(Photos from boardgamegeek.com)
Another couple of weeks and another new game to play. This time out it's something new for our group -- a cooperative game, Pandemic, by Matt Leacock.
A simple overview of the game -- at the beginning of the game, colored cubes representing different diseases are placed on random cities across the game board. Each player then takes a random "role." Each role gives that player a special ability that they can use throughout the game.
You do three things on your turn:
1) Flip over a certain number of cards from the infection deck to determine which cities become infected this turn (you will place one cube in these cities).
2) Perform your player actions. You move from city to city in a number of ways and take actions to either remove the diseases from a certain city or to play 5 cards of the same color out of your hands to completely cure a disease. Only by curing all four diseases can you win the game.
3) Draw two cards from the player deck to replenish your hand.
If at anytime a city has 3 cubes of one color in it and you are forced to add another cube to it (typically by drawing its card in step 1 above), then it outbreaks. When this happens you add one colored cube to every city that is connected to the outbreaking city. This can, of course, cause a chain reaction and things can get out of control quite quickly.
The other issue at hand is the "Epidemic" cards. These are randomly placed in the deck the players draw from in step 3. When these are drawn you pick a random card off the bottom of the infection deck and immediately infect it with three cubes. You then take the infection cards that have already been drawn (thus are the most recently infected cities), shuffle them, and then place them on TOP of the draw pile. This ensures that you will be drawing from the same batch of cities quite frequently.
You lose if you ever hit a total of 8 outbreaks or if you run out of cards to draw in the player pile. You win only by curing all four diseases.
That's basically it. The rest of it is working with your fellow players to make sure you are being as efficient as possible to stem the tide of the diseases before outbreaks occur AND make sure you are able to cure the diseases as fast as possible.
Troy's Rating
I ended up liking this game much, much more than I ever thought I would. It's a good change of pace game and since table talk is allowed and encouraged, it makes for a very engaging gaming experience. For once we aren't playing multi-player solitaire!
There is a tension to the game that ratchets up as you get closer and closer to the end and infection start spreading everywhere. It's at this point when the game can slow down a bit, due to you trying to maximize your every move. I think we still got all of our games finished in around 45 minutes, which makes it a good night-ending game.
The game does play similarly each time -- really there isn't too much nuance to the game -- however, with the different roles available (there are five of them) and the fact that the opening layout is completely random, it should have some good replayability.
The game also makes me very curious to try out some other cooperative games (the Lord of the Rings series comes to mind).
So, as you can see I have a great deal of enthusiasm for the game. Perhaps with repeated plays (and considering that we've now won on the most difficult level) it will lose some of its luster or we will burn-out on it (happened for us as a group with Race For The Galaxy). But there is just too much tension and fun while playing the game for me to not give it a high rating.
Final Rating -- 8 out of 10
Game Night Results:
Troy, Brandon, and Kevin vs. Pandemic
Easy level (4 epidemics) - WIN (1-0)
Heroic level (6 epidemics) - LOSE, LOSE, LOSE, LOSE, LOSE, LOSE, WIN (1-6)
We played one game on the "Easy" level, which we defeated without breaking a sweat. Then we tried "Heroic" level. The levels are determined by the frequency you will draw an "Epidemic" card. At the easiest level, there are 4 interspersed throughout the deck, so you have a good amount of time to take care of breakouts before the next
epidemic hits.
However, at the heroic level, you get an epidemic 6 times in the deck -- with 3 players that one epidemic for every two times around the table, on average. And let me tell you, at that level the game really, really kicked our butts.
After two nights of playing and seven total games, we finally did it.
Heroic level definitely takes a lot of good luck.
First off, you need the opening layout to be in your favor, not having too many major outbreaks far away from your starting position.
Then, for the roles, you need someone to be the Medic. It sure doesn't hurt to have the Dispatcher as well. Brandon felt you needed the Operations Expert, while I felt any of the other three cards were somewhat similar (although Operations Expert DOES help you move around the world faster, which is a necessity on the heroic level). Still, it was with the Medic, Operations Expert, and Dispatcher that we finally won the game (the only time we had that combo).
You also need a generous interval between when the epidemics hit. With the way you place the epidemic cards in the deck, it's possible to get two drawn after going around the table once. That also means that you will then have a few turns around with nothing happening. If this happens early in the game, you can survive it, but things start spreading out of control. If you can wait for this to happen until you have cured a few things, your odds for it hurting you as much go way, way down.
In conjunction with that, you really have to play all of the special cards that are in the deck, which allow you to in some way manipulate the cities that are going to be infected. Although when to use these was sometimes a difficult choice.
I should mention that there was much rejoicing when we finally won on our seventh try. We'll see if it takes us seven more times to beat the game again.
