Overview & How to Play

There are 4 diseases threatening to destroy the world! More specifically, cause a global epidemic.

The goal of Pandemic is to find the cure for all 4 diseases of different colors. The players lose when too much disease has been spread, or they run out of time.

To cure each disease, players need to get 5 of one type of color of card onto one person, and then have that person go to a research facility on the board (wooden house). This is quite tricky to do, as cards can typically only be given to another person on the same space as you, and the name of that card needs to match your current location. And you have to worry about disease spawning very turn!

This happens as players flip over cards from an infection deck. This can get exciting if cubes spawn where there’s already 3, which is the maximum amount there can be on one city. Then, the disease spreads to EVERY city that location is spawned to, essentially adding in 3-4 cubes, instead of just 1.

The second big pressure on the players is the epidemics, which are also randomly found in the player deck, the ‘good’ guy deck the players draw cards from. If one of these is drawn, 3 disease cubes spawn on a city on the bottom of the infection deck, that is a huge bad thing for the players!

Pros

The spreading of diseases from cities with 3 cubes to the surrounding ones is called an ‘outbreak’ mechanic, which excels at making this game tense. Any city with 3 cubes, or disease, on it quite alarming for the players, as it could suddenly spread disease all across the map. In fact, outbreaks can combo off each other if 2 cities, each with 3 cubes, are adjacent to each other.

Then, the 7 character role cards included are great, and definitely helps with replayability, given that you always play in the same board every time. There’s stuff like the Quarantine Specialist preventing all disease in her city and adjacent cities. Or the Medic that excels in clearing current disease. And of course the Scientist and Researcher, who are good at actually clearing the disease. You really feel like you’re embodying that specific role when playing.

The game works best with 3-4 people, but can make a great 2 player cooperative game if each player is willing to play 2 characters.

Cons

But for a game that is supposed to be family friendly, the rulebook is confusing as all heck. It is so easy to mess up rules, ranging from how a certain character’s ability works, to how epidemics are treated, and even the difference between eradicating vs. curing a disease. It is so easy to screw up a handful of rules. Player aids also need more enhancement, with round phases and objectives, and not be double sided.

The next cons fall under the hat of Pandemic’s heavily restrictive gameplay, which begin with the semi-randomized openings, with setup consisting of dumping disease cubes on to the first 9 cards flipped from the infection deck, making every game feel too similar despite appearing varied. There should have been some sort of themed openings with context to the mission the players are solving. Why is there no theme, like the return of the Bubonic Plague?

Because the openings are essentially all the same, once you find out the formula of what to prioritize in this game with a team that works for you, the game feels very solved in terms of what a consistent strategy is. There is clearly a stronger team composition when you find it that we won’t spoil. This stems from the problems ranging from game to game not being that varied, at least on hard mode. Hard mode just adds in more epidemic cards, which just speeds up the disaster of cubes dropping, not anything else, so you just optimize around that.

There’s also an action efficiency quirk we are concerned about, that leads to poor feeling turns. In Pandemic, you do 4 four actions a turn, and sometimes it is ideal to just sit around and wait if you’re in an optimal location. This feels like wasting time, since there are no downtime actions players can do—some characters do promote this ‘doing nothing’ as well!

The epidemic cards that we praised earlier actually do feel too strong when they hit. Due to their nature of immediately dropping 3 cubes on any 1 space, if there are any single cubes on any city from previous outbreaks, an immediate outbreak occurs. This often causes chain reactions that frequently lose players the game, or at least get them into a precarious position. We understand that the game wants players to go immediately to outbreaks to cure them, but to fully cure an outbreak takes at least 2-3 full rounds, which is an insane waste of time. Fully curing a new outbreak should be a lower priority than whatever players were previously working on. Also, there’s a chance that an epidemic could cause immediately another outbreak, since the city card that was epidemic’d gets shuffled back into the top of the infection deck. Epidemics are just stupidly strong and unreactable.

When things get into a negative space where Pandemic finalizes its stranglehold on you, you are actually screwed. There is no ebb-and-flow of this game, just a constant pressure to not be enveloped by the disease.

Because Pandemic is so restrictive, it encourages quarterbacking, where knowledge is so public as gamers are encouraged to play with hands face-up. Gameplay is very linear, so the owner of the game who has played this game plenty of times before will find himself frustrated at the inexperience of others and would prefer to direct them into -the- Pandemic strategy.