Prototype character cards© “LAB WARS” BY CAEZAR AL-JASSAR AND KULY HEER; GRAPHIC DESIGN BY CRIMZON STUDIO, ILLUSTRATIONS BY NIZAR ILMANWould you poison a competing scientist’s tea? Steal another lab’s research secrets? You can, in a card game being developed by Caezar Al-Jassar and Kuly Heer.
Al-Jassar, a structural biologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and Heer, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, enjoy playing games when they’re not in the lab. Inspired by anecdotes told to them by friends and colleagues as well as stories reported in Michael Brooks’s 2013 book Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science, the pair decided to create a game of their own while on holiday in Spain last summer.
“Lab Wars,” which is suitable for both scientists and nonscientists, over-exaggerates the realities of lab life, with a focus on career-building and competition. Players adopt characters—a grad student, postdoc, professor, or lab tech, among others—and scheme to gain academic prestige.
When Al-Jassar and Heer first demoed the game, at a December tabletop ...
