S2E06 - Atiwa (Fruit bats)

#Atiwa #Bats #UweRosenberg #LookoutGames #Extension #Outreach #SciComm #BoardGames #Science

Overview

It's time for bats! In this episode, we talk about Atiwa, a worker-placement game by Uwe Rosenberg based on a specific scientific study showing how fruit bats provide enormous ecological benefit to communities in Ghana. We're also joined by Mariëlle van Toor, one of the researchers involved in that exact study, to help explain why this whole thing is so important. So grab some fruit, settle into your favorite roost, and let's talk about Atiwa.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Introductions
• 01:30 Humans and honeyguides
• 05:55 Bats avoiding collisions during rush-hour
• 09:43 Atiwa gameplay
• 21:12 The study behind Atiwa
• 26:58 What is that fruit?
• 31:44 Uwe Rosenberg does great outreach
• 35:25 Exosystem services
• 39:48 More bat facts!
• 42:10 Nitpick corner
• 45:58 Final grades

Links

• Atiwa (Lookout Games)
• Original study by Mariëlle van Toor et. al. (Current Biology)
  • Video abstract for the above (Youtube)
  • Press release for the above, with photo by Christian Ziegler (Max Planck)
• Straw-colored fruit bat eating a banana (Youtube)
• Paper on honeyguides working with humans (Science)
• Paper on convergent evolution of hearing genes in bats and whales (PubMed Central)
• The Eidolon monitoring network
• Tautonym - When genus and species have the same name (Wikipedia)
• Sugar plum tree (Upaca kirkiana) (iNaturalist)
• Research article on the New York Land Acquisition Program to limit pollution to New York City (Pace Environmental Law Review) 

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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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Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Brian, hello

Jason  0:06  
and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.

Brian  0:10  
Today, we're going to discuss a T wop by lookout games. All right, hello. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian. 

Jason  0:21  
This is Jason, 

Marielle  0:22  
and this is Marielle. And I'm a researcher at Linnaeus University in southeast Sweden, and I mostly work on combinational movement ecology, and especially looking into the role of animal movement for the spread of pathogens. And sometimes I also look into dispersion of seeds by animals. So this is what is relevant for the game today.

Brian  0:42  
Very much, and we're extremely excited to have Marielle van Toor here. This is a unique example of a science game for us. This game was explicitly inspired by a study that was published by Marielle and Dina Dechmann in it wasn't even that long ago when was the study published?

Marielle  0:58  
 2019 

Brian  0:58  
in 2019 so that's relatively recent in Current Biology, which is a is a very bright and shiny journal. So very excited to be able to make this arrangement here to talk about a Atiwa and sort of environmental activism, scientific environmental activism and ecological services and bats and Ghana, okay, but before we get into that, we usually start with some kind of a science banter, science fact, Jason, you are up this time. Marielle, I think you said you might have something as well. So usually we give the guest host first dibs. So do you want to share us something with us? 

Marielle  1:30  
SoI have one thing that I think is really cool, and that is in some way related to the game, even though it's on a completely different system, but also located in Africa. So there's a researcher whose name is Claire Spottiswoode, and she works in South Africa, and she's been working on a system of mutualism, and that means interactions that are mutual or beneficial to both partners between humans and birds. And this is particularly the greater Honeyguide, which is a species that kind of indicates to honey badgers, but also humans, in this case, where to find bee nests as a resource for honey and for the honey guides also as a resource for the beeswax. And she's been working on this for a great time, a great long time. And I once saw a couple of years ago a plenary talk by her having never heard about her work. And it was absolutely amazing, because so this greater honey guide. The Latin name for that is Indicator indicator, which I think is really fun.

Brian  2:25  
I love a I can't remember the term for when the genus and species are the same name. It's my very favorite. 

Marielle  2:31  
I also don't remember, 

Brian  2:32  
yeah, I'll look it up. I did know that taxonomically, you cannot do that for plants. 

Marielle  2:36  
It's, it is, yeah, just animals. And I don't know about mushrooms. 

Brian  2:39  
I don't know about mushrooms either. I might look that up. 

Marielle  2:43  
But anyway, so she studies these in multiple different locations with different tribes of African peoples. And there is basically a way to make the interaction between humans and these honeyguides more likely, and that is because these people have developed, basically calls and whistles that attract the species. It's like, this is something that it's similar as to what you would do with your dog. You call it by its name, okay? But here's basically a specific type of whistle, and the birds locally to that, to that group of people would respond to that one more likely than to any other kind of like human sound. 

Brian  3:17  
That's fascinating. Are honey guides corvids, because this sounds like a crow thing.

Marielle  3:22  
Oh, now you're asking me things I do not know. 

Brian  3:24  
I also when I I've heard about honeyguides before, but I've usually heard them in the context of, don't they have a a symbiotic relationship with honey badgers?

Marielle  3:31  
Yes. So, so this is the same kind of this the same kind of behavior, only that they don't do it with honey badgers, but also with people,

Jason  3:38  
So I just looked it up. It looks like they're actually in the woodpecker family, or sister to the woodpecker family. Yes. 

Brian  3:44  
Okay, weird. If they were crows or corvids, I'd be like, Oh, well, of course. But to see this, like, pop up at a completely different group is actually very cool.

Marielle  3:52  
yeah. So anyway, she gave this talk, and it was completely mind blowing. So if you want, I can put in a link for one of her studies that was published in, think, Nature. So that would also give, like, a nice introduction to what is happening there.

Brian  3:52  
Yeah, absolutely. We'd be happy to, we'd be excited to put that into the show notes. For sure, is this like, sort of almost, like a form of, like, pre-domestication?

Marielle  4:13  
maybe it's a couple of years ago, so I don't really remember much, but I thought it was really, it's not something that we hear of usually. So this is quite unique, I think, yeah, if you don't consider, of course, kind of like interactions with domestic animals. 

Jason  4:26  
Yeah. Well, I want to know is, this sounds like humans are co-opting, what the birds already do with the Badgers. And I want to know how that came about. Like, obviously there's a mutualism. I assume the Badger gets the food and the honey guide gets, you said, the wax out of it. But how did the birds and the Badgers learn to communicate with each other?

Marielle  4:42  
Well, the question is, is it specific? Did it specifically evolve between honeyguides and Badgers, or is this a more kind of, like opportunistic behavior from the birds, like, in terms of like observing that there are species that prey on honey, kind of like bees Colonies, and then kind of use that information. It might not be specific to honey badgers from the start, but Iwouldn't know. 

Jason  5:05  
What do they use the wax for? I assume it's building their nest.

Marielle  5:09  
Let me just briefly check, because I don't actually know.

Brian  5:11  
 I guess the other thing is thinking about like, is this a is this a learned behavior? Is this something they have to be taught? Is this something that every Honey Badger and honey guide sort of have to develop this relationship. Does the mama Honey Badger have to exp like, you know, indicate to the to the juveniles, like, Hey, you should pay attention to these birds. 

