Everway Silver Anniversary Edition

Silver Anniversary edition

Everway is the only roleplaying game that I ever got my late wife to play. We played a lot of Magic: The Gathering and Netrunner, but roleplaying wasn’t her thing. With Everway, I talked her into playing a with two other couples. My original goal with Everway was to make it accessible and attractive to new players, and my late wife’s experience tells me that I more or less succeeded. Everway is also the first game I created after my daughter was born, and it is dedicated to her. I love all my roleplaying games. Like children, each one is special in its own way. But of all of them, Everway means the most to me personally. It’s exciting that this game from 1995 is coming back in a beautiful new Silver Anniversary edition.

 

When I hired on with Wizards of the Coast at the end of 1993, I brought the rough concept for Everway with me, and it was my main project for my first two years there. My thinking was that it had to be something new and different. There wouldn’t be much point in releasing a standard-issue roleplaying game, which would have little chance of competing externally with Dungeons & Dragons or internally with Magic. Everway was an ambitious attempt to reach a broader audience, using a system that would appeal both to experienced gamers and to new fans outside the gamer community. 

For one thing, the game had to be beautiful. The standard roleplaying experience can look to observers like an exercise in sensory deprivation, and Magic had raised expectations for how colorful a hobby game could be. Everway’s imagery was as global and multicultural as we could manage. With my own little biracial daughter at home, I wanted a game that transcended the Eurocentric template set by D&D. After Everway was published, I once got an email from an African American roleplayer who thanked me for the game. He said it had changed the way he roleplayed, inspiring him to create Black characters for the first time, not just in Everway but in other games as well. Have I mentioned how much this game means to me personally?

Colorful images appeal to the
next generation of gamers

The imagery is more than decoration. It inspires people to invent characters, adventures, and lands, drawing stories out of their imaginations. New players are often delighted to find out that they can create characters and backstories with a little prompting from the artwork. Instead of dice, Everway uses a Fortune Deck, modeled after the major arcana cards of tarot decks. The Fortune Deck is a randomizer, but one that uses symbols instead of numbers. The deck has a secret pattern, but keeping the pattern secret was a mistake. Players didn’t notice the hidden pattern, so they couldn’t appreciate it, and in the Silver Anniversary the pattern is explicit. 

While Everway didn’t clear a profit, it inspired a lot of indie RPG designers. It’s fondly remembered by a number of designers who have since made great progress in developing ways to support narrative, free-form practices in roleplaying games. It was meant to show people new ideas about how to play these games that we love, and it did. 

As a project at Wizards, Everway faced a number of systemic challenges, as perhaps all the projects that weren’t trading card games did at that time. For one thing, we didn’t control costs, and the components were prohibitively expensive. Also, it’s packaging showed that the game was different—in fact too different. On game store shelves, the packaging didn’t work. Within months of the game’s release, Wizards cut many teams and product lines and laid off the employees connected to them. Roleplaying games were cut, and the roleplaying staff was laid off. I landed in R&D, working first on Netrunner and on beginner versions of Magic. Thankfully, the company worked to find homes for the games that were cut, and Everway ended up with two big fans, twin brothers Jesse McGatha and Richard Thames Rowan. 

After all these years, Rich and Jesse have formed the Everway Company to publish a new edition of Everway—the Silver Anniversary edition. The game has an all-new format, and it will look great on game store shelves. The new publishers have incorporated art from the Spherewalker supplement by my old friend Greg Stolze, and the new version is all color. It also includes a lot more content, mostly material from Spherewalker and from several published adventures. The original was slim, but the Silver Anniversary edition is grand.

