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 Gaming with Science is a podcast that looks at science through the lens of tabletop board games. If you ever wondered how natural selection shows up in Evolution, whether Cytosis reflects actual cell metabolism, or what the socioeconomics of Monopoly are, this is the place for you. (And if not, we hope you’ll give us a try anyway.) So grab a drink, pull up a chair, and let’s have fun playing dice with the universe!Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) Science
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    • S2E10.1 - John Coveyou (Interview)

      S2E10.1 - John Coveyou (Interview)
      Dec 17 2025
      #GeniusGames #STEMEducation #SciComm #JohnCoveyou #BoardGames #Science We've done several episodes on games from Genius Games (Cytosis, Periodic, Genotype), and now we get to speak to the man behind it all: John Coveyou, founder and CEO of Genius Games. John graciously sat down with us to talk about the beginning of Genius Games, the stigma of "educational" games, the challenges and joys of STEM game design, and some of his favorite non-Genius games to play. So sit back and enjoy this conversation with the man who makes our job easy, John Coveyou. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions01:55 History of John and Genius Games07:50 Designing Educational Games13:19 Balancing Fun and Realism20:54 Most Challenging Games to Design29:55 Upcoming Offerings36:36 Favorite (Non-Genius) Games38:23 Wrap-Up Links Genius Games website Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Splash images courtesy of Genius Games. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason 0:00 Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason 0:07 Today we're talking with John Coveyou, CEO and founder of genius games. Brian 0:16 Hey everybody. Welcome to a creator interview. I'm Brian. Jason 0:19 This is Jason, Brian 0:20 and joining us is John Coveyou from genius games, John, can you introduce yourself? John 0:26 Sure, yeah, I'm the owner of genius games. I've owned it since about 2011 and we make science accurate board games and jigsaw puzzles for the hobby market. Brian 0:38 Those are very cool and very popular. I think I like the the frog. One in particular is very good. John 0:44 You dissect a frog in a lot of public school science classes, so we want to make sure we threw that one in there. Brian 0:49 I don't think I did a frog. Did you ever do a frog? John 0:52 I did. I think it was 10th grade biology. Jason 0:55 I don't remember if I ever dissected a frog. I did do a fetal pig. Brian 0:59 I remember we did a heart one time and that actually, like, screwed me up for a long time. John 1:03 Yeah, I don't want to know what this stuff looks like inside of my body. Let me just move on. Brian 1:10 Fair enough. We're really excited to be able to get you on to talk to us today. Our whole reason for existence is to talk about board games and science and genius games. As you can imagine, we have done many of your games before. We've done cytosis and periodic. We did genotype. We have more games planned in the future. We're going to be doing cellulose and probably whatever else comes down the pipe. Eventually. I'm sure we'll, we'll touch on most, if not all, of the games in the genius library. John 1:37 Well, that's great, because those are two of my favorite things, science and board gaming and both have, I mean, honestly, had a dramatic impact on my life in many ways. I mean, I run a company that combines those two, but the impact goes much deeper than that. So I'm very excited to talk about both of those things and how they came together. Could you Jason 1:55 give us a bit of your background there? Because this is not necessarily a logical place to end up. At the intersection of science and board game. Your company basically lives in the space of making what I call hard science games, games where they're not just inspired by science, but they try to portray it accurately and faithfully. What brought you to that place? John 2:13 Yeah, and you know, it's a long, windy story, but I will try and summarize it as quick as possible. I think when you see a lot of games out there in the marketplace and you see, you know, a science-based game or a STEM-based game, what you're looking at is a product someone wanted to create, to just generate money. I did not arrive at the place of creating a product. I arrived. I mean, I fell in love with the sciences, and also loved board gaming, and those two things kind of randomly came together. So a little bit about my background in the sciences. After high school, I joined the military. I was in the military for eight years total, but only three of it was on active duty. I spent about a year and a half in Iraq in Mosul and Samara. And while I was there, I was enrolled in some university classes, and one was a chemistry class. And reading through I had, I got a lot of time to read through that chemistry textbook, and some other textbooks I had chemistry and some in physics, I think I was taking at the same time, because of the the stressful environment that I was in studying sciences actually became very therapeutic for me, like ...