Jason  5:11  
Well, Wikipedia to take 

Brian  5:28  
the ultimate source of all scientific information

Jason  5:34  
Wikipedia says that they feed on wax, 

Brian  5:37  
okay, 

Marielle  5:38  
but also all the little critters that lives in there, like pupae and bees. 

Brian  5:38  
Okay, so this is like when you eat your little babybel cheese, and then you just bite through the wax, I guess. All right, thank you. That's extremely cool. And again, I think it's, it's fun to think about how these relationships sort of like pop up at this point. Jason, what did you have

Jason  5:56  
i I'm starting to follow your lead and try to find things that are on point with what we're talking about. So I started to find what was cool about bats recently, and I found one from a few months back, where some researchers fitted very, very tiny little microphones to bats in order to figure out their echolocation. Because there's a question of, how on earth do bats echolocate when they're leaving caves, when there are literally 1000s of bats all chirping at the same time trying to get their way out, and they use that echolocation to to find their way out and not crash into each other, into walls. But how do they do that when there's literally 1000s of them all doing the same thing, and those echoes are bouncing all around everywhere? So what they did is they made these teeny, teeny, tiny little microphones, like four gram microphones, because the bat is only 40 grams, so they didn't want to add a huge amount of weight to the poor bat, and they found that, yes, there is a huge cacophony, like up to like, 80, 90% of the echolocation could be masked at the time of leaving the cave, because there's just so much noise around. But the bats that were closest to the one bat going, especially the one in front, were also still the clearest, especially the one in front, it's echolocating straight ahead, so it is interfere so the ones you're most likely to collide with are also the least likely to get interfered with. And then as soon as they get out of the cave entrance, they spread out really fast. And so that they reduce those odds. Apparently it doesn't reduce the odds to zero, like there are occasional mid air bat collisions, but the way they work and the way they do their echolocation, it seems to minimize those number of those, number of collisions, and they didn't mention this, but I imagine they still don't spread out super far, because I remember that when the bats are leaving, it's a great time for them to be predated on by like birds of prey and such. And so they still want to group together for safety, but they also want to spread apart so they don't crash into each other. So maybe there may be some conflicting forces here. 

Brian  7:37  
Just out of curiosity,

Brian  7:38  
Jason, Jason, did they mention any kind of real life application, this seems like, oh, and we can use this to better inform air traffic control or something like that.

Jason  7:47  
My suspicion would be, yeah, some sort of, like, drone control or something because that, I imagine, if you I, like, I didn't read that explicitly, but I'm guessing that it's that, it's if you're trying to control a whole bunch of stuff using autonomous vehicles or something where there's a bunch of noise in the system. How can you optimize that system so as to minimize the number of conflicts that happen? And so this would be for like drones or autonomous vehicles or something, is my suspicion, like, again, I don't remember reading that in the article itself.

Marielle  8:15  
Also interesting how it's not entirely dissimilar from how that works if you use visual cues instead, because I think that is relatively similar in fish and bird swarms that you kind of like weight the input from the ones that are closest to you most.

Brian  8:28  
Do we call it a murmuration of bats, the same way we do for birds or or not? 

Jason  8:32  
with a collective noun?

Brian  8:34  
no like, with like, the murmuration behavior where like a bird can track is only ever tracking like the three birds around it, and that's where you get all the weird like wave behaviors, as you see big flocks. I guess bats aren't really notorious for flocking. I suppose so maybe not. I have a bonus fact now, because Jason's thing reminded me of something else. Now, first of all, again, I know fruit bats don't echo locate, which we're going to talk about that later,

Marielle  8:56  
with one exception. 

Brian  8:56  
Oh, there's one exception?

Marielle  8:56  
 Yes, 

Brian  8:56  
what's the exception? 

Marielle  8:57  
There's a couple of species in the genus Rousette, who have a different form of echolocation, but I think has evolved independently. Egyptian Rousette is a species that is most known for it, but I think it had there's a couple of other species in that genus that also do that. 

Brian  9:14  
Well, then, hey, that actually ties into everything else. Because I was going to talk about another example of convergent echolocation evolution, the auditory genes in bats and whales have converged. The genes that control their hearing, they have the same type of mutation. Which is 

Jason  9:29  
cool. 

Marielle  9:30  
That's cool. 

Brian  9:30  
Yeah, it's very interesting, right? Because obviously that had to be hit on separately from similar mammalian starting material. 

Marielle  9:37  
I did not know that. 

Brian  9:38  
Yeah, that's just my little bonus fact. We'll put that in the thing too. But okay, all right, who wants to talk about a board game? 

Brian  9:43  
So today, we're going to be talking about atiwa. Atiwa, there is a pronunciation guide for how it would be. It's like a di waa, which is based on the Atiwa range of a rain forest. So this game was created by Uwe Rosenberg, who is a prolific and celebrated board game designer. From Germany, looking on his Wikipedia page, it has six, six games on board. Game Geek in the top 100 with sort of a consistent mechanic. He is the co-founder of Lookout games, which published Atiwa.

Jason  10:13  
What are some of his other big hits? 

Brian  10:14  
Oh Agricola would be the one that would be probably his oldest and probably most renowned Feast of Odin. There's a two player game called Patchwork that I own and have never played. But yes, there's several games, I think, in terms of the ones that are on the the top 100 patchwork Agricola Feast of Odin. I don't think Atiwa broke into the top 100 unfortunately, but he puts out a game like every couple of years, like he is prolific. So the game itself is for one to four players got to have that solo player mode. Now, it does play fast, only about 30 minutes to play when you set it up, which always when you look at a game that looks as complicated, that seems like it's impossible, but it's really not like we'll talk about this later. 12 and up seems about right to me. I mean, Jason's daughters, yes, absolutely, 12 and up, but maybe not. Every 12 year old is going to necessarily but I mean, your your mileage may vary. So the game, what does it look like? It is this is a worker placement game, which is a very common sort of designer board game, where you'll have all these little action spots that you can put on the board that will let you do different key things. Both of the players have three sets of little workers that they can go out and to assign to collect various resources. There's one sort of central board in the middle. It's got a very distinct, sort of, like top down aerial illustration style, actually, conveniently, maybe about drone height, or maybe bat height would be the better way to think about it, sort of looking down at the landscape. So it's sort of a village in Ghana. There's trees, there's depictions of tiny, little goats, tiny little wild animals, which I wasn't really clear what those were at first, but actually, from looking into it a little bit more, hold on, I took a note on the type of animal that this was, ah, a Duekir. Here it is a is. It is a small antelope. I believe, one of the only animals other than the bats, that is specifically mentioned by name somewhere in the game, and the board has a lot of different action points on it. Other than that, you have cards that represent either terrain, so that may be like a cave, a marshland, an orchard, or a location, and these are where your villagers are going to live, and those go from farmstead is smallest up to a town with the most based on how many houses they can accommodate. In front of each player, you'll have a little board where you put your entire little stack of different little wooden meeples, and those represent goats and wild animals and trees and fruit 

