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animeiowa

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With every single day that goes by, I am more and more grateful that I managed to pull off the Infection Tag Game at AnimeIowa in 2019.

Like. I thought briefly about finally re-typing the simplified rules I would recite at the "vaccine station" for people interested in playing, since I had all of this free time now... Rationality quickly prevailed, though, as I remembered that the reason I have all of this free time is because of the actual pandemic going on right now, and maybe people won't be interested in recreating some sort of faux-infextion game for the near future.

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I mean you could retype the rules anyway, and the worst-case scenario if no one ends up wanting to play is you'll have spent a couple hours doing a thing instead of spending a couple hours looking for a thing to do

That is an excellent point.

also I admit some curiosity as to how one might play such a thing

Taking a look back through my AI tagged entries, I'm actually kinda surprised I didn't post the full rules here already! I'll see about digging those up. I'm sure I've got a copy around somewhere...

Found it on Google Docs! I remembered it being two pages long instead of one, which initially kept me searching a bit longer, until I subsequently remembered that, oh yeah, I increased the font size on the printed version to make it easier to read 😅

Short version:

Attendees would go to the Vaccine Station to volunteer to try our vaccine against Con Plague. To show they were playing the game, they would get a green sticker on their badge.

Starting then, they could stop by once an hour to roll a D20 to find out if their vaccine was still safe-ish, or if something had gone wrong, and now they were infectious; the odds of "something going wrong" went up the longer the convention went on.

If their roll meant their vaccine mutated, we'd give them a marked yellow sticker to put over their green sticker, to show that they were infectious. They'd also be given a strip of three plain yellow stickers; they could put one of these stickers over the green sticker of any other person who was playing the game (but it didn't necessarily have to be the first person they saw, so if they wanted to let the friend who was in line after them roll the die to find out if their vaccine mutated first, they could do that). Someone who had been infected this way could visit the Vaccine Station and we'd mark their yellow sticker, then give them their own strip of three plain yellow stickers to infect other participating attendees.

A roll of 1 meant the person was double infectious and was given two strips of stickers; a roll of 20 meant they were cured and could no longer infect or be infected, and given a pink sticker to put over whichever sticker they were currently wearing, green, plain yellow, or marked yellow. There were some options for how to get extra yellow stickers to infect more people as well, such as volunteering, donating $5 to that year's charity, or pre-registering for 2020 (oops), but I tried to keep it reasonably limited, to keep a single person from going out and infecting every single other attendee at the convention. (There was a kid who was, like, nine years old who really wanted to do that, and I felt a little bad about enforcing the restrictions on him, but uh. Not very.) If you were cured and wanted to play the game again, you could "earn" a chance to do so with the same activities.

Changes I would make for the future (in, say, ten or twenty years, when playing this sort of game will be in better taste):
* Increase the possibility of being "cured" as the weekend goes on, similar to how the chance of the vaccine mutating increases with time
* Remove the barrier to people starting over from green; they can start over with a fresh green sticker at any time after being "cured", even right that second.
* Maybe say 5 minute waiting period after your vaccine "mutates" before you can infect anyone else? That should cover the "I don't want to infect my best friend before they have a chance to roll on their own" pretty well, and I'm more than willing to treat "five minutes" as "once you walk away from the Vaccine Station".

Numbers wise, I prepped for waaaaay more people than we actually got playing. If we did this again—well, I'm pretty sure I can re-use the stickers we have already if we want to do this again, but if the stickers go bad or we lose them, or for some other convention that might want to try this, I'd plan for maybe 10-20% participation at most, rather than the 30-50% I'm pretty sure I planned for.

Also, sticker color choice was entirely arbitrary, and based on the colors of stickers available at Target at the time.

Edit: Oh right! My main reason for wanting to restrict how many people one individual could "infect" was to make sure that everyone playing had the chance to potentially infect other people; if one person infected everyone else, that would probably not be a very fun game!

Edited 2021-02-19 05:44 (UTC)

sounds like it would've been fun without Current Context, yeah

Yeah, it was. It was pretty fun* in the summer of 2019? Definitely not something I'd even remotely consider bringing back in the next few years.

* My biggest problem is that I was the person who was running it most of the time, so I was pretty much stuck perpetually behind the desk doing that, with little to no relief. I managed to get a couple of hours off here and there, but one of them was dedicated to being on call to personally drive disabled folks to the off-site location of our Maid Cafe (food restrictions meant we couldn't hold it at the convention center proper). I mean, the entire Environmental Enhancement team was pretty much tied down to whatever they were running, so I wasn't the only one who couldn't really get away, but I'm still kinda grumpy about one of the panels I missed.

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