The Gaming with Science Podcast looks at the intersection of science and tabletop board games, with the occasional dip into video games, RPGs, game theory, or whatever else the dice roll up. If you ever wondered how natural selection shows up in Evolution, whether Cytosis reflects actual cell metabolism, or what the socioeconomics of Monopoly are, this is the place for you. (And if not, we hope you’ll give us a try anyway.) So grab a drink, pull out some dice, and let’s get gaming with science!
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The Gaming with Science Podcast looks at the intersection of science and tabletop board games, with the occasional dip into video games, RPGs, game theory, or whatever else the dice roll up. If you ever wondered how natural selection shows up in Evolution, whether Cytosis reflects actual cell metabolism, or what the socioeconomics of Monopoly are, this is the place for you. (And if not, we hope you’ll give us a try anyway.) So grab a drink, pull out some dice, and let’s get gaming with science!
#GeniusGames #STEMEducation #SciComm #JohnCoveyou #BoardGames #Science
We've done several episodes on games from Genius Games (Cytosis, Periodic, Genotype), and now we get to speak to the man behind it all: John Coveyou, founder and CEO of Genius Games. John graciously sat down with us to talk about the beginning of Genius Games, the stigma of "educational" games, the challenges and joys of STEM game design, and some of his favorite non-Genius games to play. So sit back and enjoy this conversation with the man who makes our job easy, John Coveyou.
Timestamps
00:00 Introductions
01:55 History of John and Genius Games
07:50 Designing Educational Games
13:19 Balancing Fun and Realism
20:54 Most Challenging Games to Design
29:55 Upcoming Offerings
36:36 Favorite (Non-Genius) Games
38:23 Wrap-Up
Links
Genius Games website
Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net
This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
Splash images courtesy of Genius Games.
Full Transcript
(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )
Jason 0:00 Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.
Jason 0:07 Today we're talking with John Coveyou, CEO and founder of genius games.
Brian 0:16 Hey everybody. Welcome to a creator interview. I'm Brian.
Jason 0:19 This is Jason,
Brian 0:20 and joining us is John Coveyou from genius games, John, can you introduce yourself?
John 0:26 Sure, yeah, I'm the owner of genius games. I've owned it since about 2011 and we make science accurate board games and jigsaw puzzles for the hobby market.
Brian 0:38 Those are very cool and very popular. I think I like the the frog. One in particular is very good.
John 0:44 You dissect a frog in a lot of public school science classes, so we want to make sure we threw that one in there.
Brian 0:49 I don't think I did a frog. Did you ever do a frog?
John 0:52 I did. I think it was 10th grade biology.
Jason 0:55 I don't remember if I ever dissected a frog. I did do a fetal pig.
Brian 0:59 I remember we did a heart one time and that actually, like, screwed me up for a long time.
John 1:03 Yeah, I don't want to know what this stuff looks like inside of my body. Let me just move on.
Brian 1:10 Fair enough. We're really excited to be able to get you on to talk to us today. Our whole reason for existence is to talk about board games and science and genius games. As you can imagine, we have done many of your games before. We've done cytosis and periodic. We did genotype. We have more games planned in the future. We're going to be doing cellulose and probably whatever else comes down the pipe. Eventually. I'm sure we'll, we'll touch on most, if not all, of the games in the genius library.
John 1:37 Well, that's great, because those are two of my favorite things, science and board gaming and both have, I mean, honestly, had a dramatic impact on my life in many ways. I mean, I run a company that combines those two, but the impact goes much deeper than that. So I'm very excited to talk about both of those things and how they came together. Could you
Jason 1:55 give us a bit of your background there? Because this is not necessarily a logical place to end up. At the intersection of science and board game. Your company basically lives in the space of making what I call hard science games, games where they're not just inspired by science, but they try to portray it accurately and faithfully. What brought you to that place?
John 2:13 Yeah, and you know, it's a long, windy story, but I will try and summarize it as quick as possible. I think when you see a lot of games out there in the marketplace and you see, you know, a scie
Gaming with Science
The Gaming with Science Podcast looks at the intersection of science and tabletop board games, with the occasional dip into video games, RPGs, game theory, or whatever else the dice roll up. If you ever wondered how natural selection shows up in Evolution, whether Cytosis reflects actual cell metabolism, or what the socioeconomics of Monopoly are, this is the place for you. (And if not, we hope you’ll give us a try anyway.) So grab a drink, pull out some dice, and let’s get gaming with science!
