The Publish or Perish Game

Welcome to the chaotic life of academic publishing! In this game, you will publish useless nonsense, sabotage your colleagues’ research, and provide unhelpful comments, Reviewer 2 style. Your goal is to gain as many citations as possible when the game ends, ideally with your sanity and self-respect intact. 

The player with the most citations wins the game!

Use Research Cards like "Idea" and "Data" to publish, "Mishap Cards" to sabotage, and cards like "Collaboration" and "Workshop Attendance" to get ahead!

Trivia cards with carefully curated trivia questions and weird but true facts were specifically designed for those who are intellectually curious about everything in the world!

Created by Max Hui Bai Ph.D., tested by grad students, professors, and scholars from research institutes across the world.

Game Rules

Easy to play: the rules are all on one page!

Reviewer Comments

Reviewer 1

Reviewer 2

Fortunately, this game has so far evaded the attention of Reviewer 2🫣

Reviewer 3

Reviewer 4

Reviewer 5

Reviewer 6

Additional Reviewer Comments 

Note. The four reviews above are from a pre-released listing on Amazon. The game is not yet available for sale on Amazon, and any retail orders will be processed after all Kickstarter orders have been fulfilled.

Are you also interested in testing a preview copy? Write to max@thepublishorperishgame.com to request a preview copy! If you are an influencer, a journalist, have a sizable academic following, or are willing to post a video (e.g., for a play-through), Max would love to hear from you!

Press

Nature

C&EN

CMJ

新浪

Rédaction Médicale et Scientifique

Il Venerdì di Repubblica

What’s Included

The Publish or Perish Game is available for $29 on Kickstarter (expected to be $39 in retail). You can add additional copies as add-ons. The add-on options will appear after you select a pledge and proceed to check out first.

Expansions

The Publish or Perish Game has three expansions, each available for $12 as ad-ons on Kickstarter (expected to be $15 in retail). You can add them to the base game individually or combine them for a richer experience. The add-on options will appear after you select a pledge and proceed to check out first.

Expansion 1 The Revenge of Reviewer 2

This expansion includes 38 Action Cards that make it easier to play the base game with more than 6 players. Some of the cards can also be used to achieve different effects compared to the Action Cards in the base game. If plagiarism and IRB audits in the base game are not chaotic enough for you, Reviewer 2 in this expansion will take it to another level.

Expansion 2 Academic Sh*tpost

This expansion introduces 12 new Manuscript Cards that set out to elevate the absurdist narrative of the original game. These additions include four “sh*tpost” articles in predatory journals that accept any Action Cards to get papers published. Additionally, this expansion includes eight Manuscripts that are (marginally) significantly inappropriate. The content ranges from mild to wild. Use this expansion at your own risk. 

Expansion 3 Midterm Grading Extravaganza

This expansion includes at least 100 Trivia Cards that expand the trivia component of the original game. These cards can also be used in other trivia games.

Kickstarter Backer Thank-You Gift

Two ways to help this project and receive a small thank-you gift:

1. Pledge in the First 48 Hours (PASS DUE)
If you pledge within the first 48 hours of the launch, you will receive a set of 15 prototype Manuscript Cards (see below).

2. Help Get the Word Out
You can also help spread the word by sharing this Kickstarter page on any social media platform, and you will receive 15 prototype Manuscript Cards as well. You can write anything about this project—just make sure to include the link and post it before the campaign ends. It does not matter how many followers you have, where you post it, or what language it is in. It's the support that matters.☺️

If you do both, 30 different cards will be sent as a thank-you gift. After the campaign ends, include the link to your social media post or the screenshot of it when you confirm your order in a backer survey, and the cards will be added to your pledge.

Note. During the early stages of development, many manuscript titles were created but did not make it into the final version of the game. Instead of fully developing them with abstracts and other content, they were retrofitted onto existing Manuscript Cards using Lorem ipsum as placeholders. These cards are still playable and can be used in the game. Although these prototype cards will not be available for sale, they might be fully developed in a future expansion.

Shipping Estimates

Shipping Confirmation

Within a few weeks after the campaign concludes, you will receive an email to confirm your order details. Long after the campaign and shortly before the fulfillment, you will be able to choose the shipping options that range from the most affordable to the fastest and pay for the shipping and potential taxes and duties if applicable.

Stories from Max

“What about a game where you have to publish papers?” I asked.

There was a gasp.

“Can you… plagiarize their work?😂” Someone broke the silence. 

“You NEED to put the Reviewer 2 and the IRB in there!😱” Another yelled. Everyone then started to toss around ideas.

