As associate medical director of the Duke Infection Control Outreach Network in North Carolina, Sonali Advani assists more than 50 hospitals in the Southeast on dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.
She relaxes on weekends by playing her favorite board game. It’s called Pandemic.
Players try to stop diseases from spreading across the world while racing for cures. “It’s stress relief,” said Dr. Advani, who plays over Zoom video calls with her friends—other infectious-disease doctors.
The coronavirus pandemic is a global crisis without a clear end date. The board game Pandemic is confined to a tabletop, takes about 45 minutes to play and ends in victory or defeat. Players collaborate, instead of compete, to contain outbreaks around the world. All this has made Pandemic therapeutic for some health-care workers fighting the pandemic.
“It’s a good boost to morale,” said Neda Wick, a pathologist who plays an iPhone version of Pandemic while taking the campus shuttle around the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where she helps diagnose coronavirus patients.
Dr. Sonali Advani, an epidemiologist in Durham, N.C., plays a computer version of Pandemic with friends, who are also doctors.
Photo: Sonali AdvaniWith the tagline “Can You Save Humanity?” on the box cover, Pandemic has had a loyal following among board-game fans for more than a decade. Two to four players begin the game by choosing a role, including jobs like scientist, researcher or medic, each with unique abilities. The board is a world map, with players starting in Atlanta, home of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Players traverse the world to treat outbreaks and research cures for four diseases. They win if they can work together to develop cures before the diseases overwhelm them, by collecting enough cards to treat the diseases.
There are three ways to lose: allowing too many outbreaks and causing a global panic; allowing disease to overtake a major region; or running out of cards to play.
Many health-care professionals say they enjoy the generally accurate, if simplified, representation of how diseases spread. In Pandemic, a player flips a card to randomly determine the next city to face an outbreak.
“Just as you don’t know what card you’re going to flip over next in the game, you’re not going to know what happens next in the real world,” said Dr. Wick, who was introduced to the game by a fellow doctor in late May.
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Matt Leacock, the former Silicon Valley designer who created Pandemic, said he came up with the idea after getting fed up with negotiation-based board games such as Tigris & Euphrates. They always seemed to end after a player deceived his or her way to victory. “I wanted to create something I could play with my wife,” he said.
Instead of competing against each other, he thought, what if players teamed up to defeat a cardboard enemy? He took inspiration from the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, epidemic and consulted a friend of a friend who was an epidemiologist, someone who studies the spread of diseases.
Pandemic was released in 2008 and became popular enough to spawn several expansion sets and spinoffs. The coronavirus pandemic prompted people to dust off their copies or to buy it for the first time, resulting in a spike of sales for Pandemic’s publisher, Minnesota-based Z-Man Games. But it also presented a problem: how to sensitively sell a game based on a phenomenon currently sickening people around the world.
Dr. Neda Wick, a pathologist in Dallas, plays an iPhone version of the game Pandemic while taking the shuttle around her medical campus in June.
Photo: William WickZ-Man Games had planned to announce a spinoff, Pandemic: Hot Zone—North America, in February. Then it saw what the coronavirus was doing in China and some hotspots in the U.S. The publisher ultimately postponed the launch to May, saying in a blog post that the game had been two years in the making.
“We waited to announce because we were not trying to take advantage of anything,” said Steve Kimball, head of studio at Z-Man Games. He said Z-Man Games hasn’t actively promoted Pandemic during the global crisis.
Some hobby stores have been sold out of the game for weeks and don’t know when they’ll restock because their distributor is sold out, too. Mr. Kimball said manufacturing shutdowns, aimed at curbing the real virus’s spread, may delay reprinting of the game.
Anna Gilman snatched up Pandemic during the early days of lockdown in March, after its title intrigued her from the shelf of her local Target in New Jersey. She and her fiance have played more than 30 times since.
“I like that it’s not too easy,” said Ms. Gilman, a nurse at New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who treated cancer patients who also contracted the coronavirus. “We play it multiple times in a row, because sometimes you can’t win.”
The coronavirus pandemic inspired Trevor Bender, a Navy contractor in San Diego, with a side gig as a board-game designer, to publish online a free “Covid-19 Scenario” adaptation that people can play with existing Pandemic boards.
Instead of drawing cards to randomly determine which cities start with outbreaks, this scenario begins with Covid-19’s first hotspot: Wuhan, China. The update also starts with other real-world epicenters such as Milan, Tehran and Seoul. Mr. Bender also introduced a “social distancing” option—not part of the original game. It can help stop the spread of the fictitious disease but reduces a player to three moves per turn, instead of the usual four, simulating today’s travel restrictions, Mr. Bender said.
Dr. Wendy Olson Padilla, a urologist in Peoria, Ill., and her husband, John Olson, play an adaptation of the game Pandemic simulating the new coronavirus.
Photo: John OlsonWendy Olson Padilla and her husband, John Olson, tried Mr. Bender’s scenario. They lost. “The mechanics worked really well,” said Dr. Padilla, a urologist in Peoria, Ill. “It’s a true reflection of what’s happening.”
Pandemic has been the favorite game of Dr. Advani, in North Carolina, since she played with colleagues at her infectious-disease fellowship five years ago. Despite working longer hours as both a doctor who treats patients and a health-care epidemiologist who advises hospitals on infection-prevention programs, she sets aside time every other weekend to play Pandemic with her fiance, and a rotating group of friends and family online.
She enjoys the sense of camaraderie and control. “It’s a little more predictable,” Dr. Advani said. “The real pandemic is very unpredictable.”
Write to Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-do-doctors-treating-coronavirus-relax-by-playing-the-game-pandemic-11593369385
2020-06-28 18:43:57Z
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