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disease. Which ensures
that the macabre events end within about fifteen minutes.
With his game 1347 - De Nigrae Pestis Ludo (Magic Press Edizioni, 2018), Marco Mingozzi demonstrates how virtuous plague doctors carry out their work. Which doesn’t exclude that their chief concern is actually their prestige, mea- sured in wealth points. They reflect not only the money the doctors have, but primarily influence, patient base, equip- ment, number of assistants, and facilities such as a pharmacy or hospital.
Influence points can be used for hidden bids for the actions that come with the different locations. Unlike additional assistants, they remain available for later rounds. If you are outbid, you can console yourself (or might even have intended to do so) by converting your wager into fresh money or new assistants. Visiting the sub- urbs causes direct confrontation. Depend- ing on the influence points invested, the player who prevails here may steal money, an assistant or equipment from an oppo- nent of his choice, or even cure one of his own patients to the detriment of one
of his victim’s patients. Sometimes, the plague plays
only a supporting role. In Mario Papini’s strategy game Feudo (ZuGames, 2004), for example, players start each round by drawing a card that specifies in which areas units of the hostile aristocratic houses are infested by the plague. Even though the dis- ease becomes lethal only in
case of recurrence, it immediately reduces mobil- ity and combat strength con- siderably. Visit- ing the convent might at least pro- vide a prospect of cure – a side trip that the baron doesn’t need to take because of
his self-healing power.
It doesn’t happen before chapter III, i.e., halfway through the game, that the plague reaches Kingsbridge, the location that Michael Rieneck and Stefan Stadler use in World Without End (2009), true to the book it is based on.
Besides a pious
way of life and
contributions to
building projects,
you can now also
improve your repu-
tation by acquiring
medical knowl-
edge and then
excelling in patient care. Since nobody can catch the plague twice, it might be that no new case of sickness occurs in some rounds of the final chapter – which is rather unfortunate from the physicians’ perspective.
In their game Village (eggertspiele, 2011), Inka and Markus Brand adapted the transience of life in a grandiose manner. Adept worker management requires constantly keeping an eye on the
aging of your family mem- bers and consequently also on their demise. As soon as
you have completed a round on the lifetime track of your farmyard, a member of the currently oldest generation passes away. This pro- cess is expedited if there are no influence cubes left in the village and you therefore have to take a plague cube; or you even choose to do this earlier
in order to still be able to carry out a spe- cificaction.
Not even Klaus-Jürgen Wrede’s Car- cassonne (Hans im Glück), usually such a placid game, has been spared from the plague. spielbox-colleague Christwart Conrad was responsible for an expansion called Die Pest (spielbox edition, issue 6/2010). After a calm start-up phase, the revealed landscape tiles can also show plague symbols. Then the disease spreads from there on every turn, as indicated by flea disks. Followers who are not able to flee far enough return to their owner(s) empty-handed. The situation is alleviated bythefactthataplaguesitebecomes inactive as soon as
there are not enough
fleas available any
more.
Among other games in the Ancient World Multi Game System (Playford Games, 2018; presented in spielbox 3/2019), it contains Dark Death, by Mike Tugwell, actually an abstract thinking game with a title that just leads players to believe this would be a themed game. Six physician tiles, distributed on any spaces on the check- ered board, are initially confronted with no more than two germs in the form of red and black disks. These germs, placed on the intersections of the board and immobile, want to do harm by surround- ing the physicians. While the number of germs increases by two every round, the physicians try to decimate them by jump- ing over them. Not an easy task, since, after work, each physician needs to rest for one round. Unless one side is elimi- nated prematurely, each physician scores four points in the end, whereas each red-
&-black pair of germs is worth one point. Due to a considerable mutation rate, the virus has infiltrated various genres within 30 years, but this can’t yet be called a pandemic – a ludological diag- nosis that should well and truly make players happy. L. U. Dikus/sbw
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