Pandemic: The Board Game

You’re stuck at home because of a worldwide pandemic. What to do? Play Pandemic, the board game! I’m an old hand at Pandemic with 70 games under my belt since 2009. I guess I have plenty of experience figuring out how to save the world! Not, that the team always succeeds – it’s a cooperative game – but I’m pretty sure I have more wins than losses under my belt.

Here’s a blurry picture from a game earlier this month. It’s early in the game: Turn #2, with an eerie beginning (from randomly drawn cards during setup): Huge number of cases in East Asia (red cubes) centering in China, and some in Europe (blue cubes) including Milan. Humph. Looks like Covid-19. Well, maybe a mash-up with SARS given the outbreak in Toronto where one of the players has reduced the disease down to one blue cube. Well, there’s also the outbreak in Kinshasa (yellow cubes), not quite in the historical location for Ebola.

In Pandemic, players zip around the world trying to reduce disease outbreaks while racing to find a cure for each of four regional diseases (color-coded). Cards turned over in the top right infection deck cause (disease) cubes to be added to global cities. Player cards (lower right) serve several purposes. They can be used to fly between cities, build research facilities (you start the game with the CDC in Atlanta represented by an ecru house), and to find cures. A player needs to collect five cards of the same color, then get to a research station to find a cure. This is not easy because there’s a hand limit of seven cards; players can pass cards to one another but only under very limited circumstances.

Spread throughout the player card deck are several Epidemic cards. This is the focus of the excitement and game tension that makes Pandemic (in my opinion) a pleasure to play! An Epidemic does the following: First the Infection Marker is moved up one step; this marker determines how many infection cards are drawn each turn. Next the bottom card of the deck is drawn and three cubes added to that city, representing a new nasty proliferation of the disease. Finally, all the cards in the discard are shuffled and placed back on top of the infection draw deck, which means the cities that recently added cubes are going to have more! Why would this make you shudder? Once a city has three cubes, if its card is drawn again, an outbreak happens – a cube is added to each adjacent city! And if an adjacent city already has three cubes, the outbreak cascades!

Clearly this is a race against time. Players win if they can discover all four cures. But they must do it before the player draw deck runs out or eight outbreaks have taken place, in which case the players lose! Disease wins and we are overrun.

A nice feature of Pandemic is that each player has a specific skill. The medic (white pawn) can remove all disease cubes in a single action; normally only one cube is removed per action. The researcher (not in the pic) allows discovering a cure with four cards of the same color rather than five. The construction expert (green pawn) can build a research station in any city he/she is in for one action. The two other roles involve helping move players around the board and passing cards to each other more easily. Pandemic is for 2-4 players with five of these “roles” to choose from.

Regulating the game difficulty is a matter of shuffling the appropriate number of Epidemic cards into the player deck. The game recommends four Epidemics in your introductory game. I’ve found this works well when teaching the game to new players! It’s usually winnable for newbies but nail-biting to the end! With a few games under your belt, you’d want more of a challenge – the standard five Epidemics. And if you want an extra-difficult game, you can include six Epidemics. (The game does not come with a seventh card.)

Interestingly, in my first 70 games, I had not attempted six Epidemics. After getting used to the standard game, I started including the expansion, Pandemic: On the Brink. Besides providing eight more role cards for variation, the expansion ups the ante in three ways. First, you can replace some or all of your standard Epidemic cards with Virulent Strain Epidemic cards that add more difficulty (each card has its own twist). Second, you can have a fifth disease (purple cubes) that show up as a mutation. Third, you can add an antagonist player, the bioterrorist. I’ve played the first two aplenty, but have yet to introduce the bioterrorist. I very much enjoy the expansion; I feel it breathes new life into the standard board game.

Given Covid-19, I needed a challenge: six standard epidemic cards. Lost the first two games. (The picture is game #2.) Won the third! Not sure if it was a fluke. Have yet to get the game to the table again… except my new distraction is revisiting Bios Megafauna.