honeybees build their hives and trees, but it needs an open area with, like, wildflowers and stuff for it to actually forage in which forests are not good for that. Or I've got some stuff here in planet and, like, the narwhal, needs to have ice that is not connected to forest, so cold areas, which is where narwhals live, or giraffes are live based on the largest piece of sand you have that is next to forest. So they're kind of the open savanna area. It's like, there's only so much you can do with as simple characteristics they have here. But even though it still makes sense, you look at these like, okay, yeah, I can see kind of where the metaphor is, like, it kind of makes sense based on what it actually lives. On our planet. 

Brian  16:23  
In planet you're sort of building, presumably entire biomes. The simplest way to think about a biome is a combination of temperature and precipitation. Are the sort of things that determine sort of what can live there in terms of plant life, in terms of animal life, and it's sort of one of the ways that ecology kind of naturally partitions out is temperature and precipitation. Planet again, really strips it down to the bare basics, right? 

Jason  16:46  
Oh yeah. I mean, it only has five in the entire world that you're working with. So it takes a little bit of abstraction that you've got your water, your ice, your forest, your mountain, your desert, or sand, or whatever you want to call it very coarse grained there. But you could, you could, you could use some imagination and see a little bit more of that,

Brian  17:03  
whereas in harmonies, we're building, again, at a smaller scale, more like building an island or a landscape. So we're really, at that point, creating habitats, and I've tried to find some, like actual good dictionary definition of habitats. Like a habitat has to provide with the creature, with what it needs, in terms of food, water, shelter and space, it has to be able to complete its life cycle within that area. And one of the things we also get in harmonies that we don't have in Planet is that we have human built structures. And like nine of the 32 animals that are in the game and their habitat includes a building. So these would be things like squirrels or crows, things that do well around people.

Jason  17:41  
And I like that, because too often in these ecological conversations, we're talking is like, oh, like everything humans do is bad for the environment. And, okay, let's be honest, a lot of things we do is bad for the environment, but 

Brian  17:52  
a lot of things we do are bad. 

Jason  17:53  
Yes, a lot of things are, but they don't necessarily have to be. And then you can argue the point of harmonies is showing that it is possible to be in harmony with nature is that we can get what we need, and then other things can get what they need. And if you do it right, you can make it so everybody wins. 

Brian  18:07  
And the way that the game represents that for your city, for your building, to earn you points, it has to, again, be in harmony with nature. So how do we represent that? It means that the city has to be surrounded by three different types of tiles, so by a mountain, by a river, by a forest you can't build some. You know, huge metropolitan city where it's just city after city, building after building after building that won't earn you any points. You can do it. But basically, you are now not in harmony. You have not balanced your human buildings with the rest of nature. So it's kind of a fun way of playing with that metaphor as well. Humans get to be part of nature instead of separate from it. One of the things that we did notice about these games, and look, I 100% get it, it's fine. I understand this. These are both have this huge vertebrate bias in terms of what is represented in the game, most animals, most living animals, are, are bugs, right? Areinsects, or things like that, or arthropods. This is all vertebrates, with very few exceptions, all things with backbones in harmonies. There are in the main cards, there are out of 32 there's two insects, honeybees and ladybugs. Everything else is a vertebrate. What about in planet? 

Jason  19:17  
So we have three. We have jelly, jellyfish, octopi and scorpions. 

Brian  19:21  
So planet actually did better than harmonies with that. But I think, you know, maybe I don't know, there are some pretty charismatic insects in there. I did want to say, in the animal spirits, where, like, there's only 10 of those, you do have the dragonfly and a swallowtail butterfly. So we get, we get four insects total in the game. The rest are all vertebrates. 

Jason  19:39  
Well, let's talk a little bit about the science we can get out of this. Because there is, as you say, inspired by science and looking at these, the one that really comes to mind is like, okay, yes, ecology, but we already talked about general ecology with earth and such. It's really more the idea of, like niches, of an ecological niche, or niche, depending on how you want to pronounce it, that an organism in. Is occupying, and that basically just means, like this is its little specialized part of the world that it focuses on. Well, they're actually mostly defined by how they avoid competing with other things. So maybe you have animals that specialize at eating grass instead of broadleaf things, or maybe they specialize at leading eating the leaves that are, you know, less than two meters high, as opposed to, like a giraffe that eats the ones that are way up top into the tree tops. And so there's certain parts of their environment they're really good at exploiting, and there are other parts of the environment they don't bother with, which lets something else occupy that part of the environment. And so each of these animals has their own little habitat, their own little niche that they are as they're occupying. And really, if you look across the entire game, you have different animals that are trying to occupy different parts of the environment and different things that you're building together. What I especially like with harmonies is that part of the gameplay rewards you for finding animals that have complementary habitats, because, as Brian said, like when you place your little animal cube saying, hey, there's an animal here, you get points for that, but it only occupies one of the tile spaces, but usually requires at least two, sometimes three tile spaces in order to trigger that, leaving those other two open. So if you can find another animal that uses part of that and overlaps, then you can use that overlapping part to build its habitat and put it there. And so you can try to have complementary animals occupying your landscape, so that you get essentially as many of them in there as possible, while having a again harmonious existence, because they're all occupying different parts of the landscape.

