Pandemic

(Image courtesy Zman @ BGG)

Cooperative games are an odd beast and it takes a certain type of gamer to enjoy them. Strictly playing against a game system is tricky as it needs to strike the right balance between difficulty and enjoyment. Too hard and people get discouraged and wonder why they're even wasting their time; too easy and there's no real fun to be had. Some games, like Shadows Over Camelot and Saboteur, solve the issue by having a few unknown traitors in the game. Others, like Pandemic, go the strictly cooperative route and hope the system is engaging enough that players come back for more.

I'll admit, at first look I wasn't very excited about the game. The artwork is fairly basic and the components are average at best, although they are far too large for the playing board. Cities are fairly small dots on the map. A single player pawn is as large as a city dot and you could have multiple players in a single city along with a few wooden cubes. Hopefully they can work that out in a later reprint.

Also, I thought the game looked like it was going to be far too easy. Players are working to prevent the outbreak of four different diseases across the world. Each player is randomly assigned a special role that lets them break some rules. On your turn you get to travel around the map and try to clear out cubes that represent outbreaks. After you take your action you draw a couple of cards and then resolve the infection. The infection deck contains one card per city and for each card you draw you add one cube in that city. If the city already contains three cubes, instead of adding another cube there is an outbreak and you add a cube to each adjacent city, which could result in a chain reaction of outbreaks. Each outbreak advances the outbreak track and the game is over if you hit the end. The game is also over if you run out of cubes of a specific color or if the players exhaust their deck, so there are lots of ways to lose. You win if you can find cures in all four sections of the world which involves collecting sets of cards for a given area and playing them on your turn.

The player deck is similar to the outbreak deck as there is one card per city, but there are two differences. First, there are a few special cards mixed in that let you break the rules a bit. Second, at the start of the game the player deck is pre-built with a certain number of epidemic cards. When an epidemic card is drawn you immediately resolve the bottom card of the infection deck, reshuffle the discarded infection cards and place them on the top of the infection deck.

Yep, that's right, they go back on top. Now the game gets significantly more interesting and very dire. It seems so easy at first as you think the cubes will be spread around the map nicely but once that first epidemic hits the panic settles in. All those cities that just had infections will be getting them all over again. Suddenly you find yourself planning out your moves carefully and coordinating with your fellow players to make sure you maximize every move.

Three of us played three games last night and we lost them all although they were generally very close. The fact that we were willing to play three games back-to-back certainly says something about the game. It plays fast - maybe around an hour - and it's fun watching the world's ebb and flow of disease as it pops up and you work to (hopefully) keep it under control.

Pandemic's fast play time helps to avoid the "why the hell are we playing this" syndrome, which is a good thing. It's challenging without feeling impossible but you need to be ready for a good dose of luck. Our last two games were very close and we probably would've won had our infection draws gone differently, but we may have been able to better optimize our moves too... hard to say. It does also start to feel less like a multiplayer game and more like a puzzle that the group is collectively trying to solve. Maybe we played it a little loose but we were each giving just as much input on other's turns as we were putting thought into our own.

I think I still prefer semi-cooperative games like Shadows Over Camelot and Saboteur better as they add in a fun bluffing element for the traitors and a guessing game element for those trying to weed them out. Pandemic is fun though and the theme and mechanics work really well together. I'd love to play it some more with different numbers of players to see how it works out. If you like cooperative games it certainly seems like a good pick.