Short Wave - A Board Game Where Birds (And Science) Win

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

Wingspan is a board game that brings the world of ornithology into the living room. The game comes with 170 illustrated birds cards, each equipped with a power that reflects that bird's behavior in nature. Wingspan game designer Elizabeth Hargrave speaks with Short Wave's Emily Kwong about her quest to blend scientific accuracy with modern board game design. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Maddie Safaya here with Shortwave reporter, Emily Kwong. Hey, Maddie. So last weekend, I did something extremely nerdy. On brand, continue. Hi. Well, I organized a science-themed board game day. So we're at Crossroads Tabletop Tavern in Manassas, Virginia. My partner, Duncan, and two of our colleagues, Emily Vaughn and Rebecca Ramirez,

gathered to play Wingspan, which is a competitive bird collection game. and one to five players. A bird collection game, huh? A fiercely competitive bird collection game. We're going to play the less competitive version because I know who you all are. You don't want to end some friendships today? Remember the last time we played charades? I remember I won.

Yeah, we're not going to talk about that. So in Wingspan, you are a bird enthusiast. Got it. Trying to attract birds to your network of wildlife preserves. Makes sense. And the birds are represented through, 170 illustrated cards. You'll have a painting of a bird in the middle,

indigo bunting, barn owl, what have you. And the card will be packed with science-backed bird data. I mean, here we go. That card has the bird's diet, nest type, habitat, and you employ this scientific information in order to play the game, which is exactly what Birdwatcher

Elizabeth Hargrave had in mind when she made it. Very cool. Okay. And this game has been pretty popular, right? I mean, you don't already know that? You know I'm not into the board games? It sold 300,000 copies, Maddie. Okay. And, okay, this will impress you. It won Germany's Kenner Spiel des Yars. I'm sorry. Expert Game of the Year award. Yeah, no, I know what that is. It's a big, yeah. I'll help you out. It is like a best picture Oscar in the board gaming world. Okay. And Wingspan, it marks the first time in history. A woman has won this particular. particular award with solo credit on the design, which is staggering considering this is the first game Elizabeth Hargrave has ever made.

When you're good, you're good, you know? True. So today on the show, the question that literally every single person is asking, how do you build a family game night with scientific integrity? Something we care so much about on Shortwave. We'll meet the mind behind Wingspan and talk about the surge in STEM-inspired board games. All right, Emily Kwong, today we're talking about Wing-SPAN. a board game steeped in bird science. And bird art.

And you got to meet the designer. I did. Hi. How are you, Elizabeth? Nice to meet you. I'm Emily Claw. Elizabeth Hargrave lives in Maryland, in a house festooned by the natural world,

inside and out. There's blueberry bushes out front, a vegetable garden out back, and right where a giant oak tree once stood before it was toppled by Hurricane Irene, is a bird bath the size of a kitty pool and planted about, like teaky tortupt. are bird feeders. We'll get

downy woodpeckers and Carolina Wrens and things like that on them. We gave up and seed because the squirrels eat it before the birds can. So Elizabeth is a career health policy consultant and her husband Matt Cohen is a landscape designer

and they got seriously into bird watching after a trip to Costa Rica. They now track the birds they've seen using eBird, a massive online database, and they even plan their vacations around seeing native birds in particular places, like flamingos in the Yucatan or puffins in New England. I love all the water birds. I grew up in Florida. So I like the big waiting birds and they're easy to see. And a lot of birders participate in science, like pretty regularly. You know what I'm saying? Like there's those big community projects where they help catalog where birds are and where they aren't. It's kind of awesome.

They are. And this is not their only hobby. When you go into Elizabeth and Matt's house, There is this huge bookcase on the wall, but it's not filled with books. It's filled with board games. And there's an empty table ready to go for game night. Matt laid out and everything. So in 2014, Elizabeth's game group had a conversation that changed her life. They were talking about how much they love the mechanics of many board games, dice rolling, collecting items, but the themes were somewhat repetitive.

There's a lot of games about castles and about trains and about space. And I'm just, like, not excited about those things. There's a lot that are... And Matt said, you know, there should be a board game about birds. And my brain just sort of latched onto that and started thinking about it. And I was like, I could make that game. So Elizabeth broke out her trusted Sibley field guides and started making bird cards. And she started to think about how to represent the rules of ecology as board game mechanics.

In the same way, let's say, you build settlements in Catan. Most board games have resources in them that are like wood and ore and stone. And I was like, what would the resources be if this wasn't a game about humans? It was like a game about birds instead. And so the resources are the things that the birds eat. So in Wingspan, you are a bird enthusiast. Yes. And to attract birds to your network of wildlife preserves, you have to offer them food.

