Short Wave - Game Night With 'Shrooms

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Calling all foragers! The new board game Undergrove, co-designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton, is all about the symbiotic relationships between trees and fungi. Players assume the role of mature Douglas fir trees and partner with mushrooms, which represent the mycorrhizal network. P.S. If the name "Elizabeth Hargrave" sounds familiar — she also designed the bird-collecting game Wingspan. Have another science-backed board game you'd like us to play? Email us at [e-mail]!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, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. And Regina Barber. And a few weeks ago, Gina and I got together to play a very nerdy science-backed board game. Are you ready to play some Undergrowth? But first I had to say hi to Gina's cats. Oh, my God. I don't even know which cat that is because it's so quiet.

But you did try to recruit them. Listen, we had room at the table. We did. It's a big table. Yeah, we were playing Undergrowth, a one-to-four player game. from Elizabeth Hargrave. Yeah, she's the person who created Wingspan, that other board game we have about birds and bird habitat. Undergrove is also inspired by the natural world. Set in the Pacific Northwest, each player is a Douglas fir tree, trying to spread your seedlings across the forest

by the power of fungi. For over 300 million years, trees have traded with fungi in underground symbiotic relationships known as micro rises. Trees offer some of the carbon they photosynthesize in exchange for nutrients that the fungi extract from the soil. This is all true. Mm-hmm. Why would I lie to you? Yeah, I didn't know any of that stuff. And I also thought the game was like just going to be about mushrooms.

Sure. But it was really about this like whole fungal web that connects trees underground and spreads nutrients across the forest floor. Yeah, it's really a game about partnership. Though it does have a competitive edge. A slight competitive edge. You are a beautiful tree. I'm a beautiful treat, and we are going to be trading the carbon that we have made. They don't get to play this game.

And also, like, my partner, Max, an actual plant biologist played with us, too. And now I'm going to place two roots, one on the Zohar's Ballet and one on the Pacific Golden Chantrell. I did like all those, like, fungi names. Yeah, me too. I mean, the game is beautiful. There are these 48 hand-painted tiles, each with a mushroom on it. There's chantrells, webcaps, agarics. But in real life, mushrooms are just part of this big fungal system that can stretch for feet, sometimes hundreds of feet.

Right, like fungi are some of like the biggest organisms in the world. There's a type of mushroom we call honey mushroom where it's like square miles of territory that are all one organism. This is Elizabeth Hargrave, the designer. And she and her co-designer Mark Wooten had an interesting challenge. How do you make a game about the mycorrhizal system, this relationship between fungi and plants, when scientists don't totally know how it works? Today on the show, gamifying what we know and don't know

about this underground fungal network. With Elizabeth Hargrave. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. All right, Emily. I'm ready for this like fungal odyssey. Okay, so after my house, you went to Elizabeth's house. I did. And if Snow White designed board games, she would be Elizabeth.

Like her house has bird feeders out back, butterfly plants out front, which makes sense because Elizabeth also made mariposa. Yeah, Spanish for butterfly. And that's the game about monarch butterfly migration. As I stepped through the porch door, Elizabeth told me to leave it open. Oh, you like keeping this open? Yeah, we'll cook some mushrooms in that house. Because wafting through her house, it does smell really earthy and nice,

was the smell of mushrooms. Opening her fridge, she showed me a lot. I'm so jealous. This sounds so awesome. Hen of the woods. Hen of the woods, because it looks like the fluffed-up tail feathers of a hen, I guess. It's like got all these layers to it, little brown fronds. and they grow at the base of oak trees.

I see a little ant crawling around. There's a lot of bugs that live in mushrooms. I actually just went to a workshop about all the bugs that live in mushrooms. And Elizabeth, she's been foraging for 20 years. Wow. So most of the fungal organism, depending on the species, most of it will be underground in the soil, persisting year-round. And then, you know, when it decides the conditions are right,

It'll pop up a little mushroom. But beneath that mushroom are mycelium. This branching network of tiny filaments that act like roots. They can be like a micron thin sometimes. So they're really good at getting stuff out of the soil. And these filaments are called hyphi. As these hyphi grow, they roam the soil, gathering nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus.

And the hyphy colonized the roots of trees, which are chalkful. of delicious carbon that the Haifie want. And this trading relationship between the fungi and the trees is the whole mechanism that inspired the game. Yeah, I remember all this. Like, we were playing as trees and we would like, quote, unquote, partner with mushrooms. Right.

You would trade your carbon with the mushroom's nutrients, which were represented as these wooden tokens. Yeah, I like the little tokens. Because like the Pacific Golden Chantrell mushroom, for example, I would give it, one carbon represented by like a black token and I'd get back a phosphorus and a potassium. And that'd be represented by like an orange and a purple token. It was so satisfying. And as a tree, you could also photosynthesize, which Max, you know, my live in plant expert,

he really enjoyed it. The idea that you're like taking in carbon from the atmosphere and that you're using, you know, these macronutrients to like help facilitate the process of photosynthesis is accurate. So Elizabeth's game got that part right. Yeah, that kind of scientific integrity is what our games are known for. So before making Undergrove, she did a lot of research. She read field guides about the Pacific Northwest. She visited this website, mushroomexpert.com, the talks about the mushrooms and their microriza.

She even asked fungal experts what they think is going on, though ultimately... Anything you're going to do in a game has to be vastly oversimplified from real life. which buys you a little bit of artistic license. We don't want anything to be actively wrong, but, like, clearly, we just can't show the level of detail that's actually happening. So that made me wonder, Gina, what is actually happening? That she couldn't show at a great level of detail. With those wooden tokens.

That's right. And that brought me to the work of evolutionary biologist Toby Kierce. Toby is a professor at Voya Universitat, Amsterdam, and founder of the group, Spun, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks. In her TED Talk, she says fungi are these cunning, almost opportunistic trading partners. Like stock market traders. Right. Except they're not making decisions like us.

They don't have brains. You know, this is evolution at work. But just to explain it in human terms, Toby says there is evidence that fungi will hoard nutrients in their networks. So this makes them unavailable to the plant and other competing fungi. So basic economics, as resource availability goes down, the value goes up. The plant is forced to pay more for those same amount of resources. The tree has to pay up with more carbon. So fungi are like inflating the price of nutrients.

That's what Toby thinks. Okay. She's done experiments where she starved a plant of phosphorus in one part of the soil and then watched the exchange rate for carbon change. I'm so glad that wasn't part of the game. That would have made it so much more complicated. Right. Okay, so Toby's collaborator, Loretto Oyarte Galvez, has seen this nutrient flow up close.

She describes it like a road network. The fungi create a very complex network, which is kind of a high waist as you have for cars right in the cities. Loretto is actually a physicist, Gina. Oh, cool. Yeah, she's based. I already like her. Yeah, she's based at Amulf Institute in the Netherlands, and she uses imaging techniques to see these fungal networks that's super high.

high magnification and watch nutrients flow in both directions. Do you want to see a video? Yes, I'm playing it up now. Oh, great. Okay. Oh, I'm watching this. It looks like highways. It looks like lights on cars going through highways.

Yeah, she told me that in some networks the nutrients flow really fast. So there are like super highways where the main kind of nutrient flow happens. And then there are some that are slower. But the vast majority of plants will eventually. develop microizing, like fungal networks in their root system. And this is all happening underneath our feet. From maples to oaks to ginkos to poplars, I mean, trees could not survive without fungi. People always say that trees are the lungs of the earth.

But the fungi is actually the nervous system, which connect everything. I will say, though, the jury's still out on exactly how much carbon trees are trading for nutrients. or in some cases how much carbon is absorbed from the microaraisal network versus the soil. So in Undergrove the game, you win by soaking up carbon directly from the mushrooms and turning your seedlings into trees. However, there's actually quite a bit of controversy on, like, is that intentional? Is it truly through the microrisal network or is it sort of leaking out into the soil and getting soaked up or what's happening? So in lieu of definitive science, that's, where Elizabeth had to take some creative liberties. In Undergrove, players soak up carbon through

the micro-a-isle network, and they lock in points to win. The important thing, though, to Elizabeth, is just that people care about this network. Right. But in holding these tokens, players feel that micro-a-visal relationship. I feel like interacting with that system physically just cements it in people's brain. And like a little experiential learning of the fact that this system exists. Like you'll never forget it, right, once you've done that. And I find it really compelling that a board game can affect how people feel about the natural world. Yeah. So after Wingspan came out, all these people started birding. Yeah. And Elizabeth got messages that after Mary POSS came out, people were planning butterfly gardens. Wow. Yeah. With Undergrove, she hopes players will

maybe seek out their local mushroom club. I mean, I don't think there's any substitute for actually going out in the forest and seeing the mushrooms firsthand. But I think playing a board game might prime you to notice the mushrooms when you wouldn't have otherwise. I mean, after playing this game with you and also doing that other story we did on fungi, I've been definitely noticing mushrooms more, like, even though... Some of us played Undergrove and some of us couldn't handle the rules. 100?

100's fine. I can do one. 100's good. Let's do 100. I did end up playing Mario Kart instead of finishing this game. Totally understood, Gina. Max more than made up for it. He did.

Check out this symbiosis that I've created for myself here. That was symbiotic. That mushroom was like, thank you. Oh, we were feeling it. Undergrove is available for purchase right now, online and at Brick and Mortar Game stores. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. And Kwayze Lee was the audio engineer. Bet Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. Special thanks to Max Barnhart,

Duncan Colthart, Natasha Branch, and Ramey Barnwell. I'm Regina Barber and I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.