In Development: Metastasize! The Board Game

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Thing X, Inc. Patent #7899212: Metastasize! The Board Game

Overview:

While many educational board games are available in the marketplace, most fail to achieve the proper balance of fun and instruction, and none educate about the relentless spread of malignant cancerous growths in a way the whole family will enjoy. By pitting players against each other as cancer cells to see who can destroy a host family first, the new board game Metastasize! does both.

How It Works:

Metastasize! is played by two to four players on a board laid out like a cross-section of a human body. Participants choose from the leukemia, melanoma, basal-cell carcinoma, or non-Hodgkin lymphoma game pieces. Each player rolls a pair of dice to advance from the feet to the head of the body, trying to avoid the hazards of healthy diet, exercise, and chemotherapy along the way. Players who roll doubles experience a sudden surge in tumor growth and roll again.

Special spaces on the board call for a “Health Warning” card to be drawn. These cards will impact a player’s progress along the board. Among the available cards are:

• Extensive Family History Of Cancer! Advance 5 spaces

• Patient Refuses To Give Up Smoking! Advance 10 spaces

• Lumpectomy! Go back 5 spaces

• Treatment Moved From Dinky County Hospital To Johns Hopkins! Go back 10 spaces

• One Of Those One-In-A-Million Fluky Things! Cancer in complete remission for no apparent reason. Player immediately forfeits game, removes piece from board.

• Years of Cell Phone Use! Inconclusive. Draw again.

Along the board itself are a series of special spaces that can affect game play. For example, a Radiation Therapy square will cause the player to lose a turn, while an Extensive Use of Tanning Bed square grants the player another roll of the dice. In addition, players who land on a square already occupied by another player send that player back to the beginning as an ordinary polyp.

Development Notes:

In focus group testing, both children and their parents found Metastasize! enjoyable. The lone exceptions were families in which one of the members had cancer themselves and who could not finish the game due to profound distress of some sort or physical fatigue. Further focus groups with these afflicted families will be conducted to determine if the presence of the disease is somehow making the game rules difficult to understand. If that is the case, they will be simplified to make the game more accessible to all.