Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsPandemic has become a favorite on game nights in my circle of friends
Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2015
Pandemic has become a favorite on game nights in my circle of friends, and the On the Brink Expansion improves the experience in several ways. There are new game modes, new roles, new events, and all of them work well. On the most basic level, the ability to have five players is a big improvement. You have to relearn the board setup some to compensate for how many new events are included to keep from unbalancing the game, but none of the changes are so drastic as to be overwhelming.
Aside from this, most of the new material boils down to making the game more difficult. The most basic form of this is the addition of an additional Epidemic card to enable "Legendary" difficulty (I think we lost in ten minutes the first time we tried that mode). The Virulent Strain variation to the rules increases the power of one of the diseases. The Mutation variation adds a fifth disease. All of these are good for the increased challenge, but don't really change the core gameplay too much.
The one exceptionally different mode is the Bio-Terrorist variation, which makes one player an enemy to the rest of the group. I, like many of the other reviewers, love this mode. My friends and roommates don't all agree. It is the type of game mode that certainly has the potential to ruin friendships if you play it too often, but I think it injects some welcome variety into the game. That said, it's totally optional and the expansion has plenty of other improvements to justify buying it even if this game mode doesn't prove to be a hit with your crowd.
As a last, wonderful feature, the game box comes packaged with a tray that is capable of holding the materials not only for the expansion, but for the original game as well. This way you can actually store the original game and the expansion in a single box. It sounds like a small thing, but little touches and details like that are what separate the good game publishers from the great.