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Playing god with evolution

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 6, pages 662–663 (2022)Cite this article

Darwin’s theory of natural selection describes how competition between individuals leads to organisms becoming adapted to their environments — giving the appearance of design, without a designer. Four recent board games have turned different aspects of natural selection into a game. But are they fun? And could they even be used to teach the science?

Genotype (Genius Games; 1–5 players; 47–75 min; age 14+) has turned Mendelian genetics into a game. In this game, players are monks conducting experiments to try and understand genetic inheritance. That might sound crazy, but it really does work. You gain points by collecting different pea genotypes, and how best to do that is an efficiency puzzle. You need to plan what pea genotypes to search for, manipulate the parental plants, hire assistants, use tools and set research goals! Good play requires you to adjust your strategy depending upon how the game is progressing, but also gives the opportunity to mess with other players — for example, by choosing parental plants that make it harder or impossible to get the genotypes that other players require. Genius Games have done an amazing job of representing the science, and Genotype could easily be a teaching aid as well as a game. It even includes a booklet that goes into the science, and how the mechanics of the game were designed to capture the science.

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Fig. 1: Gods Love Dinosaurs.

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  1. Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Stuart West

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Correspondence to Stuart West.

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West, S. Playing god with evolution. Nat Ecol Evol 6, 662–663 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01736-9

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