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I play! Pandemic edition

You know how I’m really interested in virology and epidemiology?  No?  Well, I am.  I’ve always found the topics fascinating.  Partly because of such, I find Pandemic to be a very entertaining game.  In Pandemic, deadly diseases are breaking out all over the world.  All players play cooperatively as different specialists to try to cure and rid the world of said diseases.

Pandemic is nice in that it’s all players against the board.  If you have issues playing games with people because there’s always a poor winner or sore loser, a cooperative game might help.  There is a good deal of cooperative strategy as the board tries to kill everyone on earth with diseases (of four different varieties!) and your plucky band of specialists try to stop it.

You decide at the beginning of the game on the difficulty level.  The game gets progressively harder as gameplay proceeds due to the metered card draws that introduce more conflict and challenge to the game.  Players lose if eight outbreaks occur (because of worldwide panic), not enough disease cubes are left (a disease has spread too much), or not enough player cards remain (team runs out of time).  Players win if they find cures for all four diseases.

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I think this game is playable for older children.  The youngest ones I occasionally have in my care are 7-8 years old.  I don’t think they’d really appreciate the gameplay or understand the strategy.  I have one exceptionally bright 10 year old who I think could do really well with this game if I could convince him that it’s a cooperative game.  All the little boys are really competitive.  Loudly and blatantly so.  The girls can be just as competitive, but generally they’ve been more subtle.

Bonus: If you want to play for the opposite team, i.e. be the disease that wipes out the world, you can play Plague Inc.  This is a phone/video/computer game in which you…try to wipe out the world population with disease.  There’s only one disease caused by one active microbe at a time, but each microbe has different characteristics which requires different strategies for propagation.  You can evolve and mutate the microbe to modify its infectivity, severity, and lethality and drug/climate resistance.  I…may enjoy playing Plague Inc. a little too much.  I…may find it too satisfying to cause a pandemic and wipe out the world’s population…

I make! A bunch of cookie dough edition

Sometimes I like to do things.  Sometimes I like to do things obsessively.  Like the time when I decided I wanted to make cookies and then made 192837912873 dozen.  Ok, so not really that many cookies.  And I often do make large batches of things, like cookies, but it’s normally because I received a request to provide cookies for a large group of people or something.  The other weekend, I made a lot of cookies for no other reason than I felt like making cookies.  So I made cookies.  I made a lot of cookies.  I made four different types of cookies.

The thing with making a lot of cookies is that you have to somehow get rid of a lot of cookies.  I didn’t have a large event in which to foist off all these cookies.  So I ended up making the cookie dough, baking only a portion of the cookies, and then portioning out the rest of the dough and freezing it.  That means I can have fresh baked cookies quickly now.  And I can do things like bake only six cookies because all I wanted was six cookies.  Of different types.

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Anyway, I ended up making peanut butter chocolate chip chocolate peanut butter chip cookies (partly because I just really like saying that), the coffee-cinnamon-fudge cookies, oatmeal pecan chocolate chip cookies, and oatmeal pecan cranberry cookies.  I’m only realizing now that I’ve never posted about the oatmeal related cookies before.  Which is strange.  As the oatmeal pecan (or walnut) cranberry cookies are probably the ones I’m requested to make the most.  I guess I’ll post about them some time.

I probably made 2-3 dozen of each type and froze the majority of the dough.  I like to pre-portion the cookie dough so you can just stick the balls (or discs, discs are better really) on a cookie sheet and put them straight into the oven.  I know some people roll them and slice (I used to) and some people just put a whole tub of dough in the freezer.  I think pre-portioning makes the most sense because a big reason for freezing the dough is so you can have cookies quickly at a later date.  If you freeze a tub of dough, you have to defrost it before doing anything with it.

I do recommend that you flatten the dough into discs before freezing so as to have quicker and even baking from frozen.  The peanut butter chocolate chip chocolate peanut butter chip cookie will puff more on the peanut butter side than on the chocolate side if you leave the dough as a frozen ball rather than a frozen disc.  Both sides will cook through, but you’ll have a lopsided cookie if that’s of concern to you.

Baking from frozen may require a few extra minutes at the normal oven temp.  Also, when freezing, lay the discs out in a single layer on a sheet pan or something and leave overnight.  The next morning you can gather all of the frozen discs into a Ziploc for storage and not worry about chipping away at a huge block of dough later.