Pandemic board game review – the cure for boredom

This Pandemic review is long overdue. Released in 2008, it’s one of the most successful cooperative board games ever made, with multiple expansions and themed spin-offs. It’s a common recommendation for first time board gamers, yet it’s still well-regarded in groups of experienced players.

We won’t prevaricate – Pandemic is one of the best board games of all time. It’s one of the most satisfying cooperative board games ever made, and it deserves its worldwide acclaim. If you’ve ever wondered what all the fuss is about, this review explains it all.

This review is based on playing Pandemic, on and off, for years.

What is Pandemic?

Pandemic is a co-operative strategy board game for two to four players, who take on the role of scientists, medics, and disaster specialists trying to stop the spread of four lethal diseases. It’s a race against time as the illnesses spread from infected cities, and unexpected outbreaks create new hotzones around the world.

Every turn, players travel the world, treating diseases, gathering and sharing research, in an attempt to develop the four cures needed to stop the pandemic before it’s too late. There’s a lot to do and very little time to do it in, and players must work together to stamp down on short term threats while still pursuing those all-important long-term cures.

What are the components like?

Pandemic packs a lot of game into a trim box. The component quality is great, with the board printed on robust card stock and the cards reinforced with linen and laminated. It’s built for a lot of use over a long time.

The board depicts the whole world in bluescale, with major cities shown as nodes joined together by travel lines. With the colorful candy-like disease cubes that quickly spread across the globe, it looks like a high-tech holomap in a near-future disaster movie.

The four diseases are unnamed, being simply red, yellow, black, and blue. The nodes of the same color on the map represent the cities that these infections might appear in, and the same color scheme is found on the card decks that control how the diseases spread, and which the players use to research cures. It’s a simple touch that makes parsing the game nice and smooth.

Character cards, the rulebook, and box, are illustrated with modern character studies by Chris Quilliams, depicting the different specialists you’ll play as during the game. It’s believable but still characterful.

The rulebook is comprehensive and effective, though these days you will find no shortage of “how to play” videos online.

How does it play?

At its heart, Pandemic is a race against time. The players win by discovering four cures to four lethal diseases – but they can lose in three different ways. This is the delicious tension at the core of the game: developing those cures is a long term necessity that you cannot ignore. But every turn, some new short-term crisis threatens to end the game right here and now.

The cities on Pandemic’s world map are connected to one another a web of routes, which indicate how the players – and diseases – can travel from one city to the next. At the start of the game you’ll turn over several infection cards, seeding colored disease cubes onto cities all around the world. At the end of each player’s turn you’ll turn over more Infection cards, revealing yet more cities to infect.

Those disease cubes are your nemesis. You’ll spend a lot of the game sweeping them off the board to limit the spread of disease. If the supply of any one type of disease cube ever runs out, that’s game over – that disease has run rampant and will never be stopped.

Left untreated, the disease cubes in a single city can build up. If you ever need to place a cube onto a city that already contains three cubes of the same color, there’s an Outbreak instead. Disease cubes spill out into all the connected cities – potentially triggering more Outbreaks if those cities are already at their limit.

An Outbreak track keeps tabs on how many Outbreaks have occurred. If you ever reach eight Outbreaks, that’s another game over. The world’s infrastructure buckles under the strain of so many catastrophic events, and the lights go out.

So, what are you going to do about it?

Each player is represented on the map by a colored pawn. Each turn, you’ll have four precious actions, with which to move between connected cities, treat the disease and remove a cube from the city you’re in, or transfer a research card to another player (under the right conditions).

Those research cards are your key to developing permanent cures to the disease. You draw two new cards at the end of each of your turns. If you can ever assemble a set of five cards of the same color and make it to a research centre, you can spend an action to develop the cure for the corresponding disease. That doesn’t wipe the disease out, mind you, but you will be able to treat it more effectively from now on.

The problem is, the world is big. The diseases are spread across the whole map, meaning players must split up around the globe to keep a lid on the disease and prevent Outbreaks. But assembling cures means trading research cards, and you can only hand over a piece of research to another player while you’re both in the city that’s listed on the card.

