Pandemic

27th June 2021

​Sunday is here and I'm logged into Board Game Arena.

Playing board games is a great way to escape your troubles and ignore what's been happening outside your window and across the globe for the past 2 years and to do that, we chose to play a game about not 1 pandemic, but 4 of them!
The first game of the evening was Pandemic.

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What's in a game?

• Board: The board depicts a map of the Earth with a network of 48 interconnected cities spread across it and split into 4 differently coloured regions, red, blue, black and yellow.
  Outbreak track: As outbreaks occur, a marker moves along this track, when it reaches the final space.... well you get the idea.
  Infection track: As the game progresses, the rate at which new infections appear will increase as tracked on this board. In game terms, it determines how many infection cards are drawn during the infection stage, ranging from 2-4 cards.
  There are also spaces for the infection deck and player decks.
  Finally there's space for the cure markers.
• Role cards: There are 7 differently coloured role cards, as you might expect, each one has it's own role and unique special ability.
• Pawns: There are 7 of these and they correspond to the 7 role cards.
• City cards: There are 48 city cards, one for each city, city cards come in the same 4 colours of their relevant cities
• Event cards: There are 5 event cards, when used, they provide players with a one-off benefit.
• Epidemic cards: These cards increase the game's infection rate and also trigger some other nasty effects.
• Infection cards: There are 48 infection cards, one for each city and in the same 4 matching colours as city cards.
• Disease cubes: These translucent cubes come in the 4 colours to represent the 4 different diseases, there are 24 in each colour and thus 96 in total.
• Research stations: There are 6 of these little 3D models.
• Cure markers: These jar-shaped, double sided chunky plastic markers are used to indicate when one of the diseases has been cured or eradicated.
• Tokens: Used to track outbreak and infection rate.

The components in Pandemic are all of a reasonable quality as you would expect, nothing feels particularly cheap. The pawns are made of plastic and not wood, but that's a trivial quibble. The other markers are constructed of satisfyingly thick plastic.
The plastic 3D research stations are a nice touch as are the colourful, translucent, acrylic disease cubes, it also makes them easier to pick up and move - which for the cubes will occur frequently.
Artwork on the board is functional more than pretty, which is fine and everything's easy to understand, the same is true of city and infection cards which show locations on the board as opposed to containing illustrations.
​The small amount of artwork in the game mostly appears on role cards, which each have a good quality unique illustration that depicts their role, event cards also contain some unique artwork.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Shuffle the infection deck and place it face-down on the board.
  ​Draw 3 cards and place 3 disease cubes on to each city in the colour that matches each city.
  Draw 3 more cards and place 2 matching disease tokens on to those cities.
  Finally, draw another 3 cards and place a single matching disease cube on to each of those cities.
  All 9 cards should be placed into the infection deck's discard pile
• Randomly deal a role card to face-up to each player and then give them the corresponding pawn, all pawns should be placed on the Atlanta space on the board.
• Shuffle the city cards and event cards face-down to form the player deck and deal 2-4 cards to each player, depending on player count.
• Pandemic uses 3 difficulty settings; easy, medium and hard, this is determined by the number of epidemic cards used, from 4 for the easiest to 6 for the hardest.
  Players should decide on which difficulty to use and select that many epidemic cards.
  ​Then take the player deck and divide it into a number of stacks equal to the number of epidemic cards being used, each stack should as close to an equal number of cards as possible. Now shuffle an epidemic card into each stack and place the stacks on top of each other into a single player deck, the epidemic cards should now be more or less equally distributed throughout the player deck. Place the player deck on the board.
• Place on the outbreak and infection rate markers on the board in their starting positions and that's about it.

On to play
The turn structure for Pandemic is as follows: The active player has their turn, which consists of 4 actions, then they draw 2 cards from the player deck, finally the 'board' has its go. Once all of this has been completed, the player to the left becomes the active player.

