The Night We Lost Pandemic Because of Our Own Argument

We were four cards from winning. I want that on the record before I tell the rest of this, because the way the story usually gets told around the unit now makes it sound like we just collapsed, and we didn’t collapse, we self destructed, which is a different and honestly more embarrassing thing.

Slow Thursday, maybe eight months ago. Four of us at the nurses’ station, Marcus playing the Medic, me on Scientist, two others whose roles I’m leaving out because they’d rather not be blogged about, apparently, unlike Marcus who I’ve decided has forfeited veto rights by never reading this. We’d found the cure for two diseases already and had a real shot at running the table before anything actually paged us away from it.

Then Marcus wanted to change the turn order. Not the rules, just the order we were going in, because he’d convinced himself that if he went before me instead of after, he could clear a city that was about to matter. I disagreed, loudly, for a board game, because I’d already mentally mapped out my own next three moves assuming the order stayed the same, and having somebody reshuffle that felt personally offensive in a way that in hindsight says more about my state of mind after nine hours awake than about the actual stakes of a cooperative board game.

We argued for what felt like ten minutes and was probably ninety seconds. Real arguing, the kind where you’re both technically making a fair point and neither of you is willing to hand over the win. Meanwhile the infection deck did not care about our feelings. We flipped the next card mid argument, an Epidemic, and by the time we’d settled the turn order debate the board had gone from comfortable to two outbreaks away from a loss, and we never recovered the thread. Lost the game about six turns later to a cascading outbreak chain that started in a city neither of us had actually been arguing about.

Marcus’s notebook now has an asterisk next to that loss. He wrote, and I’m quoting from memory because I didn’t get a picture of it in time, lost due to Reid’s stubbornness re: turn order, and when I pointed out that his stubbornness was equally load bearing in that disaster he just shrugged and said the notebook is his and he’ll write what he wants in it.

We still talk about that game more than almost any of our actual wins. There’s something a little instructive in it too, honestly, the game didn’t beat us, we beat ourselves by getting so locked into being right about a small thing that we stopped managing the actual crisis in front of us. I’ve thought about that more than once on an actual shift, which is either a sign the game’s doing something real or a sign I need a hobby that isn’t also secretly about triage. Probably both.