Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
Virulence: An Infectious Card Game is an addictively quick and simple card game focused on viruses infecting a host cell - and how they assemble and replicate inside that host cell.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Auction/Bidding
Bid against other players to determine who receives an item, action, or priority.
Betting and Bluffing
Risk resources on uncertain outcomes while disguising intentions or information.
Deck / Bag Building
Add new pieces during play to improve the cards, tokens, or dice drawn later.
Dice Rolling
Roll dice to introduce uncertainty into actions, production, movement, or resolution.
Hand Management
Time and sequence a limited hand of cards to preserve future options.
Read the full game description
Virulence: An Infectious Card Game is an addictively quick and simple card game focused on viruses infecting a host cell - and how they assemble and replicate inside that host cell. Virulence has players take on the role of viruses competing to infect a host cell in order to replicate their own viral components, thus scoring points. Each round, players secretly choose one Virus card from their hand, place it face down on the table, then simultaneously flip these Virus cards to reveal each player's (and thus each virus') virulence. In order from the highest to the lowest virulence, players then take turns selecting from the available Viral Component cards, each awarding points in a variety of ways, or allowing that player to build their hand of Virus Cards allowing them to win critical components later. Virulence is addictively simple and competitive because it combines blind bidding/bluffing, with engine building, a bit of luck and, most importantly, it can played be taught in 30 seconds, and played 10 minutes.