It was a game night with my fellow academic friends on a sunny but chilly Thanksgiving day, typical of northern California. After hours of playing games, I had a realization: all we were doing was just pretending we were someone else interesting— by playing games, we allowed ourselves to indulge in the little fantasies of living another person’s life, all propelled by the game designers’ imagination and ingenuity.

As academics, I thought, aren’t our lives interesting too? Wouldn’t it be fun to satirize the anachronism of academic life in a game? I couldn’t stop thinking about this idea since then. The second day, I immediately started to work on a prototype. Fast forward to today, it feels almost surreal that I am launching this game!

Creative Direction

As you can probably tell from the premise by now, the Publish or Perish Game is a humorous party game with some light strategy. While I occasionally enjoy a Eurogame with indirect tension and a focus on strategy over theme, I didn't want to create a game for academics to spend more time optimizing their points than talking to each other, or in any way, hanging out together separately. Instead, I wanted this game to be a platform for us to create and share memorable moments together. As such, while gaining the most citations is the game’s ostensible goal, the real objective is to share laughter and create stories together. 

So if you want something with a “party vibe,” then this game could work well for you, but if you’re a hardcore strategist seeking deep, complex gameplay, this might not be the game for you. 

Note. The above GIF describes Max play-testing an early prototype with family and friends 

These considerations guided several decisions. For example, the game is designed to be relatively easy to pick up (the game rule is only 1 page) and has mechanisms for promoting players' talking and trash-talking to each other. For example, whenever someone publishes, everyone must proclaim “Congratulations on your publication!” while clapping. Testers report that this is one of the most enjoyable parts of the game. 

I also really like this mechanism because we academics do not celebrate our achievements nearly enough. So in this game, I want everyone to relive (or look forward to) the special moments of celebration with our friends and family as much as we can. Though just a warning, friendly bantering (e.g., snarky comments about your made-up paper) often ensues immediately afterward.

Defense

At the end of the game, each player will defend the made-up papers they published. Players' defense speeches give them the last chance to earn some additional citations by winning awards. As a play tester stated, “Most people dreaded the [defense] when we read the instructions out loud because folks feared that was going to be cheesy, but we had a blast listening to the ways people tied together ludicrous papers into a clear research trajectory.”

Although I intended this portion to take only about one minute per person (which is typical in most play test sessions), the record for going the longest was a group in Europe that took almost half an hour for each person’s speech. I’m still amazed at how they came up with so many jokes and so much trash talk during this part, and I hope your group enjoys it just as much.

One of my favorite stories about the awards is from a tester who was voted to receive the “Almost There Award” who contemptuously said, “I don’t want it!” But when they later found out they were going to miss the winner status by just 2 citations, they proclaimed “Wait, give it back!” Then everyone laughed, hard. 

Trade-Offs in Design Choices 

This game is designed for academics, whether for playing at a lab party as a bonding experience or sharing with friends and family to help them understand our motivations and struggles better. I’ve intentionally broken several conventional game design principles and disregarded some advice from professional game designers. Most of these choices were made to maximize the likelihood that academics will enjoy the game. 

For example, several game designers did not like the trivia component of this game, but most of my academic testers said they really liked it and wanted me to keep it. So I kept it. The downside, of course, is that some people will never like this game, a tradeoff I had to make. 

To improve the scientific and historical accuracy of the Trivia Cards, I enlisted help from published academics around the world to peer review the content. One of my favorite stories about it is that, on the spreadsheet where the reviewers could review and comment on the questions, I once found several scholars had a heated scholarly discussion about the precise definition of biomes. If you have published at least one paper in any fields, I'd love to have your help with it too! For more details see here. 

Versions in Other Languages 

One of the questions I often receive is will the game be released in other languages. In short, I am not sure, and it will mostly depend on how the current version does. My biggest concern is that the humor and playing experience will not translate into other languages. So this is something I will have to revisit when the time is right. That being said, creatively, I am very interested in a Chinese version, as I am a native speaker of Chinese.

Note. The figure above describes a Chinese prototype manuscript card under development. 

Conclusion

Creating this game and bringing it to life has truly been a hell of a ride. There are many moments when I doubted if it was really a good idea to create a satire about academia as an early career scholar and whether it is something that people would want at all. But there were also moments of pure joy—whether from a minor victory in development, a positive review, a supportive message, or any validation from one of you. 

At this point, I have done everything I can to give it a chance to take off. Now as it launches, it is out of my hands. I hope the world will like it, and I hope that it will bring a little bit of joy to it.☺️