georgiahca / opensciencegame Goto Github PK

• Info about each card in stored as a json object to make it easy to do version control. See #10 .
• We need cards in a spreadsheet to populate design templates. See https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fajcgzR4e4WbyHAVDwzwkcgNXaTW95ivhbjnq8TGqj0/edit#gid=182220874

Base Rules Used

See 2a4c212

Rule Modifications

• At the start of each turn players MUST draw 1 from the Idea Deck.
• They can still choose to use a Ponder Action to draw an additional Card from the Idea Deck.
• The game ends when the group 'Runs out of Ideas' (last card draw from Idea Deck).
• Global Impact cards were shuffled into Idea Deck.
• Players started with 1 Insight and 1 additional Idea.
• Retractions were shuffled back into the Deck.
• We started with 2 of each Primary Idea (A,B,C,D) in the Deck (by accident!).
• Duplicate Ideas could be Researched and Disseminated, however the same Insight could only be Disseminated once.

What happened in the game?

• The Players picked up the gist relatively quickly.
• The Retraction Notice and Falsified Data hit them pretty hard. It was a nice dramatic moment but did set them back considerably.
• The Players were able to win the game with 3 cards to go in the Idea Deck in around 45 minutes.

Who was playing?

• One PhD student (chemistry / biology).
• One non-scientist board game enthusiast.
• Me.

Overall Impressions

• Players enjoyed the game a lot.
• The (real life) PhD student (playing as Post Doc Role) especially enjoyed how much it reflected what life was actually like doing research and got into the Role Playing getting annoyed at the Professor for using all his data and getting all the credit for the Insights!
• Lots of the events got a good laugh.
• The game works well with one or more players that know about the academic system and some that are less familiar as it generates interesting discussions when the scientists explain why this stuff actually happens in real life (and how broken the system is).

Feedback

• Players found it hard to keep track of Skills as they accumulated more tools and permanent Events, often forgetting that they could have done something for free or accidentally doing something they weren't allowed to because of a restriction they forgot about.
• There were some nice narratives people built around the Duplicate Ideas. Discussions around fear of being scooped. Discussions around importance of reproducing existing research for robustness (and actually came in useful when the Falsified Data came up as I said they only had to retract one so they didn't lose the Insight because it could rely on the Duplicate).

Suggestions for New Mechanics

• Improvements to Tools Mechanic

  • Limit number of Tools each Player can use to 2.
    • Easier to keep track of Skills
    • More strategic thinking needed to decide which Tools to Learn.
    • Narrative justification is that with a lot of Tools, if you don't use them for awhile you have to put in some effort to re-learn them.
    • Forgotten Tools go back into Players hand and can be Re-Learned by spending a Learn Action.
    • This also allows the Teaching Mechanic to work better. If you can only use 2 / 3 Tools at once then 'Teaching' one from your hand you are not using to someone else doesn't disadvantage you in any way.
  • Reveal top 3 Tool Cards. Players can choose which (if any) to Learn.
    • Allows for more strategic decision making.
    • Could allow us to have a variable cost for Tools. Some Tools could cost 2 Learn Actions to Learn (and Re-Learn) to reflect how much time they take to learn in real life.

• Deck Manipulation Abilities

  • At the moment there is a lot of waiting around for the right thing to come up.
  • A lot of games have deck manipulation mechanics i.e. Look at top three cards and rearrange, search the Deck for a particular card etc.
  • We could incorporate this as a Tool / Role Skill that grants the ability to do Deck Manipulation as an Action.
    • i.e New Role: Undergraduate has Skill to search Deck for a particular Idea (costs 2 actions) (they are good at coming up with crazy ideas) but has Limitation that they are very bad at Researching and Disseminating. Either they have to Learn Tools to help them or Collaborate with other Players
  • i.e New Role: Visionary has Skill to look at top three cards from Idea Deck and rearrange (i.e. Predicting / subtly influencing what the next big Ideas in the field will be.
  • i.e. New Tool: RIO Journal (platform where researchers can share ideas / hypotheses not just outputs) allows Player to Search Deck for a particular Idea (costs 2 actions)

• i.e. New Tool: Twitter gives Players ability to look at top 3 cards (but not rearrange). If you have your finger on the pulse of what's going on in science you can predict what will happen next.

Suggestions for New Content

• Events
  • Industry sponsor won't let you publish Experimental Methods to protect the IP.
  • Grant Approved, Researching Experimental Methods and Data Sets costs 1 less Action.
  • Fear of Scooping. Limitation for a Role. If someone Disseminates an Idea you have in your hand before you then skip your next go (sulking).

Rules / Cards Used

Based on #7 with the following rules modifications:

• Roles allocated randomly to get over the uncertainty of committing to the unknown with a new game.

Tool shop rule modification
At the end of each round any remaining cards in the Tool shop were discarded and the Tool shop replenished with the top 3 cards from the Tool deck.

Motivation for tool shop rule modification
It wasn't clear how the Tool box is supposed to restock to 3 cards. As the Tool shop got stuck very early anyway, when the 3 cards were either duplicates or replicated the ability of one of the Roles in play, we decided to try the discard / replenish mechanic in order to expose the Tools to the players.

