June 2, 2021 – The incredibly popular Pandemic board game series is becoming books. The already widely circulated game originally released in 2008 was thrown under the spotlight recently for all the wrong reasons. That’s right, it has the same name as one of the worst things humanity has had to endure in the last decade or so. You have to give the Z-man games and others credit for not trying to exploit that in marketing or anything like that.
The publisher who will be releasing this is Aconyte Books who made the announcement. They have been making big moves in the space and have announced a slew of other board game related books to come.
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The books have nothing to do with the recent events though. These have been in the works for a long time. If anything, the pandemic delayed things.
Needless to say, it is a topic that people may be interested in diving into or they may not at all want to escape to as far as fiction goes. So we will see when the first book in the series finally comes out in September of 2021.
Check out the full announcement from Aconyte Books:
Finally! We are able to tell you more details of our long-planned range of novels inspired by the global bestselling game Pandemic. And just like that game and its spin-offs, the novels foreground highlights scientific cooperation and human ingenuity, as its heroes try to ensure that humanity is protected from future outbreaks. We’ve learned a lot this past 18 months and we are keen to use this knowledge to create great stories of hope in a time of crisis.
Our first title will be Pandemic: Patient Zero, by Amanda Bridgeman, will be hitting shelves in September 2021. Set a few years in the future, an expert team of epidemiologists are expressly tasked with tracking down potential outbreaks and ensuring that they are resolved before a full pandemic can break out. In this first episode, new recruit Bodhi Patel finds himself in South America, far from his comfort zone, where the clues to the source of a new mutated virus lie on land controlled by a local warlord.
Our publisher Marc says “To say this series has been long in the planning would be an understatement. Patient Zero was completely written and about to be announced in early Spring 2020 when… well, we all know what happened next. Even with a message as positive as the one enshrined in the game and the novels, the timing wasn’t right. Now updated, it truthfully and respectfully captures the courage and sacrifice of experts in the field, and shows what can be achieved when teamwork, cooperation, and empowerment are put to the test.”
Amanda Bridgeman, whose pair of futuristic crime thrillers, The Subjugate, and The Sensation, have recently been optioned for a TV series by the team behind True Detective and Mr Robot, has worked closely with the Aconyte and Z-Man teams, constructing a complete cast of relatable characters.