#17 SIMULATION GAME PANDEMIC

Simulation games such as founding villages are popular and successful in political education. They are ideal for playing out the founding of societies, developing constitutions and learning about the challenges of complex societies in a very concrete way. In contrast, today we are proposing a pandemic game for a more robust and politically aware target group. The aim of such a game, which is to be played with event cards, could be to develop a little more understanding for decision-makers in crisis situations. After all, it is not easy to make the right decisions under the conditions of radical uncertainty in a pandemic.

Before we set out to develop such a pandemic game ourselves, we looked around a bit and actually discovered a few approaches along similar lines.

The existing board game "Pandemie" could be helpful for developing your own pandemic game. It was developed by Matt Leacock and is also available in German. You can find instructions for the game here.

In the context of the pandemic, however, a number of simulation games have also been created that deal with issues of security and freedom. Both the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung offer such a pandemic game for teachers and students - but we see no reason not to use or adapt these simulations outside of school. The Europahaus Marienberg has carried out a special form of the pandemic game called Zombiland.