How will the new edition fare? It’s a better offering than the original, and the gaming community is more ready for a free-form game like Everway than it was 25 years ago. The Kickstarter campaign will be an opportunity for us to see just how much love there is out there for Everway, and how well the game might inspire a new generation of roleplayers. Originally, the Rich and Jesse were going to handle the Kickstarter on their own, but their edition is so marvelous that I told them I wanted to be involved myself. I’ll be running the Kickstarter, and I’m excited to see this remarkable game get another shot at finding its audience.

more about the Silver Anniversary edition

Crow Scientist is Live

For years, I’ve been fascinated by crow behavior, and now I have something to show for it. It’s the free app that shows kids how to observe crows the way a scientist does, and for this project I had the pleasure of working with John & Colleen Marzluff. It was a real treat to learn about crows from the experts. We talked for the first time in May, and the app is done already, with Karen Lewis’s art and all. We need feedback from players, and we need 5-star reviews. Here’s a link to the official Crow Scientist page.

The app naturally relates to my overall goal of teaching evolution science to children. Specifically, it teaches two important lessons about natural selection. First, what allows animals to survive is their behaviors. Kids observe crows and note their behaviors on checklists. Second, animals have lots of offspring, most of which die. One checklist is for breeding season observations, including young crows ending up killed. 

Doing the heavy lifting for the app was David Marques, who also published Clades Solo. He’s a creative partner as well as the programmer, and he added a wonderful feature to the app: you can add in your own photos of the behaviors you see. I’ve started adding my own photos, and it’s silly how fun it is. Players can even submit their photos to Phosphorlearn for possible use in the app. 

Kids can also submit their crow art, which the Lead Crow Scientist will post on Instagram. That’s Colleen Marzluff. She’s passionate about kids, nature, and science. You can submit art on the Phosphorlearn page or contact Colleen directly on Instagram.

2020

We wrote these rules in 2nd person
to avoid sexist pronouns (1987)

RPGs and Gender Differences 

A friend asked me to comment on a screen cap that’s going around Twitter, so here’s the comment. The screen cap is an insensitive post I made in 2008 about women and roleplaying tropes. It appears side by side with a quote by Gary Gygax in 2002 saying that there’s no sense trying to make a game that “will attract females”. The implication seems to be that I think the same way Gygax did, but in fact his quote serves as a useful counterpoint to my own views. He thought that men and women are naturally different and didn’t want RPGs to change. I think that in order to change RPGs to make them more appealing to women we need to understand both how men and women are the same and how we’re different. RPG designers have made real progress, and happily today’s RPGs are more inviting to women and less male-oriented than they were when I joined the hobby. This social-media incident also serves as an opportunity for me to make a number of related points.

A disturbing feature of controversies like this is that they hurt the very women that the accusers are trying to help. In 2014, Nobel laureate Tim Hunt made a bad joke about women in the lab. He used an ironic voice to let his audience know that he was joking, but his words were written down and shared across the internet without tone of voice. People thought he was serious and spread the quotes to shame him. A friend of mine said that Hunt’s words had a chilling effect on women considering whether to enter STEM. OK, but the only way those words had a chilling effect was by their being spread as misinformation. In 2018, University of Washington computer-science lecturer Stuart Reges suggested a way to get more women into computer science and referenced studies showing that girls tend to do better at verbal skills than math. The opposite is true for boys. A reporter from the Seattle Times garbled this reference and accused Reges of making a false claim: that boys are better at math than girls. The reporter ignored Reges’s proposal to expose more women to computing by making a computing class mandatory, and again women got misinformation about a prominent man in STEM looking down on them. Did the reporter help more women feel good about possible careers computing? No. In the current case with me, someone is implying that I have the same disdainful attitude toward women in gaming as Gary Gygax did. The people spreading the post feel like they’re helping women, but surely it doesn’t help to make the field seem more sexist than it is. Personally, it hurts to have people talking about me, but the real damage is to the many gamers who don’t know my true history and who are tricked into thinking that the lead designer on D&D 3E was a hostile to women in gaming. 

