Who: Matt Leacock is the Sunnyvale, California-based creator of the board game Pandemic, an award-winning cooperative game released in 2008 in which two to four players work together to deal with a global medical disaster. Sound familiar?

In 2014, after he had a few published games under his belt, Leacock left his day job and began designing board games full time — work that includes several stand-alone spin-off Pandemic games, including Pandemic: The Cure, Pandemic: State of Emergency and Pandemic: Reign of Cthulu (really). You can read Leacock’s blog and learn more about his award-winning games at leacock.com.

Q: Have you heard from many journalists since the (coronavirus) outbreak started here?

A: Yeah, around the country and around the world, actually.

Q: How did you get into designing board games?

A: Sure. Yeah, I’ve been designing and fiddling and playing games since I was a little kid, actually. My dream was always to get just a single game published. It happened with Pandemic and gradually became my career.

Q: Is it a difficult profession to break into?

A: Oh yeah, it’s extremely difficult. I think it’s sort of like trying to become a writer or a poet; it’s something you do on the side because it’s hard to pay the bills as a game designer, but I do feel like I just kind of stumbled into something and got kind of lucky, so I’ve been able to continue.

Q: What led you to design Pandemic in the first place?

A: I had played a cooperative game in 2000 with my wife, and really enjoyed it. I didn’t think cooperative games could be fun (laughs). I thought they were like learning exercises for kids to teach them how to share, or something like that. But I played one and really, really enjoyed it. It was in stark contrast to … really competitive games that I’d played with family. I thought, “Well, this would be a fun challenge to design a cooperative game. And pandemics were very much in the news back then. This was 2004, and SARS had come through a few years prior, and it just seemed like the perfect antagonist for the players to face. … It took me about three years to design, 2004 to 2007. It was released in 2008, and we did a 10-year anniversary edition in 2018.

Q: You’ve obviously created several (Pandemic) spin-offs. What led to those? I’m curious about how you branched into the other games.

A: Well, there’s a lot of demand for an expansion. The game came out and was a big of a sleeper hit and started to take off, and people wanted more, so I teamed up with a local designer, Tom Lehmann, and we did the first set of expansions. And it just kind of continued to grow. The publisher’s very keen on supplying other games, and I enjoyed it, so I kept at it. I think there’s, like, eight stand-alone games now.

Q: Have sales of these games gone up since people have gone into quarantine?

A: I’ve seen that it’s very much been in the news, and I’ve heard anecdotal reports of people playing them and them selling out. I don’t have any real hard numbers. I think recently sales have picked up. It’s just something that naturally happens when it’s in the news cycle so much.

Q: Which of the games would you say best predicted or reflect what’s going on now? … Like does any of the games seem to best-predict how things are actually playing out in real life?

A: Not really. I mean, they’re not really intended to be simulations. You run around as sort of a heroic team doing things that heroes do (laughs). I think a lot of people in the medical community enjoy playing it because it shows them as the protagonists, but it’s not really a simulation. You do get to see disease spread around the world, which is scary, but more than anything it just provides a context for people to work together against a common foe.

Q: Having designed the Pandemic games, did you feel a little better prepared for (the coronavirus)? I mean, obviously you must have researched pandemics.

A: (Laughs) I’ve got to say, not at all. I read about them a bit when I was first working on the game. I’ve been working on it for so long now, you naturally are drawn to stories in the news about the topic, but honestly, it’s always been something in my mind that would happen somewhere else at some other time, and now that it’s actually happened, it’s very disorienting, and very real, and I don’t feel like the reading really prepared me for it.

Q: What are you hearing from players or new fans? Do you communicate much with them?

A: Yeah. It kind of breaks down into two camps. There’s some people that just don’t want anything to do with the game because they get it full time in the news. They’re living it. You know, “Why would I want to play a game about it?” And I totally get that. But there are a lot of other people who are enjoying playing it in quarantine, because it gives them an excuse to get together with their family. But also, I think it kind of sets the stage — games can act as ways to process the world. For some people they actually feel like it gives them a sense of power over what’s going on.

Q: Do you feel like folks in the government or at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention might handle the pandemic better if they were familiar with the games and had played them before?

A: I gotta wonder. I mean, I think I chose the theme as something that clearly people would need to work together in order to beat this thing that’s bigger than any of us. It’s really about cooperating and communicating and coordinating to overcome something greater, and not a zero sum, competitive game. And yet I do see a lot of the responses are not in that spirit, and that’s discouraging.