Was it fun? It was moderately enjoyable. Strategizing and collaborating was fun because that’s something I can really sink my teeth into when I play games but the impending doom of knowing you probably weren’t going to win was just kinda meh.
What were the player interactions? As I usually do in group activities, I took on a leadership role because I thought I understood the game the best and tried to help everyone else make the best moves. Everyone did try to share there ideas too which i didn’t shut down which I think made it a positive social aspect.
How long did it take to learn? Hard to say because we left for Saxby’s in the middle of setting up but in total I’d say it took about 30 minutes.
Would you play it again? Yeah I would say I would. I’m interested in seeing how much better I could do with more experience.
3 Act Structure: We started by making small moves and following directions closely. When we got more comfortable we talked a lot more about our options and planned accordingly to account for the epidemics. We then got to a point where we realized we couldn’t win, but we reached a satisfying conclusion by eradicating the virus throughout North America.
What are the collaborative and competitive aspects to the game? The game was fully collaborative, as everyone wins or loses together. We were able to share ideas and thoughts in a somewhat stress-free way.
What is the games metaphor and which of the game’s mechanics standout? I think the metaphor is that without experience, really hard problems like curing a pandemic are almost impossible. And even with experience, things don’t always work out as expected. The one mechanic that stood out to me was the forced epidemic cards which made things harder throughout the game, but what I liked specifically was that the directions had us shuffle the epidemic cards into the deck in a way that spread them out across the game.
I’m really interested in playing this game someday. I can imagine having to work together in order to win would be sort of stressful.
The three act structure of this game sounds interesting…I’d be willing to play this game in the future. Although it didn’t seem like there was an end to the game?