Another disturbing thing about this post is the implication that it’s sexist to take seriously the inborn differences between boys and girls. Common sense tells us that the differences we see result from a combination of inborn differences and social learning, and the science bears this out. In my career, I’ve worked repeatedly to raise the profile of women in characters, art, pronouns, and the workplace. Do I get disqualified from being a feminist because I take seriously the inborn differences between boys and girls? I don’t think so. In fact, it seems to me that we can do a better job of advancing women’s interests if we understand how women and men are different as well as how we’re the same. If you want to hear about inborn differences, listen to parents. And if you disagree with me, does that disagreement mean that we can’t work together to make a better tomorrow? Enough with the left’s circular firing squad already. My focus is on a Blue November, and I hope you’ll join me.

The original post from 2008 was a conversation starter, and it’s being shared as if it were a conclusion. The wording was needlessly provocative, and I’m sorry to everyone I hurt with it. That was the year my wife died, and I wasn’t at my best. The post was provocative, and what it provoked was a bunch of stories from women about how they’d been excluded from roleplaying games by all-boy groups. I learned that my post had been ill-informed. Sometimes I say things that are wrong, and then I get better information that I didn’t even know I needed. It’s all part of the process. 

The other thing I’ve learned since 2008 is that I’m on the autism spectrum. That explains why people sometimes react to what I say in ways that I hadn’t predicted—because they’re neurotypical. Looking back, it was pretty ignorant for me to talk about the gender skew in gaming without referencing autistic traits (“engineer brain”) and their role in games and game styles. Over the decades, roleplaying games have become less “engineer-oriented” and more story oriented, and that’s great. 

For me the big issue is the prevalence of misinformation on social media. I’ve been taken in repeatedly by misinformation myself, I’ve heard misinformation from my friends, and well-meaning people have spread misinformation about me. It’s a mess, and I don’t know what to do about it. 

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2017

Rob Heinsoo (right) and me, with 13th Age rulebooks

Gen Con 50 and my Projects

Here are all the things I’m plugging at Gen Con 50. 

Grandmother Fish

The first book to teach evolution to preschoolers, back in print, this time from Macmillan. Available in bookstores. I have copies to show. www.grandmotherfish.com

Over the Edge, Atlas Games, booth 1401

All new. What have I learned about roleplaying game design in the last 25 years? Find out! I’m posting about it on Google+. Earlier edition and supplements still available at the Atlas booth. Sign up here to get on the mailing list to hear about the upcoming Kickstarter campaign. http://atlas-games.com/in/ote_kickstart/

Clades and Clades Prehistoric, Atlas Games, booth 1401

How do you make a kids’ game about evolution that gets the science right? These two animal-matching games feature living animals (Clades) and extinct animals (Clades Prehistoric). Information here: http://www.grandmotherfish.com/clades Preorder here: http://bit.ly/CladesPreorder

13th Age fantasy RPG, Pelgrane Press, 1317

Character-oriented roleplaying meets fast d20 action. Bestiary 2 is here, including my personal recommendations for twisting monsters to your better use. Core rulebook is here, plus years of supplements. http://site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/category/products/13th-age/

Follow me on 

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tweet

Twitter https://twitter.com/JonathanMTweet

G+ https://plus.google.com/+JonathanTweet

And here’s my schedule if you want to find me

Wednesday evening, Diana Jones Award Party

Thursday

     11 am, 13th Age Adventure Design Workshop

     5 pm, Over the Edge panel (all new version coming to Kickstarter) video recording here

     6 pm, Ars Magica panel

Friday, 11 am, 13th Age Monster Workshop

Saturday, 2 pm, Wizards Resurrects D&D, with the entire 3e design team, Monte Cook, Skip Williams, Rich Baker, and Peter Adkison.

Sunday, 2 pm, Contemporary Designs in Roleplaying Games, with Luke Crane, Vincent Baker, James Wallis, Ron Edwards, and Jared Sorensen

Games for Humanist Families

Clades, Chicken Cha Cha Cha, 
Cheeky Monkey, King of New York, Dixit

The games pictured here are the ones I took to the first meeting of the “humanist family game club” at my Unitarian church. The idea behind the game club is to give humanist families a fun way to hang out together. As a game designer and a father, I have spent years thinking about games that are great to play with kids and grownups together. Here are my descriptions of these games, which I recommend for humanist families.

