Giant Pandemic

Due to my work, I created a giant version of Pandemic. I made this for a team-building event. I asked younger daughter Chen Rui to draw a giant map based on the standard map. Most of the details were the same, but I needed it to be 6 feet by 4 feet. Looking at this photo you can't really tell how big the map is. You'll need to look at the map when placed in my sitting room next to the furniture. 

I needed the map to be big because I planned to have this activity accommodate 20 to 40 participants. The map needed to be big enough so that most participants could easily see the various details on the map. I did not change the game rules. The changes I made were in how this activity was to be executed by four teams as opposed to this being a game played by four players. Within each team there would be members assigned to different tasks. There would be some communication challenges thrown in. Pandemic when used well is a great team-building and training activity. 

I bought most of the activity props. I needed to get a copy of Pandemic too, because I used the cards from the actual game. For the rest, I had to hunt everywhere to find equivalent large sized components. I arranged to playtest this giant version of Pandemic. Not for gameplay, since I didn't change that, but for making sure the components worked well. My dining table was not big enough for the map. I needed to add one more table and a white board (see bottom right) to create enough flat surface for the whole map. 

I used toy cars as player pawns. The white cube is a die for prototype-making. I used it as a research centre. I used square wooden blocks as diseases. I bought them at Daiso and spray painted them. One problem with the toy cars was players could not resist playing with them. This is the kind which you can pull back and then release to have it dart forward. Chen Rui kept playing with her car, knocking over game components on the map. 

I prepared four spare cars in the same four colours as those on the map, and placed them in front of the four players as reminders to tell which one on the map was their car. Here we have one flaw. In the original game, the player pawn colours match the player character colours. I couldn't find large player pawns to match all the character cards, so I went with toy cars. 

I put the character cards into identity card holders and attached lanyards. In each team there would be one member wearing this, and his or her job was to remind the whole team they needed to fully utilise the character ability. 

I changed this part of the game board. In the original there are only four circles. When you manage to cure a disease, you put a marker into the circle. If you manage to eradicate the disease, you flip the marker to the other side, which shows a different symbol. In the giant version, I wanted something which looked like a table, each row being a different status. The four little bottles are markers you can advance downwards. 

Game in progress

For the outbreak marker and the infection rate marker, I used this type of whiteboard magnet which can be found at stationery shops. 

I found large transparent plastic cans for the four diseases. 

These four small bottles are status markers for the four diseases. Originally I thought about half filling the bottles with liquid in the four disease colours. I later changed my mind because I was worried the liquid might leak and damage the other components. 

I feel bad for having moved Jakarta into the Indian Ocean. The city locations are not meant to be accurate. 

We played the giant version with just the four of us. The team-building would have 20+. It's a little too big for four players, but a trial run was good to help iron out any issues. 

We won rather easily. That was not surprising since my daughters and I had played Pandemic and its variants many times. Vanilla Pandemic was easy for us. We did have a newbie Joti, but he picked up quickly under our guidance. One thing I learned from this playtesting was when I conducted the team-building activity, I should refrain from giving too much guidance. I should only teach the rules and not give any tips. If I were to guide the participants on how to play, it would effectively be me playing and not them learning. 

The activity during the team-building workshop took about 2.5 hours. I told the attendees that had a very difficult mission, because they had to manage not just COVID-19, but also COVID-20, COVID-21 and COVID-22. 

Learning the rules was challenging for them. After all they were not regular gamers. However they were sporting and participative. There was plenty of discussion and debating. 

I created many player roles and assigned them to more than half the participants. I don't mean the roles in the game like medic, scientist and operations expert. I mean player roles I created when I turned the game into a team activity involving four teams. Naturally there was a team leader for each team. I had four disease controllers whose jobs were to handle the disease cubes. No one else was allowed to touch the disease cubes but them four. I had card holders who were responsible for drawing and handling player cards. No one else were allowed to touch the player cards. One player role which turned out to be quite fun (but also busy for the guy assigned) was the infection officer. His job was to draw and announce the two infection cards at the end of every turn. Basically he was the bringer of bad news. That stage of a game turn was called Breaking News. 

