Components

The game board depicts major cities of the world, linking them by paths for movement (and infection). Each city belongs to one of four groups, representing where a disease will arise. The board also tracks the status of disease cures and the severity of infections and outbreaks.

There are two card decks. The Infection Deck has a card for each city in the game, while the player's deck has these plus special action cards and Epidemic cards. You can adjust the challenge level of the game by modifying the number of Epidemics in the deck.

Diseases are represented by 24 cubes of a given color.

Each role has a token and card summary of its special action and the generic ones all players may do. There are seven or so house tokens representing research centers the group can build.

Game Play

At the start of the game, all players are at CDC headquarters in Atlanta. Nine cities begin with infections at varying levels of severity.

Each turn, a player can act up to four times: moving around the world using various methods, treating a disease by removing a cube from an infected city, and working with the player's deck to cure the afflictions once and for all. The latter is done by discarding five cards of one color in a city with a research center. The players will win if they discover all four cures before other events cause failure.

And how do you lose? Let me count the ways. If the players run out of cards to draw from their deck, if a disease spreads so much that a 25th cube would be needed, and if there are more than 8 outbreaks - a situation where a disease is so prevalent in one city that it spreads to all adjoining ones, which can in turn cause more outbreaks. Diseases flourish at the end of each player's turn, when cities are targeted by drawing them from the Infection Deck.

The most interesting mechanic of Pandemic operates when an Epidemic card is drawn from the player deck. The bottom card of the Infection Deck becomes the latest city to get infected; then it and any cards previously drawn are shuffled and placed back on top of that deck. This is the most likely cause for an outbreak, as explained in the paragraph above. The knowledge that certain cities will be danger zones for an entire game is balanced by the need to constantly attend to them before they harm bordering cities.

Each role a player can select is better at one task than its fellows. A medic cures more than one cube, while a scientist needs only four cards to discover a cure.

Game Design

For me, Pandemic is distinguished by the replenishment of the Infection Deck. The fact that a minority of these cards will be involved in the game allows for a great deal of replay variety. Objections to the game tend to center around the idea that players are solving a problem more than playing a game. To some extent, this is true of all cooperative games, but it can seem like an unlucky draw of Infection Cards will doom a game from the outset, without regard to the choices made by the group.

Players must also be wary of one or two assertive individuals taking over the decision-making process, otherwise a game may become an extended solitaire exercise. Again, this is symptomatic of all cooperative games and not Pandemic in general.

Conclusion

The mounting stress of seeing diseases spread throughout the world makes this a tense game with a rewarding payoff. By scaling the difficulty and differing the potential danger zones, no two games will unfold in the same way. The components and play reinforce the dramatic subject material well.

Afterword - On the Brink

The first published expansion to Pandemic is titled On the Brink. It adds more roles and special cards, as well as more twists on diseases. A fifth disease is introduced, as well as mutations and increased potencies. All of these options are modular and can be used in varying combinations. One role, the Bioterrorist, is adversarial, changing the style of play into something more like Scotland Yard or Fury of Dracula. Recommended for the masochist who likes variation.

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