Team:ULB-Brussels/Human/MissionBGF

The second edition of the Brussels Games Festival (BGF) hosted for 32h more than 3000 participants on the theme of board and role-playing games. It is an opportunity for game creators to advertise their inventions, and for actors of the game community to reach their public directly

We were assigned to the “Games and society” section of the BGF by highlighting the ludic dimension of the iGEM competition and the similarities between Biobrick construction and Lego™ constructions. We created Bactéries : Mission survie (Bacteria : Survival mission), a board game on the thematic of microbiology. We discussed about our iGEM project while explaining the rules of our board game to players. Should they be receptive, we would talk over the subjects of bioindustry, genetic modifications and antibiotic resistance to evaluate their knowledge in biotechnologies.

Our project was a success : More than 50 quizzes about biotechnologies where answered, and dozens of people stopped at our stand to play and talk with us for more than half an hour. The festival was also featured in the RTBF news (Radio-Télévision Belge de la communauté Française, the main French-speaking Belgian broadcasting organism) where we appreared for a short moment. (see http://www.rtbf.be/video/detail_brussels-games-festival?id=1949379 between 00:48 and 01:07)

Game description

Board game for 2 to 6 players

Synopsis

"You are a bacterium. Your mission: survive. The big bad human beings released massive quantities of toxic chemicals, known as antibiotics, in order to kill you. To save yourself and your brethren, you will have to find and gather the hallowed relics of your folk: the antibiotic resistance genes !"

Game rules

• The board includes a linear DNA molécule and 4 plasmids [Pic. 3]. The DNA molecule begins by a condensed chromosome and is composed of an helix skeleton and 4 DNA bases of different colours. The plasmids are circular DNA molecules that are represented by 4 discs at the bottom of the board. Each plasmid contains a resistance gene, a replication inhibitor frame, and an origin of replication frame. There are 4 plasmids, each bearing the resistance to an antibiotic (resistance to Ampicilin, Tectracyclin, Kanamycin and Chloramphenicol), and each characterized by a different colour corresponding to a DNA base.


Picture 3: The board we created for Bactéries : Mission survie.


• There are 5 Petri dishes delivered with the board: one containing several tokens of the 4 colours corresponding to the plasmids and the DNA bases (yellow, orange, dark blue and light blue), and 4 which contain the resistance genes flanked with 2 restrictions sites (HindIII, BamHI, or EcoRI ; one Petri dish per antiobiotic) [Pic. 4]. A gene flanked by 2 definite restriction site is called a Biobrick.


Picture 4: The five dishes, four of them containing antibiotic resistance genes.


• Each player begins on the condensed chromosome. One player at a time rolls the 2 dices, choose the dice with the number that suits him the best, and hops the corresponding number of DNA bases on the board. Once he stops on a DNA base, he is given a token of the colour corresponding to the colour of the base he has stopped upon. One can hop from base to base following the same DNA strand, or one can jump from one strand to the other using two complementary bases (the bases that face each other on their respective strand).
• Once a player has obtained 2 tokens of the same colour, he must exchange them in order to reach the plasmid of the corresponding colour. He is positioned on the origin of replication (ORI), and wait for his next turn.
• In order to gain an antibiotic resistance gene, the player has to stop on the corresponding frame. Once he has, he can draw a resistance gene in the deck corresponding to the antibiotic of the plasmid. If he stops on the “Replication inhibitor” frame, he must skip his next turn.
• In order to exit a plasmid, the player must stop on the ORI frame or play a 2 with one dice, and chose this dice to move (he then exits the plasmid at the end of the turn, after having moved of 2 frames). Playing a 2 represents duplicating the plasmid. Beware: those conditions compel the player to exit the plasmid, even if he has not managed to retrieve the resistance gene yet !
• In order to win, a player has to collect all 4 resistance genes, and thoses genes must have complementary restriction sites (e.g., if you draw a EcoRI|Kanalmycine|BamHI resistance gene, you can only connect it with another resistance gene that begins by BamHI or ends by EcoRI). You must thus make a giant Biobrick that assembles the 4 antibiotic resistance genes in whatever order allows the restriction site to complement each other [Pic. 5].


Picture 5: Final configuration achieved by an 11yo child during a game, winning the game in front of 3 adult opponents with the four resistances collected.