Playing the board game Pandemic feels especially on-the-nose these days.

Colleen Brady / DCist

Labyrinth, a local board game store in Capitol Hill, is seeing some very of-the-moment purchases from customers.

“We’ve sold a ton of Pandemic these past few weeks,” says owner Kathleen Donahue. It’s a collaborative game in which players take on different roles with the Centers for Disease Control (think dispatcher, medic, quarantine specialist) and try to stop four diseases that are spreading across the globe, and it feels very relevant right now—the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on Wednesday,

In just the last few days alone, Labyrinth has sold 16 Pandemic board games, per Donahue. By comparison, during the same length of time in January, customers bought four. (Indeed, an employee thought the store had sold out entirely, before finding five more games hidden in a box.)

And that’s not the only game seeing a surge in sales. “I’ve been surprised because there’s another game called We’re Doomed—we’ve been selling a lot of that one, too.” That game is all about building a rocket to launch off a soon-to-be-destroyed Earth. “It’s a kind of dark humor, super funny game,” says Donahue.

While at first she was tickled by the marked increase in Pandemic sales, Donahue says she worries that people who play the game, especially with younger kids, might get even more stressed out—”It’s really hard to win,” she says. (I can confirm.)

But she says overall, “tons of people coming in to try to find things they can do while stuck at home, and board games are great for that,” though she recommends wares that are “happy and fun and bring joy—I think we need more of that.”

Already, Labyrinth is offering curbside assistance to customers who don’t want to go inside the store, in what she’s calling a “latex glove service.” Donahue expects she’ll have to cancel some upcoming events typically held there, like in-store game nights, and is thinking of starting a delivery service.

“I’m just desperately trying to differ out how I can keep all of my staff safe and paid,” she says. “We’ll try to stay open as long as we can.”