Team:Mingdao/Education/Board Game

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MINGDAO CHECKER – TEETH BATTLE

    The board game is a simple way both entertaining and educating people to learn new things. We’re inspired by Taiwan’s traditional board game, Chinese checkers (跳棋). We designed a Mingdao Checker – Teeth Battle for understanding oral biology and synthetic biology. Through playing the game, the participants will know how the tooth decay happens, what factors and bacteria influence the disease, and what actions you can do to prevent caries. The board game has two opposite players on behalf of oral natural antagonistic relationship between S. sanguinis and S. mutans, which are resulting in oral health or tooth decay, respectively. Just play the game by moving the teeth across the board and get knowledge you never learned in such a way.

PLAYERS

    The board game is divided into two sides, the combat between two opposite biofilms in the human oral cavity with antagonist relationship between Streptococcus sanguinis and Streptococcus mutans, plainly speaking “the good bacteria” and “the bad bacteria”, respectively. Each of these two kinds of bacteria has their own weapon equipped to attack the other and utilized to protect themselves away from the other's attack.

CARDS

    There are four types of cards linked to the various reactions, combat occurring in human oral.

  TYPE I

BACTERIA CARDS: Streptococcus sanguinis and Streptococcus mutans. The players choose one of them in the beginning of the game.

  TYPE II

ABILITY CARDS: a stack of cards for the players randomly picking up, including offence and defense cards with corresponding bacterial genes. For examples, S. sanguinis has pyruvate oxidase gene to produce H2O2 and thiol peroxidase to decompose H2O2. S. mutans has lactate dehydrogenase to generate lactic acid and NADH oxidase to deal with oxygen stress in the environment.

  TYPE III

COMPONENT CARDS: a stack of cards for the chosen bacteria to survive or attack such as energy, oxygens, carbohydrates, and the other nutrients. For example, biofilm can be made by the transfer of glucose to sucrose to glucan and finally to biofilm.

  TYPE IV

OPPORTUNITY CARDS: which can be taken after each round, providing challenges for the players to deal with such as environmental shocks (e.g., anaerobic stress and aerobic status), energy metabolism (e.g., ATP, TCA and ETC reaction cycles.)

GAME RULES

    The types of cards can be distributed around the board and taken according to the rule. Players don't have to be worried about not knowing the ability of each card. The cards in hand cover all of the information the players need for the game. What’s on the top of card is the contents including the bacterial name, the card’s type, the function with a short description to inform and suggest the player's action.

  Rules

The rules of the board game are pretty simple.
  • Randomly pick up a BACTERIA CARD, in which S. mutans will destroy teeth, otherwise, S. sanguinis will make teeth healthy.
  • Both sides pick 3 cards in the beginning with 5 teeth in hand.
  • Pick one OPPORTUNITY CARDS in the beginning of each round, shown to the opponent.
  • Pick 2 ABILITY CARDS and 2 teeth after each round
  • Put the used cards back to the bottom of the card stack
  • Move with your TEETH across the board with your strategy and tactics.
  • Cards in your hand can be assembled to make a function for protection or attack.
  • To attack, your TOOTH will be replaced by others. On the other hand, the opponent can use biofilm (ABILITY CARD) to defend from the attack.
  • The TEETH have to be connected when moving your tooth. If a tooth were taken over by the opponent’s attack, all TEETH in front of it will be wiped out.
  • Who is the first player moving the connected TEETH to the opposite of the board will win the game.

  Strategies

We provided several strategies for players who want to win the TEETH BATTLE.
  • Build your CARDS up at the beginning of the game, don’t be in a rush on putting the TEETH.
  • Attack the opponent’s TEETH by breaking their line.
  • Protect your line from being disrupted by the opponent using ABILITY CARD (e.g., biofilm).
  • Try to place your TEETH to block the opponent’s line.
  • In order to prevent your connected line from being separated by the opponent, you can build a thicker line with ABILITY CARDS and COMPONENT CARDS to defense.
  • Assemble CARDS with a set of ABILITY CARDS and COMPONENT CARDS to make functional attack and defense.
  • Carefully keep CARDS in need, because you may lack CARDS near the end.

  Some tricks easy to remember

There’s easy tricks for players who have no ideas what they can move in the next step.
  • Place the TEETH
  • Assemble your CARDS
  • Break the opponent’s line
  • Block the opponent’s path
  • Just pass a round and wait more CARDS

CARD INFORMATION

CONCLUSION

    S. sanguinis benefits human oral health and is considered as an ally to help humans in terms of fighting against S. mutans. S. sanguinis produces hydrogen peroxide as its primary weapon against S. mutans. On the other hand, S. mutans is the enemy to teeth due to its lactate production. The acidic environment will be harmful to acid-sensitive S. sanguinis.

    We design this Board Game – Teeth Battle to educate people oral health-related knowledge through entertainment! The game is easy to play with simple rules listed on the card. The homeostasis of the oral cavity is complicated as you may see. However, we believe, through this Board Game, the participants at all ages can easily and impressively learn oral microbiology by just playing a game.