The last time 25-year-old board-gaming addict Asis Mansingh left her house on March 14 before she went into self-quarantine, she had played Pandemic with her friends in a cafe in south Delhi. In fact, she had been happily playing Pandemic for close to five months until lockdown, with no premonition of the approaching contagion in the outside world. With a copy of the board-game handed down by a relative in the US in late 2019, Asis has been addicted to Pandemic in which 2 to 4 players collaborate and frantically work against time to save the world from four virulent diseases breaking out simultaneously. Asis inevitably got very involved in "saving the world" aspect of the game and even had her non-board-gaming friends take a keen interest. But in the middle of the lockdown, while Asis is dying to get back to board-gaming, she isn't particularly looking forward to playing Pandemic. "I have played it so much recently. Honestly, I think I have had my fill of the game and now it feels just too real," rues Asis who even taught Pandemic in a cafe in Gurugram as part of a three-month board-gaming stint.
But the game Pandemic—first released in 2008 and conceived by game designer Matt Leacock from Minnesota in the US—has valuable lessons to offer to doctors, governments, scientists and other frontline soldiers scrambling to end the scourge of COVID-19. The game's underlying message—that of unity and collaboration—cannot feel more urgent in the middle of the worst global health crisis of the 21st century. "There is no individual winner in the game. We are all playing against the diseases. There are four diseases in the world and they are constantly spreading at every turn in the game. Essentially you are running on a timer and if the diseases spread too much, you are done for. The players have to be doing what they can by working to the best of their capabilities to save the world. It is a strongly cooperative game and if you are not in tune with other players, you are not going to get anything done," says Asis about the game which Leacock started designing in 2004 when SARS was breaking big in the real world. Back then, Leacock wanted to design a "cooperative" game, and viruses and diseases proved to be the best common enemy humanity could join forces against.
Hence in Pandemic, the participating players are specialists who tend to identify disease hotspots. They research cures for the four plagues before they explode. The game board has many population centers and a player has to collect cards and travel cities around the world, treat infected clusters, discover cures and build research stations. While there are cards which arm players can handle with greater abilities, the dreaded Epidemic! cards intensify the disease. Players are required to gauge their strengths and collaborate accordingly to end the diseases. If one or more disease can't be controlled, all the players loose, and if all four diseases are exterminated, everybody wins.
This strategy game, when it first came out, ushered in a whole new genre of co-operative games, where players come together to work against the game itself. And now there are multiple versions of Pandemic: the 2013 edition has two new roles, a contingency planner and a quarantine specialist. "Pandemic: Legacy", more deeply plotted with a storyline, is, according to BoardGameGeek, "the single best board game ever made".
Mithun Balraj—who founded ReRoll, a board games collective in Bengaluru—says that after 180 weeks of offline meets, the gamers' community now plays online. Pandemic is one such lockdown game. "It's quite frantic and difficult. The game is set on a map of the world and players control little pawns which move across the world. To develop a cure, you need to get enough research data which exists in the form of cards. It's hard because you have limited capacity to hold cards in your hands. And you have to work within the systems given in the game which is challenging."