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From WBEZ Chicago, this is Nerda and I'm Greta Johnson. We did it. We made it to another weekend.

Today we are going to revisit a topic that I find endlessly fascinating. It's a little

many series we started last year called nerdy jobs. Now what I love about these conversations

is that they are a peak into a totally different career than your own. There a chance to learn

about creativity and craft in a huge variety of fields and about how a person ended up doing

something super cool and surprising and maybe even a little bit random. Today we're going to listen

back in here from some professional knitters and someone who watches movies as her job.

But first up is a game designer. Elizabeth Hargrave is the creator of the wildly popular

game wingspan. She says it all started when she and her nature nerd friends realized all their

favorite board games were about topics they didn't actually care about. We were like why are there

no games about anything that were actually interested in like why are they all about castles and

trades. Many of you have probably already played it but for those of you wingspan noobs out there,

here's how Elizabeth describes the game. Each card is a different bird and you are playing out your

own personal set of birds into this area that's sort of like a park that you control and the

different areas in the park that you do different things in the games. So one lets you get more cards

and one lets you lay eggs which are points and as you put birds out into those different areas,

they make you better at doing those basic elements of the game. Obviously Elizabeth has thought a

lot about that magical combination of when a game is both difficult and fun. So you have games with

simple rules like Uno but also not a lot of decisions to make and you have games with super

...