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As I mentioned in another question, I recently got the On-the-Brink expansion and have been a bit puzzled with the BT challenge gameplay. I was looking for gameplay videos but haven't found any..

My question is about when the BT/black -pawn gets placed on the board. The rulebook says it's placed on the board whenever another player is at a city BT is in. So far each time I've played Pandemic, we play the actions as a sequence and not really one-by-one. So while the "good guys" are playing their actions, does the BT have to jump in and put his pawn on the board? What happens if one "good guy" happens to pass by the city BT is in, en route to some other city?

Example:

  • Player1 starts her turn in city A and wants to treat disease in city D.
  • BT resides in city C.
  • Player1 moves from A to D; via B and C.

Does BT jump in the gameplay to place his pawn on C, only to remove it again immediately?

Edit: As I stated in a comment below, how the goodies move becomes non-trivial for as the path from one city to another, may involve passing through different cities, even though the number of actions required might be the same.

Example: If a player announces that she's going from Cairo to Karachi, does the BT have to ask "via Baghdad or Riyadh?". Doing so, sort of invalidates the point of secrecy for the BT.

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  • "If a player announces that she's going from Cairo to Karachi" - even before the bioterrorist existed, everyone I've played with would have at least counted along the board to show the number of moves it is, if not moved their pawn along the path. That part of the question seems like kind of a non-issue.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Apr 16, 2015 at 16:52

1 Answer 1

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Yes, as soon as the player moves through the city you are in, you should interrupt them and inform them that you are in that city. They then have the option of continuing with their original plan, or deciding to stop in that city and capture you instead.

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  • does that mean the "good guys" need to break up their moves to individual actions? It becomes not trivial as there are several spots on the map where there are multiple possibilities to get from A to B, e.g. From Cairo to Karachi, a player can go via Baghdad or via Riyadh.
    – posdef
    Commented Apr 16, 2015 at 12:41
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    They must specify which cities they are moving through. They should be doing this anyway when they physically move their pawn, but it is especially important when playing the Bioterrorist variant. You should enforce it at all times, whether you are in one of those cities or not. If they still forget to do so regularly, I suppose that you can house rule that the BT does not have to reveal at intermediate cities if the player never specifies they are going through it. That should give them incentive to develop better habits.
    – bwarner
    Commented Apr 16, 2015 at 14:10
  • @posdef It's not so much "break up their moves" as "say what they're actually doing" - they can still do it all at once, they just have to quickly tap their pawn through the cities. Besides, if they're playing against the bioterrorist, surely they want to consider which path to follow because they have some guess where the bioterrorist might be.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Apr 16, 2015 at 16:50

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