by fredd13
I've seen the following "life hacks" mentioned in threads on this game:* Offsetting or cross-stacking Player Deck piles when adding Epidemics;
* Keeping tight records (spreadsheet or hand-written) on the Infection Deck
* Placing Plague cubes on the spaces on the Incident Track
* Placing Supply Center buildings on the Objectives card
I used a couple more during our game, and thought I'd share, for whatever they're worth. Did anyone else come up with others?
General: Generic marker tokens.
Years ago I bought a jar of glass beads (of the sort used to fill glass vases for display, or in some CCGs as tokens on cards). Just the job.
I first dug them out when the number of cities we were potentially needing to adjust population on was climbing - drop one token on every city that had any potential pluses or minuses to population; double-check that we'd got them all; resolve one city at a time and remove the marker. I started out using dice - for some reason (size and colour, probably) the glass beads seemed to work much better.
Once I'd got them out, though, they became invaluable. I must have used them for marking half a dozen things along the way. The only one I definitely remember was "vulnerable cities" (cities that were poised to come out of the Infection deck, and didn't have adequate supply at the time), but there were several others - any time there was some aspect of the board where we wanted a short-term highlight on.
Removable labels: Extra Board Stickers
When I was planning to try and resuscitate my copy of Season 1, I bought a pack of Avery removable labels for my printer (the precise sheet is 6467, if anyone's remotely interested). I found those very useful later in the game for extra board stickers, once we'd opened Box 6 (spoilers):
[o]
We got fed up of trying to remember which precise cities were in Box 6 (or even out of the game). We marked cities we'd managed to send completely into Box 6 with red "Hearts". Cities whose Infection deck cards had all been destroyed got yellow "Smilies". Cities The "flavour" text that went with Box suggested that there was some possibility that some or all of the cards in there might eventually return, so it seemed sensible to have the two different statuses.
I basically just used a label template, picked a couple of likely-looking "Wing-ding" characters, and tweaked text and background colours.
[/o]
(Now I've got the things, I find them invaluable. The cutting of some of my board stickers for Season 1 was mis-registered, for example, making them look cheap and nasty; I knocked up some much nicer replacements. For another game I'm playing, I'm finding I need to annotate the rules a lot. So rather than scrawl all over the limited space in the rule booklet, I've typed the amendments separately, and made up a pile of stickers saying "see addendum". And when I change my mind - as I sometimes do - they just get peeled back off.)