Rowitt, Ryan

This presentation will present Grassvasion, a tabletop game for 3-4 players that illustrates basic concepts around invasive grasses. The game is a form of science communication from an NSF grant studying the governance of invasive grasses in Southern Arizona. In the game (and in real life), a diverse set of actors needs to build their shared capacity to stem the invasion before the invasion overwhelms the community. The game is semi-cooperative. Different players take on different roles (a rancher, a park ranger, an activist, an analyst) with different individual objectives and different incentives to work together (or not) to stem the invasion. In this panel, I will present an overview of Grassvasion, including our motivation for developing the game, how we developed game mechanics and objectives that effectively communicate key themes in our social-ecological system, and how we plan to use the game to teach people in our community and beyond about the challenge of invasive grasses – and how to overcome those challenges.