Pandemic

A cooperative game against viruses that could end all humanity. This game really makes us hold our breath when we have to draw cards. It’s quite nerve wracking, but also fun to play.

Setup isn’t very hard since there is a board which maps out everything. The only thing we have to do is shuffle up the decks and setup the starting viruses. There are different difficulties with easy having 4 epidemic event cards and hard mode having 6 epidemic event cards. An epidemic has 3 effects. First, increase the infection rate. Second, take the bottom card from the infection deck and infect it with 3 cubes. Third, shuffle discard and place on top of infection deck. When the area has 3 viruses on it and another virus is to be placed on it, an outbreak occurs which infects all surrounding areas.

Each player gets an occupation, we decided to do this randomly to make things more interesting. Problem is that we may have 2 classes which are not the most useful for the current game.

The player’s deck is our draw deck, or our resources. First, we get 4 starting cards. For hard mode, we split the remaining player’s deck into 6 as evenly piles as we can. Then we place each pile with a epidemic card and shuffle each pile separately. Each pile is then placed on top of each other to make one deck.

The infection deck contains cities that the virus infects each turn. To set up, draw 3 piles of 3 cards. These are the starting point for the viruses. The first pile has 3 cubes (which represents the virus), 2nd pile gets 2 cubes, and 3rd pile gets 1 cube. The virus gets to go every time a player turn has ended, infecting cities equal to the number shown on the infection rate bar.   

There are a couple of other markers on the board as well. One is the number of outbreaks that have occurred. Next is the virus indicator showing which virus is cured. In this version, there are only 4 types of viruses.

The last thing is to set up the research station, which is always at Atlanta. The point of the research station is to cure a disease. A player needs 5 of the same color card to cure it unless your role is the scientist, which only needs 4. This is where the players start. Each player gets 4 moves on their turn. Luckily there is a reminder card of what actions are possible.

The winning conditions of the game is to find all the cures.

The losing conditions are:

Outbreak marker reaches the skull for a total of 8 outbreaks.

Ran out of cubes of any color, virus is not out of control.

Out of cards in the Player’s deck, ran out of resources.

Well our game didn’t look too well starting. We had an operations expert (JDX) and a quarantine specialist (Rami). Not too bad of a combo. Then the turns started. Quarantine specialist went to tame the infections over in Madrid and Paris while Operations expert went down to the yellow area towards Johannesburg. A total of 3 turns finished and we had a epidemic card already!

Not looking so good.

Cured yellow!

Uh-oh...

We failed!

Well those epidemics kept wrecking us. We had so many outbreaks that the outbreak counter reach max and the game ended. It was unfortunate because the Quarantine specialist was great at keeping infections down but it was just not quick enough. Operations expert was great for the research stations or else we wouldn’t have gotten the cure for yellow or red.

As much as we wished we won that game, we were not able to predict the infections very well. We believe this game is a lot of fun. We can’t wait to try a 4 player game just to see how much more difficult it is. So to answer the question "Can we save humanity?" The answer is no, we failed humanity.

There are currently two more expansions for this game. Pandemic: On the Brink and Pandemic: In the lab. We will probably get these expansions eventually to try it out. More gameplay, another disease, as well as one person playing against the team who are trying to find the cure.

Posted by Rami & JDX