EpiDetective · cancer awareness game
A Town of 1,000
One town, one thousand women, followed from their twenties to 75. You sit on the council, and each decade you have three points of effort to spend on the things that shape breast-cancer risk across a whole population. The town’s projected outcome updates as you go. The effects come from published studies, and they are modest; that is part of the point.
Ages 14 and up · about 8 minutes · keyboard, mouse or touch. Sources are shown with every card.
For adults: the evidence behind this game → Alcoholic drinks Reading the evidence
The town’s 1,000 women
Projected to age 75
Illustrative model. It forecasts nothing.- diagnosed by 75
- die of it
- neither
- baseline, about 94 and about 15
spring morning
The Twenties
The council’s forecast
Pick one to run the count.
How the town did
- diagnosed by 75
- die of it
- neither
- baseline, about 94 and about 15
For adults: the evidence behind this game → Alcoholic drinks Reading the evidence
How to play
- The town follows 1,000 women from their twenties to age 75. The grid of dots shows how many are projected to be diagnosed with breast cancer by 75 (red) and how many to die of it (ink). It starts from the Western European figures.
- Each decade brings two decision cards. Every option has an effort cost of 0, 1 or 2, and the council has 3 points of effort per decade, so you cannot do everything.
- Pick one option on each card, then close the chapter. First the council makes its forecast: how far will this decade’s choices move the number diagnosed? Then the projection updates and you see what changed, with the evidence and the matching recommendation from the European Code Against Cancer.
- Some cards test judgement more than budget. Effort spent on something without evidence changes nothing in the town.
- After five decades you see how the town did, how it compares with doing nothing and with the most any council could do, and what the game can and cannot say.
The numbers are population averages from pooled studies. They describe what tends to happen across a thousand women and cannot predict any one woman’s future.
About the numbers
Settings
Settings are kept on this device only.