Tabletop and board games aren’t just for rainy days or awkward family events anymore. As the game industry grows, people of all ages are jumping to play “the original social network.” In our ever-increasing technological world, playing old-school games is a welcome retreat from the overexposure to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of social media. Over the past few years, board games have become the hot new hobby. Instead of friends sitting around the same table and staring at their phones, they are now either working with or against each other. Millions upon millions of new fans have begun to join their friends in real life for a fun game of Pandemic, 7 Wonders, or Ticket to Ride. The Everything Tabletop Games Book shows how to play some of the best tabletop games in the world, from classic strategy games like Settlers of Catan to great new games like Gloomhaven. Throughout the book, you’ll learn the different genres of tabletop and board games; how to play each game; rules and strategies to help you win; and even where to play online—including new expansions to keep your favorite games fresh and exciting. So gather up some friends, pick a game from this book, and start playing! You’ll be having a blast in no time.

In March 2020 POLITICO reported that after the Ebola outbreak in 2014, the Obama Administration's National Security Council had prepared a detailed, thorough "pandemic playbook" that was available to Trump administration officials, who treated it dismissively and did not draw on it during the response to the coronavirus. The leaked 69-page PowerPoint is reproduced in full color in durable hardcover landscape format, a crucial resource for understanding the Trump administration's response to COVID-19. The Playbook describes itself as follows: "a decision-making tool that identifies: (1) questions to ask; (2) agency counterparts to consult for answers to each; and (3) key decisions which may require deliberation through the Presidential Policy Directive (PPD)-1 process or its successor National Security Council process." This is a document with an optimistic view of its role in the world. It is not clear that policy leaders in any Administration are actually interested in outsourcing their decision-making to a tool developed by a previous admninistration. To the contrary, policy-makers typically place a great deal of emphasis on getting their own people in place to ask the right questions. The main body of the Playbook is comprised of two major sections, one for international events that have not yet reached the US and one for events with a US locus. For each, a "Rubric" is provided that "is not intended to serve as a comprehensive concept of operations or replace national or pre-existing U.S. Government response structures, but rather to serve as a proposed guide based on existing authorities, guidance, and response frameworks for staff monitoring emerging infectious disease threats and interagency planning and response, should the need arise in the future." The key words are "for staff monitoring emerging infectious disease threats..." -- in other words, this document was intended for use by staff who are monitoring things, rather than for policy makers who are deciding them. The Rubrics explicitly spell out key assumptions--for example, on the domestic side that "the U.S. Government will use all powers at its disposal to prevent, slow, or mitigate the spread of an emerging infectious disease threat..." The drafters did not include any language such as "unless it might hurt the stock market." Both Rubrics contain exhaustive lists of important questions and decisions that correspond well with what we know now to have been important in the response to COVID-19. An Appendix contains several useful resources, including a laundrty list of "declarations and mitigation options" -- things that the US government or other agencies can declare and do, specifically including pharmaceutical, medical, travel-related and community interventions. Some of the latter will seem remarkably familiar: a. Voluntary home isolation of the ill and home quarantine of the exposed b. Dismissal of students from schools c. Social distancing measures, such as telework d. Cancellation of large public gatherings; and e. Widespread use of personal protective devices A section on Communications envisages the Secretary of HHS as the primary spokesperson. No mention is made of daily 5 pm press conferences with the President. Readers who enjoy works like THE GREAT INFLUENZA, CONTAGION, and THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN will find this a fascinating look behind the curtain. Also an ideal gift for that "no masks" relative who just will not read the peer-reviewed science that you patiently email to them!

Educational technology adoption is more widespread than ever in the wake of COVID-19, as corporations have commodified student engagement in makeshift packages marketed as gamification. This book seeks to create a space for playful learning in higher education, asserting the need for a pedagogy of care and engagement as well as collaboration with students to help us reimagine education outside of prescriptive educational technology. Virtual learning has turned the course management system into the classroom, and business platforms for streaming video have become awkward substitutions for lecture and discussion. Gaming, once heralded as a potential tool for rethinking our relationship with educational technology, is now inextricably linked in our collective understanding to challenges of misogyny, white supremacy, and the circulation of misinformation. The initial promise of games-based learning seems to linger only as gamification, a form of structuring that creates mechanisms and incentives but limits opportunity for play. As higher education teeters on the brink of unprecedented crisis, this book proclaims the urgent need to find a space for playful learning and to find new inspiration in the platforms and interventions of personal gaming, and in turn restructure the corporatized, surveilling classroom of a gamified world. Through an in-depth analysis of the challenges and opportunities presented by pandemic pedagogy, this book reveals the conditions that led to the widespread failure of adoption of games-based learning and offers a model of hope for a future driven by new tools and platforms for personal, experimental game-making as intellectual inquiry.

