She Invented a Board Game with Scientific Integrity. It’s Taking Off
First, a side note: this article seems to do a lot of lauding of her game on the basis that she&#x27;s a woman designing a board game.  Granted, this is not an industry with a large % of women in design roles, but it&#x27;s definitely not some revolutionary role she&#x27;s taking on, and the article definitely makes her seem like she&#x27;s taking on the industry alone.<p>As for the game:  It definitely looks interesting enough -- Very similar to &quot;Evolution&quot;, but with a lot more stats that are tracked.<p>I found some quotes in the article that I took umbrage with as well, pointing to them overly lauding her:<p>&gt; [...] some gamers scratched their heads and said, “Birds? Really!?” They expressed concern that our feathered friends might not resonate with a community usually drawn to zombies, dragons, spaceships, farming, civilizations and (of course) trains.<p>We have board games about some of the most banal possible topics, and they are some of the best ones out there, and this isn&#x27;t even the first game like this (see my comment about Evolution).  Also, in that list of &quot;things gamers like&quot;, some of those things are not like the others, and serve as perfect examples that esoteric or &quot;boring&quot; topics still make gamers play a game if the game using the topic is a good one.  Seems like they cherry picked the few people who had a negative reaction to subject matter -- After seeing the offerings at GenCon last year, I can say that most board game enthusiasts care very little in the end about the topic, and much more about enjoyable gameplay and interesting mechanics.<p>&gt; It offers numerous paths to victory (the Holy Grail in game design) without inducing “analysis paralysis.”<p>I am not a board game designer, but I am a very big enthusiast and have played LOTS of different games.  This does not strike me as a &quot;Holy Grail in game design&quot;.  This is pretty much an expectation for any reasonably complex board game coming out these days.  I can think of plenty of examples that satisfy this criteria, and have for years.<p>In the end, I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s probably a great game -- it definitely seems to hit on lots of things popular games use these days, and it seems like it was made to still be approachable despite its depth behind the scenes, but this article does a pretty awful job representing the game in favor of trying to elevate the designer to a status that she really doesn&#x27;t fit in, let alone need to succeed.  The game is already successful.  Let her credentials ride on that, not on her gender.<p>[EDIT]:  Removed some hyperbole.  No need for that.