First player rotation
At the beginning of the game the first player is given the First Player Token, allowing them to take the first turn of the round. The last action of a round is to pass the First Player Token to the next Player clockwise.

Motivation for First player rotation
When playing with the Tool box discard / replenish mechanic, First player rotation is required to prevent the same player always having the first shot at the Tool box.

Cards
The set taken from the Sprint.

Players

2 players:

• Player A: ex developmental biologist, now a science publishing professional
• Player B: ex biochemist, now a science publishing professional and software developer (me)

Game Report

• Player A: PhD Student
• Player B: Post Doc

The Tool box clogged up very quickly, and we house ruled our way out of that (see Rules section above). This did lead to some good moments of tension when considering a decision: if you don't take a Tool card, it won't be available next turn, but its duplicate might be, but only might be, but how much do you want that tool vs to do some other thing...

All but one Insight came out very late in the game, but we managed to pull it off and win in the very last turn.

Player A achieved their personal objective.

Player B did not achieve their personal objective. But only because they kept getting distracted taking notes ;-)

The way the restrictive Events and the helpful Tools acted in tension with each other worked well. At one point there it looked like the game was deadlocked, but the Teach action saved the day.

The compulsory take-a-card mechanic adds some tension as the game clock. This worked well.

Overall Impressions

• Player A enjoyed the game, and is looking forward to playing it again when the cards hold more themed content.

• General feeling it would have been more fun with more players.

Detailed Feedback

• Although it worked mechanistically (just) as a 2 player game, it wasn't as fun as the play tests with more players. Three contributing factors were the limited number of roles in play leading to limited variey in playing styles; the sheer number of tools that each player had (even though not all of them were used), and the cognitive load of managing half a deck of dependency trees each making it feel a bit fiddly.

• Little motivation to use the Teach action with 2 players and that many tools (it happened once in the whole game).

• 2 random Starting Ideas that excluded D / E / F, and no dedicated Insights, worked well.

• Player A said they thought that having the Idea sets colour coded rather than the Idea types would be helpful (types might be distinguisehd by icon).

• Player A said they would like to be easily able to distinguish between the Tools that help you Reaearch more easily and the Tools that let you Disseminate more easily.

Card clarifications

Some comments and questions regarding cards where the game effects are not totally clear:

• Tool "Pre-print server" should make it easier to disseminate using Open accesss tokens only, not with Restricted access tokens too.
• Event "Hardware failure" should only affect researched Data Sets?
• Global event ""Institutional bias" only affects non-disseminated research outputs?
• Event "Collaborate at a conference" leaves it up to the player to decide how many Ideas they want to swap?

Suggestions for New Mechanics

• The Tool box feels like it needs fixing:

  • Could consider the discard / replenish mechanic along with First player rotation. This had the effect of focusing the attention on the Tools, and the game seemed to fall into 2 phases: first the learn-lots-of-tools phase, followed by the do-the-science phase. Should the discard / replenish Tool Box mechanic be adopted, the number of cards in the Tools deck needs be a multiple of 3.

  • A simpler approach might be to increase the Tool box to, say, 5 cards and just replace cards as they are taken.

• Player A suggested decoupling the personal objectives from the Role cards and allocating them independently. Would lead to a lot more potential variation (and probably please Professors who do like open science.) Might require a rethink around the characterisation in the Role cards and the stories we want them to tell. Might also mean a lot more play testing as many more combinations.

Suggestions for New Content

Player A suggested a couple of new cards:

New Event:
Title: preLights
Flavour text: Your paper has been featured in preLights
Game effect: You may give an Idea of your choice to a player of your choice.

New Event:
Title: Mendeley
Flavour text: Someone shares a paper with you in Mendeley
Game effect: You may request a specific Idea from the player of your choice, who may decide to give it to you.

• Also encourage people to play 'house' rules and submit Play Test Reports

Rules Used

See 4d60e5a for exact rules used

• At the start of each turn players MUST draw 1 from the Idea Deck.
• They can still choose to use a Ponder Action to draw an additional Card from the Idea Deck.
• The game ends when the group 'Runs out of Ideas' (last card draw from Idea Deck).
• Global Impact cards were shuffled into Idea Deck.
• Players started with 1 Insight and 1 additional Idea.
• Retractions were shuffled back into the Deck.
• We started with 2 of each Primary Idea (A,B,C,D) in the Deck.
• Duplicate Ideas could be Researched and Disseminated, however the same Insight could only be Disseminated once.
• Top 3 Tools were placed face up. Players can choose which to Learn.
• Players could only have 2 Tools active at any one time and could swap for an Action, returning the unused Tool to their hand.

Who was playing?

• Player A was a doctor and played as the Data Scientist.
• Player B was someone who did a masters in Physics and now works as a Cloud computing consultant and played as the Post Doc.
• Player C was me playing as the PhD Student.

What happened in the game?

