LogFAQs > #933886897

48. Pandemic (2008)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Point-to-point movement, set collection, action-point allocation
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 45-60 minutes
Experience: 15+ games over 10+ sessions (2015-2019) with 2-4 players
Previous ranks: 11/100 (2016), 8/80 (2018)

Summary - There are four diseases (represented by differently colored cubes) infecting the globe, each originating in a general region of the world. Each player is an employee of the CDC who gets four actions on their turn: traveling between cities, building research centers, treating diseases within cities, and researching cures for diseases. You discover a cure by collecting five city cards, which you draw at the end of your turn. After your turn, an infection deck spawns an increasing number of disease cubes in cities. The catch: sometimes the virus intensifies - i.e., the cities that were infected become the ones that will become infected again in the future.

Design - Like Catan for Eurogames, Pandemic is probably the archetypal cooperative board game. It's got a crackin' theme and an addictive puzzle and a blend of luck and strategy. It has the board fighting back violently with epidemics cards and escalating numbers of cubes added per turn. It has variable player powers. And it often has that climactic moment where you can win or lose.

Of course, this means that Pandemic also is the poster-child for some of the issues with cooperative games. The most common thing people accuse Pandemic of is being quarterback-heavy - i.e., it handles differences in player-skill very poorly; with no hidden information, the most skilled (or loudest) player can simply tell everyone else what to do. And this would actually benefit the team, while obviously not being fun for the players who are just being told what to do. Pandemic also can result in unsatisfying game arcs, if randomness hits in ways that make the game a walkover or just wrecks you in an unpreventable way. The game also vary weirdly in terms of how well it scales with respect to difficulty, depending on how the cards are drawn. All of these are pretty valid concerns to me, though I'd argue that the right cast of players can render the quarterbacking moot, and that luck on average enhances the experience.

For my money, the most brilliant thing about Pandemic is its "intensification" method, by which each game gains a distinctive flavor. Each game will start as some random smattering of cities across the globe, but depending on how you spread out to contain those cities, you'll be locked into paying attention there for essentially the whole game. I also really like the flight mechanic - you can discard a city card to fly to that city. But, in order to fly out of a city or, more importantly, build a research center, you need to discard the city you are in. So how do you balance moving around the slow way versus discarding the potentially precious city cards?

The one thing I find a little anticlimactic about Pandemic is that its "set-collection" method to cure diseases doesn't feel particularly cutting-edge. It's highly subject to luck of draw with almost zero mitigation, since sharing knowledge is an act that can happen maybe twice per game in an aggressive game. As a result, the scientist/researcher are overpowered in my opinion, and along with the medic are easily the best roles. Also, the game makes you desire to eradicate diseases, but that should happen rarely in most games. "Winning" with an overrun map somehow feels wrong. Nonetheless, these are rather small complaints that arguably simplify and make more accessible an excellent cooperative puzzle.

Experience - I first got Pandemic in 2012 or 2013 and was overwhelmed by the bookkeeping. (Indeed, the setup can be cumbersome, and I made the mistake of thinking you needed to stack the cubes). After I'd been in the hobby proper, I finally revisited the game and found it easy enough to pick up. I played it a few times at every player count and then started bringing it as a gateway game to meetups when I couldn't get myself into longer games. Letting or helping people solve stuff feels really good as an icebreaker type of game, and the theme is excellent and engrossing. While most games in my hobby group played were a bit newer than Pandemic, we also got a great night out of playing Pandemic like four times (and dying each time. Oops!) I've played it with my family and other non-gamer friends and had fun as well.

In 2019, Pandemic hit the table with my new gaming pal, for two rounds. The first time, we got blasted out by a shit epidemic draw. Fine. The second time, we simply couldn't draw into five of the same for some of the diseases. We lost due to running out the deck. It was insanely dispiriting, and that, perhaps more than anything, has dropped Pandemic's ranking hard.

Future - Given that Pandemic might have become game non grata to gaming pal #1, it feels a bit unlikely it'll hit the table anytime soon. Pandemic sits in a spot where we'll see a lot of games, where my future desire to play it is dampened in comparison to how much fun I've had in the past. I simultaneously feel that this ranking is justified and far too low. That's just how it works sometimes.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness