Pandemic Board Game (Base Game) | Family Board Game | Board Game for Adults and Family | Cooperative Board Game | Ages 8+ | 2 to 4 players | Average Playtime 45 minutes | Made by Z-Man Games

This game is fun, not too time consuming, but theres definitely a learning curve. Its also important to be very strategic as this game can be HARD. It took a few play throughs before we were successful. We ended up creating some house rules to make it more enjoyable, such as reshuffling the deck instead of simply losing.

This is a game that requires you to plan and think ahead, much like a game of chess. Its also co-operative, so instead of working against each other, each player must work together toward a main goal of curing each disease. Each game is new and exciting with all the different Hero cards which have different skills to help you out during your turns. Im not entirely sure if younger kids (under 12) might be able to fully understand and appreciate this game because there really is a lot of strategy involved. But if youre playing to teach those skills, this would be the perfect game to use.

My family spent an entire day playing this game while we were quarantining with COVID! It was super fun to work together as a family, instead of play against each other like most games. My 9 year old daughter particularly enjoyed this game & it was particularly enjoyable as a parent watching her use a higher level of thinking to help strategize ways & moves we can all make to beat the game. I will say that the instructions are basically a small book (not really but like 8-10 pgs long) & can be overwhelming when you read. We played 5 games the first day we opened it & every time we played, we found more instructions or rules that we didn’t know or understand the last round. This was due to multiple reasons, 1. The instructions were long & we overlooked something accidentally 2. The instructions weren’t very clear in some instances 3. The instructions didn’t address everything 4. Instructions seemed to jump around & refer you to another page. The biggest point of confusion was curing the virus VS. eradicating the virus, how you achieved curing/eradicating, what the benefits are of curing/eradicating & what the game actually intends for you to do to win the game. It got a little frustrating towards the last couple games. At one point, we even googled to clarify. I think we FINALLY understand how the game is intended to be played & I’m not going to lie, I think I liked the way we had initially played it best. All that being said, we still really enjoyed playing the game as a family & working together! I enjoyed the strategizing & higher level processing that is needed to plan for the win, along with the semi-relevance to todays climate in regards to COVID. It added a little bit of learning & deeper understanding to our fun. My daughter is still begging to play again!

I have been playing more and more board games over the last year and Pandemic has been the best addition to my slowly growing collection. Working with my friends and family instead of against them was a great change of pace after years of royal rumble style board gaming. This game is just as fun to play with 2 people as it is with several more and no two games of Pandemic are the same. It is just as easy to lose this game as it is to win and losing only makes me want to play it again. I have begun to purchase the expansion sets and each new update only makes the game more entertaining and fun. That being said, the original game is extremely replayable and worth every penny. For the dedicated tabletop player, or the family looking to play infrequently, this is a must buy game!

Pros: High quality components, challenging, requires strategy Cons: Can be too random, one person can take over if youre not careful Excellent cooperative game. I got this to play with my girlfriend, and weve played with our families and some friends as well. It is very easy to teach since youre all on the same team, so you can show people how to play as you play. It also lets you choose how difficult you want it to be by letting you decide how many Epidemic cards you add to the player deck. When these are drawn, they will make you infect more cities each turn and they will cause all the cities you have already infected to be shuffled and placed back on top, so they will keep getting more disease added to them. The more Epidemic cards there are, the harder the game gets because this happens more often. It requires a lot of foresight and strategy if you want to win, as you always have to be aware of what cities are potentially going to be drawn, and if you get close to the end you need to remember that there are only a set number of turns. Each player has a different ability that they can use, so we have found that it can be easier to play with more people, as this gives you access to more abilities. However, in the games I have played, we have both won and lost with 2, 3, and 4 people playing. It can certainly be tough depending on the game. And thats why Im rating it 4 stars. I really like the game, and, as a side note, the physical game itself is outstanding. The box is very sturdy with spaces inside for all the pieces and cards. The cards are sturdy and the player pieces and disease cubes are all beautiful (everyone comments on how nice the components are). However, the game play can vary greatly. Sometimes youll win easily, sometimes youll win at the last second, sometimes youll get crushed early, sometimes youll lose just when you think youve won it. This can be a good and bad thing. I like that theres no way to figure it out and win every time, but it would be nice if it wasnt as random. (I suppose you could decide where to put the Epidemic cards in the deck, but we havent tried that.) I played with my brother once and we won very easily, and now hes convinced that it is too trivial. All in all, I would certainly recommend it to anyone looking for a challenging co-op game.

