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From the maker of the viral bird board game Wingspan comes your next nature boardgame adventure- Undergrove, Elizabeth Hargrave’s new game about mushrooms. Join the National Museum of Natural History for a fungi-filled evening for amateur mycologists, mushroom-hunters, fungi-lovers, and gamers alike.

Elizabeth Hargrave (game designer), Ted Schultz (entomologist specializing in fungus-farming ants, NMNH), and Ian Medeiros (Peter Buck Fellow, Department of Biology, NMNH) chat with Rebecca Johnson (Associate Director for Science and Chief Scientist, NMNH) about their work around fungi and symbiotic relationships, appreciating biodiversity and connecting to nature, and what makes then excited about the wild world of mushrooms.

After the conversation, stick around to learn and play Undergrove with game tables facilitated by Labyrinth Games, chat with NMNH experts, color a lichen, and enjoy late hours at the Museum Gallery shop.

Registration is free and encouraged; seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors open at 6:00 pm, program starts at 6:30 pm. Gallery shop is open for program participants between 6:00 pm and 8:30 pm.

 

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Bios:

Elizabeth Hargrave
Elizabeth Hargrave spent over 20 years working as a policy analyst before she started designing board games on the side. Her first game, Wingspan, was inspired by her love of birds. It has broken out of the niche boardgame market to sell 2 million copies worldwide, turning gamers into birders and birders into gamers along the way. Since then, she's published games on migrating monarch butterflies, fox genetics, and Victorian flower language. Her latest release, Undergrove, is about the mycorrhizal relationships between trees and mushrooms.

Ian Medeiros
Ian Medeiros is a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History. Grounded in systematic biology and natural history, his research deals with symbiotic interactions and the biodiversity, evolution, biogeography, and ecology of a group of fungi that includes species from baker’s yeasts to bread mold, from fungi that cause athlete’s foot to the gray and green lichens on tree bark.

Ted Schultz
Ted Schultz is the curator of ants and research entomologist at the National Museum of Natural History. He works broadly on the systematics and evolution of ants, but his main research focus is studying the coevolution and dynamics of fungus-farming ants and their fungal cultivars- ants that began farming millions of years before the evolution of humans. Ted spends a lot of time in the Neotropics collecting ants and fungi, from which he obtains phylogenomic and other diverse data.