Review Details

Pandemic

Product Review (submitted on October 1, 2015):

Pandemic is the popular cooperative board game that everyone has talked about. Well, believe all the great things they say about it.

I've lost games of Pandemic about as often as I've won, and I've never had a bad game. This games puts you and up to 3 other people (more with expansions) against diseases that are threatening to overtake the world. The only way to win is for you and all other players to cure the diseases present. Develop all four cures, and you win.

If you run out of disease cubes, you lose. If you reach a certain number of outbreaks, you lose. If you run out of player cards before you can cure all 4 diseases, you lose. The only way to win is to combine strategies and work together.

The mechanic in this game is simple and elegant, and the one thing that sucks more life out of you at the end of every turn is how the diseases spread. Some can cause outbreaks, and outbreaks can cause other outbreaks in chain reaction fashion. Epidemics can wreck your chances at eradicating disease. All in all, it's a tense, slow burn that humanity many never recover from.

And it is so. Much. Fun. Get this game. Introduce your non-gamer friends to it, and they will be hooked.