Pandemic Review

Pandemic is a cooperative game for 2 to 4 players designed by Matt Leacock.

In Pandemic, up to 4 players play cooperatively to find the cures for 4 diseases that are emerging throughout the whole world.

Games last from 30 to 60 minutes, maybe a little less if you find yourself facing a really infectious disease!

You start with a role, medic, dispatcher, operations expert, researcher or scientist, each role has a special ability to help you fight the diseases. In the course of the game, you’ll trade player cards with other players and discard player cards to fly to different cities, establish research stations and find cures for diseases. At the end of your turn you play infection cards and infect cities with more disease cubes.

You win when your team has found the 4 cures and lose if you don’t have enough cubes of a disease to put on the board, the eighth outbreak occurs (outbreaks occur when diseases would get more than 3 cubes in a city, instead you infect the neighboring cities) or if a player can’t draw a card from the player deck.

Good luck on saving the world, you’ll need it!

What is it all about?

You begin the game with a role, randomly picking from: medic, dispatcher, operations expert, researcher or scientist. Your pawn starts at a research station in Atlanta and you draw a set number of player cards from 2 to 4 depending on the number of players, these cards depict cities you can travel to.

Then you shuffle from 4 to 6 epidemic cards in the player deck depending on how difficult you want the game to be. The infection rate starts at 2 (which means each player will draw 2 infection cards after their turn) and the outbreak marker starts at 0, now you draw 3 sets of 3 cards from the infection deck and put 3 disease cubes in the pictured cities from the appropriate diseases for the first set, 2 disease cubes for the second set and 1 disease cube for the third set.

The game is now setup and players will take successive turns to beat the game. On your turn you have 4 actions to spend, draw 2 player cards and then take the infector role to add more disease cubes to the board. If you ever have more than 7 cards in your hand you must discard the excess cards.

You have a choice from 8 actions available, 4 basic actions and 4 special actions. The 4 basic actions are:

• Drive/Ferry: move to an adjacent city (if it is connected by a red line);
• Direct Flight : play a card from your hand and go to the city shown in the card;
• Charter Flight : play the card from the city your pawn is and move to any other city on the board;
• Shuttle Flight: if your pawn is in a city with a research station, move to another city with a research station.

As you’ve noticed these are the actions necessary to move around on the board, they aren’t really complicated, but once you realize that those cards you’re spending are the same cards you need to cure a disease it becomes critical to think which cards to spend and which cards to keep.

Then there are the special actions:

• Build a research station: play the card corresponding to the city your pawn is, you place a research station there. Research stations allow for Shuttle flights and are needed for finding cures;
• Discover a cure: if your pawn is in a city with a research station, discard 5 cards of the same color to cure the disease of that color, take a cure marker and place it in the appropriate place in the board. When you have all 4 cures you win, notice that there still may be cubes of that disease in the board, you only need to find the cures to win.
• Treat disease: remove a disease cube from the city your pawn is in. If the cure for that disease has been found then remove all cubes from that color. If at any time there are no cubes of a certain disease and you’ve already found the cure for that disease, the disease is eradicated and no more cubes of that color enter the board.
• Share knowledge: Give a card to other player or receive a card from another player. Your pawns must be in the same city and the card must match the city you’re in.

Now you draw 2 cards. Cards have 3 types: the normal city cards, special event cards and epidemic cards. Special event cards can be played at any time and grant a special ability when played (like transporting a pawn for free from a city to another), epidemic cards are the cards you’ll soon love to hate.

When you draw an epidemic card from the player deck you must increase the infection rate (which will later make you draw more cards in the infector phase), then you take the bottom card from the infector deck and put 3 cubes on that city. If the city can’t hold more cubes then you leave 3 cubes of that disease there and an outbreak occurs. After that you take the infector card discard pile shuffle it and put it on top of the deck, in practice this means that the cities that were previously infected will come up again during the infector phase and there is an added risk of outbreaks.

Outbreaks occur whenever a city would get more than 3 cubes of one color, instead of getting any more cubes there is an outbreak and you add a cube to each adjacent city, if one of those cities would get more than 3 cubes another outbreak can occur, etc, etc. So you see that epidemics are really dangerous cards if you leave the disease cubes unattended because if 8 outbreaks occur it’s “game over”.

Now you play as the infector, you draw as many infection cards as the infection rate (it goes from 2 to 4) and add one cube of the appropriate color to each city, applying any outbreaks that occur.

So that’s a turn sequence, you win when you find the 4 cures and lose when you can’t draw enough cards from the player deck, 8 outbreaks occur or can’t add any more cubes from one color.

To spice things up, in the beginning of the game you get a random role card making each team member a valuable ally:

• Medic: You remove all cubes from a city when you treat it and when your pawn enters a city with cured diseases they are automatically treated (without spending any action).
• Scientist: You only need 4 cards to find a cure.
• Dispatcher: You may move other player’s pawns as your own and you can move any pawn to another pawn’s position for 1 action.
• Researcher: You may give one of your cards to another player for 1 action as long as your pawns are in the same city; the cards you give are not limited to the city you’re in.
• Operations Expert: you may build a research station for 1 action on your current city, no card is necessary to build it. This role has been revised in the upcoming On the Brink expansion and now if you are in a city with a research station you can discard any city card in your hand to go to any city.

In the box

The box brings pawns for each role (a little big for my taste, but the expansion will bring smaller pawns for every role), research stations, cure, infection and outbreak markers, 24 disease cubes for each color, player, infection and role cards. It also brings 4 handy reference cards for each player listing all the available actions. The quality of the components is excellent, from the board to the linen finish cards and it even comes with baggies to keep your game pieces! The only downside of the box is its useless insert, it was made to hold the cards but it’s doing absolutely nothing there.

Is this the game for me?

First of all, you need to like cooperative games. Many people don’t like them because if one player is left to decide all the actions these games usually become a puzzle for that player and plain boring for all the other players. The basic game rules tells you to play with your hand revealed, but I’d suggest playing only with the advanced rules where your hand is hidden to avoid this problem a bit, you can still talk about your hand but it becomes a harder for one player to “dominate” the game. Remember that when playing a cooperative game the most important objective maybe is not winning but doing some actual teamwork.

Pandemic is elegantly designed and the way the cubes spread across the table really makes you think that you’re fighting an actual epidemic. It has 3 levels of difficulty for you to adjust, which is great for novice players to learn but not feel totally beaten down and for advanced players to feel challenged.

This isn’t a game that once you’ve learned to beat it loses its interest. It has just the right amount of random events to always surprise you.

The upcoming expansion will also give this game another life, as it will offer many options and variants to add to the main game though it will make Pandemic lose some of its simplicity rules-wise.

Final Score

7

Links

• Pandemic official site
• Pandemic on BoardGameGeek