Brian  21:40  
And I think harmonies represents niche, niche partitioning really well, actually, because of that exact reason, like the animal physically occupies space, and really only one animal can be on that tile, right? Whereas with planet, kind of, once you recruit your animals, they just kind of sit in a stack and you never think about it again, which is sort of a little different, unfortunately,

Brian  22:00  
 yes, but there is the thing where, so the way you draft the animals, the animals, you see them all like lined out for the course of the game. So you know what's coming down. There's a variant rule where you don't but so you see what's happening. So you can build your planet saying, Hey, I'm not going to get anything this term, but I'm going to try to aim in three turns when I'm first player, I'm going to try to go for that Orca, which requires a large amount of ocean touching ice, so I'm going to make sure I have a really big ocean touching ice. But that decision means that, you know, two turns later, when there's something that needs a lot of ocean that does not touch ice, you're out of luck. And so there is a little bit of that habitat partitioning going on. It's less within your own little environment and more among the different planets that are being built. It's like by choosing to go after one particular setup, I am sort of cutting myself off from a different one, leaving someone else to take it and specialize that way.

Brian  22:52  
Let's jump into why we're not doing science grades. It's not that we couldn't, but just like we're now, I don't think we're going to, right?

Jason  22:59  
yeah probably not again these. I mean your your litmus test is, will people have some wrong idea about the science? I don't think it's deep enough to really merit that. My thing is, does it portray what it's trying to portray? Well, honestly, I think so yes, but they're not trying to portray too much. I think harmonies probably went deeper than planet on purpose, and I think they both hit kind of the level they were going at. But this is not a science game. This is not something from genius games or Elizabeth Hargrave where, like, the science is central to it. This is like, Oh, here's this metaphor from nature that we can take and we'll use that to make a fun game.

Brian  23:34  
 I've been thinking about what it takes to make a hard science game. I don't think they sat down and did a ton of research on each of these 32 animals, how they would work together, and what their specific habitat requirements were. It's just sort of a, just a representation based on almost common knowledge about these things, although some of them are really cute, right? Like you said, with the honeybee having the tree surrounded by the by the field, it's, it's very evocative. It's very it's a great role play, to be able to to play harmonies and sort of place all of those things, but they weren't really trying to do science. And I don't think anybody's going to learn anything wrong from either of these games, right?

Jason  24:10  
I mean, the only way someone learns something wrong is if one of these has some habitat that doesn't make sense for its animal, and neither of us spotted anything like that. So I think.

Brian  24:18  
I think they're just fine. But let's talk about the fun. And we can talk about the fun, in this case, in terms of compare and contrast. Harmonies is my favorite game, also one of the only games I've ever beat Jason at. So that's interesting. But you know, since this is a bonus episode, it doesn't count. The thing that I like about harmonies is that you it's just just the right amount of sort of strategic balance. For me, you always feel like there's something that you can do that's helpful, right? You never feel like you're stuck with only bad choices, because even if you can't satisfy any of your animal habitats, you can work towards some kind of a landscape goal, like building up your mountain chain, or trying to build a city somewhere or something like that. Harmonies is an A+ for me. For fun. I would play this pretty much anytime. Planets, it has a great gimmick, and I agree with you that the rules were made simple on purpose to try to make it easier to play with kids. And it plays fast too, right? I mean, both of these games play fast, but planet plays really fast, particularly with only two people. There's not quite as many choices to make, and you do kind of end up feeling a little hamstrung by previous choices and what's in front of you. So if I have to choose between the two, I'm going to choose harmonies. I think planet, I'll probably give a B, because I think the gimmick of the three dimensional planet is the most appealing thing about it. 

Jason  25:34  
Yeah, I think mine will come out close. I think I give harmonies an A and planet, a B+ for basically the same reasons, and I don't want to knock on planet. It's like it is simple on purpose. It's simpler than I prefer. But this would be great to play with my nine year old. Like, I would love getting this out for a quick 20 minute game. And I think that would be perfect. And I would love doing that. I wouldn't necessarily pull it out with my peer group of adults who want to have some more strategic depth, but since it is aimed at a younger audience like I think it does that part very well. So it it almost, I'd almost give it a context dependent grade. given like, if I had my choice between this and Exploding Kittens, I would take this 100% of the time, guaranteed. So on the Exploding Kitten scale, me with my peers, okay, B+ me with my kids. A, I would go with it. I would definitely take this with my kids. I would love doing that. 

Brian  26:27  
The simplicity and the speed, you know, planet might actually be a good fit for a classroom. You already mentioned that, but I kind of think it's true for the I'm not sure what the best age would be. I feel like for an elementary school level, if you're having your ecology or your biome unit, planet, would probably be a nice supporting activity. 

Jason  26:46  
Yep, probably elementary school, maybe, maybe up to middle school. It may get a little too simple for them by the time you get into like, eighth or ninth grade. But no, I think it'll work. I mean, and honestly, even into high school, I think it would be, well, high school at that point becomes more fun than instructional. But yeah, elementary to middle school is probably the sweet spot there.

Brian  27:02  
All right. Well, thank you for joining us for our break bonus episode, thanks for tuning in. Have a great month and great games

Jason  27:11  
and have fun playing dice with universe, see ya. 

Brian  27:14  
This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we've 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