Seeds and fruit and mammals and fish and insects, invertebrates. Broadly represented by five colorful tokens. We got invertebrate tokens. We do. I'm into this game. What are we talking? Araknids, nematodes. What are we doing?

Caterpillars. Fine. All right. Fine. But it exists. Invertebrates. They made it into a game. And, you know, from this first light bulb moment, creating the mechanic around bird food came other ideas.

Like, what if dice were rolled in a bird, feeder type tower. And what if points were, I don't know, acquired by laying eggs? And what if the bird powers in the game mirrored bird behavior in real life? So take, for example, the acorn woodpecker. They drill holes in trees. Store those acorns in those tree cubbies. That's right. In nature, that's called food caching. And in the game, if you acquire seed tokens, you store them on that card and they're worth points at the end of the game. So the game is resembling how birds behave in nature. Another example, predation. So the Cooper's hawk, if you draw that card, and then you get another card with a smaller bird,

you can tuck it beneath the hawk card, symbolizing that the hawk has gobbled up its prey. Yeah. And when we played, one person really embraced this strategy. It's very on brand that Duncan's is murdering other birds, and Emily is including more in her flock. Wow. I feel like that. Where's the lie, Duncan? You don't even know what my brand is.

Honestly, smack talk is the best part about competing in my experience. So, okay, if I was going to win, and I would, what would be the best strategy for the game? Well, there are multiple paths to victory in wingspan. And a variety of cards, like the bald eagle isn't inherently more powerful than the backyard chickadee. It's all in how you use it. And most importantly for Elizabeth, the cards are factual. So in making them, she drew from eBirds, the Cornell Lab, Ornithology's all about birds website, the Audubon Guide to North American Birds, and of course,

her Sibley Field Guides. Sounds like a lot of data gathering. Yes, your favorite. And the spreadsheet Elizabeth made for wingspan after harvesting all this data is 596 rows long. She showed it to me. So, this is the inside architecture of one. All right. A spy.

I was pretty excited. Remember, Elizabeth, that she spent most of her career as a health policy. analyst. So this is by no means her biggest spreadsheet. No, she's very good at gathering data and organizing it. But this is her very first game. And while she's not a scientist, her game is kind of a quiet lesson in ecology. At least, that was Angela Twang's impression. She's a lecture at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. And while reviewing the game for Science Magazine, notice something about how the bird cards complimented one another. You kind of start off with a completely blank nature preserve. And you're

trying to attract these birds into your preserve one at a time. So, like, you know, the order actually really matters, and you might get a different community depending on who gets their first. So the first bird cards you place in your nature preserve impacts other bird cards in the future. And that is a real concept in ecology, known as the priority effect. That states, like, you know, the order in which species arrive to a new habitat can actually dictate the way that community structures itself. That's fun. This is fun. Yeah. Here's what's interesting. Elizabeth Hargrave,

while not an ornithologist, by sticking to the facts when it came to bird behavior, ended up modeling some of the inner workings of ecosystems in the game, which, again, was not on purpose. Right. But I think it's cool that it also does that accidentally. I mean, at what point do you think what works in science also works in games? That's a really good question. I mean, I think that's kind of where my head was at when I first started thinking about wingspan was that concept that all of these economic systems that we model in board games really do have a lot of parallels in nature. And I was feeling like no one had really exploited that

in a board game. So supply and demand, resource scarcity, these economic ideas represented in board games obviously exist in nature too. Yeah, if one could or is using up a certain resource, then it's not there for others. And I feel like Wingspan is coming at a time where there has been this boom in STEM-powered board games, right? Yeah, the past five or six years, we have now evolution, terraforming Mars, cytosis. You would love that game. And for Elizabeth, this signals a growing appetite for board games that explore a greater diversity of themes from a greater diversity of designers. When Wingspan came out last year, her hope was simply to get birders into board games.

and board gamers into birding. But what I hadn't really thought about is that there's this set of people who are already birders and board gamers, and they lost it. Speaking of losing, I lost our game of wingspan. The other three, they all tied, and it was only broken by the fact

that Duncan had more food in his cash. I told you he would win, but we can award first and second. a third place. Then we all walked away feeling a little bit more connected to our avian friends. Which is all you can ask in a bird game, honestly. It was an afternoon well spent. But honestly, Kwong, don't bring me another board game episode unless you can win it. All it says when my script is Kwong returns sass.

My brain is blank. Can we just wrap this episode up? This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, who didn't win. Fact-checked by Emily Vaughn, who also lost, and Viet Leye, who did not play. And thank you to Josh Newell and James Willits for engineering this episode. I'm Maddie Safayette. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.