Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsThe Greatest Cooperative Game Ever
Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2015
Pandemic is a 2 to 4 player cooperative strategy game about doctors fighting diseases. All around, it’s a downright amazing game whether you’re a casual board gamer or a hard core one. Anyone who believes that the life of a doctor is boring or mundane might find a brand you appreciation for them when they play this game for the first time, but I think Pandemic’s biggest contribution to gaming is the standard it set for the many other cooperative games that came after it.
In Pandemic every player is given a special role-card with a nameless character on it who has a special power that will be vital to winning the game. The game board itself is a map of the world with 48 of the most important cities connected to one another by white lines to indicate paths for movement. The four diseases you are struggling to cure are represented by tiny different colored cubes that will inhabit these cities, slowly making the population sicker and sicker.
The players have two objectives that are vital to winning. If the entire supply of any one disease has been distributed across the board, the players loose. So part of the gameplay involves traveling to the world’s many cities to treat the inhabitants and removing disease cubes from those spaces. However, to overcome the diseases and win the game, players have a hand of different colored cards with the names of different cities on them. Players can travel greater distances by surrendering some of these cards, but the real goal is to visit one of the research centers on the board and surrender five cards of the same color to find a cure for one particular disease. Once the cures for all four diseases have been discovered, the players win the game.
Much of the game’s intrigue comes from your hand of cards because in almost every game players will be unsure if they want to use those cards for transportation or save them instead for finding a cure. The majority of player to player interaction involves passing and exchanging these cards around to create optimal hands, but even that will prove a challenge. One of the hardest rules for the players to follow is probably the one that won’t let you exchange a card unless the city printed on that card matches the one you’re currently in. Having one person playing as the Researcher can be the greatest benefit to your team, since they get to ignore that rule.
So on top of the player’s gameplay being very intriguing, the diseases also have an interesting gameplay style. The game’s difficulty is determined by how many Epidemic cards that you have shuffled into the Player Deck. The diseases themselves get a separate pile of cards called the Infection Deck. Each card from the Infection Deck has the name of a city where you will place one more disease cube at the end of each and every turn. Epidemic cards from the Player Deck are downright diabolical, because they will force you to take the discarded Infection cards and then put them back on top of the deck they came from. That means diseases will start targeting the same cities multiple times and players will be running back and forth trying to keep the diseases under control. Outbreaks are even worse, when there are already too many disease cubes on one city and the game will force you to put a cube on each connecting city instead. The mass mayhem and panic that starts to circulate around the game table is one of the most enjoyable things about Pandemic.
The gameplay is a truly flawless experience, in my opinion. Turns tend to happen very quickly and each player’s unique power will strongly encourage coordination between everyone. Pandemic also balances dumb luck with careful strategic planning, because it’s possible you’ll already have the cure for a disease within the first turn of the game. However, if players don’t coordination their efforts and manage their resources wisely that is the path to certain doom. But it’s not only the balance and the coordination that makes the gameplay perfect but also the right theme.
Playing as doctors and trying to do something as noble as fighting diseases is something that everybody in the world can truly admire. When the world is suffering from a pandemic it doesn’t matter what creed or nationality you are since everyone will pool their efforts to save humanity itself, hence the cooperative play. The art direction is also very complimentary of the theme. The game and the cards kind of remind me of a computer monitor that’s tracking the progress of each person and disease. It’s all very family friendly too, since there is no artwork portraying any gruesome pain or agony.
Now, to nitpick on some of the game’s very few shortcomings, there are probably a few people who won’t be convinced a tiny colored cube represents a disease very well. Personally, this has never distracted me from an enjoyable game. Also, the spaces that represent each city can also be very small when trying to fit disease cubes, a research station and player pawns all together into a circle half an inch across. But once again, this has never been a problem to me if the game board isn’t shaken too much.
So altogether, Pandemic is probably the single best cooperative board game that was ever created. It’s fresh and exciting every time I play it, and I always enjoy upping the difficulty to see how much better I can do against the diseases. Winning and loosing are both very fun if you work well together as a team. But even to this day, Pandemic is an example to other game designers trying to make cooperative board games, and it’s not very hard to see why when you pick it up and play it.
