Lab Wars
Forget Pokémon, there’s a new science-themed card game where you build up your lab and sabotage your competitors all for scientific glory.
My editor, Mark Rosenzweig, sent me a link to a Wall Street Journal article that touted offbeat games. Lab Wars, created by a pair of scientists in the United Kingdom, was among the mix. According to the article, players control a team of professors, postdoctoral fellows and Ph.D. students and amass scientific equipment and publications (journal articles and books). Whichever lab attains the most “impact points” wins the game. A clever sabotage element converts the game from a simple race into a contest that also involves deducing and interfering with the other labs’ strategies.
The designers, Caezar Al-Jassar and Kuly Heer, state that the game cards are based on real life events they, as scientists, have encountered, heard about or researched. Al-Jassar has a B.Sc from Cardiff University in Pharmacology and a Ph.D from Birmingham University in molecular and structural biology. He works at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. Heer has a B.Sc in Psychology from Aston University and a Ph.D in Psychology from Birmingham University.
On the Lab Wars website, the duo notes: “Being a difficult and laborious industry, some famous and/or dodgy scientists have often [resorted] to underhanded tactics to get ahead of their peers. Using this as the driving force we decided that we should create a game around this concept so that players could be devious against one another with a science theme.”
Let’s just hope this doesn’t go the way Pokémon has and we find players roaming around labs trying to capture scientists and besmirch their reputations for real.
