Today I came across a story of board gamers playing a game to help raise funds to fight Ebola. What game are they playing? Pandemic of course.

Pandemic is a collaborative boardgame where you work together to stop the spread of four deadly diseases around the world. It was created by Matt Leacock who also happens to be one of the folks behind this idea of playing the game to raise $100,000 to go to Doctors Without Borders and their fight against Ebola.

So Matt is asking people to hold Pandemic Parties, where people come together to play Pandemic the game (or any game) and donate money to fight Ebola.

When I heard about this I thought wow! This is amazing. It’s such a great idea, and a perfect match between the issue and the game. This isn’t the first charity gaming event by a long shot. And they aren’t asking people to do like marathon events. To me they are asking for something more akin to a MacMillan Cancer Support coffee morning. Come together, play a game or two of Pandemic, enjoy a coffee (or other beverage), have a good time, donate money, leave with a warm fuzzy feeling.

The great thing I think about holding a Pandemic Party is that you can theme it a lot. Petrie dishes to hold the virus counters (I know some folks already use this for the game), players could wear surgical masks and rubber gloves while playing, you could get some injection pens (pens that look like injection needles) and have them stored in a test tube holder and give them to participants.

The nice thing is Pandemic is one of my pile of shame games. So this will be a great excuse to play the game. I’m not sure when the deadline is for doing this, I know nothing will happen this side of Christmas but I will look at organising something for January.

Hopefully after you have looked at the links below you will also feel like holding a Pandemic Party. I do hope so.

You can find out more about holding a Pandemic Party by visiting the official web site .

You can read the original story I read here it also has video to.

And if you want to find out more about the game and see what it is like to play there is the rather excellent episode of Wil Wheatons tabletop.

You can get Pandemic from your friendly local gamestore, or online from the likes of Amazon. There is also Pandemic the Cure that is a dice based version of the game.

Posted by me using my iPad and the Blogsy app