Great strategy based game. It’s not a fast pace type. Can be pretty complex. There is prep work to do before hand and I highly recommend reading the instructions til you get the hang of it. Basically work with your team to not die. There multiple ways to lose and you will lose probably more time than wins, but that’s what makes this game fun. It constantly changes the way you plan each time

Great game for four people. It is a co-op game, so you arent playing against each other, but together to achieve a shared goal. Plenty of ways to lose, and you can adjust how many epidemic cards you include to change the difficulty. Each player has a different role, those roles give them special abilities: Scientist - one less card to cure a disease, Researcher - can give city cards without being in that city, Medic - treat disease with fewer actions, etc. It takes a bit to understand how to play, but once it clicks, you just get it, and it is a lot of fun. Highly recommend it, looking forward to picking up the expansions.

Played this game at a friends house and had to get it for mine. I love how it requires teamwork and it’s extra fun to name the viruses after you “cure” them.

When I first saw this game I had never actually heard of cooperative games. I read a bit about the concept and I thought to myself that it all seemed a bit pointless – playing games is about winning and how do you win if you don’t have someone to beat? I know that solo games such as solitaire are geared towards beating the system, but to me that’s because you don’t have a human to go up against (and ideally mash). I’m sure I’m not the only one whose family background was board games when it rains, with a win at all costs attitude instilled at an early age – it’s just what you did! But then I thought about it. I love my wife so why do I always want to pulp her when we bring out the old favourites? I thought to myself that it might be a better idea if we face things together, a kind of extension on how couples are supposed to be. So I bought Pandemic as a Christmas present for her (me!), not knowing very much about it at all or if we would enjoy it. But hey, need to shop for present: box ticked! We took our time learning the rules, but they aren’t too hard to grasp and we played a few easier levels and then dived into the toughest one. When we lost there was no finger pointing and when (if!) we won it was a very affirming experience for us as a team. I really have to recommend this game; it’s given me a taste for an unexpected evolution in game development and now I’m looking at other things out there too. But we still play the old stuff like Ludo and Risk, and she still hammers me in chess…

Pandemic hardly needs more positive reviews, but I feel kind of obligated to add my two cents to the mix. This is a game thats really taken a preeminent position in the realm of modern cooperative board games, and with good reason. I think the biggest compliment that I can pay it is that it is pretty simple in terms of game-play but thoroughly addictive, the latter made all the more impressive by the fact that you lose the game about 75% of the time! Its no small feat to create a game that makes players want to keep coming back to it even AFTER they get their butts kicked again...and again....and again. Another thing I really like personally is that theres just enough luck and randomness to the game (in both the setup and during the game) that each game feels somewhat unique, which also helps the replay value. Put more simply: though you will start to develop a bit of a strategy after a few plays through, theres no solving the game in a way that reduces the challenge to the point of it becoming too easy or boring. If theres one thing Pandemics are not, its predictable! If I have one criticism of the game it is that the aforementioned luck/randomness can be quite cruel; sometimes you seem to have everything under control (well, as much as you CAN when facing multiple, terrifying world-wide epidemics!) and then BOOM, a particularly unfortunate card-draw suddenly dooms your efforts. Actually, no thats not really accurate. Its more a case of simply not having the resources to deal with everything that needs dealt with at any given moment, which eventually leads to said un-dealt-with thing coming back and biting you in the a**. But its never a case where you feel the game is inherently unfair, but more AAAGGGHH I NEW WE SHOULD HAVE DONE ______ INSTEAD OF _______ WHEN WE HAD THE CHANCE!. Anyway, put simply, its a very satisfying experience---win, lose or.....lose ;) (theres no draw in Pandemic; either you save the world or you dont!). One last note: you wont really see any mention of Pandemic being a single-player game, but it is very much playable solo. The only thing lost is the interaction between players (which granted, is the main appeal of cooperative games). Pandemic plays just fine solo though (you simply play two or more characters yourself)...so much so that Im surprised the designer didnt just go ahead and say 1-5 players instead of 2-5.