• Actions: The active player has 4 actions and can spend actions to perform the actions below.
  Move: Spend an action to move to a linked adjacent city.
  Play card: The active player may discard a city card to move to that city or if the card matches the city their pawn is currently on, then it can be discarded to move to any city. This always costs an action and the card must be discarded.
  Research station: For an action point, the active player can move between 2 research station, regardless of their positions on the board.
  Pass card: If the active player and any other player have their pawns on the same city, a player card may be passed between them for an action, provided it matches the location they are on.
  ​Build research station: To build the research station, the active player must discard the city card that matches the city they are on and also spend an action, place a research station token on that location.
  Treat disease: For an action, the active player may remove a disease cube from their current location.
  Cure disease: If the active player has 5 city cards of the same colour and they are currently on a location also has a research station, they can discard those cards and use a action to cure the disease of the matching colour.
  A cured disease can still spread, but is now much easier to cure - an action can be spent to remove all disease cubes of that colour from a city instead of a single cube. Once all the disease cubes for a cured disease have been removed from a board, then that disease has been eradicated and won't return this game.
  Special ability: Some special abilities require the spending of an action to use.
  Event cards: Playing an event card doesn't cost an action, furthermore any player can play one in any player's turn unless a card has been drawn but not resolved.
  Hand limit: It's worth mentioning that all players have a hand limit of 7, any cards above this number must be discarded or possibly played in the case of an event card.
  ​You will have no doubt noticed that needing 5 cards of a single colour out of a hand of 7 means that players will forced to discard other cards frequently in pursuit of their objective. This is par for the course for a Pandemic game.
• Draw cards: Once the active player has finished their 4 actions, they must draw 2 cards from the player deck, if these are city or event cards, then it's all good. If however, it includes an epidemic card, things just went south.
  Epidemic Card: When an epidemic card is drawn, 3 events will be triggered.
  Increase rate: Move the marker 1 space along the infection rate track, this may increase the number of cards drawn during the infection stage.
  Epidemic infection: Draw a card from the bottom of the infection deck and increase the number of cubes of the corresponding colour on the revealed location to 3, if the location already contains cubes, an outbreak will occur (See below for more on outbreaks.).
  Resupply infection deck: Take all the cards in the infection deck's discard pile (Including the one just drawn from the bottom of the deck.) and shuffle them, then place them face-down on top of the infection deck, do not shuffle the unrevealed cards in the infection deck.
  In game terms, this means that cities that have already experienced infection will experience it again before other cities. The pressure is on!
• Infect: Draw a number of cards from the infection deck equal to the infection rate, add a disease cube in the card's colour to each revealed city. Cities cannot hold more than 3 cubes of each colour, if a disease cube would be added to a city that already has 3 cubes in that colour, don't add the cube, instead an outbreak occurs.
  All revealed cards should then be discarded.
  Outbreak: When an outbreak occurs, 2 events will be triggered
  Marker: Move the marker on the outbreak track along by 1 space when an outbreak occurs.
  Expansion: Next, add a disease cube of the outbreak's colour to every adjacent connected city, if an adjacent city already 3 cubes in that colour, then another outbreak occurs, thus multiple outbreaks may and probably will happen, however, a city can only experience 1 outbreak per infection card drawn.

Play then progresses to the player on the left.

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Endgame
Play continues until one of the following conditions is met.
If the marker on the outbreak track reaches its 8th and final space; the players collectively lose.
If, at any time a disease cube needs to be added to the board and none are available in that colour; the players lose.
If a player needs to draw 2 cards from the player deck and cannot do so because none or only one is available.... you guessed it; the players lose.
If all 4 diseases are cured, then the players immediately win. Diseases do not need to be eradicated in order to win.

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Overall
Well, Pandemic.... what's there to say about this game?
​Pandemic is a pillar of modern cooperative games that has been followed up not only by a slew of expansions and spinoffs, but also a number of differently themed games such as Horrified that employ similar mechanics.
Some of Pandemic's elements and mechanics may seem a bit trite nowadays, but that's simply because they're part of a game that popularised those mechanics in the first place and is a testament to Pandemic's longevity and influence.

Pandemic utilises the tried-and-tested game flow of alternating between player turns and card-driven board actions in a game that is a globe-trotting race against time. In a turn, players are faced with the difficult choice of trying to stem the spread of the 4 diseases or instead trying to interact with the other players and swap the cards necessary to cure those diseases. Ultimately, players will need to find a balance between the two approaches.
As with other cooperative games, bad luck may play a major role in Pandemic and mitigating that bad luck is vital to winning.
Decisive actions, recognising priorities and acting on them are also vital to success, as are knowing when to use role special abilities.
Pandemic is also hard, I think this comes down to Pandemic's rules for swapping city cards between players which requires them to be in that card's city in order to do so. It's unlikely players will be able to collect 5 cards of single colour on their own so coordination between players is vital.
We've played a few of the iterations that followed Pandemic and it always felt like this rule has been softened a little. Is that as bad thing, I suspect YMMV?


Pandemic does a good job at evoking the feel of a spreading global crisis and the desperate worldwide fight to contain it.

I have to admit, considering the events of the past 2 years, we haven't had much compulsion to play Pandemic. Even so and despite the difficulty, I feel that if you like cooperative games, it's still worth playing, it challenges players with making difficult decisions at nearly every avenue and is satisfying to win.