Dixit by Jean-Louis Roubira

This charming game involves looking carefully at the detailed, dreamlike, full-color images on the game cards, so it has plenty of appeal from the start. One player gives a clue about a card they secretly chose from their hand. Then each other player secretly chooses a card from their own hands that more or less matches the clue. These cards get turned up, and only the clue-giver knows which one is the “real” card. Everyone tries to guess which card is the clue-giver’s, and players all score points based on how the guesses turned out. The real trick is that the clue-giver gets points only if at least one player successfully guesses the card and at least one player fails to guess their card. If the clue is too clear or too vague, the clue-giver loses the round. Kids have a hard time hitting the right balance between clarity and opacity, so they can struggle as the clue-giver. Little kids do well on a “team” with a grownup. Most of the game, however, is guessing others’ cards, and little kids can have fun doing that. Playing Dixit, whether giving a clue or trying to follow one, is a sophisticated use of our ability to communicate. For kids, it’s an enjoyable way to practice thinking “what did they mean by what they said that?” As for its humanist qualities, Dixit is all about understanding other people’s stories—and often misunderstanding them.

King of New York by Richard Garfield

This action-oriented game is the only violent game on this list, and it’s the most rules heavy. I recommend it because it handles battles in a way that is smart for play balance and good for avoiding hurt feelings. It’s true that the players control monsters that fight over who is the “king of New York”, but the system works such that you never choose which player you attack. Everyone attacks the monster that’s in Manhattan, except for the monster in Manhattan, who attacks everyone else. Play is straightforward: you roll a bunch of special dice, and reroll any dice whose results you don’t like. After up to two rerolls, you use the final results to determine how your monster fights other monsters, heals its wounds, smashes buildings, fights the military, gains energy for special powers, or gains fame. Kids who don’t really know the game can play by feel, and even if they don’t win their monsters will smash buildings, fight other monsters, and step on tanks like the big kids’ monsters do. Educational bit: The map shows the five boroughs of New York so you can show them to kids. One downside: A monster can sometimes get knocked out of the fight and the player out of the game. Usually, however, a player wins by amassing 20 fame points, not by defeating all the other monsters. 

Cheeky Monkey by Reiner Knizia

In this simple but engaging game, players pull animal tokens out of a bag. You can stop after taking a few tokens, or you can take more, but if you pull an animal that duplicates one you’ve already pulled this turn, all the animals you pulled this turn go back in the bag. A press-your-luck mechanic like this is great for kids because they can make real tactical decisions by feel, deciding whether to play it safe or to take risks and living with the consequences. If you have to put all those tokens back in the bag, it’s because you pulled one too many tokens, not because another player messed with you. A few additional rules involve stealing tokens, allowing for player interaction. In addition to being a fun game, Cheeky Monkey features hyenas, walruses, and other distinctive animals from around the world, with science notes about their habits and habitats. 

Chicken Cha Cha Cha by Klaus Zoch

In this German game, you move your chicken around a track, using concentration-style memory play to control movement. Kids are famously good at memory tasks, so it’s a great multigenerational game. The pictures are fun and colorful, mostly animals and eggs. The game includes an aggressive element in that you are trying to steal the tail feathers of all the other chickens, but the circular track prevents players from simply picking on whichever other player they like. Most of the action is memory play and moving around the track. 

Clades and Clades: Prehistoric by Yours Truly

In addition to teaching kids about evolution, Clades has a lot going for it as a game for kids and grownups. Physically, the game involves looking at lots of cute pictures of animals, something that even little kids enjoy. Everyone plays all the time, so kids never have to wait their turn. It’s easy to make the game simpler for beginners, and it’s easy to handicap. Plus, of course, it’s about evolution and science. A middle school science teacher I know says that the game elicits deep questions from students. Clades: Prehistoric is the same game, but with dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and other extinct animals. Order here from Atlas Games or ask for it from you friendly local game store.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game

Why Games for Humanist Families?