I did not manipulate the game setup or the two card decks to make it easier or harder for them to win. I just let randomness run its course. Pandemic is well balanced and a random setup normally won't create too extreme a situation. Also the point of the exercise was not to intentionally let them win so that they would feel good, or to make them lose so that they would learn from failure. It was an exercise to challenge their teamwork, communication, collaboration, strategic awareness and strategic planning. 

Adrian was the card holder for Team 3 (red team) and his job included drawing player cards. He happened to be the only person to ever draw Epidemic cards. Everyone blamed him for having unlucky hands. It really wasn't his fault. He just happened to be assigned the job. Look at his nervousness as it was time to draw player cards again. At this point he had already drawn two Epidemic cards. 

In the end, they only managed to cure two diseases before they were hit by the 8th outbreak and lost. They were close. They were only three turns away from curing the remaining two diseases. One team already had enough cards to treat the third disease. The next team had enough cards to pass to the following team, which would then have enough to cure the fourth disease. 

boardgaming in photos: play and work

It feels like it has been a long time since I have done a photos post like this. I checked the photos I have been accumulating. The oldest one was from almost two months ago. Most of my blog posts are about new games I play. Photos posts are for the non-new games I play. Not necessarily old games, just games that I have already written about before in my normal blog posts. Photos posts are one form of me sharing my personal journey.

28 Jan 2016. Playing Ticket To Ride with Eva and Teck Seng. Teck Seng wanted to try the game, so I brought it to the office. We all started in the north eastern corner, so it was quite tense. All of us needed to go to Montreal.

29 Jan 2016. Ruby and Benz. In January when a local newspaper interviewed me, they asked me to recommend some games that can be played with children. One of the games I recommended was Pandemic. After my colleagues read the article, they were keen to try it. So I brought it to the office. No, don't ask me whether we do work in the office. But yes, they loved the game.

4 Feb 2016. Han was in town before Chinese New Year, and we gathered at Allen's place to play some games. Samurai is one of Allen's favourite games, and he's very good at it. I had thought this time I would finally beat him, but he won yet again. This is an older version of Samurai. The latest version has different artwork and components. I have seen the photos but not a physical copy. I think I prefer the older version, especially the black pieces, which are classy. I wonder whether Allen will buy a copy of the latest version. He already has two copies of the older version, one copy for playing and the other for collection / backup / cultural heritage.

We were done with Honshu (main island) and were now fighting over Kyushu and Shikoku.

13 Feb 2016. During the Chinese New Year holidays I taught my mum Red7. The kids had played the game before.

My mum looked clueless, but when we played, she beat all of us. There's a Cantonese saying which is roughly equivalent to "wolf in sheep's clothing" - pretending to be a pig in order to devour the tiger.

21 Feb 2016. I held an open house during Chinese New Year and invited colleagues and friends over to play boardgames. Carcassonne was popular. Those who tried it liked it so much that later on when we ran out of tables to play on, they played on the floor.

Halli Galli attracted many spectators and got the contestants really pumped up, as you can see in this photo. Kit Loong (left) got so excited that he broke the plastic stool he was sitting on. Thankfully he was not injured.

Loopin' Louie worked well for young and old, the youngest being Kwe Long's 2-year-old son. My colleagues later asked me to bring this to the office.

Risk Express is one of Reiner Knizia's lesser known games. I had not played it for quite some time. I only thought about it when I was preparing for the open house, because it's a game suitable for people new to boardgames.

This was my homemade version of Ca$h N Gun$. My wife Michelle does not allow gun-like toys at home, so I did not make toy guns. Thus the finger guns.

Zombie Tower 3D. I just checked their Kickstarter page, and the next edition has been funded successfully. Congratulations!

