Devlog #1

Our team is working to build a board game based around invasive species in the Great Lakes Region. We want to make a game that is fun for board game enthusiasts to play, while also helping players learn about the effects of invasive species in the area and what can be done to stop the spread. 

Because many existing educational games around invasive species are aimed at school-age children, we want to focus more on an adult audience and are drawing from games with mechanics of spreading such as Pandemic and Pox. Also, since we narrowed our initial focus to the Great Lakes Region, we are going to use zebra mussels as a starting point to think about modeling the ecosystem in our game. 

Zebra mussels attach to any hard surface in the water, such as boats, pipes, and docks, which can cause structural damage and increase maintenance costs. In addition, zebra mussels consume phytoplankton, which reduces the availability of nutrients for organisms higher up the food chain and can cause harmful habitat alterations. Zebra mussels can be spread between bodies of water by people transporting boats, fishing equipment, or cargo. 

In our game, players will be able to move around the Great Lakes in order to stop outbreaks of zebra mussel populations from spreading through actions such as Inspect and Restore. We are working on determining specific environmental impacts and native species that we want to include in the game.