Pandemic

A quick post to cover another 52 Games entry.

Just before Christmas I picked up a copy of Pandemic for $5 in a charity shop. Looks like it's never been played - it was in perfect condition.

Anyway, it's taken us until now to get around to playing it. Maya had played it once, years ago, and enjoyed it, and didn't even know we had a copy. Once she found out we pencilled it in for one of our Wednesday evening family game sessions.

And the game? It's co-operative - you either all win or all lose - and you play various specialists teamed up to control and stamp out the spread of four diseases around the world. It's a race against the clock as each diseases slowly spreads and could potentially explode into a catastrophic outbreak. If you get too many outbreaks, or run out of time (basically exhaust the deck) you lose. You have to balance finding a cure for each of the four diseases with controlling the spread.

Our first game was a disaster. Not because we didn't know what we were doing (although we didn't, really) but because the initial draw of outbreaks saw a bunch of cities close together with high levels of infection, and we then drew an Outbreak card on the first turn which saw them spread and multiply. Because of the way the infection deck works, this then makes those cities more likely to see further infections, and we ended up with a fatal series of infection cascades that meant within a few turns we'd lost the game.

Still, we got to understand the outbreak and infection mechanisms, and what things to stamp on or control as quickly as possible.

I played the Quarantine Specialist, Maya the Researcher and Catherine the Operations Expert.

With the first game having ended so quickly we set up another. Once again I got the Quarantine Specialist, Maya was now the Dispatcher and Catherine the Contingency Planner.

We got a much better handle on this game, stamping out a number of outbreaks fairly quickly before they got out of control. One did go wild in China, but we were already on the scene and had a cure ready to deploy, so defeated it just before it would have gone critical. Maya was apprehensive about her player ability to move other people's pieces, but once we got playing she used it to bring useful cards to her and then throw out cures for each of teh four diseases. Catherine's ability to retrieve and replay event cards helped at the end, when she was able to use one to hold off a potentially fatal cascade, and I was often in the right place at the right time to stop diseases spreading with the quarantine skills. In the end we cured all four diseases for a win. We'd had six outbreaks, our of the eight allowed.

To be fair we were playing at the easiest level, but it was only our second game.

I think this is one we might pull out again. I'm not sure if it's likely to be an absolute favourite, but it wasn't without interest.

52 Games - Game 26

(I am now halfway through the 52 Games project. That seems fairly impressive, in less than three months, but obviously it's going to get harder as a lot of the games I regularly play have already been covered.)