Game review: Vaxcards

What is Vaxcards?

It is a card game that’s all about improving your own immunity through vaccination. To start, each player has a deck of bacteria and viruses that are part of childhood vaccination programmes. Players build up their resistance whilst coping with the nasty infections their opponent throws at them and playing their own special moves. The moves are all cleverly linked to symptoms of disease such as ‘blood leech’ on the hookworm allows you to steal some ‘resistance’ from your opponent. However this is a competitive game, so whilst shielding you must work simultaneously to lower your opponent’s resistance!

Is it Fun?

The game has a wonderful cartoon based atheistic and all the diseases are exceptionally well illustrated by Jimmy Braten. The playful nature of the illustrations combined with the gruesome symptoms of the disease (supervomit or megapoo anyone?) make the game a fun experience even with young children. The special moves are all linked to symptoms of disease and can add to the hilarity such as ‘red eye’ which penalizes your opponent for opening both eyes for the rest of the round and ‘neck stiffness’ which forces them to play with their ear touching their shoulder! The game is rapid to play and the rules simple enough to pick up.  It even comes with children friendly (under six) and more advanced (budding immunologists) rule sets to make the game accessible to all.

Is it Educational?

The game was designed by an Australian doctor with the aim of educating and rewarding every child for vaccination. The game's diseases and symptoms are all realistic (all be it with the colourful language and imagery) which certainly helps players to appreciate the symptoms of those diseases we are vaccinated against. Each disease card includes additional scientific information such as incidence, mortality, type (bacteria, virus etc.) and vector. In addition, to the starter deck of common childhood vaccinations, Vaxcards has a number of additional decks such as the tropical deck (vaccinations you may require when travelling) and the eradication deck (diseases nearly or totally eradicated through vaccination). The game clearly has educational value, especially for children when part of a more formal session.

Conclusion

A fun, lighthearted game designed to increase educational awareness of vaccinations. The games starter deck is even available free (print-to-play) on the games website, so no excuse not to check it out!

Dr Louise Robinson is Lecturer in Forensic Biology and Dr Ian Turner an Associate Professor in Learning and Teaching, both at the University of Derby.