• The rules were explained to the Players before hand in the car. They were then able to pick it up fairly easily when we got the actual cards out.
• Player A (as the Data Scientist) was able to Research and Published lots of Analysis very quickly in keeping with his character.
• However, we didn't draw any Methods cards for ages which stopped us progressing.
• Player A then got hit by the 'Teach a Lecture Course - Take 1 less Action per turn' card and also has a Role Limitation that it takes 2 actions to Research Data Sets so there was very little he could do. He equipped a Tool to take it back down to 1 Action but then he had Data Set E which needed 2 Actions to Research!
• We lost the game but would have won if there we had 1 more turn so fairly well timed.
• We got a bit screwed over by poor shuffling of the Deck on my part.

Overall Impressions

• A good game, needs better balancing.
• Quite frustrating because often you were close to being able to do something but couldn't because of the dependency bottlenecks. Felt you couldn't do anything useful because you are just waiting.

Feedback

• Too straightforward, doesn't require enough strategic thinking.
  • Not enough room for decision making because you were mainly just limited by what you CAN do.
• Hard to keep track of things.
  • What the Action cost is for different things for each Player.
  • Which of my Ideas I can play based on what's on the Table.
• Not sure what Disseminate means, why not Publish?
• Closed Access didn't have much of an effect over the game.
• Should be more mechanics to swap cards.
• Retraction Notice shouldn't apply to Insights. Too disruptive. If it was for Methods it would provide an incentive to publish Duplicates.
• At the start you should be dealt 2 random Ideas, having an Insight from the beginning is pointless because they take so long to actually be useful (especially if there is a hand limit).
• You should be able to pick your Roles. Allows people to feel more invested in their character and introduces another strategic decision.
• Pre-print server is Over Powered. Definitely shouldn't be two of them.

Suggestions for New Mechanics

• There should be a hand limit to make it easier to keep track of what you can do.
  • Introduces strategic decisions.
  • Creates an incentive to Research ASAP to avoid having to discard cards.
• A way to unblock Events.
• Teaching may introduce more strategy.
• Maybe it requires an additional Action to use 'Restricted Access Content'?
• Spend an Action to clear the Tool shop.

Suggestions for New Content

• Go on Vacation - skip a turn
• Attend Open Science Event - Search the Tool Deck for a Tool and equip it.
• Role with an Extra Tool slot.

Rules / Cards Used

See commit f5f032c for the rules / cards used.

• Played with a Hand Limit of 7.
• Undergraduate could search Deck for any idea.
• Professor could look at top 3 cards and rearrange.

(we didn't really play with personal objectives)

Players

• Played with my family. All non-scientists (apart from me).

• Player A as Post Doc. Player B as Professor. Player C as Librarian. Player D as Undergraduate.

Game Report

• Got the Retraction Notices early in the game so they didn't have much of an impact.

• Got a lot of A/B/C/D early in the game so there wasn't much blockage to Research. E/F/G only came up later.

• Won comfortably in about 40 mins with lots of cards left in Deck.

• Undergraduate never used their power to Search the Deck for any Idea.

• Not much Tool use. Undergraduate used it quite effectively to overcome their role limitations.

• The 'look at top 3 cards' mechanic was used effectively twice (once by the Professor and once from the Event) to arrange things so that Events had least impact on the game (i.e. Undergraduate took the Elsevier Subscription cancellation).

• Had a few instances of people getting scooped (someone publishing an Insight just before someone else).

Overall Impressions

• Player A found it initially confusing. Maybe understanding the terminology 'Research / Publish' etc would've made it easier to remember the rules. Had to keep being told what cost an Action and what didn't (drawing a card at start of turn isn't an action, Research and Publish are separate Actions).

• Player B found it easy to follow the rules. Took awhile to get into but enjoyed it in the end. Really liked the collaboration aspect. Found it interesting to learn the different aspects of the scientific process even at a basic level. The lesson about Open Science making things easier really came through.

• Personally I thought it all went a bit too smoothly. Felt too easy.

Detailed Feedback

• The Hand Limit never came into play as no one ever had more than 5 cards in their hand so I don't think it's a problem.

• Never really felt blocked. Undergraduate never even used Deck search ability (maybe just forgot but clearly didn't ever have a desperate need and still won comfortably).

• Tools were used quite conservatively. It was never too difficult to keep track of the cost.

Suggestions for New Mechanics

• I really want something to happen when someone get's scooped (another Player publishes and Insight they have before them). Not sure what though? Skip a turn because you are grumpy? Would show that fear of scooping is silly and damaging when you are all trying to get to the same end.

• I still quite want to try a more binary approach to skills so you're not calculating the cost of Actions, you just can or can't. Also might encourage more Tool use.

• I think having separate Personal Objective Cards would be quite a good addition as discussed.

• I think having everyone Publish Restricted Access by default would've raised the stakes on the Open Access Publishing side.

Suggestions for New Content

• For the Objectives Cards, they should say the Group Objective (to remind everyone) and a Personal Objective. One of the Objectives Cards should not care about the Group Objective but the game should be set up such that it's actually really hard to for them to get their Personal Objective without helping everyone else (due to dependencies).