A game called The Great Flu got a lot of press this week, thanks to an Associated Press article. It was created by the head of virology at a Dutch hospital, so it's no surprise that it's not much of a game. It's more like an interactive exercise in triage on a global scale.

[Dr. Albert] Osterhaus said the video game's approximation of combating a pandemic, choosing between various interventions yet still watching the outbreak spread, gives people a sense of how difficult it is to make decisions in the public health world.

You can play The Great Flu here. Dr. Osterhaus himself appears in the game, delivering dire news in little video clips. It's worth clicking on the "Learn More" button from the main screen, where he lays out in very simple language how a virus works and how it can be countered. He ends with a succinct statement that homeopathic solutions do not work against influenza. Hear hear.

But are there games like this that are actual good games?

Glad you asked. Meet me after the jump and we'll talk.

For the same basic idea, but with more actual gameplay, try Pandemic: American Swine. It's played on a map of the US. You manage the government reaction to a swine flu outbreak as it spreads from state to state. Decide how to spend your money to contain the outbreak while a vaccine is researched. Then you get to decide which states get the vaccine first. If things get desperate, you can drop a neutron bomb on a city to clear out the population. Or, if you want to save a few bucks, you can just nuke the city. Be careful to manage the panic bar, because if everyone freaks out, you lose the game. It's still not much of a game, since the causes and effects aren't very clear, so you're essentially surfing a bunch of numbers.

There are better disease games, but from here, it gets confusing. There's a board game called Pandemic that you can play over a free German service called Brettspielwelt, which is German for "this costs a heck of a lot less than buying all these $60 board games and letting them languish in your closet". You'll find a whole mess of board games playable online, for the low low price of figuring out how to get past the occasional German word.

Pandemic is a cooperative multiplayer game in which up to four players with different abilities move around a map of the globe trying to contain and ultimately cure multiple epidemics. It's relatively simple and elegant, with plenty of European abstraction. Try it here, but ideally with a couple friends in tow.

But the real Pandemic you're looking for is the prequel to American Swine, which is actually the fourth in a series of games from Dark Realm Studios. The three games before American Swine were called Pandemic, Pandemic: Extinction of Man, and Pandemic 2, in that order (I told you it was going to get confusing). They all featured the unique twist that you assumed the role of the disease itself. The first two games were turn-based and pretty rudimentary, so you'll want to jump straight to Pandemic 2, Dark Realm's third game.

In Pandemic 2, as you spread, you earn evolution points. Spend these to mutate the disease, much like you'd build a character in an RPG. You want to start out infectious, but subtle. You don't want to be too lethal or too visible. You certainly don't want to kill too many people too quickly, or schools and airports start closing, and the government starts to take measures to prevent you. Ideally, you don't even want to incapacitate your victims too terribly. I like to level up my drug resistance, for instance, and avoid visible symptoms. Then, once I've got a wide global presence, I save up my points for a global coup de grace.

In my best game, I was able to spread Syfyus, a bacteria whose only effect was sneezing. I spent evolution points to remove coughs and fever. This let me move easily from Australia, to North America, to Russia, and so forth. After two months, I'd spread to 400 million people around the world. I saved up and purchased kidney failure. Bam, 70 million deaths in a week! Within 100 days of a guy in Australia sneezing, I'd killed 1 billion people. Once deaths had gone up to 6 billion, there were no longer any hospitals open to work on a vaccine. It was just a matter of time. I added effects such as sensitivity to other diseases and insanity. As countries around the world were emptied of their population, I purchased lethal brain swelling to quickly finish off the last survivors in the Middle East. After barely 200 days, I'd exterminated all of mankind. My score of 68,000 points was one of the best of the day.

Like Introversion's chilling Defcon, a dispassionate game about nuclear war, Pandemic 2 is cold, clinical, and chilling. It traffics in numbers and imagination in a way that few games understand. It is the apocalypse as a spreadsheet. If you play just one game about disease, let it be this one.