Introduction to my first educational boardgame - Virus Micro-War [WIP]

If you're only interested in the game itself, please skip the first 2 parts and go directly to part 3.

1. Background
Always wanted to write a blog about my ideas and work on BGDF but always felt too much pressure as a first-time game designer. No fancy team supporting me but myself. No brilliant artwork, and not much experience either. But still, I always hold the idea that I want to design games that are both fun and educational. But I don't want to design games just for kids. I would like a game that can even attract adults to play and gain some insights into certain subjects.

So some "ideal" attributes that my games should have would be:
1. Scientific - my top priority: All designs should have the latest scientific theories/proofs backing them up. When designs can not strictly follow such theories/proofs because of the selected game mechanism and the pursuit of other "ideal" attributes, they will be identified in either rule book or a separate pamphlet.
2. (relatively) Simple: Since I design my games so that people can learn some fascinating stuff about our world in a simpler way, I surely don't want them to have a hard time learning how to play my games!
3. Fun: Well, that's what we all want from games right?

2. Why I make Virus Micro-War
I was still living in China when SARS happened. It was both terrifying and fascinating to know that a small virus called SARS coronavirus with a diameter of only around 120nm can have such a devastating effect to our body. But not much information was available to me during that period.

Recent MERS and Ebola outbreaks brought people's attention back to virus. And this time thanks to internet and social media, I could have a lot of first-hand information about people's knowledge and attitudes towards them. Surprisingly many do not know much about virus except for what are fed to them by unreliable sources, including news reports. Good news is that these unreliable sources can still carry the right messages from time to time.

Some famous games have already worked with virus theme. And of course Pandemic and Plague Inc. are on the top of the list. These games provide us an overview of how viruses adapt to environment via mutation and spread across the world. But many of them lack the details of how virus works in a micro level. How can virus manage to penetrate our defence? How can they manipulate our cells to their own advantages and thrive in them?

So here comes Virus Micro-War (name tbd), a game trying to answer the above mentioned questions.

3. Introduction to Virus Micro-War
Virus Micro-War (name tbd) is a two-player game set in a micro world where each player has a virus and a cell. Each player will use their own virus to infect opponent's cell, interfere with its defence, and turn it into a virus factory. The goal is to assemble enough virions and release them from opponent's cell. First one reaching a certain number of virions will win.

Game components:
1. Cell board: a board demonstrating cell structure, viral content location, and cell immune response.
2. Virus card: a card listing some basic properties of a virus and some special abilities that differentiate it from other viruses in-game
3. Action card: a viral life cycle is broken down into several actions, each listed on an action card to demonstrate process of viral genome replication, viral protein synthesis, and etc.
4. Immune Response/Evasion board: a board tracking cell's antiviral activities and virus' immune evasion activities (currently using dice to indicate antiviral levels and evasion levels).
5. Some dice: dice are mainly used to determine if an immune response can take effect or not, other than tracking levels as I mentioned earlier. They are also occasionally used to determine if mutations can happen or not.

Game progression (1 virus attacking 1 cell)*:
1. Virus initiate entry into cell and preparing itself to establish a virus factory inside. In the meantime, cell will build its pattern recognition receptors (to detect virus presence) and signaling pathways so that after virus presence is detected, cell can enter antiviral state.
2. Virus starts protein synthesis and genome replication while cell starts making antiviral proteins. These antiviral proteins can stop virus from making more viral proteins and/or cause programmed cell dealth to destroy virus factory once and for all. Virus thus needs to either block these antiviral proteins directly to make them less efficient or block cell's antiviral state so that no more antiviral proteins can be made.
3. While battling cell's immune system, virus still has to make enough genomes and proteins so that new virions can be assembled and released from cell.
*Remember, your opponent's are doing the same. So it is a race! Don't take too long just to beat cell's immune system!

4. Acknowledgement
Special thanks to Professor Vincent Racaniello from Columbia University who published his entire virology course lectures on youtube. 26 hours of videos are no kidding but I enjoyed them so much. If you would like to skip my game and find out what is happening in the viral micro world, here's the link for 2015 spring lecture videos.

I would also like to thank National Center for Biotechnology Information which provided me a handful of high quality academic papers to help me understand many details of viruses that I would like to include in my game.

Last but not the least, thank you all for making it this far reading my first blog post. Thank you from the bottom of my heart - Xiaochen Huang