About Germle

A daily outbreak puzzle. Everyone gets the same small social network each day. It takes about two minutes.

How to play

You have 4 vaccines. Tap people to vaccinate them; they leave the network. Break it into pieces.
Then an outbreak starts. Tap a healthy person to quarantine them — but every quarantine passes a day, and the infection spreads.
The game ends when the outbreak has nowhere left to go. Save as many people as you can.

The rules in detail

The network has 40 people. Lines are contacts. You can drag people around to see the network better; it changes nothing in the game.
Orange people with a cross refuse vaccines. They can still catch the infection, and you can still quarantine them.
When your last vaccine is used, two people fall ill, never next to each other if that can be avoided. Infected people are red with a white centre and cannot be quarantined.
Each day, every contact between an infected and a healthy person passes the infection with a 35% chance. Even if every one of those chances misses, at least one person who can be reached falls ill that day. People infected today start spreading tomorrow.
Nobody recovers. Vaccinated and quarantined people are safe for good.
Your score is the share of the 40 people who never got infected: vaccinated, quarantined and untouched people all count as saved. Save 70% or more and the outbreak is Contained; below that, it Spread.
Chance is fixed for the day: two players who make the same moves see exactly the same outbreak. A new puzzle starts at midnight your local time.

Practice

Practice mode lets you set the network size, contacts, vaccines, outbreaks, refusers and contagiousness, and replay any seed. Practice games never count toward your stats.

Inspiration

Germle is an original game inspired by Vax! (2014), created by Ellsworth Campbell and Isaac Bromley of the Salathé Group at Penn State and released under CC BY-SA 3.0. Germle is a from-scratch implementation: it shares none of Vax!'s code, artwork, text or level data.

Privacy

No accounts, no tracking in the game; progress is stored in your browser.