Jason  12:30  
and people, 

Brian  12:31  
yes, and people, families specifically. And your goal in the game is to assemble like upwards of eight of these little tiles representing either the terrain or the locations, and sort of build a little Tableau where your people will live, where they will collect resources. And one of the important Uwe Rosenberg mechanics that he uses in most of his games is that you have to feed your people at the end of the turn, you have to have enough resources to make sure that your people are fed. So the conceit of the game is based on bat's, ability to reforest is like one of the main mechanics in the game. So as you're playing your people need to have a couple of things. They need to have food, and they need to have gold. They need to have some kind of economy, and they'll use that to plus wood build their houses. There's several different things that they can eat. If you have goats, they'll provide some food just as milk. Or you can slaughter the goat and get extra food. You can hunt for wild animals. You can collect fruit, or you can eat bats. And if you don't have that, you can also pay for food. So the main mechanic in the game is these families you have. They call them trained and untrained families. So when you start your family is untrained. Evidently, they have not been informed about the ecological benefits of bats. So those families have a couple different things that distinguish them. They at the end of each turn, they go out, and they will mine for gold, and that is associated with pollution. You will actually block out spaces on your tiles, the pollution associated with collecting gold, with artisanal gold mining. 

Jason  13:58  
And important part here is that you're not guaranteed to find the gold you draw it out of the bag. You might get one, you might get zero, you might get very, very lucky and get two. But that almost never happens. So it's like you're guaranteed to pollute your land, but you're not guaranteed to actually earn anything.

Brian  14:11  
That's true. So the untrained families will mine. The untrained families also will have the ability to eat bats. They will provide one food as bush meat, presumably a trained family on the and that's familiar with the advantages of bats. They don't have to go mining. They just receive gold. I don't know what that represents. I suppose that's supposed to represent the additional economic benefit of working with the bats. 

Jason  14:32  
I was actually explaining this to my family last night. I was just saying, we're gonna be recording this today, and it's like, yeah, and then you train the family, and then, like, they can have a bat live with them, and then they just earn money because of that. So my 18-year old daughter says, Well, it sounds like people are just paying them to like bats maybe, well, yes. And I thought I was like, Yeah, but actually it's more like the bats are paying them rent. So if we wanted to completely break the metaphor of the game, what happens is the bats are now the ones mining gold, and they're justbetter at it than the humans, and they're paying the humans rent. In reality, yes, it is probably like, Oh, this is the benefits of agroforestry or something like that. But it is funny, if you sort of like, twist the metaphor of the game a bit, 

Brian  15:12  
a little bit yeah, 

Marielle  15:13  
and maybe it's kind of going in the direction it's like, these bats obviously don't only disperse seeds of fruit trees, but also of seeds that are otherwise economically important. I think this is like the most important seed disperser for African teak, which is quite valuable as lumber. 

Brian  15:28  
The other thing that a trained family can do, and Jason already alluded to this, is that they can allow a bat to live, I guess, in their house, or at least on their property. I don't know if the idea is the bat's actually living in the hut itself, but just close by, and they can't eat the bats anymore, but the gold to bat trade off seems like it completely like covers for that to get your little houses to expand your village, you need to pay for gold and trees. So you have to cut down trees that are on your tableau to do it, and that's where the bats really come into play, because the bats are able to eat fruit and cause trees to just spread and sprout. And actually, you can get a pretty efficient bat to tree engine going at a certain point and just have a ton of trees growing every turn. Basically, 

Marielle  16:11  
free food. 

Brian  16:11  
Yep, free food, free wood, free everything. Let's see, I think the game is based on victory points. You get victory points for how much gold you have. You get victory points for you know, how many things you have on your tableau, in terms of trees and wild animals and goats and particularly people, you get points for the cards that you've put into your tableau, your locations and your villages and stuff. Some of the terrain cards actually give you negative points. Some of the terrain cards are like, Hey, here's like, a free house. So actually, that's, that's very powerful. So you're actually going to lose some points for doing that. One of my very favorite terrain cards is this very goofy card that Jason knows what I'm going to talk about. This is the haunted house card. Oh, yeah. So it is an empty house. It is depicted in the night form, and it has a spot to put bats all around it,

Jason  16:56  
yeah. The thing is, it's actually not empty. It's just a dilapidated, broken down house. And there it does show a family inside.

Brian  17:04  
And yeah, I think that that is the basis of the game. Is there anything that you feel like I missed Jason?

Jason  17:08  
My impression playing this game is, it's a very, it feels like a very complex game, because when we were playing any given turn, there were like 20 different options I had for where to put my meeple to try to get something done. And so I kind of had to take the approach of, instead of like, of all these options, which is the optimal to do? It was more like, Okay, here's my goal. Which of these options will get me closer to that goal? They would change a little bit which of those actions are available, just shifts a little bit over time. It's not a huge amount, but it does change a bit to make each game a little bit unique. And we talked about how you were trying to figure out, Is it possible to, like, win the game just through the gold mining method? And I think the answer that is no, 

Brian  17:46  
absolutely no. I don't think you can.

Jason  17:48  
 You're destroying your board to be able to put stuff there, which is what gets you most points. And you're not guaranteed to get the gold back. You train a family, you're guaranteed to get the gold. It's just better. So they're not subtle in the messaging of the game is that having the bats around and living in harmony with the bats is just paying better for trying to win the game.

Brian  18:04  
It sort of takes that idea of board game metaphor and like what you take away from and it's like, okay, don't do this. This is bad. You literally cannot win this way. One of these days, I am just gonna have to try being the like, Captain Planet, the bad guy, the villain, who would just know I don't like bats and I refuse to work with them. We'll just see how bad it actually goes. 

Jason  18:23  
Eat all the bats and mine all the gold. 

Brian  18:25  
And yep, eat all the bats, mine all the gold, cut down all the trees, 

Marielle  18:28  
hunt down all the wildlife. 

Brian  18:30  
Yep, just goats. Nothing but goats.

Jason  18:32  
It was a little a little bit of dissonance in that we worked out that mathematically, at the end of your last turn, you still have to feed everyone and stuff. And so that's the point at which the wild animals aren't worth very many victory points. And so that last turn, the most optimal way of feeding all your families is just to slaughter all the wild life

Brian  18:50  
Yeah, you just, you just drive all the wild animals extinct. It's fine, they'll come back. 

Jason  18:53  
That's a little bit of dissonance, but that's it's only in the last turn, 

Brian  18:57  
to be honest, that last turn change in strategy is also really common for a lot of these games. There's usually things that you would do in the last turn that would make no sense any other time. I imagine that for an optimizer like you, Jason, this game probably did seem really complicated. I gotta be honest, I was dreading this game just a little bit. I was concerned that as a very Euro worker placement game, by the pinnacle of Euro worker placement game designers, Uwe Rosenberg, that this was going to favor strategic complexity over fun, that this was going to be like the game for the Board Game Geek, Board Game Geek extremist, yeah, so in in magic terminology, you have the Spike archetype, the person who there to master the rules and to win through understanding the game better than their opponents. This is like how the world record Scrabble people aren't necessarily people who speak English, they just have memorized the dictionary. Were you aware of that? 

Jason  19:49  
I was not aware of that. 

