Board games reviews: Plague Inc; Evolution: The Beginning; Kingdomino
There's a faintly luddite spirit to the board game renaissance of recent years, perhaps a reaction to the heavy demands screens now make on our time. Yet there isn't such a great divide between games built of cardboard and those spun from code. They explore similar themes and their designers frequently learn from one another.
In 2007, a simple web game, Pandemic, challenged players with spreading an infection across the world. Around the same time, an unrelated board game of the same name tasked its players with preventing the spread of disease and quickly assumed cult status. Soon after, a mobile game called Plague Inc reversed the goal again, making global epidemic a mainstay of many commutes, while happily crediting the original Pandemic web game as an inspiration. Now Plague Inc has been reimagined as a board game that looks much like a homage to the board game, completing a considerable circle over 10 years.
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