Game Review: Pandemic

In my series of games posts, I have been highlighting some of our family's favourite games.  Here's another one:  Pandemic.

The premise behind Pandemic is that there are four diseases spreading around the world, and the players have to work together to find cures for the diseases and stop them from spreading.  Originally a board game, Pandemic has also been made into an electronic game that can be played on ipads.  Since Steve has the electronic version of the game, this is the one that we play.

The game board is a world map, with certain cities that are labeled and connected with lines, which are a way of traveling from city to city.  Each player has a certain "character" or "job" that gives them special abilities, such as protecting the cities they are near from being infected by the diseases, or building research stations for free.

There is one way to win Pandemic... and there are many ways to lose!  The goal of the game is to find a cure for each of the four diseases (by collecting five cards of each colour) before: you run out of cards (two are dealt out at the end of each turn), you run out of disease cubes (each time a city is infected, a disease cube is placed on it), or there are too many outbreaks (each city can only hold three disease cubes - if it receives a fourth it outbreaks and cubes are placed on all the surrounding cities).  A certain number of cities are infected with one cube after each turn, and there are epidemic cards in the deck that put three cubes onto a city.  Sounds like a recipe for disaster?  Good thing everyone is working together!

I am a big fan of cooperative games.  I like it when everyone is working together to win.  Perhaps because then I don't have an internal conflict between my desire to be nice to everyone and my desire to win.  And in Pandemic, you are definitely all working together against a significant challenge!  There are four levels at which you can play, and we often win... when we're playing at the easiest level!

I have only played the actual board game once, but I have played the electronic version many times.  We like to project the game onto our big screen, and play the accompanying music through our sound system.  It makes the game experience even more intense!

Pandemic is a fun and challenging game, using a lot of strategy and a little luck.  Nothing can beat working together as a team to save the world!