Games are great ways to let kids see humanism in action. For one thing, we humanists turn to other humans for our meaning in life, not to a spirit or an afterlife. Your experience playing a game results from a live interaction shared with other people and with no fore-ordained conclusion. That’s a genuine interaction in a way that seeing a movie together is not. Engaging with other humans for an evening also sends the implicit message that human relationships are worth investing in, a message that adults pick up as well as children. Second, playing games is good for social development. On one level, it teaches basics such as fairness and being a good sport. On a more fundamental level, games teach children to see human interaction as a social construct. Society is like a game, with rules, penalties, winners, and losers. We agree to interact with each other by the rules, but ultimately the rules are up to us, and we can change them to make things better. For example, if we play a game “fairly” and by the rules, some people have built-in advantages that give them an outsize chance of winning. Older kids, for example, do better at Dixit than younger ones. Is that fair? If not, can we change the rules to make the game more even? Whatever the answer, that’s good humanist thinking. 

Kids’ Games and Clades: earlier post on noncommercial games for kids 

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day

A song about natural selection by
cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo

Happy Darwin Day! Today I’m running a bunch of activities at Seattle’s Darwin Day celebration, noon to 3 in Bellevue. To coordinate with the organizer, I made a list of evolution activities that I’m ready to run, and here it is. I’ve done most of these activities at school visits or other events, but a few are untried. 

Grandmother Fish

The book is a starting point for discussions about evolution and about the history of life on earth.

Wiggle-Along: A read-along of the book, with five kids in front demonstrating the sounds and motions of each Grandmother. Everyone follows along. Great for kids getting their wiggles out. If you’re not familiar with the book, you can see an early draft being read to kids for the first time in this video, which we originally did for the Kickstarter campaign in 2014. 

Timeline exercises: The five kid volunteers are part of a visual demonstration of how much time has passed since each of the Grandmothers, compared to each other, compared to Earth’s history, and compared to the existence of the universe. You can print full-size images for the five “grandmothers” to hold, available here. 

The story of my book: For kids who dream about being authors someday, the story of how I wrote Grandmother Fish is partly inspirational and partly a caution. It took me many years to figure out how to do the book, and I needed help from many friends to get it right. You can do great things, but it can take a long time, and you need to learn to accept help. 

Q&A: There’s a ton of science behind Grandmother Fish that is not obvious on the surface, so if kids have questions, I have answers.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game
This is my animal-matching card game of evolutionary relationships. A “clade” is a complete branch of the evolutionary family tree. For example, “birds” composed a clade, and reptiles and birds together form a larger clade called Sauropsida. Up to 8 kids can play at once, but they’d have to all squeeze around a shared play area. This game is suited to an activity center, sort of like a craft session but for a game instead of a craft. People can drop into and out of games. The game is also a “conversation starter” for evolutionary history, as represented by the animals on the cards. Clades is illustrated by Karen Lewis, the same wonderful children’s artist who illustrated Grandmother Fish.

Kids’ Songs and Dances

We humans all evolved from people who sang and danced around the campfire all night. This stuff is fun for kids, and when kids dance, it’s an excuse for grownups to have fun, too. 

“Charles Darwin” dance: The hokey-pokey meets evolution, where kids evolve from fish into humans one body part at a time. Here a link to the lyrics. They start like this, and you get the idea. 

     “You put your right fin in, 

     You take your right fin out,

     You put your right fin in,

     And derive an arm right out…”

“If You’re Disgusted and You Know It”: A lot like “If You’re Happy and You Know It” but with universal facial expressions and sounds for key emotions: happy (smiling), sad (weeping), scared (scared face), disgusted (yuck face), and surprised (“oh” face).

“Five Violet Spiders”: A familiar tune gets original lyrics and a video by cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo. The song demonstrates natural selection, as the most visible spiders get eaten.

Link to video

Stand Up Interactive Activities

These activities require people to stand up and move around. 

