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In this puzzle, you are given particular roles, cards in hand, infection rate, etc., and challenged to complete a specific task after one or more turns. Z-Man Games has published a few more puzzles since then — "The Friendly Skies" (PDF), "Say Goodbye to the Blues" (PDF), and "The Event Speciale" (PDF) — on both the Pandemic Facebook page and the Z-Man Games Twitter.
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The puzzles are designed by John Knoerzer, a name you might have heard during BGG convention coverage as John served as my cameraperson for many years at Spielwarenmesse, in addition to being part of the annual BGG team at SPIEL. John and BGG's Beth Heile have been playtesters for years for Pandemic designer Matt Leacock, so they are possibly more familiar with the ins-and-outs of the game than anyone else on Earth (aside from M.L.). I've overheard conversations in which they relay the details of this game or that, and they're like bridge players who can replay the entire hand from memory, telling you the odds of everything they did.
John first mentioned these Pandemic puzzles to me years ago, and I'm glad they're finally becoming a reality. Maybe they'll be collected in a spiral-bound book at some point and become a huge best seller, at which point we can turn the tables and put him on camera with me behind it.
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The topics covered during "Board at Home" were:
— "A Public Archive of Japanese Board Game History", by Nathan Altice
— "Adaptation and Playing Apart: How 'In-Person' Play Is Responding to the Pandemic", by Elizabeth Swensen
— "Problematic Faves: Games and the Black Gaze", by A.M. Darke
— "Indie Tabletop RPGs: They Exist, They're Cheap…and You'll Love Them", by Tad Leckman
— "Words, Sentiments, and Games: A textual analysis of board game reviews", by Kristina Golubiewski-Davis
— "Bridging Mediums: The Design of App-Integrated Board Games", by Andrew Fischer, Senior Manager of Digital Development at Fantasy Flight Games
Videos for five of these presentations are available on the "2021 Board at Home" page, with the video for "Words, Sentiments, and Games" missing at the moment as the credits on it are being fixed. The video should be live again on Monday, March 15, and you might want to look for it given the description of this talk:
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Have you ever wondered what you can learn from board game reviews beyond an average ranking? In this talk, Kristy explores and compares the reviews of popular games as ranked by Board Game Geek using text analysis tools and sentiment analysis to look specifically at how popular board games compare to educational board games. Do the terms people use for educational board games suggest different aspects of the game are being judged? What types of sentiments are associated with different board games? How do reviews on gaming specific sites, such as Board Game Geek, differ to reviews on more general sites, such as Amazon? Watch to find out!
Given my interest in Japanese games, I found the talk by Nathan Altice equal parts fascinating and frustrating, with the latter feeling coming from knowing that these titles are often not listed in the BGG database! Anyway, here's that video:• Are you familiar with games from South America and Central America? If so, Hilko Drude — who has added dozens of such titles to the BGG database — is looking for your help to add more. To get started, head to this item on his "Bringing Latin American Games to BGG!" GeekList.
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• This item is not related to games other than it being an exhortation by me for more adventurous and unexpected subject matter in games.
With that in mind, I'd like to direct your attention to The New York Times article titled "Meet the Sea Slugs That Chop Off Their Heads and Grow New Bodies" in which author Annie Roth expands upon that headline to a fascinating degree of detail. A short video at the top of that article shows the head of an Elysia marginata moving around and encountering its former body, which still reacts to being touched.
The head and the body of Elysia marginata; image by Sayaka Mitoh
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