Brian  19:50  
Yeah, some of the anyway that's that is a complete and utter tangent. So we don't need to go down that route. But Mariel, have you had a chance to play Atiwa before? 

Marielle  19:59  
A couple of. Times, yes, yeah. That's a bit of time ago. Okay, I have to say I'm not that particularly strategic about these games. I just do what I think is fun. 

Brian  20:07  
Yep, me too.

Marielle  20:07  
 and I'll see what what happens in the end. Which means that in another one of Uwe Rosenberg's games, Caverna, I tend to lose, and it's always the same person who wins in our little board game group, yeah, because that's the thing that I never do, but here I've one time managed to win.

Brian  20:23  
It sounds like you may have a similar board game dynamic to Jason and I, where I am the less strategic player I play for fun. 

Marielle  20:31  
Yeah, fun is good. 

Brian  20:32  
Are you a board game nerd? Marielle, I forgot to ask. 

Marielle  20:35  
Not a nerd.

Marielle  20:37  
I think that's more my friends. Okay. I'll go along happily, though. 

Brian  20:40  
All right, 

Jason  20:41  
you did say, before we started recording, you're a podcaster, though,right? 

Marielle  20:45  
Long time ago. It's quite some time ago, but I did that during my PhD with a friend of mine, science news podcast.

Brian  20:51  
What was the title? Is it still like around? 

Marielle  20:54  
No, it's like, it's no longer active. I think you can still find the episodes on YouTube or so. It's in German, though the name of the podcast was, and you can pronounce it two different ways, conscience or con science, because we were both located in Conscience in southern Germany.

Brian  21:08  
Oh, well, that's a cool triple pun. I like that a lot, all right. So yeah, let's, let's try to talk about the science. Here we again. We're in this absolutely unique circumstance of having a game inspired, having the researcher who inspired the game here to talk about the science, one of one of the researchers, one of the researchers

Marielle  21:24  
Exactly. Yeah, we need to basically do a little disclaimer, because the study system is mostly that of Dina Dechmann, who is at the Max Planck Institute for nowadays animal behavior, and she's a former colleague of mine, so I did my PhD there, and she has been working with the study system for at least since 2009 I think. And I joined for this one one study, because our interests kind of combined, and we said, it's like, oh, it would be cool to, kind of like, do this in this other way. And that is where my expertise came in. Yeah. But she's been working with this particular bat species in that particular area for a very long time, together with others. Of course,

Brian  22:00  
you're still colleagues, right? You just you were at Max. Planck, is that correct? 

Marielle  22:03  
Yes, 

Brian  22:04  
okay, all right, I understand it's like, I don't think she died. 

Marielle  22:10  
No,

Jason  22:13  
that would explain why she didn't respond to emails. No offense if you're listening. Dina,

Brian  22:17  
yeah. Is she gonna listen to this? Should we give her a hard time for not coming on?

Marielle  22:18  
Oh, no, I don't think we should, 

Brian  22:21  
okay.

Jason  22:22  
I know schedule probably very, very busy conducting research out there in the real world to help you,

Brian  22:27  
anybody can make time to actually like to have professors schedules coordinate for things like this is always seems like a small miracle. So, you know, no shade, if she, you know, I am sure she would have come if she was, if she was able. But yeah, Dina Dechmann and yourself, you guys were colleagues on this, and she has done a lot of work on the bats. But let's actually so some of the things that we had here was like, so How accurate do you think the science is as depicted in Atiwa?

Brian  22:52  
So maybe we should say a little bit about what the study was, 

Brian  22:52  
yes please, of course,  that would make perfect sense,

Marielle  22:56  
because otherwise it will be harder to understand. So this is mostly based on the study of our species of fruit bat that is called straw colored fruit bats. And as far as I'm aware, it's the most common kind of like individual numerous species of mammals in Africa. 

Brian  23:14  
Wow, 

Marielle  23:14  
African continent. And what they do with this really special is so they they hang out during the day in trees, roosts in colony sizes up to a million. So it's a huge amount of fruit bats making a lot of noise, probably. And what they do is they they commute at night. So when, when dusk falls, they fly out from their roost, seemingly independently, in different directions, and then they go in search of flowering or fruiting trees. And then they will, if it's if it's a flowering tree, they will basically just try to slurp up the nectar, maybe eat some some pollen. And if it's a fruiting tree, they will go there. They will pick a fruit fly to a feeding roost, like a different tree that's a little bit away, which is more safe, because obviously, if you have a fruiting tree that's like attracting a lot of animals, you will also have predators. And then they will eat this fruit. If it's one that has a large seed, they will kind of like squeeze out the fruit juice and just drink that and then drop the seed where they eat. And if it's small seeds, they might ingest them. And then that is when these long distances that they cover during a single night, so these these food trees, can be up to 80 to 90 kilometers away from where they sleep during the daytime. 

Jason  24:21  
Wow. 

Marielle  24:22  
That is when this kind of like having seeds in their gut and transporting them over very long distances is ecologically very important, because they will just poop off the seeds wherever they go.

Brian  24:33  
So you're used to hearing about birds having this kind of behavior.

Marielle  24:36  
Yes, and here the thought is, why are bats particularly good at this? Because they eat the seeds that they actually eat are usually small ones, and small seeds are common in pioneering and trees that are able to kind of colonize open areas. And what bats do, different from a lot of forest bird species is actually cross open areas. 

Brian  24:54  
Oh, okay, 

Marielle  24:55  
which a lot of birds don't really like doing, especially if they're forest specialists. Whereas these bats don't care, because they fly at night.

Jason  25:02  
And you said earlier, these bats don't echo locate, 

Marielle  25:05  
no, 

Jason  25:05  
presumably because they're not trying to. They can navigate well by sight, and they probably seek out their food more by smell. Is that right? I assume they have really good senses ofsmell. 

Marielle  25:14  
Might be, yeah, and, and, I mean, obviously they're, they're mostly, they get it gets underway while it's still dusky, so there's like twilight around. And what you can how you can always tell a species of bat that is echolocating from one that is using sight. The ones with sight have really, really big eyes. The ones that don't echolocate and Eidolon, the straw colored fruit bat, has huge eyes. 

Brian  25:35  
They're very cute. 

Marielle  25:36  
They are, I mean, watch them eat a banana.

Brian  25:42  
Yeah? We will absolutely put a video of that into the show notes.

Marielle  25:46  
So in the study that we did was basically we had tracks, GPS tracks from these bats, and what I did was basically train a movement model based on that and do a bunch of simulations to kind of look at given their behavior that they do, and given on the colony sizes that we are aware of during different times of year. What would we expect to see in terms of seed dispersal for an entire colony instead of just a single individual, kind of like a spatially explicit prediction of what we think might happen.

Jason  26:12  
Okay, what was your take home from that 

Marielle  26:14  
that they probably, just like most of the seeds will probably disperse to relatively close to the roosting site because they have very long gut retention times. And gut retention time means, how long does the seed stay inside the body of the bat? How long does it take before it exits the bats again? I mean, we did. We did the simulation basically for a single night based on the assumption that all that these bats are eating during this night is like small seeded fruits, huge amounts, I mean, amazing amounts of poop spread over the environment.