Bloodlines: Roll giant dice to simulate the identification of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam in deep time. Little kids can do it, although it involves probably going extinct.

Mates: Mate-choosing simulations with cards. We simulate monogamy, mixed polygamy, and total polygamy. Kids can do it, but that might be weird. 

Life-on-Earth Timeline: This activity follows the Grandmother Fish reading. It could also be cut loose as its own activity. 

Walk-and-Talk

Stand and be counted with your people! Everyone stands in a group. The leader presents the group with either/or choices such as, “If your favorite dinosaur is a Triceratops or other herbivorer, move left. If your favorite dinosaur is a Tyrannosaur or other predator, move right.” Everybody moves and then gets to see how everyone else in the group answers each question. Opinionated people on either side can explain their choices. Periodically we stop and discuss, and then move on to new questions. The questions cover evolution questions that people can answer personally, such as favorite extinct animal, experience with evolution while growing up or in school, mammals versus birds, personal experiences (hunting, foraging, cooking, having children). It’s something of a mixer. 

Kahoot! Quizzes

These are two short online quizzes with my original questions and creative-commons images. They cover big ideas, not trivia. For each question, one option is a silly answer, so kids who can’t actually answer the questions can still play along by spotting the silly answers. I use each question as a way to put some aspect of evolution into a greater context, showing how this information fits into the larger picture. These quizzes are on the Kahoot! site, which allows people to answer questions on their phones and participate in the quiz all at once. The quizzes are free for the public to use. 

Wings Quiz: 12 questions on wings, which was the theme of Seattle’s Darwin Day this year. You can also listen to a 15-minute audio of my practicing running the quiz. You can see how I pull in evolutionary concepts and use the questions as starting points. 

Link to quiz    Link to audio

Evolution Quiz: 10 questions on evolution, Charles Darwin, and life on Earth. These are big ideas, like what Darwin thought of “savages”, not trivia, like what years Origin of Species was published. 

Link to quiz

Poetry Reading: “The Sea” by Mary Oliver

This poem is about a woman yearning to return to the fishy life of her ancestors. It’s so good I memorized it to recite at Burning Man one year. Evolution isn’t just about what happened in the past. It’s also about how we feel today, knowing that we are connected to all living things.

Link to poem    

There’s only time for me to do a fraction of these activities at Darwin Day today, but I hope to do the rest someday.

Kids’ Games and Clades

Air Land Sea is my only perfect game.
Also great for kids.

Most of my adult life, my livelihood has been creating sophisticated games for adults. Some games were artsy, like Over the Edge. Others were commercial endeavors, as when I led the redesign of Dungeons & Dragons and helped revive the sagging brand. At the same time that I was creating commercial games for strangers, I was also creating free games for kids, actually for my daughter as she grew up. These projects were “for fun” games that few people have heard about. It’s something new and exciting for me to do a professional game that’s kid-friendly, and that’s what Clades is. This post describes some of my kid games that, in some way, led up to Clades.

Twenty Guesses

If you play Twenty Questions with kids, you will discover that they would rather make guesses than reframe their guesses as yes-or-no questions. So how do you play Twenty Questions with little children? Turn it into “Twenty Guesses”. Instead of trying to get little kids to form yes-or-no questions, let them do what they want to do and just makes guesses. The trick is in how the grownup with the “secret” answers the guess. The grownup gives one hint about how the guess is “right” and another about how the guess is “wrong”. This structure models abstract categorization for little children, and they get it. Here’s a hypothetical example.

Grownup: OK, I’m thinking of something. [secretly thinking “monkey”] 

Kid 1: Is it a car? 

Grownup: No, like a car, it can move from one place to another, but unlike a car it’s alive. 

Kid 2: Is it a dog? 

Grownup: It is a mammal, like a dog, but it’s not usually kept as a pet. 

Kid 1: A cat! 

Grownup: Remember, people don’t usually have them as pets, but they are furry and they have tails. 

Kid 3: A beaver. 

