Games don’t have to be good to be educational

 When I looked at Orphan Source Detected!, it reminded me of the kind of Print and Plays I saw when I first started looking at PnPa back in the early 00s. Minimal graphics, basic mechanics but very grounded theme.

The idea is that you are a scientist with a Geiger counter trying to find six orphan sources in a rural area. An orphan source is a self-contained radioactive source that isn’t under proper control. Real thing, real problem. Historically, it looks like they have been caused by a combination of carelessness and stupidity.

The game itself consists of a seven-by-seven grid. You add a die and something to write with. Each turn, you pick an empty square, roll a die and write the number in. One through four gets you nothing. Five and six gives you out plus one and plus 2 in adjacent squares. Seven or more, you’ve found one of the orphans sources. After you’ve found a source, roll for casualties but you get to subtract the number of sources you’ve already found from that roll.

There is nothing in the rules about having to make a trail of spaces, that each one has to be adjacent. I also figure that the bonuses only get added to empty spaces. I mean, to already searched spaces that have a number in them.

So, the obvious strategy is trying to chain bonuses. My boards look like I’m making a checkerboard of numbers. You can’t find an orphan source without getting bonuses since you can’t roll a seven on a six-sided die without a sharpie.

There are variations but they are all different radioactive materials with slightly different modifiers.

Okay, there’s not much here, mechanically. The basic strategy is really obvious and the random number generating powers-that-be can wipe out your plans. A series of ones left one of my plays with missing sources and a decimated rural landscape. I found it amusing when my plan came together but there’s a lot of other light Roll and Writes that do that better.

The real value of Orphan Source Detected! for me was the rabbit hole it took me down researching real life orphan sources. And the game actually includes helpful links!

While the Goiania Incident that required over a 100,000 people to be screened for radiation contamination is mentioned in the rules, the Ciudad Juárez cobalt-60 contamination incident is the one that really blew my mind. An accident ended up contaminating 6000 tons of rebar, requiring the demolition of hundreds of buildings.

Orphan Source Detected isn’t a good game but it led to some good history lessons.

https://ellie-valkyrie.itch.io/orphan-source-detected-osd-solo-roll-and-write