Pandemic Review – The Game That Saved Me From Catan (and Greg)

While Munchkin and Settlers of Catan were my first introductions to modern board gaming. It didn’t become a hobby for me until I played Pandemic. In this review, you’re going to learn why it made such an impression on me, and why I still consider it the best gateway game.

For starters, everyone in Pandemic is working together to rid the world of four diseases. You each take control of one character and get four actions to move throughout the world, build hospitals, and treat diseases by removing cubes from the board.

After you’ve taken these actions, and begin to feel good about yourself, the disease strikes. You’ll draw some disease cards that show the location to place disease cubes throughout the world.

Players and the disease, then take alternating turns until someone draws an Epidemic card. When this happens, the number of disease cards you must per turn draw goes up. Causing the disease to be harder, and harder to control.

Eventually, this all leads up to a climatic finish where either you finish researching cures for all four diseases and win. Or get overrun by these infections and lose.

For someone who grew up on a diet of Monopoly and Hungry, Hungry Hippos, a non-combative game such as Pandemic was such a fresh and foreign idea. I immediately fell in love.

Working together amid a catastrophe

There are a lot of pluses for cooperative games. For one, you all win or lose together, meaning there are no sour grapes between players. Like when some STUPID IDIOT places a robber on your space in Catan – I’m looking at you, Greg!

But more importantly, it allows for hand-holding when teaching the game. Especially when someone is new to modern board gaming, as there are a lot of new mechanisms introduced by the game. Beyond the introduction, a cooperative game allows you to talk openly about strategies and different moves. Without Greg using them against you later on.

Now, throughout Pandemic you’ll move about the map, curing diseases, and putting cards towards research. But the real beauty of the design is when someone draws an Epidemic card.

You won’t think this at the time though. More likely you’ll be thinking: ah crap!

However, it’s these cards that ramp up the difficulty of the game. Although, they increase the number of disease cards drawn after your every turn. More importantly, they also make you shuffle all the already drawn disease cards back on top of the deck. Ensuring future diseases will land on places already infected, organically creating hot spots of disease around the world.

This synergises with the outbreak mechanic. Whereby if any location with three disease cubes would receive a fourth, it instead outbreaks. This means you place a disease cube on all adjacent locations.

As play continues, and there are more disease cubes on the board, the chance of outbreaks increases astronomically. Making the game all about risk management, and figuring out what you’re willing to sacrifice to achieve victory.

May luck be with you

I’m a huge fan of Pandemic, especially when used as an introduction for new board gamers. But there are some reasons why it might not be a good fit.

For one, since there’s almost no hidden information, one player can dominate the conversation and strategy of the team. This is often called quarterbacking, and while it might feel great for the quarterback, the rest of the table feels unempowered, powerless, and unheard.

Then the other reason to avoid Pandemic, is if you’re not a fan of the random draws. Sometimes you will lose almost instantly because got the mother of all bad draws, and other times Pandemic you win so handily that it becomes boring. But in my experience, both of these scenarios are rare, and the game usually comes down to a nail-biting last few turns.

Lastly, and this is fixed with expansions, the original Pandemic gets stale after about 10 plays. Even though there are different player roles with unique powers that change the way you play. You’re still likely to get a handle on how to solve the puzzle easily enough.

For this reason, you’re will have to read my review of the expansion Pandemic: On the Brink to see how they fix this shortcoming and make Pandemic one of the best cooperative board games ever made.