by postm
OverviewPandemic is a cooperative game where the players fight four diseases. Their main goal is to discover a cure for all four, but they have to do this before the diseases spread too much.
Presentation and components
I'm going to be brutally honest here. When I first saw the game a couple of years ago, I didn't think it looked like a game at all. The box art looks more like the cover of a children's book about medecine and healthcare than a game. Many of those I have introduced this game to just wrinkles their nose when they see the box.
In the box there are two decks of cards (Infection Cards and Player Cards) and a few role cards. Card quality is just fine. Maybe a wee bit on the thin side, but not so thin it becomes a problem. Some people might sleeve their cards, but I don't think that's a requirement here.
The board itself is of good stiff quality and a smooth surface, but the artwork is nothing special. It's a world map. A bit dull and bland.
The players are represented by simple wooden pawns. Maybe it's just me but I find those to be incredibly boring so I have used my friend's idea and put together LEGO figures to replace these pawns. Much more fun if you ask me.
Then there's cubes. The different diseases are represented by wooden cubes of four differrent colors. Again, not very exciting. I would much rather see small wooden bacteria and viruses.
There are also six cardboard tokens of standard quality. Four of which represent the cures and the last two the infection rate and outbreak counter. Not much to say about those.
Gameplay Overview
So how does the game play? Well, like I said the players works as a team to beat the game. Each player picks a role card at random. The different roles are Medic, Dispatcher, Operations Expert, Researcher and Scientist. Each of these have different special abilities that comes into play under different circumstances. Some of these are more powerful than others, but regardless of what roles are given to you, I recommend that you make the most of it and use it as much as you can.
On a player's turn he/she takes four actions. There are eight different actions to choose from. Four of these are different ways to move across the board in order to reach infected areas. The remaining four include treatment of infected areas, discovering cures, trading or building a research station (which are required to discover cures).
There are also Special Event cards that players can play at any point during the game. These can be found in the Player Cards deck. They are special actions that help the players in different ways. These can also be played during another player's turn. Some are more useful than others but they are almost never wasted.
Once the actions are taken, the player draws two cards and lastly he/she takes the role of the infector. This consists of drawing cards (2-4 cards depending on how far into the game you are) from the infection deck. The cities on these cards recieves a cube. If a fourth cube should have been added you get an Outbreak and the neighbouring cities gets a cube instead and the Outbreak marker is moved one step closer to defeat. Here chains of outbreaks can occur. Those can be devastating.
Then the next player takes his turn in the same manner.
The game is lost if the Player Card deck runs out, disease cube reservoir of a single color runs out or if the outbreak marker hits 8. The only way to win is to find a cure for all four diseases before any of the loss conditions are met.
The challenge here is the occasional Epidemic card drawn from the Player Cards deck. These will make you shuffle the Infection Card discard pile and then place it back on TOP of the Infection Deck. This will cause cities you have recently drawn and infected to be drawn again soon and infecting these cities further and causing Outbreaks, making it significantly harder for the players to keep the diseases at bay while searching for cures. The game difficulty can be tweaked by adding more or removing some these cards.
What do I think about it?
Pandemic is one of the best cooperative games out there. There's no denying it. The most important thing to me when I look at cooperative games is its difficulty and if it can be changed easily. I want my cooperative games to be challenging and scalable. Pandemic is both. First time you play it you will most likely lose, but soon you will get better and will want to make it more difficult. This is done easily in Pandemic by adding more Epidemic cards.
Because of it's difficulty and the rapid spreading of diseases due to outbreaks and Epidemic cards, the game has a real sense of urgency and desperation. This, too, is vital in a cooperative game.
"Oh no! We're all in Asia and Europe treating the red disease and we've overlooked the 3x yellow outbreak chain building up in South America! We're boned!".
These type of sentences is often heard when playing Pandemic and the gameplay following is exciting and a real sense of accomplishment is felt if you manage to survive it.
In spite of its unique theme, Pandemic reaches a broad audience. The game is very family friendly. Saving the world is a great theme for any family where kids play together with adults. It is also easy for almost anyone to grasp the idea of the game and what to do. The rules are really easy to learn and the rulebook is one of the best of its kind. And because it's easy to learn it is also easy to teach others. Not only is the rules simple, but the mechanics also makes sense in this setting.
My tip when teaching this game to others is to not tell them how the Epidemic cards work before one is actually drawn during the game. Once they see you have to place the discard pile back on top of the deck most new players respond with an "Oh crap!" and get very excited and a bit frightened. NOW they know what will happen and will suddenly get more into the game (which have been quite boring up until now to be honest).
Now for the negative. Great as this game is it does have some flaws. After a handful of plays the game does become repetetive. If you have played it as much as I have you will realize that most games are the same without any exciting and uique events. I doubt you will have exciting stories to tell from an especially exciting game of Pandemic. All games feel the same after a while.
Now, the lack of variety can be mended... at a cost. There is an expansion called On the Brink that I highly recommend. This expansion adds new roles, but more importanly it adds three new variants of the game.
The first variant makes one of the four diseases more potent and needs to be looked after more carefully. The second adds a fifth disease (mutation) to the board that acts differently and more unpredictable. The last variant adds a Bio Terrorist to the game where one of the players takes this role and works against the rest throughout the game.
This expansion adds much needed variety for experienced players and a great deal of challenge. The first two variants can even be combined into one badass hardcore experience if you feel you can handle it.
The last drawback to Pandemic is a well known problem in cooperative games. It's easy for experienced players to tell what new players should do. I do my best to encourage new players to make their own decisions and see what happens, but that's not always so easy as it sounds as newer players usually ask what they should do. In such cases I try to give them an array of options and tell the pros and cons for all of them. Sometimes this works well, but sometimes I feel like they make me pick for them. Try to prevent this as much as possible. It's a cooperative game after all, not a dictatorship.
Conclusion
Pandemic is a great game. Experienced players like it because of its challenge. Families love it because of the theme and "easy to learn hard to master" aspect. After a few plays it might feel flat and repetetive. Get the expansion before this happens to increase the longevity of the game.
Pros:
+Challenge and customizable difficulty
+Easy to learn and teach
+Wide audience and family friendly
Cons:
-Repetetive without the expansion
-Prone to the dictatorship syndrome
-Boring components