Jason  26:41  
Hey, bat guanos have been a resource for centuries. So,

Marielle  26:46  
yeah. So actually, the seeds get deposited with their own little heap of fertilizer. 

Brian  26:50  
It's a good relationship

Marielle  26:51  
 more relevant for elephant dung, I guess, with seeds, but less competition, because less seeds in the single droplet. 

Brian  26:58  
So I did want to ask, so the game, what it depicts, it's just fruit. It's incredibly generic. And basically every tree has sort of this, like, I'm not sure it's just a generic orange colored fruit.

Jason  27:10  
It looks like a pumpkin to me, but it's probably meant to be more like a peach or apricot or some other, like,

Marielle  27:15  
no its a very specific fruits. 

Brian  27:19  
Is it Shea? Is it Shea fruit? 

Marielle  27:21  
Oh, help. I used to know this. I don't remember, 

Brian  27:24  
because this is

Brian  27:24  
something I was not able like I was trying to figure out, you know, I found the duiker antelope and everything. And then the only other species that's specifically mentioned by name in the game, other than Eidolon, other than the straw collar fruit bat itself, is the baobab tree. But I'm trying to figure out what this fruit is. It looks a little bit like a shea tree fruit, but I don't think people eat that.

Marielle  27:42  
The species is Uapaca kirkiana. I can also look at the English name. Hold on, so it's called Sugar Plum in German. Yeah, sugar plum.

Brian  27:50  
So I'm assuming, based on a name like that, that must be good 

Marielle  27:54  
or ridiculously sweet, and nothing else. I don't know, but it would be obviously a good energy source for bats, if it's very dense in sugars.

Brian  28:01  
Okay, so the particular fruit that's depicted in the game is probably supposed to Oh, it is. It is. Look at that. That has a lot of different colors. That's neat. Okay, well, we're gonna have to link to that too. Thank you for sharing that, because I could not figure it out. So I was like, I was trying to look up native fruit trees in Ghana, and there were a lot of ones that were mentioned as economically important, but this one wasn't on the list. So thank you.

Marielle  28:24  
Yeah. The thing is, I probably know which photo this kind of illustration is kind of inspired by,

Brian  28:29  
oh yeah, like the original illustration of the bat eating the fruit. 

Marielle  28:33  
There is a photo, photograph of that that's also in the press release that was mentioned in the little information booklet that comes with the game. And a photo has been taken by Christian Ziegler, because, like a very well known nature photographer who works a lot with scientists at the Max Planck

Brian  28:49  
Institute, this is such a unique experience of having this game that is tied so explicitly to this study. It's very, very fun. Okay, so one of the other things I wanted to ask based on this conversation about the idea of the large fruited the large seeded fruit versus the small seeded fruit is it does make me curious if there's any evidence of co-evolution, or a symbiotic relationship between specific fruit trees and between the bats, because it seems like there's sort of a natural compatibility here.

Marielle  29:16  
I don't know whether that would be the case in any kind of like seed dispersal as such. What you do see is kind of CO evolution between particularly bats, particular bat species and tree species that require bats for pollination. So flowers are often much more morphologically, kind of like adapted to their pollinators, as opposed to fruit, because fruits that will be tasty to nearly everyone, okay, that makes sense. I'm not aware of any like specific species specific some mutualisms with straw colored fruit bats, but I think there's a couple of examples for it in meso Northern America in terms of pollinating bats.

Brian  29:54  
Okay, so co evolution from a pollination perspective, but not necessarily for explicitly seed dispersal.

Marielle  30:00  
not that I'm aware of at least. 

Brian  30:01  
Okay, all right, so how do you like again? The whole point of the game is bats eat fruit, grow trees like that. If that conceit seems like that is at the core of how this is working. Obviously, all games are a metaphor. It's not a perfect representation. You're not going to grow a tree and well, it's always a little unclear. How much time is passing when we're dealing with these things. Jason, do you want to like, how would we approximate the amount of time that is passing?

Jason  30:28  
Well, so at the end of every turn you have your reproduction phase, which is where, if you have enough of a certain type of meeple on there, the families, the goats, the wild animals, they make more of themselves. So I think a year is probably a good one. The people I assume are less like this is families growing. More like, hey, a new family has moved into the neighborhood, into the village, from somewhere else. But if we're assuming, like the wild animals and the goats, probably about a year,

Brian  30:53  
okay, so, but a tree is not going to grow in a year. No,

Jason  30:58  
that's an abstraction, yeah,

Brian  31:00  
but I don't know any game, video game or board game. Well, with the, I guess, with the notable exception of photosynthesis, where growing the tree is the entire mechanic of the game, where the trees aren't growing way too fast, right? That's just nobody wants to wait for trees to grow as long as they actually take to grow, right?

Marielle  31:15  
That would be a very long let's create 35 rounds of this before we commit the first harvest.

Brian  31:23  
Maybe that's that's going a little bit too far down the simulation route, I suppose. Again, one of the things I wanted to mention is, and I love it whenever a game does this, because, again, it's very helpful to me, is that there's an accompanying booklet that comes with the game, sort of explaining the history of Ghana, the study from a lay perspective, how it is represented in the game, gold mining, all of this stuff. It's like, Oh, okay. Well, here's my designer notes. Also in the rule booklet, there is a little tiny caricature of Uwe Rosenberg, sort of explaining the implementation of different aspects in the game, which I think when you get to the point where you're putting your own a caricature of your own head into the game, that must mean that you, you're a celebrated and recognized board game designer, I suppose,

Marielle  32:03  
also some level of, probably kind of personal engagement with this that goes beyond just like, oh, I had this idea for a game 

Brian  32:10  
that's true,

Marielle  32:11  
 like, personal interest in the entire system. Probably, yeah, because I think as far as I've heard, he wanted to write a book about this. 

Brian  32:19  
He did. I, although it was supposed to be, yes, there was supposed to be, like a full companion non fiction book. I don't speak German, Weckruf aus Ghana. 

Marielle  32:26  
Yeah, it's like wake up call, 

Brian  32:28  
but as far as I can tell, unfortunately, it looks like that was never published. There's an ISBN number that doesn't go anywhere. It seems like maybe, maybe Atiwa didn't sell as many copies as they wanted to kind of justify it. But, you know, the game is out there, and I have to imagine that the game has attracted attention, and that's not a bad thing. Again, this idea of games as educational tools, particularly, this is really specifically an outreach tool, isn't something I've really seen very much. So

Marielle  32:54  
no, this is, this is definitely the best, like, this study has had the best outreach I've ever seen. Like, Let's all make board games about studies, because then people will actually be interested in it.