Grownup: It has hair and a tail like a beaver, but it doesn’t live in the water. It lives in the trees.

Kid 2: A three-toed sloth!

Grownup: Remember, it has a tail, but it does live in the jungle, like a sloth does. It jumps around a lot more than a sloth. 

Kid 3: A monkey! 

Grownup: Right.

For more discussion of this variant on Twenty Questions, see my web page on this game, where I called the game “Guessit”.

Spaceship

A finished game of Spaceship

Little kids love this game because they make real, tactical decisions that help them win most games. Plus they get to draw spaceships, plus they get to scribble all over the grownup’s spaceship. To play, each player draws a spaceship, with weaponry. Then you play in rounds until one player has shot the other player’s spaceship four times. Each round starts with the child rolling a die. The child chooses to keep the die with the number it rolled, or give the die to the grownup. The child physically places the die on the spaceship with the number up. Then the grownup rolls a second die and places it on the other spaceship. If your spaceship has a number at least as big as the other spaceship’s number, you shoot the enemy ship. You can draw an explosion on the enemy spaceship, indicating about 1/4 destruction. A spaceship is destroyed if it’s hit four times. If both players get to 4 at the same time, it’s a draw.

This game is the simplest way I can think of to give a quite small child real tactical choices with instant consequences, good or bad. Spaceship is a little-kid version of Air, Land, and Sea.

For more information, here’s the link to my web page on this game.

Air Land Sea

Update: The end state of an improvised miniatures game that
adapted the Air Land Sea mechanic. This is the 4-year old’s
army. He tied the 10-year old.

This remarkable little work is the only perfect game I’ve ever done. It uses the Spaceship mechanic, except that there are 12 locations to place a die result. Each environment—air, land, or sea—has two locations on each player’s side. Your total value for each environment equals your two numbers multiplied together. You win if, after 12 dice rolls, your total is higher than the other player’s total in two or three environments.  Anyone can start playing with a few seconds’ worth of instruction, and you can complete a match in a minute or two. Even though the game is this simple, it has a distinct beginning phase, middle, and end. Some moves are easy to make, but other rolls give you choices that are painful. I invented this game as a way to teach multiplication, but you can simplify it by switching to addition or even dropping the arithmetic altogether.

For more about this game, here’s my original page about it.

Clever observers might see a resemblance between the three environments in Air Land Sea, the three theaters in Richard Garfield’s Star Wars card game, and the three environments in Clades.

Princess

This simple card game was all about the central question of poker: should I put more money in and vie for the pot, or should I cut my losses and fold? This relates directly to the other important question: are they bluffing? The top card in the custom deck is the Princess, thus the name of the game. This game was not a hit, but even a failed experiment teaches you something. Maybe if I made kids actually bet money, they’d find it more engaging, but I’m not sure that’s a great idea. In creating games for grownups, Rob Heinsoo makes use of a similar tension—to vie for the pot or not—in his grownup games Three Dragon Ante and Night Eternal.

Checkers variants

Checkers is a great game for a grownup and a child to play competitively against each other. Unlike chess, the game plays perfectly well with some of the grownup’s pieces removed. This asymmetry gives the game momentum, in that the grownup starts behind but might pull ahead. Both players can try as hard as they can to win, and the grownup can increase or decrease the child’s advantage just by starting with more or fewer pieces. To keep the game from dragging on, have a player win when they have more queens than the other player has pieces (regular pieces plus crowned pieces). Since I played with my daughter, the crowned pieces were queens, and the uncrowned “men” were princesses.

Here’s my original page on checkers.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game

For years I’ve puzzled over how one could create an evolution game that has solid science behind it. My answer is Clades. It works by playing to kids’ natural inclination to categorize animals, and it teaches that the way to understand an animal’s place in this world is to understand its evolutionary history. Like many of the games I’ve described here, it works great when grownups play with kids. For example, since most of the cards are face-up on the table, it’s easy for a grownup to help younger players.

