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boq2's Pandemic (Other)
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| [February 12, 2016 12:38:22 AM]
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Pandemic is a cooperative board game for 2 - 4 players that can be played in around an hour. A friend and I both learned the rules and played our first games together, and had a surprising amount of fun for two people with little familiarity with board games beyond childhood activities.
Objectives: Players cooperate to cure 4 different diseases that are popping up all over the world. Players each take on 1 of 7 roles (medic, researcher, dispatcher, operations expert, scientist, contingency planner, and quarantine specialist), each with their own unique traits and modifications to the rules, and must travel around containing the disease and preventing outbreak. Players win and the game ends when all 4 cures are found. Players lose if you run out of any color disease tokens, you run out of player cards, or you get to outbreak level 8.
Set up: Initial set up of the board requires the players to draw several cards to determine the board state. After 3 sets of 3 cities are drawn and disease tokens are placed (3, 2, and 1 tokens for each city in each set respectively), players are dealt role cards and draw their initial hand from the player cards stack. The outbreak and infection tokens are set at the starting positions, and then gameplay can begin.
Gameplay turns: In each turn, a player must take 4 actions. Unless it says specifically (such as some role specific perks), you can repeat actions multiple times in a turn. After completing 4 actions, the player must draw two cards from the player card pile and discard cards or play event cards in order to keep the hand at a maximum of 7. If an epidemic card is drawn, the bottom infection card is given 3 disease tokens and discarded, the infection level is raised, and the infection discard pile is shuffled and added back to the top of the deck for the intensifies step. After cards are drawn, the infection phase begins and as many infection cards are drawn as the infection level dictates (starts with 2). Place a disease token in each of the drawn cities from the infection cards, and the turn is completed. If a city has 3 disease tokens, an outbreak occurs instead of adding a fourth token. When an outbreak occurs, the outbreak level increases by one and each adjacent city receives a disease token of the color in question. Outbreaks can cause a chain reaction and can sneak up on you if an unlucky epidemic card is drawn.
Actions: Players can drive to an adjacent city, fly to any city for which they hold the card and discard, fly to any city period if they hold and discard the city which they occupy, and fly between research centers freely. All travel actions simply take one action and any combination can be used in a turn. Players can share knowledge, or give or take any city card to a cooperator as long as they both occupy that city. Players can also treat disease of any city they occupy, removing 1 disease token (unless the disease has been cured), build a research center at the cost of the city card they are occupying, and cure a disease if they are at a research center and discard 5 cards of the same color.
Game 1: In game 1, I was dealt the quarantine specialist role and my friend was dealt the contingency planner. The quarantine specialist prevents disease tokens and outbreaks from occurring within any city they occupy or are adjacent to. The contingency planner has the ability to spend an action to store a discarded action card for later use. We were off to a lucky start and by and large had a false impression of the complexity of the game. We were able to, without ever moving beyond two squares apart from each other, spend our actions primarily traveling single spaces and saving cards since there was no real urgency from the initial board state. With some lucky hands, the share knowledge action allowed us to very quickly cure both the red and the blue disease before the first outbreak even occurred. While our good luck (is that what they call bad shuffling? Yay RNG.) did begin to run out at some point, we were still able to end the game without ever feeling like we were in danger of losing. We made it to outbreak level 4 and got through 3 of 5 epidemic cards, but still had very little reason to feel threatened by the number of disease cubes available. A very good and enjoyable first game, but we'd soon we had a somewhat false impression of how things can go.
Game 2: In game two I drew the operations expert and my friend drew the role I had just played, quarantine specialist. The operations expert has the added abilities to add a research center to any city he occupies without needing the city card itself. They also have the added action of being able to fly from a research center to any city by discarding any city card once per turn. Even from the initial set up we could tell this was going to be a very different game. It was as if the gods of bad shuffling came down to right our wrongs, and show us our folly. We drew three blue cards in the first set, leaving us with prime conditions for a chain reaction outbreak out of the gate. To make matters worse, one of the second set was blue as well. Luckily, the majority of the rest of the initial draw was well distributed, mostly split between red and black and ironically leaving a single token in the yellow region. We spent our first actions traveling to the blue region in order to try and mitigate the situation before we got any more unlucky draws for that area. We luckily did not have to deal with an outbreak in the first turn, but it wasn't long until we had to deal with an epidemic card that resulted in raising our outbreak level to 3 and leaving us in a very bad position and with very little useful in our hand. Now, for the ironic part I mentioned: we spent most of our actions in the initially infected areas and did not notice that our drawn cards had left a nice little trail of yellow across South America. Nothing crazy or in real jeopardy, which is perhaps why we paid it no attention still. It was the next turn that I drew my first epidemic card between both games, and the one that would cause us to quickly lose. It placed 3 disease tokens in Sao Paulo, resulting in a chain reaction of outbreaks after the subsequent infection turn. We were left on the other side of the world and with very few yellow cards. The game ended with only one disease cured by running out of yellow disease tokens on outbreak level 6. We understood better just how little we knew about the general strategy of the game at this point.
I am interested in playing again soon to see how more people affects the complexity and the strategy involved, and whether that appears to make it easier or more difficult. It appears to me that some roles may be more crucial to the difficulty of the game than others, though they are all useful. Whether that is a valid criticism or not, it apparently didn't matter in our game. In my opinion, we had the stronger role combination in game two, but the only thing that seems to matter in the end was the will of the cards. Regardless of the frustrating defeat, we had a good time and even enjoyed the humor involved in the stark contrast between how these two games played out. I recommend it for anyone who hasn't tried it or who is simply wanting to become more interested in board games in general.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Feb 12th, 2016 at 01:30:22.
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boq2's Pandemic (Other)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 11 February, 2016
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