Board Game Analysis #1 – Pandemic

Pandemic from Z-man Games is a co-operative strategy game for two to four players (although due to its strategic nature of being a co-op game, you can be as many as you’d like, inc. being alone) where your goal is to save the world from four different diseases that are spreading quickly around the globe.

The game can be played by anyone from ten and up, but I would recommend someone in their older teens or young adultery due to its heavy focus on thinking and with a theme of infections that suit pop culture at the time of writing.

Overview of the game

How the game works

Some points to notice before reading further

• Each city got its own Player Card and Infection Card.
• An Outbreak happens when a city is about to get more than three Disease Cubes of the same color, resulting in all the adjacent cities getting one (meaning that this can become a chain reaction if you’re not careful).
• A player can never have more than seven cards at any time. A card needs to be discarded directly when the eight card is picked up.
• The Player Cards gets split up into two to six piles with one Epidemic card in each before being shuffled. So if you want a higher difficulty you choose six piles where they will occur more often.

In the setup of the game each player gets assigned to one of five different roles that provides different advantages to the team and two player cards. 9 cities drawn at random gets 1-3 disease cubes put on them that represent how much the area has been infected and a research station that acts like a headquarter where you can get cures and a transport to another research station is placed on Atlanta, which is the starting position for the players. The player that last was sick starts his or her round first (not recommended to continue using this rule if you play more than once).

For each turn a player can make four actions that consists of basic, special and role specific actions. The basic actions are moving to an adjacent city, flying to a city for the cost of the Player Card of said city, flying to any city on the map if you stand on a city that you have the card for (discard the card) and moving to another research station if you stand on one. The special actions are “Build a Research Station” (in the city of a card you own, discard the card), “Discover a Cure” (if you have five Player Cards of the same color and stand on a research station, you may develop a cure for the disease of that color), “Treat Disease” (lets you remove a Disease Cube from the city you are standing in) and “Share Knowledge” (transfer the Player Card of a city you and another player stand in).

The five roles are Medic, Researcher, Dispatcher, Scientist and the Operations Expert. Each of these excels in different ways, often by having an improved version of the basic or special actions. The Medic can remove Disease Cubes easier, the Researcher isn’t as restricted when transferring cards, the Dispatcher can use basic actions on another player and also fly them to another player, the Scientist only requires four cards to discover a cure and the Operations Expert can place research stations in the city he or she is currently inhibiting without having the matching Player Card.

After a player has done their four actions or passed they will draw two player cards and two to four (infection rate) cities will be drawn from the Infection Card pile, these will have one Disease Cube each put on them. If the player draws an Epidemic card the city at the bottom of the Infection Card pile will have three Disease Cubes placed on it, the infection rate will go up and all the cards in the Infected Discard Pile will be shuffled and placed on top of the pile again. This means that the chance of a city with a lot of cubes already may get infected again really soon, resulting in Outbreaks.

There’s only one way of achieving victory in this, finding all four cures. When this is done the game ends directly and you don’t need to treat the remaining Disease Cubes. The game is lost when one of these conditions are met: There’s been eight Outbreaks, there are no more Disease Cubes to place in a color or there are no more Player Cards to draw.

For a more in-depth look at the rules, check out the manual here.

Strong points of the game

If there’s one thing all of us could agree on when playing it’s how incredibly well balanced the game is. Almost all the times that we played, the game was decided one turn before or after the game ended. It didn’t matter how close we were to winning, we were facing a constant time pressure. If the breakouts didn’t go out of hand or we ran out of Disease Cubes, the Player Card-amount would sink down to zero just at the perfect time. And when we felt like we might have a simple round, BAM, we were unlucky with the shuffling and got two epidemic cards close to eachother and the whole circus came to town again.

The makers of the game definitely spent a lot of time on playtesting it. Almost everything in the game seems to be polished to perfection when it comes to creating pressure on the players. Should we focus on keeping the infection in check? Should we try and get the cures as fast as possible? One way or another the game is going to get you, even if it’s because of how many research stations you can have out at the same time or because you need to throw away one of those important cards due to reaching the limit of cards you can hold. There are also special Player Cards that act as a relief for players. These cards can do things like discarding an Infection Card from the game completely or moving a player to any city on the map. What makes these really interesting is that they can be used at any time, even during someone else’s turn for some bonus tactical decisions.

Another small, but still impressive, thing about the card count is that there are fewer Infection Cards than Player Cards and even though the Infection Cards are drawn more often, they will never run out due to the way the shuffling of the Epidemic cards work. As you may recall, the minimum amount of piles with Epidemic cards is two, this means that the discard pile will always be added back to the pile at least once after half the cards are used. If there were only one Epidemic card, there’s the possibility that it would show up too early and only a small part of the deck would shuffled back on top of the pile meaning that the Infection cards would run out before the Player cards.

Highlight of the game

However, the most interesting system in the game is the roles of the players. If you paid attention you might have noticed that there are five different roles, but only four can be used in the same game. This creates both replay value and a dynamic between the roles where you try to figure out which roles suit together. The Dispatcher could help the Medic treat cities, the Researcher is great for pushing cards onto the Scientist which got an easier time to create cures and the Operations Expert can be critical in certain moments when you need a house thrown at you.

The more we played of the game the more we started discussing what class that was the best one, or even if it was better to be fewer players where you get to use the same two or three classes more often. Early on we figured that some roles was a lot better than the other ones, but even when playing without these we still managed well. We also started seeing more and more positive attributes for the less appealing roles the more we tried them out.

Weak points of the game

You might have guessed that I quite enjoy how well the game plays, but every game has its flaws. I can only find a few smaller ones with this game, however.

1) At least one player in four-player matches tends to be ignored during all portions of the game. Since the importance of getting the cures is so high we often had to focus on two or three players while letting the last one just do its own thing so we could get to the next turn. This often ended up being the Operations Expert since their importance varies during the game quite heavily.

2) There’s a lot of thinking in this game, maybe a little too much even? Having a constant time pressure on us forced us to play at our best and even though this is good and all, we occasionally didn’t progress at all due to the many options we had. This was especially true with Dispatcher due to their ability to move other players. The round we played without the Dispatcher was a lot quicker in playtime and I mean a lot.

3) The game got pretty boring after awhile. Even though board games aren’t meant to be played a lot of times in a row, I can’t see myself coming back to it again. The game feels like a quest for the ultimate strategy, but once you have found it (or gotten close to it), there simply aren’t enough random factors in the game to justify playing it again other than for some brain training.

4) Like most board games of this style, there’s a lot of rules and we kept finding things that we either misinterpreted or simply missed, sometimes because the manual seemed to contradict what was said on the role cards.

Summary

Pandemic is a well thought out board game that can challenge and surprise even the thinker. It focuses heavily on strategic thinking and you most likely will have a lot better chance if you take the chance to discuss with your teammates before doing your own thing. Pandemic might be one of the most well-balanced board games out there and the game will keep finding ways to keep you on your toes while you count how many cards there are left before the game is over. The game does take maybe one or two games to get into and the thinking might end up on the heavy side without feeling too rewarding.