26 Feb 2016. Edwin, Xiao Zhu, Eva. Some of my colleagues like cooperative games, so I recommended Samurai Spirit. I said this was very difficult to beat, much more so than Pandemic. They already struggled with Pandemic, and had asked me to play with them again to teach them the strategies. I told them that they needed to be very calculative and not waste any action or any opportunities for optimisation. I was rather OCD with the components - cards must be laid out with the right side up, and must be discarded with the right side up. I kept fixing their errors for them. They probably think I'm crazy.

I taught my colleagues Samurai Spirit at the normal difficulty level, and not the easy level. The designer recommended so. Only if you keep losing at normal level do you then step down to the easy level. As I played with my colleagues, I explained the various tactical considerations behind the actions they take. We played carefully and meticulously. Part of doing well in Samurai Spirit is remembering the cards you've seen. With more people playing, we had more brains to help remember stuff. We ended up winning without too much trouble. I was surprised. This was supposed to be a difficult game. Now it felt like I had exaggerated to them about how tough the game was. When was the promised challenge?!

I thought about whether it was the right thing to do when I explained to them the intricacies of decision making in Samurai Sword. I learned many of these from scratch when I explored the game myself. To me, this exploration and learning were part of the fun. By directly teaching them these lessons I had learnt, I was denying them the joy of discovering these tricks themselves. Ultimately, I think what I did was fine, because my colleagues were not hardcore boardgamers like me. They were casual players and they just wanted to play and have fun. They were not the type to think very deeply about game mechanisms. By guiding them, I helped them speed up their learning process so that they could play more effectively and be competitive.

They later played the game by themselves, and lost. I was happy. Not because they lost, but because the difficulty I had promised earlier had finally been delivered.

4 Mar 2016. Ruby, Benz, Edmond, Xiao Zhu, Edwin. Ruby said she was interested in games with a traitor mechanism, like Templar Intrigue which I had taught them before. So I taught them Saboteur. We played 2 rounds (normally a complete game has 3 rounds). The first round was very exciting. We had 7 players, but it felt like we had 5 saboteurs! Normally in a 7 player game there should be either 2 or 3 saboteurs. You won't know for sure till the round ends. We later realised that Benz had incorrectly identified his loyal card as a saboteur card; and Edmond had misunderstood what a good dwarf should be doing, and had been doing all the wrong things. When I explained the rules earlier, I jokingly said that it was easy to identify the saboteur card because the saboteur had an evil face (in addition to the card having the text "Saboteur"). Benz had drawn a loyal card, but he thought the loyal dwarf's face looked evil, so he thought he was a saboteur. I guess I should not have made my game teaching too colourful.

I was a saboteur in this round, and I was rather confused because it seemed I had too many accomplices. It was hilarious when we found out why. It was also very exciting because being saboteur was naturally nerve-wracking. You need to pretend to be good, yet you must find ways to undermine the team's effort. For the second round, we played correctly, but it turned out to be rather anti-climactic. There were only two saboteurs this time, and the loyal dwarves managed to dig a path all the way to the gold mine very quickly, ending the round. The saboteurs didn't have time to do much damage. No accusations flying around, no nasty cards played on one another. Victory for the loyal dwarves felt boring. It was crazy. Maybe the saboteurs should have been more proactive, or the loyal dwarves should have been more aggressive in competing to be the one to find the gold mine.

This was the early part of the first round, when everyone behaved like loyal dwarves, steadfastly digging the tunnel towards the three possible locations of the gold mine.

This was near the end of the round. If I remember correctly the real gold mine was the card at the top. I had seen it using a special ability card. I was a traitor, and I had lied that the gold mine was the bottom card. At a crucial moment, I played a tunnel card that prevented the loyal dwarves from advancing to the bottom card. Playing such a card meant announcing to the world that I was a saboteur, but I was fine with that because my intention was to mislead. I wanted to lure the loyal dwarves into wasting their cards by hindering me, by undoing the damage I had done, and by pushing towards the wrong goal.

