Pandemic Puzzle
Pandemic Puzzle is in development for Android and desktop devices. Feedback is welcome.
Privacy Statement
This game does not, nor ever will, collect any data.
Permissions
The game requires internet access to activate a license. Once activation is complete, you can revoke the permission without consequence, but you’ll need to remember to grant the permission again if you need to re-activate. There are no license restrictions for any release prior to 1.0, so internet access is not currently necessary.
Instructions
Goal
Your goal is to move all people from the bottom of the board to the top while avoiding or minimizing infections from invisible viruses randomly scattered around the board. A level ends when everybody is in the top row or dead. If anybody remains healthy, the level resets with the healthy people at the bottom again. The game ends when nobody is healthy or if your remaining time reaches zero.
Input
Touch or click a person to make that person active (indicated with yellow highlighting). Move the active person by touching adjacent board positions. Alternatively, you can touch and drag, but be very careful because it is easy to “fat finger” a person into an unintended location.
For devices with a keyboard, you can move the active person using the arrow keys, WASD+QEZX, and the number pad keys 1-9 (omit 5).
Game Play
As viruses are invisible to the naked eye, you must infer their locations. If a person begins showing symptoms, the person came into direct contact with the virus or stood adjacent to an infected person. Infected people spread the virus around the board when they move.
Try to maximize your score, which updates after each level. The people worth the most points are the people demographically most at risk of perishing. In order of highest to lowest points: elders (8), men (6), women (4), children (2). An infected person is worth half as many points as the same person uninfected.
- Stethoscope
- Remaining time (left, in seconds), and score
- Danger (red)/Safe (green) markers
- ICU bed locations
- Vaccine
- Obstacle
- Masks
- Person to move
Use the stethoscope to show you who is infected. It costs 5 seconds of remaining time, but you don’t have to wait for anybody to show symptoms.
Use the “danger” and “safe” markers to annotate board positions. For example, if a person is showing symptoms, that board position is definitely infected. Annotate “danger” so you don’t lose this information after the person moves elsewhere.
1 or 2 ICU beds appear in the top row. These special locations are never infected, and infection via transmission between people never occurs to or from an ICU bed location. When an infected person ends a level on an ICU bed, that person might heal and proceed to the next level. Note that infected people can still perish while on a ICU bed before the level ends.
Acquiring the vaccine spares a person from infection 3 times. A person does not retain the benefit of these power-ups after a level concludes, and the vaccine’s location might be infected.
Acquiring a mask reduces the probability of spreading the virus between adjacent people. The probability is lowest when both people have a mask. A mask’s location might be infected.
Fast-Forward
When you have identified a safe path from a person’s location to the top row, you can choose to move that person directly to the top row instead of being limited to adjacent positions. Click a person to make him or her active, and then click a top row position. If there is an unobstructed, presumably safe path available, you will see it denoted with footprints. Click the “X” to decline; click the check to access the path and move the person to the destination.
“Presumably safe” positions are positions you have annotated as safe (green) and spaces in the top and bottom rows that you have not annotated as dangerous (red). The path is actually safe only to the extent that your annotations are correct. You can spread the virus quickly with fast-forwarding if you’re not careful.
The path is not random. You will always get the same path for the same board conditions.
Report a Bug / Request a Feature
The best way to report a bug, or to request a feature, is to file an issue on Github. Be sure to tag your issue with the “pandemic-puzzle” label. Please provide appropriate supporting documentation, such as screenshots and steps to reproduce.