In 2016, artist Karen Lewis and I returned to Kickstarter to raise money for Clades, and we raised enough to produce a “dinosaur” version, Clades Prehistoric. You can play the games separately or together. Clades and Clades Prehistoric are available from Atlas Games or (better yet) from your friendly local brick-and-mortar store. 

Clades and Clades Prehistoric available from Atlas Games

2016

Clades Card Preview

Squamates, by Karen Lewis

Karen recently updated the card face for Clades, the secret game we’re working on, and here’s what they look like. With this nice look, I’m getting excited about this game. For years I was stumped by the question of how to do an evolution game. Now I have one.

All my life I have loved biology, but I never learned what a clade was until I started studying evolution to write Grandmother Fish. Now that I know what a clade is, I’m so excited about the idea that I created a game about it. A clade is any complete branch of the evolutionary family tree. In other words, it is an ancestral population plus all the descendants of that population. “Mammal” is a clade because all mammals descend from an early mammalian population, and no other animals do. The category “reptile” is not a clade because birds descend from the same early reptiles that lizards and crocodiles descend from. Since “reptile” doesn’t include birds, it doesn’t include all the descendants of those early reptiles and can’t be a clade. Biologists have reclassified living things along cladistic lines, putting birds with reptiles in the “sauropsid” group (meaning “lizard-face”).

The top card shown is the clade Squamata (“scaly”). Squamates are lizards and snakes. The card also shows four smaller clades: the chameleon clade, the snake clade, the gecko clade, and the Toxicofera clade (including snakes and chameleons but not geckos). In turn, the Squamata clade shown on this card is part of the sauropsid clade with birds, turtles, and crocodiles. The bottom card is the clade Whippomorpha, which includes whales, dolphins, and hippos. The whippomorphs are part of a major mammal clade including deer, pigs, horses, carnivores, and most large land animals.

Whippomorphs,  by Karen Lewis

Since the concept of the clade is based on common descent, clades demonstrate that evolution has happened. The only reason that scientists can read the genomes of different organisms and classify them together in clades is that different species evolved from common ancestors. When we say that hippos are closely related to whales, we don’t mean that they’re alike. We mean that their common ancestor lived not too long ago, maybe 50 million years ago in this case. In the 1700s, Linnaeus classified organisms according to their traits, such as whether they have scales. Today, we classify organisms according to their evolutionary family history.

The clades concept helped me create an evolution-themed game that kids and grownups can both play. For years I’ve mused about how one could create an evolution-themed game that didn’t compromise on the science. The big problem, as Richard Garfield has observed, is that games are about players planning to reach a goal, which is the opposite of evolution. By its nature, evolution defies the default structure of a game. Another problem is that you “win” evolution by reproducing. Computer games can model reproduction easily, but that’s hard to do with a tabletop game. One year when the Burning Man theme was evolution, I ran mate-choice simulations using playing cards, but we couldn’t do successive generations because there’s no easy way to represent reproduction. And that’s where I was stuck. Thanks to my research on Grandmother Fish, I learned about clades. That gave me a new angle from which to approach the problem of how to do an evolution-themed game, and I’m gratified to have finally designed one. Happily, this game is all about Karen’s cute, little pictures of animals, which are on all the cards. 

As with Grandmother Fish, it’s exciting to be on the side of scientific literacy, especially evolutionary science. Scientific literacy has been on the rise for the last century, and that may have contributed to the rise in IQs. Science is so well-proven that even the opponents of science, such as creationists, pretend to be scientists. Evolution in particular is a great topic to be working with because it’s a scientific topic that people respond to emotionally. Some people hate it, but others respond warmly to it. It’s about who we are, and I bet that’s why it matters to people. 

No more details yet. Just wanted to offer a peek at the cards and rave about clades. The plan is to run a Kickstarter later this year. Stay tuned. 

Clades in Grandmother Fish: post from last August.

More on clades: The Berkeley site Understanding Evolution has some nice explanations of clades free online. I also worked on the Wikipedia page.