Early Childhood Education and Care in a Global Pandemic is a book that highlights how the international early childhood education and care sector responded to the global COVID-19 pandemic. It shows the resiliency of the sector around the world as it grappled with a rapidly changing environment of uncertainty and complexity. Drawing on a diverse range of early childhood education and care contexts, the book captures real-life examples of how COVID-19 impacted children, educators and teachers, and families. Chapters present cases of the particular challenges that COVID-19 presented in a wide range of countries and then how they responded to these challenges – challenges that tested the resilience of children, educators and teachers, and families. By forward anchoring, each chapter examines the opportunities that arose from these challenges and how new local knowledge was produced as new ways were found to support children, educators and teachers, and families during this time. This book offers early childhood education and care a timely resource on lessons learnt from a once-in-a-lifetime event. It offers the sector a way forward to commit to developing new ways of thinking and working that stem from the lessons learnt during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This edited collection brings in multiple scholarly perspectives to examine the impact of the pandemic and resulting government policies, especially lockdowns, on one particular cultural sphere: games. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted virtually every aspect of our lives, regardless of where we live. In the initial months, many industry reports noted the unexpected positive impact on online digital game sales. Games were not just lockdown-proof, but boosted by lockdowns. Stay-at-home orders triggered a rush toward games as an alternative form of entertainment, and the ubiquity of mobile phones allowed wider than ever participation. Gaming and Gamers in Times of Pandemic studies how the COVID-19 pandemic affected game players, game developers, game journalists and game scholars alike in many other ways, starting with the most direct – illness, and sometimes death. Some effects are temporary, others are here to stay.

Drawing on urban and community resilience literature, Urban Preppers and the Pandemic in New York City: Class, Resilience and Sheltering in Place offers a detailed qualitative analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on New York City and on the philosophy and practices of the city’s urban prepper subculture. With a special focus on the height of the pandemic in New York, this book considers the city’s unique position as the pandemic’s first epicenter in the United States. It also explores the lived experience of enduring the pandemic as reflections of class division, considering key themes, including the exodus of the wealthy, sheltering in place for the middle class, the inability to leave high-risk neighborhoods for the poor, and sheltering-in-place practices and community resilience efforts by New York preppers. It analyzes the importance of good government and an engaged citizenry in developing an agenda for the city’s continued recovery and its future, underscoring the need for cities to develop disaster management approaches that expand traditional “command and control” models to make space for local knowledge and resources. At its core, Urban Preppers and the Pandemic in New York City: Class, Resilience and Sheltering in Place is about understanding New York City’s pandemic experience and how self-reliance evolves into community resilience outside of institutions. It is vital reading for scholars and students of sociology, anthropology, geography and urban studies with interests in subcultures, ethnography and the sociology of disasters.

Reactions to pandemics are unlike any other global emergency; with an emphasis on withdrawal and containment of the sight of the infected. Dealing with the historical and conceptual background of diseases in politics and international relations, this volume investigates the global political reaction to pandemic scares. By evaluating anxiety and the political response to pandemics as a legitimisation of the modern state and its ability to protect its citizens from infectious disease, Understanding the Politics of Pandemic Scares examines the connection between international health governance and the emerging Western liberal world order. The case studies, including SARS, Bird Flu and Swine Flu, provide an understanding of how the world order, global health governance and people’s bodies interact to produce scares and panics. Aaltola introduces an innovative new concept of ‘politosomatics’ based on the relationship that links individual stress, strain, and fear with global circulations of power to evaluate increasingly global bio-political environments in which pandemics exist. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of International Relations, Global Health, International Public Health and Global Health governance.

This book argues against the rapidly expanding literature about misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic - and that the real issues are much broader. Mainstream news media, except Fox News, has generally done a good job in educating people about the basic facts and precautions to be taken. Pandemic: A Test of the News identifies the mainframes used to tell the media story. With some exceptions such as long reads in The New Yorker and the Guardian, the media has not included the fundamental factors that caused the pandemic, the seriousness of a medical crisis that will last for several years - and the same factors that will cause the next pandemic.