by nerman8r
Hi folks,I have read a number of posts where people are finding the game quite difficult because of bad luck or failure to get the right recons done or what-have-you. I wanted to offer a couple ways to take notes to make the game easier:
1) Note how many cards are in the player deck, and where the epidemic cards are, so the first epidemic might be in the top 8 cards, the next in the 8 cards below that, and so on. Keep track of how many cards are drawn to give yourself an idea of when it might turn up.
2) This is what we (well, I) do. Write a list of all the infection cards that are drawn, down the left-hand side of the page. So at the game start it might look like this (I might have colours wrong. I don't have the board in front of me.)
Blue
New York 1
2
Washington 1
London 1
Yellow
Sao Paulo 1
2
Black
Cairo 1
Tripoli 1
Istanbul 1
Leave enough room for the missing cards. Keep adding cards as they are discarded. When there's an epidemic, first add the new card from the bottom, then draw a line down the page to the right of your list. As each card comes up a second time, make a check mark to the right of the line for the corresponding card. For each subsequent epidemic, make another line.
In this way, you can predict with some accuracy what cards will show up, both if an epidemic is drawn, and if not.
If you have scrap paper, use that. Hope that helps!