Jason  33:04  
Well, let's all make good board games. Good board we have talked about the issue where educational board games are almost a dirty word, because most of the scientists making the games are not game designers. They don't know how to make the game fun. I think it really helps here that you had a world class, literally, world class game designer translate the science into something that is an actually very fun, strategically complex worker placement game that still manages to convey the point of the science,

Marielle  33:32  
yes, but also creating some somewhat of a "what if "scenario. Because obviously, I mean, part of the motivation for working with bats can also be they get a lot of bad representation elsewhere. It's like they have not always the best names, and they're not only from a scientific standpoint, straw colored fruit bats are not only interesting in terms of ecosystem services, but also, of course, zoonotic diseases, zoonotic being diseases that can spread from animals to humans.

Jason  34:00  
Yeah, I believe bats are like one of the huge reservoirs of coronaviruses in the world, aka, where COVID probably came from, if you step it back, a few mutations.

Marielle  34:09  
So doing something to kind of show is like these are not only negative, but that can also be like a positive association, and to a degree that we're probably not fully aware of, that is kind of like the study, and then what he did was basically, it's like, what if people actually were aware, were actually aware of this in a particular region? How could you develop a system where you have cooperation, instead of eating them just for bush meat? Because that is what happens. 

Jason  34:34  
That was a question we had. Is there any sort of outreach, extension programs in place to to do what happens at the game, to educate families and say, Hey, this is actually helping you out in the long run. So let's try to get this harmony going. Is, do those programs actually exist?

Marielle  34:51  
This is something that would obviously be better answered by Dina, because she she is aware of that more and also involved in some of kind of like monitoring projects and so on. So. Have, they have, like, an Africa wide Eidolon monitoring program that they're running where they do also educate people, I think, but that is then really people who are kind of, like local and interested in that to begin with. I'm not aware of any larger scaled education in that

Brian  35:14  
regard. So that that really is the what if scenario. It's like, what if we did do this. It's not representing something that's actually happening. It's more of like we really should be doing. This is that the idea of like ecosystem services, this idea of the sort of like unseen economic benefits that come from a healthy ecosystem, it's very hard to communicate, because it's like, you've got to you can't see it, or you just assume it, versus that tangible benefit of money in hand, right? It's It's tricky, and I know this is one example of that, of the benefits of bats for reforestation. I think wetlands, we talk about that, for their ecosystem services, for what they do, for the water system, for cleaning up water. And the ways to calculate it is, if you didn't have that, how much would it cost to do that yourself. How much would it cost for humans to replicate that? And usually it's not practical. It's like, you shouldn't be doing it, right? You can't do it,

Marielle  36:08  
yeah. And sometimes it's also really kind of, like, hard to understand what is actually going on. And, like, how much of a deal is it like, what are the kind of, what is kind of the rattail of all of this? Because we assume that there is a huge impact of huge bat colonies on seed dispersal and probably also nutrient spread, but we don't know, and the only way to really test that out is to kind of take away all the bats. Oh, no, we shouldn't test at all. 

Brian  36:34  
Not a good thing for a controlled experiment. I don't think, 

Marielle  36:37  
no, 

Brian  36:37  
but I guess that's why studies like this are so important, right is to try to get a clearer understanding about what the benefits actually are. 

Jason  36:45  
Yeah, I was gonna say there are examples where we do get this right. So my understanding is, and we can, I can double check this, but in the show notes, is that part of the reason why a large part of upstate New York, here in the States, is state park or wilderness or stuff, is to essentially maintain the drinking water quality for New York City. It's like the Hudson drains like half the state. And apparently, long time ago, they recognized that we need to protect this so that New York City actually has quality drinking water. And so that's why the development up there has been much less. And I'll double check that and put in the link in the show notes for the sources for that.

Brian  37:19  
I guess I'm also curious, what was the what was the context of this game happening? You were approached about this for permission, or what was that? How did that happen?

Jason  37:29  
How do we get Uwe Rosenberg to make a game out of our research? That's what he's asking, 

Brian  37:34  
not really, but, but sure. 

Marielle  37:36  
No, actually, I had nothing to do with that at all. It's like at the time that the game was nearly finished, and they were looking for some additional information for their little um info booklet. 

Brian  37:45  
Oh, wow. 

Marielle  37:45  
They kind of put in with the game. They told us, it's like, Oh, yeah. So Uwe Rosenberg made this game, would you like us to include any more additional information? And you're like, is this spam? And the only reason why I kind of, like, looked at it to begin with, was because lookout games and the name Uwe Rosenberg rang a bell. So as I said, I'm not the Board Game Nerd, so I didn't immediately recognize the name, but like, sounds familiar, and that's why I looked at it. I was like, Oh, I think this is a big deal. I had to ask my nerd friends first

Brian  38:08  
 man, he really must have got inspired by your study. It's got to feel really good. It's just like he read a press release related to the study, and it was like, this is the seed of a thing that I'm going to spend the next year of my life working on

Marielle  38:32  
somehow. Yes, I don't know how that happened, and maybe it was just this. I think in the booklet, he mentioned specifically some reference to a local King, yeah, who does exist and who is quite fond of these bats and lets them kind of like roost in his private gardens. And that is kind of like an example for for the local community, maybe. But the problem is, I've never actually been there. So as I said, it's Dina's study system, and I was just a local computer nerd to do some calculations.

Brian  38:59  
Jason is also my local computer nerd. Although I guess you spend more time in the field than I do. I'm really the laboratory, so I shouldn't, like, point any, any shade you're in your direction,

Jason  39:11  
yeah, although I say, like, it's definitely people ask me for gardening information, just because they hear I work on corn. It's like, wrong skill set. Like, you want to genome analyzed. I'm good. Its a miracle my corn survives at the end of the season.

Marielle  39:23  
Yeah. Also, don't dare put me in a lab.

Brian  39:26  
Oh, are you? You are not a wet lab person? 

Marielle  39:28  
No it's like I did some lab, lab work during my education, but I no, okay, I'm not very good at that.

Brian  39:37  
That's totally fair. My lab smells very bad. That's my usual thing. I like to point out to people. But anyway, let's see. What else is there? Anything else that we should talk about that we haven't yet related to the science?

Jason  39:48  
Well I'm curious. Let's broaden this a little bit. So we focused a lot on this particular study system, with these particular fruit bats. How widespread are fruit bats? Most of the bats I think about are the echo locating bats, which presumably are not fruit bats. Bats. But are there fruit bats on every continent? Like? How many species are there like,

Brian  40:04  
except for Antarctica, there's no, there's no Antarctic. Yes, there's no fruit bats in Antarctica. 

Jason  40:04  
I don't think there's any like those Antarctica. Ignore Antarctica like the penguins can have it. We'll just ignore it for the purposes of every continent step statements. 

Marielle  40:20  
Oh, and now you're asking the non bat experts. So I think this last time I heard there was, like around there was more than 1400 species of bats, most of which are what you call the microbats, Microchiroptera, which is the echolocating ones, but some of those are also fruit eating, kind of like you have these two big branches. One is mega bats, the other one is micro bats. She tells you something about the size

Brian  40:44  
we need some nano bats we'll have to work on that.

Marielle  40:50  
And I think I mean, this might be completely wrong, that there's around 250 species or so of the larger ones

Brian  40:56  
aren't most mammals, bats?

