by loudwalrus
The important bit is that it gives you no information you didn't already have access to. In our game we just kept track of the epidemic "piles" by hand. We knew how many cards we had and simple math told us how many were in each pile. And then we just ticked it off, turn by turn. That way we always knew the probability of an epidemic every turn. The rules specifically say you are allowed to do this note taking kind of thing.Spoiler August
[o]We did this all game, but it obviously became critical once Monitor became available.[/o]
At some point (I can't remember when) we saw someone suggest the "offset" life hack and we started doing that as well, just to confirm our math. We continued to do manual tracking anyway.
We always used a "scribe" to record every turn anyway. We found it helpful just to verify that we did every step correctly. In Season 1, we'd sometimes find we'd miscalculate how many actions someone had taken, or how many cards they drew, or we'd move the wrong piece and forget where it had started. Just a quick note for each turn: keeping track of each deck, which four actions they took, and anything critical that happened (like an incident).