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      40 min
    • S2E10 - Nature (Evolution redux)

      S2E10 - Nature (Evolution redux)
      Nov 26 2025
      #NatureGame #NorthStarGames #Evolution #Ecology #Predators #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Summary Welcome to Nature, the next evolution of Evolution! We're joined once again by Dr. Thiago Moreira to talk about this reimagining of a popular game, including covering a lot of evolutionary territory we couldn't last time. We'll talk about why everything isn't actually turning into crabs, why anteater-ification needs to be a word, how humans shape evolution from moths to elephants, what exactly a species is and where they come from, and why there's no such thing as "more evolved" creatures, (at least among anything still alive). Timestamps 00:00 Introductions02:14 Better DNA preservation05:00 Bird-hunting tortoise06:54 Basics of Nature16:23 Evolution in a nutshell18:30 Convergent evolution27:42 Human-induced evolution34:22 Species and speciation40:52 Evolution toward simplicity45:49 Final grades Links Nature Web Site (North Star Games) Preserving DNA with EDTA (Phys.org) Video of tortoise hunting a bird (YouTube) Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Brian 0:06 Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about science behind some of your favorite games. Jason 0:10 Today, we will be talking about nature by North Star games. Hey everyone, welcome back. This is Jason. Brian 0:18 This is Brian. Thiago 0:19 I'm Thiago Jason 0:20 again, Thiago, so y'all may remember Tiago Moreira from our episode on evolution back in season one. He is back with us today to talk about nature, which is the next evolution of evolution. So Thiago, can you give our listeners a quick refresh on who you are and what your background is? Thiago 0:38 Hi, of course. My name is Thiago Moreira, I'm a assistant professor of honors and biology at George Washington University in Washington, DC. I do have a background in zoology, and my PhD was in evolutionary biology, and my object of studies are spiders. Brian 0:54 So Tiago has the questionable honor of being our first returning guest. Jason 1:00 All right, we're going to assume that is a high honor. Thiago 1:03 I consider an honor. Jason 1:05 And Tiago, I don't know if we asked you this the first time, but we're making it a habit to ask our guests what their favorite game is. What's your favorite game? Thiago 1:13 Tabletop game? Jason 1:14 Sure. Brian 1:14 Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be. Thiago 1:17 I get into the habit of like playing tabletop games, like board games later. So like, as a gamer, my favorite was always role playing games. And I'm from Brazil, and in Brazil at the time that I was a kid, we didn't have DND officially there, so we have others. So like, I play some very old school ones, but I guess the one that marked my teenage years and young adult years more was like Vampire the Masquerade. Jason 1:43 Oh, okay, I never played that one, but I did play several other of white wolf's Orpheus is my personal favorite. Thiago 1:49 Okay, Brian 1:50 so you were sort of in the sort of 90s renaissance of indie tabletop roleplay Thiago 1:54 kind of, yeah. Jason 1:56 So did you like, have cape and fangs and all that sort of stuff? Thiago 2:01 I never do the the live action was, it's always tabletop, like, always rolling dice and like, that's it. Brian 2:07 That seems like a shame, Tiago, because I think you'd make a pretty good vampire. Thiago 2:12 I tried once. Didn't work. Brian 2:13 Okay, Jason 2:14 well, let's move on to our fun science fact. Tiago, as our guest, you get to go first. What do you have for us from the world of science. Thiago 2:21 So I got this news the other day, like and like something that is probably going to be very influential in what I do. I'm a systematic person, so I do work with systematics, trying to uncover the tree of life. And we use a lot of molecular data. And this was this news from, apparently, people in Northwestern University, they found something that actually preserves DNA better than actually what we use currently, which is ethanol. So apparently when they use EDTA, which is a food preserver, it actually preserved the DNA samples more efficiently than actually ethanol, Brian 2:57 just like a suspension, like a solution of EDTA? Thiago 3:00 Yeah, they made a kind of solution to it. And actually, they found this by accident, apparently. So they just got a sample that fell in there, like, and apparently it works. Apparently it says here that, like, they got some samples from fish in ddta, ...