Marielle  40:58  
 uh, no rodents, I think are more species rich, okay, according to this reference, 197 species of megabats

Brian  41:05  
We just need three more to get the even 200 

Marielle  41:08  
Yeah, that's probably gonna happen, because there's a lot of like, I mean, especially in the microbats, there's a lot of cryptic speciation, where you have species that look the same but they're not actually the same species.

Jason  41:18  
Yeah, genetic data will probably start separating that out some.

Brian  41:21  
Yeah, I was gonna say, Jason, that's your job. You could be the genome guy, right? Get us those extra three species of bats?

Marielle  41:27  
I mean, the one that I mentioned Rousettus, the echolocating mega bats. Seems there's like a bunch of subspecies with very distinct distribution areas. Maybe there's something more to that. And then you would get above your 200

Brian  41:38  
I gotta say that genus name is fantastic. Eidolon. What a fantastic like, I'm used to only hearing that in fantasy settings, but that's a good one. 

Jason  41:46  
So when you say mega bat is big, big bat. Like, how big of a bat are we talking about? Is it like cat sized with wings, or

Marielle  41:54  
they're much more lightweight. So I don't want it not the largest, but also not the smallest. And they, I think, weigh up to 350 grams, but the wingspan is like 75 centimeters. Oh, wow, quite large. There's larger ones, especially if you go to Southeast Asia,

Brian  42:10  
if there's no other specific scientific topics, I think maybe we should do one of my favorite parts of the episode, which is the nitpick corner, which is, where is a little thing that was like, you know, that's not exactly this. Is where we do the um, actually this right? Or how we would make things better. We just give ourselves permission to nitpick, right? We don't actually expect the game to be perfectly accurate, but we just want to point out anything that's not quite like that actually would be in science. So obviously, we already talked about trees don't grow in a year. I think everybody already knows that, but it's worth mentioning. Marielle, is there something that you had that you wanted to point out?

Marielle  42:43  
So I think what Dina would like me to point out is that the picture on the front of the box doesn't actually show a straw colored fruit bat. 

Brian  42:52  
Oh no! Oh, what is it? 

Marielle  42:54  
Well, I don't remember, but if you look at the straw colored fruit bat, the head is much doesn't go grey, 

Brian  43:00  
more straw colored. 

Marielle  43:01  
Yeah, exactly. And especially, they have this kind of, like, yellow strip of fur on the sides of their neck, which is where the name, I think, comes from. As I said, it's like, I can show you the picture that I think inspired this to some degree, because it's the same fruit, but I don't think it depicts it correctly.

Brian  43:16  
Okay, that is a pretty big and legitimate nitpick. I think, to have the whole game be about straw colored fruit bats, and have the cover image not be a straw colored fruit bat.

Marielle  43:26  
Yeah. Dina would know which one one is shown there. But as I said, I'm a bit more iffy on my bats. 

Brian  43:31  
Okay, all right, Jason, did you have something you wanted to pick at? 

Jason  43:34  
The only one I could think of is that one end of game thing where it's like, okay, now time to slaughter all the wild animals and eat them for food, because I get more points that way. That's the one thing. 

Brian  43:47  
Is there a way that you would penalize that? I guess you just need to make the wild animals worth more points or something?

Jason  43:48  
Basically, yeah, okay, the only reason they do that is because they're worth a lot fewer points than goats, but they give you the same amount of food just about

Brian  43:55  
and mine actually isn't even in the game, but I'm gonna pick anyway. It's in the accompanying booklet, the section about the benefits of fruit bats. When they go to the list, there's a thing the list of bat superpowers is long. They see with their ears, use ultrasound to orient themselves in the dark. That's true, but that's not, that's not these bats, right? There's also the comments about they their cells slow down the aging process. So I think that maybe some bats, obviously, maybe live for long times or have cancer repairing genes. But again, it's like, that's not wrong. It's just not specifically these fruit bats,

Marielle  44:27  
no. But bats are generally quite long, lived

Brian  44:29  
 okay, for their size?

Brian  44:30  
More than you would expect?

Marielle  44:31  
 So they, I think I once had in my hand a captive bats that was one of the horseshoe bats. That lady was 20 years old, and that is not uncommon to see in that 

Brian  44:35  
that's a long time for an animal that's that size, right? I guess. 

Marielle  44:45  
Yeah. 

Brian  44:46  
Do they do? They break the the heartbeat rule, or that rule of thumb?

Marielle  44:50  
Well, what is an average heart rate if you have a species that goes into torpor, 

Brian  44:54  
good point, 

Marielle  44:55  
Hibernate? Yeah, that's hard to tell, but I think they do okay. That comes especially. Actually, I think so what they do, like they would usually, you would expect them to consume more energy, if we're not talking about echolocating bats, because Echolocation is energetically costly. But what they do is they time it with their wing beads, and that makes it cheaper.

Brian  45:12  
I never really thought about there being a cost to echolocate.

Marielle  45:15  
I mean more bats, if you measure it right in front of their face, I think it's like 120 decibels. That's a loud scream. 

Brian  45:23  
So they're yelling so much they're burning calories. That's very cool. Okay, let's see, there was, you used an idiom. I wasn't familiar with the rat tail

Marielle  45:34  
Oh, sorry, that's like a German Yeah, 

Brian  45:36  
I figured it was a German idiom. What does that mean?

Marielle  45:39  
 It basically means, like, everything that's somehow attached to it. It's like, the chain of consequences.

Brian  45:44  
Okay, okay, okay, that's cool. I don't know if we haven't I couldn't

Marielle  45:48  
remember what I wanted to say. So it's like, 

Brian  45:50  
it's fine. No, this is, this is the fun thing about having people from all over the world, they get to talk to us, and we get to learn different idioms and stuff. Okay, so I think if that's our nitpick corner, why don't we move on to grading, and then we can wrap up this. One's a little tricky. Let's start with science. Jason, why don't you go first?

Jason  46:07  
So I am not a bat expert, so I'm going off the vibe I've gotten from talking with Marielle here and the other stuff, I'd say my metric is generally like, how well is it getting across was trying to do? And the metric here is, is trying to show that if we cooperate with the fruit bats, then things work out better in the long term. That part seems solid. I would probably put it in the maybe, like the A- range. It seems pretty good. Probably a few things that could be a little better. You mentioned some of the stuff in the rule book, where it's talking about the superpowers of like all bats as a unit, as opposed to, like this particular bat. But overall, I think it seems pretty good. And I mean, this was done, like, without necessarily consulting the scientists, just like, hey, this is a cool story. Let's do the research. Let's make this work. I mean, that may deserve some extra credit to bump up to A.

