MAAD Scientist Technologies

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Lad Luck

You are a lab gremlin. Ruin a graduate student's experiment using only things that really happen. Or be the student. Or play each other.

Best full screen: the text is small otherwise. Click the game first, then use the arrow keys to choose, Enter to confirm and Esc to leave. It needs a keyboard, and takes a few seconds to load. Open it in its own tab.

What you do

Lad Luck is a gremlin with one ambition: to ruin every experiment a graduate student runs.

There is a rule. Only real life counts. No spilling, no unplugging, no swapping labels. Every sabotage has to be something that really happens in a laboratory, and the result has to come out wrong for the real reason.

The student’s defence is the controls they chose to run. Nobody has time for all of them.

There are three ways to play.

  • Be Lad Luck. You see which precautions the student took. Choose a sabotage that gets past them. Some of your options do nothing at all, and you are expected to know which.
  • Be the student. Choose two precautions, then find out what Lad Luck did. If one of yours raises a flag, work out what it was flagging.
  • Two players, one keyboard. The student chooses in secret. The gremlin chooses blind. Swap every round.

Six experiments: three ways of measuring protein, a western blot, a qPCR, and a drug tested on cells.

What you find out

  • Why a tryptophan-rich protein fools one protein assay, and an arginine-poor one fools another.
  • Which assay is ruined by DTT and shrugs at detergent, and which is the other way round.
  • What a well with no template is for, and what it cannot tell you.
  • How a blot can show a convincing band of the wrong protein.
  • How a drug can make dead cells look alive.
  • Why three replicates of a wrong number agree with each other.

A control answers one question. Choosing controls is choosing which ways of being wrong you would notice.

Where the science comes from

Every sabotage in the game is a standard, well-documented interference, the kind listed in assay manufacturers’ compatibility tables and in published guidelines for qPCR and cell culture. Which control catches which is simplified to yes or no. In a real laboratory a control more often raises a suspicion than delivers a verdict.