6 Mar 2016. For elder daughter Shee Yun's 11th birthday, we organised a small party, getting her to invite some friends over to play, which of course included playing boardgames. Escape was a hit with the children. After lunch, they were so eager to play that they couldn't wait for the table to be cleared. They sat down on the floor to play.

Qwirkle works well with children. The rules are not complex, and it is language independent. There is some strategy too.

The result of this game surprised me. It was younger daughter Chen Rui (right) who won. She was the youngest among the children, since the other children were mostly her elder sister's classmates. Shee Yun and Chen Rui have played many boardgames with me, so they have an advantage over their friends. However I had expected Shee Yun to win because she had been leading throughout most of the game. Chen Rui had kept one important tile and waited for the best moment to play it. She did it just before the game ended, and scored big. That catapulted her to the front to win the game. I had not expected this from my innocent little precious princess. I had underestimated her.

boardgaming in photos: gaming at Meeples Cafe and at work

15 Nov 2015. Shee Yun (10) saw Michelle and I preparing to play Russian Railroads. She seemed curious, so I asked whether she wanted to play. She said yes. This was my first time playing with three players. We used a different side of the board from the 2-player game. There were more work spaces we could use.

This time my strategy was centred around industrialisation. I had built all five factories (purple arrow-shaped tiles along the bottom edge of the player board). I had also activated my second industry marker - the purple hex-shaped wooden pawn. I didn't put much effort in railroad track building. The best I had was a grey track, i.e. Level 2.

The red, yellow and green pawns are player workers. The blue pawns are temporary workers you can fight for every round. The space you need to use to recruit them is on the left side of this photo - that space showing two blue men.

22 Nov 2015. Machi Koro Deluxe, which contains both the main expansions, Harbor and Millionaire's Row. The dice are different. The side showing a mountain means 1. There are renovation markers now. They are needed due to the powers of the cards in the Millionaire's Row expansion.

The Demolition Company is a card from the Millionaire's Row expansion. If your die roll activates it, you earn $8 but must demolish one of your landmark buildings. This is a building you need to be careful with, lest you demolish any expensive landmark building.

The Moving Company lets you, or rather, forces you to give a building to another player. This can be quite annoying to your opponents if you combo it with many Loan Offices. When you build a Loan Office (for free!), you gain $5, but each time it is activated, you need to pay $2. However if you conveniently give the Loan Office to an opponent, you will never need to pay the $2. The obligation is passed to your opponent. Evil! Both of these are from Millionaire's Row.

Look how much fun Chen Rui is having with these new evil cards in Millionaire's Row.

I have played many games of Machi Koro with my children. Since adding the Harbor expansion, I have never won. They like to gang up on me, but in this game there aren't that many ways you can collaborate. However I still do lose to them all the time. It was only after we added Millionaire's Row that I started winning again. Comparing the two expansions, I think Harbor is almost necessary if you want to play regularly. It makes the game more variable because of the market mechanism (not all buildings are available all the time). The added cards also mean more variety. Millionaire's Row adds some more cards, some of which are a little quirky. It feels less necessary, but if you've played a lot of Machi Koro, spicing it up now and then is always good. The way we played - mixing all cards in - may not be ideal, because there are probably too many card types, which makes collecting the same cards difficult. The cards may be a bit too diluted. I'm too lazy to sort out the cards though, so I'll probably continue to play this way. We still have lots of fun this way.

This was worth taking a photo. It had been such a long time since the previous time I won a game.

27 Dec 2015. The children suggested FITS, which I hadn't played for a long time.

The numbers not covered are worth victory points. The solid circles not covered will entail a penalty.

3 Jan 2016. I brought the family to Meeples Cafe. It had been a long time since our previous visit. Log from Meeples Cafe always keeps for me a complimentary copy of every issue of the Spielbox magazine. By then I had accumulated quite a stack. Our visit was a belated birthday celebration for Chen Rui, who is a December baby. It was very crowded when we got there. Thankfully we didn't go too late. Our table was one of the last few remaining.