Brian  46:51  
That's a good point. I mean, I guess we think that most of the people that are designing science games aren't necessarily communicating with scientists at the design scientists at the design stage, right,

Jason  46:59  
yes, but most of them are also working off of general level science, as opposed to, like, this very specific research study that came out. Okay,

Brian  47:07  
so let's see, in terms of the things here, I think that there is the reforestation capacity of the fruit bats. So that is being represented. There is the, I don't really know if it's specifically representing the ecological advantages of fruit bats, in the sense of like, it doesn't really explain the gold mechanic. It does say that gold mining is bad. And I mean, I did find a study that the sort of local, small scale gold mining is involved with a lot of removal of top vegetation. Because, again, they're not going deep, they're going shallow. So you're cutting down way more vegetation, way more trees to do it. They are using mercury to extract the gold from the soil. And that, you know, is presumably what we're talking about, the pollution. It's it is a damaging process. So I'd say those two things, the bat reforestation and the pollution associated with gold mining. I think it does a good job there. I don't see anything wrong with an A-, like you've said before, Jason, like you say a lot. They're not trying to represent a lot of science here, but I think what they are trying to do, they're doing pretty well. And that whole thing about the echolocation, that's just a tiny little note in the accompanying booklet, and it's not even in the rule book, but it does. I wish more people knew that only some bats echolacate, that's all Okay, so I'm fine with A-. What do you think Marielle?

Marielle  48:22  
Okay. So disclaimer, I'm obviously not entirely unbiased in this.

Brian  48:29  
We wouldn't expect you to be. I'm sure you have strong opinions.

Marielle  48:32  
So if I, if I think back to how it was playing the game for the first time, as I said, it's like, I haven't been involved in this game at all up until the time that they said, it's like, we have this game to take this idea and make a game out of it, and not just make it into, as you said, like a, like a small bad game, but like a well designed game that takes this front and center. I think that's really cool. I also think it was really kind of how it emerges from using this kind of, like bits of knowledge. Is like, hey, let's train families to make better use of bats than just bush meat. I think that comes across really well when playing it's something that is a fun way of playing the game. So I'm fine with that. Okay,

Brian  49:12  
so what do you think A- then, oh, wait, no, we said we have a different grading scheme. What was it? Again?

Marielle  49:16  
Yes. So I work in Sweden, as I said, and there you grade students on based on what this they have like, there's fail, there's pass, and there is, like, very good, like, pass with distinction, and an A-, i think would fall for us with a distinct a pass with distinction.

Brian  49:33  
So you think this is, this is a pass with distinction?

Marielle  49:36  
Yeah, if we're kind of aligned on the general like, science rating, then I think, Okay,

Brian  49:41  
well, I think we should definitely use your version of the grading I mean, you, you're free to use whichever grading scale you find the most convenient, so we don't all have to use the same rubric necessarily. What about fun? I'm not kidding. I was thinking, Oh my God, I am not going to enjoy this game. And I don't know how much that colored my perspective. I actually really like this game. It's fun. It's quick to play, maybe, like, you know, I'm not the most tactical player, so I'm not super concerned about it, but it's enjoyable. It's a lot of fun to, sort of like, make all your your little choices. And the other thing that surprised me is it really does play quick. I mean, it's a half an hour game and you're done. It takes, it takes longer to set up the game than it does to play the game, which I guess does happen sometimes. So am I gonna pull it off the shelf and play it again? Absolutely, I am. I think I've got a couple people I want to play it with. In particular, we got some people coming in this weekend. I think we might try to play with so I'm giving that an A. That's that is my metric for how fun it is. Is am I going to get it off the shelf and play it again? So it's an A, or I'm sorry I pass with distinction.

Jason  50:37  
I'm definitely gonna give it a pass. I think I need to play it a few more times to see if it is passed with distinction or not. Because the the one time we played like I got sort of a feel for it, I'd want to do some replaying on it.

Brian  50:48  
So, Jason, by 20 points, you sort of got a feel for it?. I think you figured it out, man. But okay,

Jason  50:56  
I just want to try it out a few more times where I could be playing the game and get into the groove of it, other than just learning at a time it's gonna be somewhere in their a range, A, A minus. I don't know exactly where it would fall. Okay, it probably doesn't matter. It's like, would I play this again? Yes, that's probably the only thing that actuallymatters. 

Brian  51:10  
That's true. And Marielle, I know that you said you're not like a committed Board Game Nerd, but you're there for it. So did you want to give it a fun grade, too?

Marielle  51:18  
Yes. So I'm probably more in the camp Brian when it comes to how I play board games, more like for the fun rather than for for the winning specifically. And as I said, I am biased. But having having played another another couple games that kind of like go in this direction, for example, another one of Uwe Rosenberg's, which is Caverna, I think I like it for the fun and not necessarily for the competition. And here, I think, compared to Caverna, for example, it is less what happens less is kind of like frustrating the other players by your choices, just because there's so many different choices on the board, some of which kind of like lead into the same resources. So if you if you're less of a naughty player, to frustrate other people's

Brian  52:01  
strategy. It's great you're less like Jason, who likes to mess with people.

Marielle  52:05  
So for me, I enjoyed myself a lot. So I was actually surprised. So I was also thinking, like, oh, is this gonna be as good? But I liked it a lot, so I'll, I'll go along with the pass pass with distinction. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. And it's like, it's the little star, because I'm biased. Maybe

Brian  52:22  
I think in this situation, you can be forgiven for having some bias

Marielle  52:26  
Also can I just say wooden meeples? You get a bonus point for that

Brian  52:30  
Actually, I think the little wild animal meeples are some of my favorite meeples ever, just these like I do love the idea of a generic animal, like nothing in particular, of course. Now I know it's actually this Duiker but

Marielle  52:43  
I think I know which species you're referring to. I would call it the "Diker", but just because I'm Dutch, and I kind of automatically do that when I see something that looks Dutch. 

Brian  52:52  
Yeah, you're probably right. 

Marielle  52:53  
And I think the bat of the little meep looks exactly like the photos that I have in my hand from this particular species of antelope.

Brian  53:01  
Okay, nice. All right, so I guess with that, we should maybe think about wrapping up the recording. Marielle, Is there anywhere where you'd like anybody to be able to reach you do you social media? I know it's not like professors aren't always amazing at that. I know neither are we, but sometimes we want to give people the opportunity. 

Marielle  53:18  
Yeah, I'm not great with social media, also not a professor. But what I would like to share is maybe, for when we published the study, we made a we, which was mostly Dina and Teague, while they were out in the field, together with film team, a video abstract. So if you want to have a little look more into what it looks like in that particular area, although that they made this in Kasanka  National Park in Zambia. But if you want to see a struggle at fruit bats and just how amazing it looks when you have hundreds of 1000s of bats flying out from a roost, then you should look, 

Brian  53:52  
oh, my goodness. So we would love, I mean, try to stop us. Show us the link. No, we will definitely share that. Man. We might, I might need to try to figure out if I because we do little videos that we put out for these episodes, I put them on, like, tick tock and stuff like that. Maybe I want to, like, edit in just the tiniest little clip of that. That would be fun. I might try. We'll see how that goes. Anyway. Okay, well, I'm really glad that you're able to find time to join us and talk about this, you know, unique game and this sort of unique link between a scientific study and a game. I guess with that, we're gonna wrap it up here. So I want to thank our listeners for tuning in, though, until next time, have a great month and great games, and as always,

Jason  54:29  
have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. This has been

Brian  54:32  
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 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