POSTED BY dean-haworth on September 24, 2011Pandemic
Can you remember 2008?
The world economy was on the brink of collapse, the price of petrol rose above $100 a barrel for the first time and Russia and Georgia went to war. Good times. Good, good times!
But in the middle of all the fun and games deadly diseases where breaking out all over the world. From Africa, where a yellow disease was spreading like wildfire, to the Middle East and Asia where the black disease infected millions. China and the Far East had to deal with a red variant and worst of all the US and Europe were plague-ridden with some unknown blue blight.
Ok, so the four colourful diseases threatening the world weren’t real, but they were the perfect theme for a friendly cooperative board game. That game was, and is, Pandemic.
So here’s the thing. There’s been an outbreak of four deadly diseases. Inconveniently for the players, they have broken out thousands of miles away from each other. Spreading from city to city, they’re threatening to wipe out mankind. It’s your job to travel the world, working with your fellow medical specialists to find a cure for each of these pathogens, beating them back, saving the world.
It’s a simple game. So simple in fact that the whole game is laid out in a small corner of the board in 3 short bullet points.
1. Take four actions.
The person whose turn it is takes four actions. These actions are neatly explained on each player’s reference card. Basic actions include moving your little pawn from one city to another and treating a disease.
2. Draw 2 cards.
The player draws two cards from the Player Cards deck. This deck mainly contains colour coded city cards. You need five of the same colour in order to find a cure for that disease. They also allow you to get around the board quickly. Discard the card depicting Paris and you can move there.
3. Draw infection cards.
You draw a number of cards from the Infection Deck. These cards also depict the different cities found on the board but when these are revealed you must place a little cube on the city indicating the spreading of the disease.
And that’s it. That’s almost everything you need to know. Everything listed in a small corner of the board and little reference cards. It’s a great game for introducing new players to. It’s one of the few games out there where it’s possible to throw the board on the table, start playing and learn as you play.
But don’t let the simplicity of the rules convince you that the game is easy, it’s anything but. It will beat you. It will beat you hard. You will cry and beg for mercy, but the game won’t listen. It will just beat you harder and faster.
In a game earlier this year, my team were feeling confident, at the end of my first turn things were looking good. We had treated a few cities, ridding them of some nasty disease, and we had everything under control. However, by the time the three other players had had their turn, the game was over. We had lost. While it was quick, it certainly wasn’t painless. When things start to go wrong in Pandemic, they go wrong quickly. The diseases spread and soon humanity is snowballing into oblivion.
The key to Pandemic, the reason why I love it so, and why at times it’s so bloody difficult, is the brilliantly devised Infection Deck. It is from this deck where the players draw cards at the end of their turn. These cards infect the city depicted on it with one cube of disease, indicating the spreading of the disease.
Ok, fine. Nothing particularly clever about it so far, but when a player draws a Epidemic card from the Player Cards deck things start to get interesting. When one appears a few things happen, none of them good. First, the infection rate is increased, meaning more cities will be infected each turn. Then the card instructs you to draw a card from the bottom of the Infection Deck. The reason for doing this becomes clear when you follow the third instruction on the card. You must shuffle the Infection Deck discard pile and place it back on top of the Infection Deck!
What this means is the cities that have recently been infected by disease are going to get infected again, and what’s more, the card that you got from the bottom of the Infection Deck will be near the top too. So, for example, London might have just been infected the previous turn but now it’s card is back in the deck. It could be infected again soon, maybe the very next turn!
The rush to start treating the cities that you know are near the top of the Infection Deck starts. If any cities already have three cubes of disease stacked up on them you need to get to them quickly. If their card turns up again there will be an Outbreak, infecting all nearby cities and moving the players a step closer to defeat!
Pandemic becomes a game of fire-fighting and priorities. Players flying around the world removing disease form the most infected cities. Do you treat Mexico City’s three disease cubes, protecting the city from causing an outbreak and infecting nearby cities of L.A., Lima, Bogota, Miami and Chicago? Or do you fly over to Asia where Tehran, Baghdad and Delhi are heavily infected too. An outbreak their could cause further outbreaks, losing you the game? The players also have to be thinking about curing the diseases. It’s the only way to win the game but there are often more pressing matters on you mind. You’ll be too busy trying not to lose the game to concentrate on winning it!
As you can imagine, it’s vital that you work as a team, thinking a few moves ahead and spreading the work between you. Working together while working to treat diseases on the different continents is the order of the day here. To help the players in the quest to save humanity they are assigned different roles at the beginning of the game and all have really useful special abilities.
The Medic’s ability lets the player remove all disease cubes from an infected city, rather than just one. The Troubleshooter is allowed to look at the cards at the top of the Infection Deck, there are loads of different roles, some with more useful abilities than others however, only through proper thoughtful use of these powers, and good strategic teamwork, will the players succeed in winning the game.
So, it’s an extremely fun game with some really nice gameplay mechanics. The Infection Deck in particular brilliantly simulates how I imagine a real life pandemic would spread, not that I think about these too often of course!
The one other thing I like about Pandemic is the disease cubes. I love them. Almost unnaturally so! To look at them they’re just simple coloured wooden cubes, but they’re beautiful. They’re perfectly sized diseased cubes of joy. While placing each cube down on a city means millions of innocent civilians becoming infected with a deadly disease, for me it’s a chance to touch them, hold them and fondle them.
It’s almost as if the designers were worried that a boardgame about a five deadly plagues would be too dark to appeal to a wide audience and decided to brighten it up by using colourful pieces normally found in games aimed at children, but they work perfectly.
It is a shame then that the artwork is a little disappointing. I guess the art on the Role Cards are ok, but I find them bland. It’s not the end of the world, and certainly shouldn’t put you off buying the game, but a little more effort here would have made a big difference and such a negative paragraph in an otherwise glowing appraisal wouldn’t have been needed.
Back in 2008, Pandemic was part of a new wave of cooperative games to surface and went on to be nominated and win many awards. It was a massive success. You only need to look at how many cooperative games are out there to realise just how popular these games have become. Games stores have become filled with games that require teamwork and cooperation to succeed rather than a cut-throat determination to hammer your opponents in to the ground! Pandemic was there at the start of coop-mania, and in my book, it’s still one of the best.
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