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      50 min
    • S2E09 - Periodic (the Periodic Table)

      S2E09 - Periodic (the Periodic Table)
      Oct 29 2025
      #Periodic #GeniusGames #Chemistry #PeriodicTable #Atoms #Elements #STEM #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Summary In this episode we get elemental for the game Periodic, with the amazing Dr. Raychelle Burks as our special guest. We talk about why the table is arranged like it is, why some elements are weird, what the groupings mean, why we should love *all* subatomic particles, how isotopes help solve crimes, and how some people get viscious when playing Monopoly. So grab some dihydrogen monoxide and join us for Periodic, by Genius Games. Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions02:52 - Molybdenum poisoning & glowing plants12:39 - Basics of Periodic19:14 - What is the Periodic Table?32:35 - Why are some elements weird?39:53 - Not just electrons55:16 - Nitpick corner1:00:37 - Final grades Links Periodic official site (Genius Games)Cattle molybdenum poisoning (Australian Veterinary Journal)Glowing succulents (Matter) Glowing rubidium (Youtube; Royal Society of Chemistry)NIST periodic table Dr. Raychelle Burk on Tiktok, and her Trace Analysis column Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason 0:00 Jason, 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 0:12 Today, we're talking about periodic by genius games. Hello. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian Jason 0:20 this is Jason Brian 0:21 and we are joined by Dr Raychelle Burks, Raychelle, could you introduce yourself please? Raychelle 0:26 Yes, I am Raychelle Burks, I am a chemist and a forensic scientist. Brian 0:32 Well, I'm so glad you're able to join us today. We were just talking about, let's see you said that your Instagram handle is radium, yttrium, and you'rr Dr. rubidium. And this is game is all about the periodic table. You use three different elements in your sort of social or media, like internet handles. So I think we got the right person for this. Raychelle 0:51 I hope so. Jason 0:52 And just to give a bit more information to our listeners, you said you're at American University in Washington, DC, right? Raychelle 0:57 Yes, the and actually, it's funny, because it's like, it is American University. What a wild name for a school. We have a lot of universities, but it is one that's kind of got a congressional mandate. There was, you know, back in the day, they were like, we are going to have the American University. And it's like, it didn't quite work out, Brian 1:16 but that's interesting. So you said there's a congressional mandate. So this is kind of like, we're at the University of Georgia. We're a land grant institution, so we sort of have this mission that the university is supposed to satisfy you. You are in a similar situation. Raychelle 1:29 It's, well, it's weird, you know, I went to a land grant institution, so I'm a proud corn Husker. That's where I got my PhD. So University of Nebraska at Lincoln and so land grant institutions, definitely a bit different, right? Because you're taxpayer money, there's some property involved, and you have a mandate, you have an extension office. I believe you have a fantastic extension office. I think all state residents you know, have the ability to have, like, a library card and come to a university event, like there's a real community kind of based thing. And in a way, American actually also has that many universities do, especially for the neighborhood they're in. But American University is actually chartered by Congress, like, way back in the day, I think it's 1893 is this a pop quiz now? But so it's, it's an interesting history that that kind of comes about. Brian 2:25 Well, very cool. Let's see. So, so we're here to talk about the game periodic by genius games. This is another in our genius games roster, which I figure eventually we'll be working our way through all of the genius games games at some point or another. But this is our second chemistry game. So we're excited to talk about it, but really, this game is about the periodic table specifically, which is very cool, and I definitely have questions, so I'm excited to have somebody here to to give answers. But why don't we start with our science banter topic? So what have we learned or found studies something interesting in the world of science today. So we usually let our guests go first if they've got something, if not, Jason has something queued up Raychelle 3:08 well, as a forensic scientist, I will say I spent a lot of time kind of in crime. I mean, hey, Okay, Brian 3:17 makes sense. ...
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      1 h et 8 min
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