On Tuesday March 1^st, the participants of the new GAME project will for the first time meet at GEOMAR. For the following 4 weeks, they will discuss about the scientific background of their study and will develop a methodology for the upcoming project. The preparative course, which is always held in March, is an essential component of each GAME project. It is vitally important for the success of the study that all student teams agree on a common experimental approach which they will follow throughout the following months. This will enable them to collect data that are truly comparable between the various study sites. In 2016, the GAME experiments will be conducted at institutes in Chile, Indonesia, Japan, Portugal and Wales. Since the beginning of February, the student teams are complete and we are looking forward to welcoming 10 new participants from 5 different countries to the programme. Their research project will focus on the effects of microplastics on benthic invertebrates and is, by this, a follow up of the two projects on the same subject that were run in 2013 and 2014. However, this time the teams will investigate whether environmental stressors, such as heat stress, interact with microplastics and whether they have the potential to amplify the negative effects of the plastic particles that we observed in the earlier studies. A preliminary outline of the project is available on our website.