Last night, my friends Dennis and Justin (more about them later) joined me in trying out a new board game I picked up called Pandemic. The object of the game is to prevent four mysterious diseases from spreading while racing to find a cure. Players take turns traveling across the globe to treat infections while finding new paths to move around the world. While this is happening, the diseases spread infection and outbreaks occur.
For anyone who’s enjoyed movies like Outbreak, World War Z, Contagion or 28 Days Later, there’s a certain perverse pleasure in watching infections spread across the globe while those who seek answers try valiantly to stop them. Some games, like Plague, Inc. on mobile devices, want you to see if you can infect the world while scientists block your every attempt. This game, however, wants you to find a cure and save the world.
This is a cooperative game, so we did our best to work together to solve the world’s problems. The game starts in Atlanta where the Centers for Disease Control is located. You each take on a random role in the game that gives you a special benefit in your attempts to thwart the nasty plagues that could wipe out humanity. You have four actions to perform each round, which include flying to new destinations, treating diseases, setting up research facilities, and discovering cures.
After you’ve completed your actions, it’s time to start booking flights elsewhere or obtaining reports on new potential outbreaks. This requires you to draw cards with various cities on them as well as events that help stall the spread or generally provide you aid in your quest. Unfortunately, there are also epidemics waiting to appear and if you draw one of these, prepare for things to go south quickly. After that, the infection spreads, typically in cities where you’ve already been. You can have outbreaks in this phase where cities that have large numbers of infections cannot hold them and they spread to neighboring cities.
It’s an intense game that requires a lot of multi-tasking, watching across multiple geographic areas with unique challenges, simply evoked through game mechanics that are challenging, but emblematic.
Our first game didn’t go well as we didn’t quite understand how the mechanics of spreading disease worked. As a result, the “yellow” virus that plagues all of South America, Miami, Mexico, and most of Africa, managed to spread from Johannesburg and Buenos Aires and completely eliminate the small pool of clear yellow plastic cubes assigned to that disease. We found a couple of cures, but were overwhelmed before we could find the rest.
When we went into our second game, we understood how quickly things could get out of control and began to better work at stopping the spread. We then came across another problem while trying to focus on eradicating the diseases rather than cure them. We hadn’t remembered the rules very well and forgot that winning the game just required the curing of all four diseases, not the eradication. So, while we had eradicated the “blue” disease that could have crippled most of the United States and Europe, the “red” virus hit hard in the eastern Asian nations starting from Beijing (in spite of my presence in that region trying to tamp it down), and also from the “black” region across the rest of Asia and North Africa moving out from Delhi.
It’s a fun game and we’re likely to keep playing until we beat it. There are tons of expansions, but I don’t know if we’re quite ready to complicate an already tricky game.
If you’re interested in purchasing it and aren’t sure where to find it in your local gaming community, here’s a link to the Amazon product listing where you can buy the game. It’s worth the price as games don’t take very long to play once you get the hang of the rules and, if you’re like me and love cooperative games where players win together rather than by beating each other, this will be a great game to play. It’s easy enough for kids to learn and enjoy while it’s challenging enough for adults.
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