Board Game Analysis #1 – Pandemic
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Game description Pandemic is a 2 to 4 player board game where the players work together to save the world from disease. The games goal is to find cures for all 4 diseases. To find a cure you must collect 5 player cards of the same colour (the colour is representing which disease it is) and discard them while standing on a research station. Each player is assigned a role that has different characteristics that buffs one kind of action. There are five roles: the Researcher, the Operations Expert, the Medic, the Dispatcher and the Scientist. For example the Dispatcher that have the ability to Move your fellow players’ pawns on your turn as if they were your own or Move any pawn to another city containing a pawn for 1 action. These roles will force players to focus on one kind of action and creates an environment for planning and strategizing. An important thing to know is that maximum 4 roles can be played each session. This will create different conditions depending on which roles are included. The player has 4 actions to spend on each turn. These actions can be used for things as moving, treating disease or building research stations. When the player has done her/his actions she/he will draw two player cards. The player cards are needed not only for finding cures but also for using some of the actions available. After each player turn infection cards will be drawn and disease cubes will be placed on the board. At first two infection cards will be drawn and one cube of the shown colour will be placed in the city on the card. During the game when a type of player card, called epidemic card, is drawn they will increase the amount of infection cards drawn. If a city gets more than 3 disease cubes it will cause a breakout and all the surrounding cities will gain one cube of the same colour that caused the breakout. There is a breakout indicator on the game board that will increase one step for every breakout. When it hits eight the game is over and the players lose. The players can also lose if ALL cubes of one colour are on the board or if the player card pile is empty. These lose conditions are controlling the time the game can be played and it puts more pressure on the players to keep the cubes on the board at a low level as well as to be economical in the use of player cards. The best and worst sides of the game The best part of Pandemic is its co-op experience. It creates a game experience where everybody works together to reach the goal, to save the world. It simulates how people with different occupations work together in a crisis in a very convincing way. You sometimes have to sacrifice what you really want to do in order to do what is the most beneficial for the cause. For example if you were the dispatcher you may have to move another player on your turn so that that player can use all of her/his actions to treat disease in order to prevent a breakout. But this is also the worst side of the game. Depending on what strategy is being followed some players can become redundant or at least lose its own free will which can make the game tedious and boring for an individual player. This was something we noticed as we played the game, there was always someone that did not feel as involved as the others. Core game system The core game system is the action system. This is what enables the players to affect the game and the flow of the session. Since different players priorities different things the actions are what will make each game session different form another, depending on who are playing it. A player has four actions to spend each turn. Since there are different kinds of actions the actions the players choose to use will change how the game is developing from start to finish. It is what decides whether or not the players will win the game or not. These are the actions available: Basic actions:
Special actions:
As you see there are two categories of actions. There are the Basic Actions that are related to moving and then there is the Special Actions that are what you do to change the state of the game. Some of the actions need you to discard a player card in order to be done. This makes the decision of what action to do more important and opens up for different strategies. Since the players card is a limited resource that, if it is used up, ends the game it creates dilemmas whether to use them or not. If there are three disease cubes in a city 3 steps away from the player, who has the player card with that city, and the player want to go there to treat the disease she/he has two options. Either she/he can use three actions to move to that city and then remove one cube. Or she/he can use the direct flight action, discard the player card for that city and then remove all three cubes. He then completely removes the risk for a breakout in that city but also lessens her/his chance to discover the cure for that disease. The most interesting system The most interesting system in Pandemic, in my opinion, is the epidemic system. When an epidemic card is drawn from the player card pile three things happens.
Why do I find this the most interesting system? Because it intensifies the game tremendously, since the cards that will be drawn now are the ones that already have been drawn before. Therefore they are much more likely to already have 1 or more cubes on them. Until an epidemic card is drawn the game doesn’t feel very stressful or challenging. Target group interpretation The target audience for this game is people over the age of ten, as stated on the box. This is because the game requires a slightly higher form of tactics and understanding than games for people under ten. Its aesthetics are also more suitable for older children as it is a stressful game with a mature graphical style. I would recommend the game to non-competitive players that enjoy co-op and strategy play. To win the game communication is crucial so it is important that the players likes and are comfortable with discussing what actions are most suitable. Although I am aware that some people of young age have these characteristics, I believe that it is more common for children to enjoy more competitive and easy to pick up games. I would say that the target audience would be people over the age of 12 as these will be more aware of how the game relates to real world problems and therefore have a more immersive gaming experience. Summary (of how this correlates) Most things in the game correlate quite well. The way everybody has to work together and discuss every move makes it possible for all players to be active during the whole game. You don’t just sit there and wait for your turn; you have to think about what everybody should do and be ready for many different situations that can occur. You have to focus on several different components and make sure you win the game before any of the lose conditions happen. As I said earlier I believe that Pandemic is a rather successful simulation of how people have to work together in a crisis and I find that aspect of the game very appealing. We tried to play the game as both the minimum and the maximum players and what we found was that the game was very well balanced, every time we won we did so just before we were about to lose. This made the game very exciting and thrilling. But the game has bad sides as well. After playing several times I noticed that it didn’t take many playthroughs until you learned how to solve each situation that occurred. This might have been because we were the same people playing each time, so we learned and stuck to our strategy, but I still believe that it became a little bit too easy. Another thing was the thing about some players becoming redundant or too ruled by the communal goal. This made the players feel unequal and sometimes caused small arguments that affected the experience in a negative way. But overall I found the game to be a really good experience and it was a very good way to create a good environment for discussions. In some way I think it worked as an icebreaker four our group (that was new for the year) and made everybody feel more comfortable with each other. |
