Black Death is a humorous and macabre little board game about life in the Middle Ages, circa 1400AD, during the height of the Plague. Each player takes the role of a different disease, and whoever wipes out most of Europe wins! Loads of fun for 1 to 30 million people, though 3-4 players gives best results.
Black Death includes a 4 page rulebook, a four-color map, player aid cards and a bunch of die cut counters. It requires two six-sided dice, and a slightly twisted sense of humor, which you have to procure on your own. The map represents 14th century Europe, major cities and the trade routes between them. Each player chooses a disease of a given virulence and mortality, and tries to spread as fast and wide as possible before the people carrying their disease either recover or die. The more of your counters on the map, the more you can score, but scoring means that some of your population dies, removing those counters from the map, making it a self-balancing situation. Players can also use action cards based on historical events to modify diseases or alter travel patterns. All in all, it is educational, tacky and fun.
Black Death is an exceptionally nice looking pdf (graphics by Alvin Helms) available from BTRC or our online vendors for US$8.00. While we will continue to sell the remaining stock of the original printed version for anyone who wants it, the new pdf version looks a lot better.
The downside is you have to print and assemble it yourself. But, what you get looks like this. Very nice. For those who request it, we can provide sets of pre-printed components on high-quality stock. To see what the download looks like, download the sample file from here.
March 27, 2011: Jabberwock has done a nice academic comparison of Black Death to the book Connected (by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler). Read it here.