The children wanted to play Cloud 9. We had played this before quite a few times. I don't insist on trying out new games, but I do try to avoid playing games we already own. We might as well play at home. Cloud 9 is an excellent family game. I recently tried its new incarnation Celestia. I prefer the older game, because it is simpler.

The children asked to play Dixit too. Now we do own this game, but their argument was the cards in this set was different from the ones we had. They did have a point, so we played. I (green) did very poorly. I think I came last.

Forbidden Island was another game the children suggested. We had played this quite a few times. We played twice this day, beating the easy difficulty level without breaking a sweat, but losing when we moved on to the normal difficulty level. It was quite exciting though, and in my opinion much more fun than the easy game.

This was the first game which we won.

This was the second game. The helicopter pad was in a far corner, on the right, which was a pain. It kept flooding, and we had to keep going back to pump the water away. The moment it sank, the game would be lost immediately because we would not be able to leave the island. In this photo it was flooded again, i.e. showing the blue side.

We lost the game. The water level reached the deadly stage before we could retrieve all four artifacts. The flooding had cut off our path, and we had to rely on special abilities or specific cards to get to the helipad.

The game we enjoyed most this trip was Coconuts. The idea is to use a catapult (in the shape of a monkey) to launch rubber coconuts into plastic cups. The game starts with many cups in the centre of the table. Whenever you successfully land a coconut in a cup, you claim that cup and place it on your player board. The goal is to claim 6 cups to build a pyramid. This game is harder than it looks. The catapults are not precise, and the rubber coconuts often bounce. Sometimes a coconut drops into a cup only to immediately bounce out. Sometimes it lands in a different cup after bouncing out. It's crazy!

Chen Rui taking aim.

Scoring is exhilarating.

17 Jan 2016. I played Zombie Tower 3D with the children.

21 Jan 2016. Teck Seng wanted to learn Catan, so I brought it to the office. Teaching and playing this game again reminded me how wonderful it is and why it has become a classic. In our game Eva and Teck Seng competed fiercely for the longest road trophy. On one of Eva's turns, she built three roads at one go to overtake Teck Seng and wrestle the trophy from him. Intense! I started upgrading my settlements to cities earlier than the rest, which helped me gather more resources. By the time the others started doing it, ore and grain became very scarce. I was fortunate to have started doing upgrades when supply was higher than demand.

I was green. I had two separate regions, and I never linked them up.

22 Jan 2016. I brought 10 Days in Asia to the office also upon a colleague's request. I told them this was geography mahjong. The game we played was very funny. Teck Seng and Xiaozhu played as a team. With two heads thinking, they should be doing better than the rest of us. However they kept making mistakes and tripping over each other that they ended up doing worse than everyone else. We kept hearing them exclaim oh no we should have played this card, or oh gosh we should have picked that card, or why did we place this card here? It was more entertaining than a comedy show.

We got to a point where three players were one card away from winning (excluding the duo of Teck Seng and Xiaozhu naturally). It was nail-biting. We exhausted the draw deck and had to reshuffle the discard piles to form a new draw deck. At that time I could sense I was not likely to win. I needed a China card or a Thailand card, but I hadn't seen them so far, so they must be in the hands of the other players. Sure enough, I later learned that Teck Seng and Xiaozhu had both the China cards, and Ruby the Thailand card. Ruby was the one who announced victory. However when she showed us her 10-day itinerary, we spotted a mistake. She had planned to take a train from Thailand to South Korea, but the train networks of these two countries didn't overlap. Ooops. Eventually we decided it was a tied game with no winner.

I realised I had taught one rule wrong. When you draw a card from the draw deck, if you don't like it, you can immediately discard it. I had taught my colleagues that they must replace it with another card in their hands. Sorry...