Okay folks, it's time!! This was definitely a labor of love, and something that's been in the works for 4+ years.
Inspired by the perfect similarity between #JWST's primary mirror and the Catan board, I present JWST Catan: Explore the Universe
#UnfoldTheUniverse 🧵(1/23)
2/ The full board at a glance. This is a 1-to-1 mapping to the original Catan game, subbing in astro stuff for all your favorite resources and game pieces.
In what I'm sure will be way too long a thread, I'll show the pieces and mappings from the original game
3/ (Just to be super clear, I'm making no claims to creating any ideas or Catan gameplay. All I did was come up with some astro mappings and go a bit overboard in painting game pieces and designing cards etc.)
4/ So let's jump right in and explore JWST Catan. Instead of an island, we're exploring a whole universe!
5/ First, you can collect dark matter from the cosmic web
(Original Catan: hills produce brick)
Inspiration for tile art: the Millennium Simulation wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/virgo/…
6/ And gas from planetary nebulae
(Original: forest produces wood)
Inspiration for tile art: loosely based on the Helix Nebula, nasa.gov/multimedia/ima…
7/ Ionizing (wooo!) photos from OB associations
(Original: fields produce grain)
Inspiration for tile art: I sorta made this one up
8/ Neutrinos from stellar fusion
(Original: mountains produce ore)
Inspiration for tile art: image of the sun by the Solar Orbiter
esa.int/ESA_Multimedia…
9/ And metals from supernovae (and just to confuse things, there are tiles meant to represent both type Ia and core collapse supernovae)
(Original: fields produce wool (or sheep))
10/ Inspiration for supernova tile hexes:
- the Type Ia was inspired by an artist's impression
esa.int/Science_Explor…
- the core collapse SN is loosely based on an artist's conception of SN2016aps
pweb.cfa.harvard.edu/news/8629/imag…
11/ The cosmic void doesn't produce any resources, and the Black Hole steals resources
(The desert produces nothing, and the Robber steals resources)
Inspiration for Black Hole: @ehtelescope's image of M87* in April 2019 eventhorizontelescope.org
12/ Form a galaxy with dark matter, gas, photons and metals.
Evolve a galaxy into a galaxy cluster with 2x photons and 3x neutrinos
(Original: building a settlement requires brick, wood, grain and wool/ sheep. Upgrading a settlement into a city requires 2x grain and 3x ore)
13/ You can form a filament with dark matter and gas.
Or get a cosmic evolution card with metals, photons and neutrinos
(Building a road requires brick and wood. A development card requires sheep/wool, grain, and ore)
14/ The back of the resource and cosmic evolution cards is a simulated #JWST deep field created by @stsci.
And the rulebook cover features parts of 3 of JWST'S early release observations (SMACS 0723, the Carina Nebula, and Stephan's Quintet nasa.gov/webbfirstimages)
15/ In the bonus version of the game, the back of the cosmic evolution cards is the @ceers_jwst logo!
16/ Cosmic evolution cards come in 3 varieties:
- Black hole formation (original: knight cards)
- Progress cards
- Cosmic milestone cards (victory point cards)
17/ Cosmic milestone cards include
- ionizing a bubble (Figure 4 from Tilvi+2020 ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020ApJ...…)
- forming a milky way (spitzer.caltech.edu/image/ssc2008-…)
- creating an active galactic nucleus (composite of Centaurus A, apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080110.…)
18/ - enriching the circumgalactic medium, Fig 1 Tumlinson, Peeples, & Werk 2017 ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017ARA%26…
- colliding neutron stars (based on an animation of a neutron star merger svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10543 & the 'chirp' detected in @LIGO data on 17 Aug 2017 ligo.caltech.edu/page/press-rel…
19/ Earn 2 cosmic milestones for forming the longest filament or the most massive black hole
(2 victory points for the longest road or largest army)
20/ Instead of domestic and maritime trade at harbors, use extragalactic and multiverse trade at spaceports
21/ The base of the board is a set of beautiful birch laser cut pieces made by CuttingEtchGA etsy.com/shop/cuttinget…
And the cards were printed by makeplayingcards.com
22/ The rulebook and a PDF for the cards will be available on github once I finish reducing real #JWST data🎉🎉, so in 1 to 7 months 🤪😀
23/23 Thanks for hanging this long!
And congrats to the entire #JWST team and absolutely everyone involved over the years for creating, building, launching, commissioning and supporting such an incredible observatory!!!
Wow everyone, I'm really touched by the warm reception!! I was so excited to share the results, I'm glad folks're enjoying it! And I'm super excited to hear from/get to meet so many more space nerds!!
I'm seeing questions about getting this up as a Kickstarter. Unfortunately I don't have any plans for this at the moment, but I won't rule it out entirely 😉. I'll let y'all know if/when that happens
In the meantime, I hope everyone continues to enjoy exploring the universe with #JWST!
Also, #RenameJWST
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