[PNP] Hide the Havarti

I'm really terrible about this, because anytime anything remotely having to do with smallpox, bubonic plague, etc. comes up, I'll start going off for an hour on the subject, so please forgive me if this is too much of a tangent.

In general, fungus makes for a poor pandemic agent, at last among people (bats, frogs, and other animal populations can be decimated by fungal infections). Likewise, cheese isn't really the best vector for spreading such an agent. That said, historically, many things have been blamed for the spread of disease, from cats to Jews, when they were not actually vectors. A game set during the Napoleonic War makes this notion more feasible as there is the element of the "other" to associate with the disease, which is such a classic element of historic accounts and epidemiological storytelling. You thereby propagate the notion of it being spread by filthy French cheese even if the cheese is not the actual culprit, just as the 1918 H1N1 pandemic was termed the Spanish Flu even though it did not originate there. You could have a card that makes you twice as guilty if they find the cheese in the same location as a Swedish Cheese Witch, or some such.

That's not to say cheese couldn't theoretically work out as a vector. One gram of cheese contains about 10 billion microbial cells of bacteria and fungus. Personally, I'd say your best bet is to make the pathogen a mycophage, a bacteria that feeds on the fungi found in cheese. It is not part of the cheese-making process but is introduced by the environment. One possibility is that the bacteria generates a toxin that it uses to destroy the cell walls of the fungus, which happens to also be deadly to humans in sufficient quantity. The problem there though is that you've just created a new vector for food poisoning -- hardly a pandemic. It could instead be a mycovirus that thrives on some element of cheese but can also infect the candida endosymbionts that grow on the human body. The virus will shed cells that are toxic to the human host, allowing the candida to perpetuate and disrupt mucosal membranes, which eventually leads to a systemic infection and death by endocarditis. It's kind of an awesome vector, because you eat infected cheese and the viral cells are then introduced directly to the candida in your mouth and digestive tract. It poisons you to give its host a better condition to thrive in, and by time you die, your skin is covered in infected candida cells, ready to be picked up by anyone who touches you. Fun!

The future setting just doesn't work because it flies in the face of how society is structured and the advances in technology that we are seeing, which make this sort of problem even less likely to occur. Were cheese to become deadly, it would just give more power to Big Cheese, the Kraft type companies that could guarantee a safe product, muscling out the little guys through lobbying for more stringent cheese production laws. Inspectors barging into basements, that's 19th century right there.

Head back to the 19th century and people don't understand the pathology of the disease, but they do note that handling cheese can lead to infection (due to either infected fungal cells or encapsulated viral spores). You get the desired outcome, witch hunts, etc.

In summary, the best epidemiological storytelling has a scapegoat in the human population, much like how people turn against other people in zombie fiction (zombies being a sort of macro-virus). The Napoleonic setting works really well because it is right on the heels of the French Revolution and in the wake of the Enlightenment, which led to to such fervent nationalism and racism. You can mine the social satire, the prejudices of the time, Europe being in relative turmoil, and then let them eat the frosty icing of the disease shtick.

In comparing it to other plagues, perhaps something brief, accurate, but kind of funny, like:

1346, Siege of Caffa: The Tartars besieging the port of Caffa used catapults to hurl the corpses of their plague stricken comrades over the walls of the city. Sadly, the end result was not Tartar sauce, which would not be invented for another five-hundred-years. Instead, this early example of biological warfare sparked a global pandemic that would claim the lives of as many as 200 million people.

1815, Battle of Waterloo: The worst pandemic in history originated with a great commander, a crushing defeat, and a few dozen wheels of Camembert . . .

And in the spirit of a happy 4th of July, we can all thank our forefathers for engaging in biological warfare (or what we'd call terrorism today) by sending smallpox-ridden blankets into Boston to kill off the garrison there. Yay, good guys! I highly recommend reading Pox Americana for anyone interested in knowing how Smallpox shaped our nation's history.

"Great Influenza" was a good book. If you want a really fun read, I suggest Richard "The Demon in the Freezer." He's the same guy who did "Hot Zone."

Hilarious game! The mechanics look really neat to me.

Quick question, during play testing, does having more formagers make the game significantly harder for the inspecteur?

Also, if you're unlucky, even if you have perfect memory, can the inspecteur inspect four times without finding cheese? The sniffing mouse can only be used once.
By my quick calculations, if you simply flip the cards over in order, there's about a 1/3 chance you fail 4 times before you find 4 cheeses.
I suppose it's not that big an issue for quick games where everybody gets to go a few times.

YAY! I love when designers put 'em on Google Docs. I'll take a look after I finish proofing Second Line.