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

My family loves playing games; were very competitive and therefore we werent sure how this collaborative game would work for us. We were very pleasantly surprised! We work together against the game and we are addicted! Ive had it for over a year now. I bought the first edition then got the On The Brink Expansion, which was 2nd edition so I had to order the 2nd edition Pandemic so everything matched (they upgraded the design and materials). After a year, we still thoroughly enjoy it - the novelty hasnt worn off. The thing that makes it a long-lasting source of enjoyment is that each game is different. You can play with different difficulty levels, as well as play various combinations of roles, and the card order will be different every time so no two games can be the same. Tactics and strategy that worked on one game may not be the best way to play in a subsequent game. A key thing to remember when playing this is its very easy for stronger (bossier, louder, control freaks etc.) players to dominate everything. It then becomes a watch me save the world on behalf of us all type thing and not fun for the others sitting around the table. When I play this with just my husband, we have balanced discussions (we even sometimes play with a third phantom person to make it more interesting and make decisions on their behalf!), but when my parents play with us, we both make an effort not to control it all. We ask them what they think we should do and I have to say, I love the fact that I sometimes think somethings a no-brainer and then my dad will come up with an alternative plan and itll be brilliant! Its good fun for strategic thinkers and you can participate as little or as much as youd like. I really recommend this game!

Love this game - my sister and I have played it about ten times since Christmas Eve. We really like the cooperative aspect (especially since I have a tendency to become very competitive with certain board games...) and the fact that each game is different enough to keep it interesting. This game involves a lot of strategy and planning ahead, as well as communication, and builds skills in team work (compromise, conflict resolution, problem solving as a group, crisis management) - something most board games do not accomplish at all! The board and pieces are also easy to assemble, quick to store away neatly, and we think the game pieces look really nice too - love the translucent cubes. Hey, aesthetics count for something when youre staring at a game board for 45 minutes (or more, since its hard to stop at just one game!). Bonus: youre learning a bit of world geography and demographics as you play, also!

My husband and I love this game! Its fun with two of us or with another couple. Very challenging and different every time you play.

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

KEY TIP: Watch the tutorials on YouTube. The manufacturer has one (ZManGamesOfficial) and theres another one by a guy who does nothing but review games (Watch It Played). I watched a couple of others and these were the best, by far. The directions are good as an in-game reference, but not to teach you how to play. The goal is really this - have one player get 5 card of the same color so you can then cure a disease. Everything else plays in to that. Get 5 of the same color, cure the disease, and youre on your way. Use the player abilities. Theyre really helpful. Collaborate. Thats the fun of the game and what makes it unique. Ive played it 3-player and 4-player, with my kids (14 & 16) and with adults, and its a lot of fun and a very unique premise for a board game - both in concept and that its collaborative. Get the game, watch the videos, play the game with the directions/reference handy, and youll be on your way in no time!

My wife and I had been looking for board games for a while to play as a family (we have a 13 year old daughter). My wife is extremely competitive and me, well, Im definitely not a competitive person. I purchased this one as a means to keep the rage at bay for when a loser doesnt like losing or to enhance the enjoyment for those who care not if they win or lose and someone is taking the game too seriously. A cooperative game didnt make much sense to me at first, but once we opened up the game, figured out how to start our first game, and then take on widespread diseases all across the world we realized there was no turning back. Since we played our first game of Pandemic, we havent played competitive games since with very rare exceptions. This isnt just because cooperative game play leads to a happier marriage. No, no. The largest portion of what makes this game so good is that it the game play requires so much strategy and is surprisingly simple to learn as soon as you start playing. It offers a very dynamic challenge while also offering great rewards when your strategies work out. It also offers different difficulty settings very easily by adding or taking away a single type of card (6 total, adding all 6 of the infection cards means the game is painfully difficult. Going down to 4 of them makes for a far easier experience). If anyone enjoys board games then this is by far the one Id recommend more than any other when it comes to cooperative game play.

Matt Leacocks Pandemic originally came out in 2008 and took the gaming world by storm, through its novel theme and new mechanics for abstractly modeling the way that an epidemic spreads, and the broad ways that the Center for Disease Control attempts to slow and turn the tide on raging outbreaks. It highly abstracts the above concepts, but the basic idea of the game is that each player is randomly assigned a cooperative role in fighting outbreaks or researching and delivering cures, and there are four disease strains breaking out in random cities around the globe. The pandemics are seeded at the start of the game, by a series of rounds of piling increasingly heavy collections of disease cubes on cities on the board. This sets up the world stage to be ripe for outbreaks. The outbreak trigger point to the game is that no city can contain more than three disease cubes of a given color, and that a fourth immediately causes outbreaks in each adjoining city (modeled by placing single new cubes in all connected cities, one hop away). This outbreak process can cause fresh outbreaks to cascade from city to city. And its the job of the players to run around from city to city treating the various diseases while assembling enough city cards (5) to finally cure a given disease. The opponent disease process is played in this game by having each player, at the end of their turn, complete a series of actions that automatically seed further infections by drawing and infecting fresh cities. The nifty innovation that makes a bad outbreak worse, is that Mr. Leacock has specific cards in the deck that cause the players to take all of the cards used to generate prior outbreaks, and reshuffle them right back on top of the disease-outbreak draw pile. In this way, diseases start in a particular set of cities, and those cities become more and more likely to see re-outbreaks. Combine this with the cascading outbreaks mechanic above, and youve got a situation that rapidly gets out of control if the players dont rapidly get things in control. :^D In other words, its a fun game. BUT, I do have to make an observation: Pandemic is a lot easier with five players than it is using two, when playing by solely the base rules. With two you have to run like a madman to stay ahead of outbreaks. But with five players youve got plenty of people tackling outbreaks and collecting the materials for cures. So it shifts from a frantic and tense game, to more of a leisurely conversational game. :^P I originally bought a copy in 2009, then traded it away for something else. But over time, folks continued to ask about the virus game, and it has always been damn easy to teach & play. So, when the price was right at Amazon, I jumped back in and re-added to my collection.

Omg I went to Costco today for t.p. and couldn’t get any because they were all out because people are getting crazy about the Coronavirus... buying up t.p., bottled water, flour, hand sanitizer, etc. like crazy. It was bonkers like first episode of your favorite apocalypse tv show where they set up the disaster. I came home and looked at this game sitting on the floor from Xmas, still unopened. I realized we might be playing it soon when we’re all stuck at home because the plague arrives, and thought that was pretty ironic. Maybe if it gets real bad there’s paper pieces we can use for t.p.

Best choice ever. I was reluctant to get a game thats not fantasy, but this was by far the best game I could have got this year to play with my husband. Apart from being co-op and you have to defeat the game, its challenging and losing doesnt make us feel bad. Quick to learn, and set up. The box is the right size, easy to transport and well definitely carry it with us on our trips. We must find the cure for several diseases as they spread quickly, there are several ways to lose the game and a few to win. We can discuss plans and strategies before acting. Its a very well balanced and creative game. even the element of luck works perfectly. And we still have fun when we are completely destroyed by the diseases.

This has quickly become one of my favorite board games. The play time is about 30-45 minutes. I really enjoy the strategy and how it has you work together as a team rather than individual competitors. Youre playing against the game rather than each other. The box kid has a pretty tight fit so try not to slide the lid into the base when playing- it is very difficult to get apart. The pieces all come on little jewelry type bags. We were able to get little boxes from the container store to put the pieces in after the bags were broken. The board is very sleek and seems pretty sturdy. Weve played this many times and love it so much we will be buying the expansion pack soon enough. Get it, youll be in love!