Pandemic on Game Night

We introduced my daughter’s 18 year old friend to Pandemic on Game Night. Her response, “I love this game! We all get to talk!” Pandemic is a co-operative game about saving the world from infectious disease. This means, we all live or die together. How cheerful!

Pandemic Board Game Review

The game starts simply enough. You are given a roll, and a few player cards. A few of the world’s cities are infected with disease. Your team’s job; find cures for the disease by collecting a set of colored player cards, and turning them in at a research station. Sounds simple? While you are blissfully collecting those cards, disease is spreading with every turn of the Infection deck. Now you have to get boots and scientists on the ground to wipe those little cubes off the board.

Still sound straightforward?

Now add in the Epidemic cards! Extra disease cubes hit the cities… and when the city is saturated, OUTBREAK! And the disease spreads.

Sadly, there are more ways to die in Pandemic than to win.

Run out of Player Cards… you lose
Too many Outbreaks… you lose
Run out of Disease cubes… you lose

But it’s not impossible! Special Event cards can give your team a little extra help when you need it. And if you work together, and the cards are in your favor, you can cure the four diseases before there is a world-wide Pandemic.

What I really Like About Pandemic

What works about Pandemic is that no one player can really just sit back and let the others do the work. Each person is assigned a role in a disease control team… Researcher, Medic, Dispatch. Each role has strengths that are applied at certain points of the game. Before each turn, there is discussion about which way to go. No one goes rogue. (Not even my daughter, who hates co-operative games… she makes an exception for Pandemic, because she likes the idea of diseases wiping out the world. ) (Don’t ask).

Also, it’s interesting just how emotionally involved players get in the game. It is sad when Dehli or Essen face an outbreak….

What I don’t Like about Pandemic

When you buy the basic Pandemic set, all of the components are in teeny ziplock bags that are 1) a pain to open and 2) sort of fragile. Because you are constantly placing cubes on the board, the baggies slow everything down. I bought these little containers to store our disease cubes… not cheap, but worth it. The cube holders come with the On the Brink Expansion set…so that alone makes the expansion worth picking up (we now have extra cube holders).

Who Can Play Pandemic?

The box says ages 13 and up. My youngest started playing when she was 11, and she game, and is our rules expert (of course, she’s a natural gamer…).Pandemic is good for experienced gamers, because of the strategy, but it’s also good for newer gamers, those wanting to move up from Monopoly or Sorry, since it’s co-operative, it’s easy to help newbies along without interrupting the game too much.