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'Infection's' creator Dan Sullivan.
Photograph by Skye Dunlap
Infectious Fun
A local game creator hopes that families will stay home for an evening of the plague
By Kelly Wilkinson
Dan Sullivan is hoping people will forgo the movies and instead settle in with friends and family for an evening of the plague, athlete's foot and scurvy.
In October, Sullivan released his game "Infection" more than 15 years after he first thought of the idea. It's a board game about medicine and diseases where competitors race to cure all of their ailments or simply be the last player to remain alive. He's printed 4,000 games and is selling them in 15 stores throughout California.
"No one wants to play a game where you all get sick and die--that isn't a fun game," Sullivan says. "So you start off sick and compete to get healthy and there are different ways to get cured: a specialist, a hospital, a voodoo doctor. I wanted it to be sort of serious and for people to be able to learn while they're playing and having fun."
The diseases range from ingrown toenails, bad breath and zits to DeQuervain's Disease, giantism and trichinosis. Cards give Latin names, causes, treatment and symptoms. Around the board, squares indicate that diseases can be picked up in public restrooms, community swim centers or family reunions. Players can be afflicted with a disease automatically if they can't identify an ailment through its description.
Sullivan, who spends the day ripping apart computers and fixing them as an analytical service supervisor at LSI Logic, said he and a college roommate thought of the idea at UC Berkeley.
"We were sitting in the library looking up gross things like 18- and 19-year-olds do, and my friend said, 'Why don't you think of something that will make us a million dollars?' " Sullivan explains.
The next day, Sullivan had formed the general outline for the game and the two spent hours looking up bizarre and disgusting diseases. After developing a crude version--Sullivan says it looked like a third-grader's project because neither had any art skills--and mailing a copy to themselves for copyrighting purposes, the idea sat dormant for several years.
Sullivan returned to the game in graduate school and copyrighted a new version in 1991.
"After I finished school and paid off all my debts and got a real job, I thought I should do this again," Sullivan says.
And with that decision, Sullivan has plunged into an underworld of game making: a world that has invaded his apartment and the homes of family members as piles of dice, rubber bands and brightly colored cards mount on dining room tables, along hallways and in closets. He's enlisted his family to help build the games to cut labor costs.
"We're still assembling cards that should have come collated," Sullivan says of the 226 different-colored cards representing diseases, cures and intensive care techniques. In a move that he thought might lessen costs, he bought individual parts for the game through a wide variety of vendors rather than from one gaming company, and bought a shrink-wrapping machine to do that part himself.
"I must have talked to 15 or 20 people about dice alone," he says. "And I had 8,000 die in my apartment."
Sullivan decided on 4,000 games because production prices drop drastically when the number of units increase and says "that was a number I couldn't really afford, but I kind of could."
His initial costs were $44,000.
He now admits that he "did everything wrong" and has learned how he could have spent less money, but remains philosophical about the experience.
"The first time you do it, you'll always mess up," he says.
Photograph by Skye Dunlap
'Infection's' competitors race to cure their ailments. Dan Sullivan created the board game 'Infection' while he and a friend 'were sitting in the library looking up gross things like 18- and 19-year-olds do,' Sullivan explained. 'Infection's' diseases range from ingrown toenails, bad breath and zits to DeQuervain's Disease, giantism and trichinosis.
As part of Sullivan's educational marketing strategy, he's selling the game to science departments at high schools and has donated some to hospital break rooms and medical schools. But the game's concept has bred confusion also: Sullivan good-humoredly recalls talking one woman who ran a clinic in the Himalayas out of buying the game as a substitute for authentic medical books.
"The disease cards are as accurate as possible; however the treatments described on the cure cards have no factual basis," the game's preamble reads. "Any medical questions concerning treatments or diagnosis should be directed to a physician."
Laurie Turner, a biology teacher at Fremont High School, said the school bought several games this spring to use in classes as a teaching aid.
"The students had a lot of fun with them," she said. "[The game] doesn't tell you everything but it tells you enough that then you start to wonder. So it's perfect for biology classes and a great way to get students interested."
"There's a section in the state standards about viruses and bacteria, so we learn that around diseases," she said.
Turner said she introduced the game in her classes this spring on a limited basis, when students finished their work early or needed some extension work. She said she expects the game will be more widely used next year when it can be further integrated into the curriculum.
"Any chance we get for a good, useful game--we grab it," she said. Her classes often make up their own Bingo or Jeopardy-style games, Turner said, "but when someone does it for us, it's a lot better."
Continuing with the educational marketing strategy, Sullivan said he's working on a "High School Health" version that will have educational topics particularly relevant to teens like drinking, sexually transmitted diseases, eating disorders and drugs.
Sullivan expects the version to be out early next year and said he's also received suggestions for different sets of cards such as diseases of the 16th Century, diseases of Africa or mental health ailments. With additional sets of cards, players could use the same original board and just buy new card sets, Sullivan says.
Currently, the game sells for between $28 and $30 including tax and shipping from his website.
"As long as I get this out there and see it up on some shelves, I'll be happy."
For more information, log on to www.earwig.net.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
