QUARTETnary - the card game about the geological time scale: crowdfunding, manufacturing, and educational value

QUARTETnary is an educational card game about the geological time scale. Consisting of 60 beautifully illustrated and colourful cards, QUARTETnary has players explore all the important events in the Earth’s history: from dinosaurs to humans and from the formation of the Alps to the formation of the Himalayas. 

Suitable for ages 8 and up, gameplay follows that of the classic card game ‘quartets’, where players aim to collect sets of four cards belonging to a specific group (in this case, a certain geological time unit). At the end of the game, the player with the most complete geological time line (i.e., the most quartets) wins the game! 

Here, we present the design of the fully finished card game (including prototypes to play at the Geoscience Game Night at EGU!) and our journey to get the game manufactured. Specifically, we will touch upon the following:

• setting up our own company ‘The Silly Scientist’ to publish the game 
• finding and selecting a printer 
• playtesting the game (how to make a prototype?) and the design changes to the cards as a result of playtesting 
• the preparation of and results from our crowdfunding campaign via Kickstarter 
• distribution and shipping of QUARTETnary to Kickstarter backers and going towards retail

To assess the educational benefits of QUARTETnary, we also present preliminary results from surveys filled in by people before and after playing QUARTETnary. The surveys assess players’ knowledge of the geological time scale and the history of the Earth through both self-assessment (“How much do you know about Earth’s history?”) and objective questions testing knowledge of specific events (“Which geological time period(s) ended with a major mass extinction?”) and the order of events (“What happened in the same time period during which the Sahara was formed?”). Hence, through the surveys we are able to assess if and how a player’s knowledge on the history of the Earth improves through playing QUARTETnary. In addition, we gather subjective feedback through the surveys on what players think of QUARTETnary both in terms of being fun to play and as an educational tool. The subset of results shown here stem from playtesting QUARTETnary with colleagues and friends with a university and Earth science / astronomy background who generally played the game once between filling in the before and after surveys. Future data from the Kickstarter backers should give a more complete overview of the educational value of QUARTETnary with more diversity in (scholarly) backgrounds and the amounts of times QUARTETnary was played between surveys.