Research cards can also speed up your travel. Each card works as a one-way flight ticket, letting you fly into or out of the corresponding city. Or if you can make it there by foot, you can spend the research card to establish a research centre in the city. Those research centres are the only places you can discover cures, and players can move from one research centre to another as if they were adjacent.

So here’s more tension. Your research cards are essential for travelling long distance and building research centres. They’re also a vital resource that you must shepherd carefully to have any hope of winning the game.

That deck of research cards is the game’s third and final loss condition – a timer ticking down to doomsday. Once that deck runs out of cards, the research funding has run out, and earth accepts its fate. If that wasn’t bad enough, the deck is also packed with horrible surprises – the Epidemic cards.

When you draw an Epidemic card, you’ll first draw a city from the bottom of the Infection deck and stuff it full of disease cubes. You then reshuffle the entire discard pile and put it on top of the Infection deck, exposing cities that may already be packed with disease cubes to the risk of infection once more.

You’ll then intensify the infection, progressing along a track that gradually increases how many cards you draw in each Infection phase. And you’ll then proceed with regular infections, with everything much riskier than it was before.

There are some things on your side. Tucked into the research deck are Event Cards, one-off powers that break the rules of the game: building a research centre for free, transporting a player to any city, or skipping the Infection phase for ‘One Quiet Night’, for example.

Each player has a unique ability, too. When the Medic uses an action to treat disease, they remove all the cubes of one type from the city they’re in, not just one. The Scientist can find a cure with just four research cards, not five. The challenging-to-use Quarantine specialist can prevent infection cubes being placed in her current city, or any that are adjacent to it.

Even with these advantages, your first game of Pandemic will feel like spinning plates in a thunderstorm. The players will set off around the world to stomp down disease outbreaks, only to find new infections cropping up exactly where they aren’t.

One player will get four out of five research cards in one color by luck, but find themselves stuck holding down an outbreak in an isolated territory where they simply can’t trade cards. To your horror, you’ll draw Epidemic cards two turns in a row, and a once-safe region is now teetering on the brink of multiple Outbreaks.

Unless you’re lucky or already familiar with co-operative games, you’re going to lose that first game of Pandemic. You may even be flabbergasted that there are higher difficulty levels that put more Epidemic cards into the deck, and start the game with an even higher initial rate of infection.

But playing Pandemic will make you better at it. You’ll get a feel for the rhythm of the diseases, how fast they spread, how rapidly your team will go from placid to panicked as an unexpected Outbreak takes hold. You’ll learn which hotspots are about to boil over, and which you can leave to simmer. The skills of different characters reveal their utility and new options open up.

That central balancing act, between the need for a long term solution and the necessity of stamping out fires here and now, begins to seem less impossible. And when you win, you will feel utterly triumphant – but you won’t feel finished. Every game of Pandemic is different, victory is never quite certain, and there’s always something new to try.

Who is it for? Who isn’t it for?

Pandemic is a fantastic cooperative board game for couples, families, and groups of friends. It’s a genuine challenge with several difficulty levels, and will satisfy experienced hobbyists just as much as first time board gamers.

Like most cooperative board games, Pandemic can be prone to quarterbacking – one player calling the shots because they (think they) know best. Whether or not this is a problem depends on the individual and the group in question. A parent gently nudging their kids away from disaster is very different from That One Guy who gets mad when the other players don’t follow his plans.

If you’d like something a little more chilled, or want something suitable for slightly younger kids, Forbidden Island is a simpler entry point to the genre. It doesn’t have the depth of Pandemic, but it is a great fun game.

There are multiple Pandemic expansions. None of them are essential – they offer variants and higher challenge for players who have already rinsed the base game. Of the bunch, ‘On the Brink’ is our go-to recommendation, as it offers three higher difficulty game modes, including a variant where one player becomes a hidden bioterrorist traitor.

If you do find that you utterly adore Pandemic and want to raise the stakes even higher, we recommend Pandemic Legacy Season One. This transforms the familiar game into an evolving saga where the outcome of one game impacts the state of the world for the next.

Source: Wargamer