Do you know there are known unknowns in epidemic management game Raxxon?

Title Do you know there are known unknowns in epidemic management game Raxxon?
Author Tom Chick
Posted in Game reviews
When February 25, 2021

When it comes to gaming the spread of infectious disease, everyone loves Matt Leacock's Pandemic. Not me. I think it does a terrible job of modeling the outbreak, spread, and containment of an epidemic..

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I agree that I’ve never found Pandemic particularly thematic (or all that compelling as a design), although Legacy helps by adding explicit narrative beats and more specific mechanics that are less…weird and abstract than the city card hand management of base Pandemic.

I don’t recall - how did you end up liking AuZtralia?

I found Auztralia pretty disappointing. Basically a combination of two cool things – horde mode and railroad games – that turn into one bland thing. Martin Wallace’s A Study in Beige.

Especially Season Two. Flipping the gameplay mechanic so you’re the spreading cubes was kind of brilliant.

-Tom

Seems neat to have all these specific interactions that might only happen rarely. In a digital version, they could hide those until they occur the first time (like monster drops in a castlevania game)

Perhaps Pandemic is less interested in simulating an epidemic than in evoking camaraderie and crisis management in the face of desperate odds.

I mean, at a time when cooperative games were not in the mainstream of the hobby, isn’t that why you would make a pure us-versus-the-game game? Isn’t that what the game is “about,” more than how many people died in Chennai?

Trying to use communication and planning to narrowly avert disaster is also what Knizia’s Lord of the Rings (the true pioneer of the genre) is about. What Pandemic’s theme adds to the experience, by contrast, is not some kind of real-world pathogen modeling–it’s relatability. It’s stakes. The stakes of all boardgames are imaginary, but Pandemic’s can arguably get a tighter grip on the imagination of more people than playing keep-the-ring-away-from-Sauron.

So it seems to me that the concept of fighting diseases is more a means to an end than the end in itself. Which means that it’s most successful if it encourages the feeling of oncoming catastrophe, while allowing you to forestall that catastrophe with minute contributions, made more powerful by clever coordination.

It seems clear to me that Pandemic doesn’t particularly care about simulating diseases. It doesn’t care about simulating anything. It cares about giving you the remote chance of becoming a team and the even more remote chance of averting disaster. If you look at a cooperative game and see a solitaire game in disguise, I can see how you might not appreciate it.

Everything you’ve written applies to games I “appreciate”, such as Arkham Horror, Grizzled, Robinson Crusoe, Flash Point, Spirit Island, Zombicide, and, well, pretty much every other solitaire/co-op game I can think of. Even Raxxon! I assure you that my issues with Pandemic are entirely based on its design and not whether I play it with other people.

-Tom

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Fair enough! Every co-op game is about teamwork. But taking Arkham Horror or Zombicide in comparison to Pandemic, don’t you think that those games are fundamentally as focused on other things–perhaps we’d say a constellation of story episodes, or the feeling of being powerful in combat, respectively–as they are on teamwork? Because it seems to me that Pandemic, being a simpler game, is not trying to do too much more than put the players in a pressure cooker together.

Grizzled arguably is the closest to doing what Pandemic is doing. Flash Point is similar too, though I think it adds a dose of personal heroism. Thing is, can’t you easily knock both of those games for failing at the same thing you criticize Pandemic for? Grizzled’s model of living through war is harrowing but kind of sloppy and weird. And Flash Point’s model for fire spreading is laughable.

Flash Point is, in theory, made in consultation with actual firefighters. Is the fire propagation model completely realistic? No. But moving through the building, rescuing injured people, securing hazardous materials, spraying things with a high pressure hose, the various specialist roles, sometimes having to cut through parts of the structure to reach people timely…these are all things that pretty clearly and directly map to stuff actual firefighters do. I cannot map anything Pandemic is doing with cards to anything in the real world.

The Arkham Horror I meant was the original first edition boardgame (aka Eldritch Horror v0.1). Where everyone is ultimately holding back the gates/Old One that will end the game. And I would say Zombicide isn’t about feeling powerful in combat so much as holding back a bunch of cubes that grow every turn. But they’re minis instead of cubes. Table presence FTW!

Oh, sure, Grizzled is a simple matching symbols puzzle, absolutely. But I kind of like how it’s suggesting a story rather than trying to represent anything. I suppose you could say the same about, say, the cards in Pandemic. But I have no idea what those cards are even suggesting. From my Thunderbirds review:

I do, however, know what the whistle in Grizzled suggests.

-Tom

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It was a $40 release, but you can find it for half that on Amazon right now

it is even cheaper here, bought it. A nice little card puzzle it looks like. Btw @tomchick Your rules video was great. I wish more videos would be like this. Starting with the goal of the game and introducing rules in a logic way.
A lot of boardgame tutorial videos, they rush through every each rule and by the end you know 100 little rules but have no idea how to play or how it all fits together.

Thanks for that, @newbrof! I love teaching boardgames because I like kind of reverse-engineering the rules. Basically, breaking them down and then working out the best way to communicate them. Which is almost never the way they’re actually written.

Hope you enjoy Raxxon. Remember that Gabriel Diaz is baby mode!

-T

6 posts were split to a new topic: “Quarterbacking” in boardgames: a Pandemic problem or a people problem?

Oh god, flashbacks to Tom Vasel’s overview videos. I’ve never seen anyone worse at explaining games.

He’s so bad, that he can do an overview of a game I already know, and I walk away not sure how to play anymore!

On a related note, is there a term for the board gamer who makes rules explanations more difficult? While you’re trying to paint broad strokes to get concepts or overviews across, they have to chime in with the exceptions to every rule you mention. Every single exception, every single rule. It never even seems to be for the benefit of the learners, but rather to just show off what they know.

“Okay so this is the town of Arkham. An ancient one is waking up, and if this doom track ever fills up, he wakes up and we have to fight him.”

“Except Azathoth. Then the game ends in defeat.”

“Right…so you’re going around closing gates and sealing them. If you seal six, you win. And new gates can’t open on sealed ones.”

“Except gate bursts!”

“Right…but we’re not playing with those.”

“But they exist!”

“Right…so you also want to keep monsters under control because any above a certain number overflow into the outskirts and raise the terror level, which is bad.”

“Except in 2 player games where the outskirt is a bigger safety valve and it becomes a viable strategy to not confront monsters.”

“Right…but we’re playing with 5. You know what? Fuck it let’s just start.”

Would you call him The Showoff? The Exceptionalist? Trevor?

Someone elsewhere online pointed me at a pretty competitively priced core KS pledge plus a couple addons listing for Lords of Hellas on Facebook Marketplace, which I would never have looked at in a million years on my own, and flush with tax return money and in an excess of love for Awaken Realms I went ahead and bought in. It arrived today, because the seller used the postal service and not fucking UPS. (I carry a grudge, I don’t know if that’s clear.) I have no idea if I’ll like it (although I’m a fan of the two other Awaken Realms games I’ve played - Tainted Grail and Etherfields - and I’ve watched enough The Edge: Dawnfall campaign play and pre-release coverage of The Great Wall and ISS Vanguard to expect to like them), but fuckit. Here we go. Someday. When I can have people over again.

It does have a solo “campaign”, though, where the Persians invade and you have a prologue and two acts (with little narrative scripts) worth of fighting them off to do. Maybe I’ll get around to setting up to try that once I’ve freed tablespace from a couple other higher priority projects.

For those in UK, the game is currently available for less than £12 delivered:

I enjoyed Tom’s rule explanations and playthroughs. But I’ve already bought several solo games based on his advice. Not sure my shelves and free time can take many more.