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

Pandemic is a fun cooperative game that pins your group against the board and 4 diseases destroying the world. The game can be manageable to insanely difficult depending on how you set it up (number of epidemic Cards), the vocations of your players, and just pure luck. Pandemic can strengthen your leadership abilities, communication skills, and your strategizing. Grab 3 friends and rid the world of the deadly diseases. Bonus note: it is always fun to put a name to the diseases your curing— bird flu, AIDS, zombie apocalypse, etc.

For those who are tired of competitive, relationship-ending board games this game is for you. It is well thought out and fun to play. Up to four players can take on the task of attempting to cure four different diseases before you run out of resources. There are varying levels of difficulty to get you into the game and it is very replayable. At the easiest setting, players can get a feel for the mechanics of the game while still confronting a strong challenge and at the most difficult setting you might want to remove all of the breakable objects near you as you will be tempted to throw things and flip tables but you will do so cooperatively so you wont be alone in your efforts. Be warned, you will lose... a lot, but the fun mechanics of the game and the cooperative play is enough to keep you coming back to save the worlds population against the four deadly diseases that cause outbreak after outbreak.

This seems to be a great game to play with friends; So far we just play me and my wife, so it can get really hard some times (played only 2 characters). If you feel it is difficult to win, just take more characters out of the box and use 2 of them for each player. It is really good game, really fun and the Skills from each Character is really fun to play, they can give you a nice advantage to win. It can snow ball you really hard, so just go with it and have fun.

Positives: The game is great! The difficulty is adjustable, the game concept is great, and the cooperative play keeps the game going great even if its not going so well. Also, the time required for game completion is at about 30 mins which means you can get multiple play throughs in one night. On top of all of that the replay value is very high. Each game you play: there will be a different set of countries that are infected, the infection that is spreading and how it is spreading is different, and you usually dont play the same role in each game. Negatives: The paint on the game board is easy to scratch if youre not careful with it. Over all: 9.5 out of 10 in my book!

I think what I like most about this game is that there’s not one winner. Either you all win or you all lose. It’s nice to have a break from individual competition.

Pandemic is a truly cooperative game. The game really makes you work together in order to win. Each player is randomly dealt one of seven role cards at the beginning of the game. Each role has its own unique special abilities. Before playing, I didnt think I would like the role selection being random, but I really like it now. If in each game you have a different subset of roles in play, you have to keep thinking of new overall strategies (how you will use combinations of different roles to good effect). Your common enemy in the game is the four diseases, which are controlled randmoly by an Infection deck and 4-6 Epidemic cards scattered throughout your player deck. Your goal throughout the game is to travel around the map, treating the diseases and trying to get enough of the right cards (either by sharing cards with each other, or drawing the from a player deck) to cure the diseases. When you cure all four diseases (even if the diseases have not been treated everywhere) you win the game. The randomness of the disease mechanics keeps the game interesting every time. Because it is random, you might sometimes have a game with an impossibly difficult deck. That might bother some people, but I didnt mind too much. We lost the game, and then set it up to start over again. Theres no bitterness, because when you lose, you all lose together; there is no one to accuse of playing unfairly. Other than an occasional bad deck situation, the difficulty of the game is not too bad. My wife and I have only played the easy mode (which uses 4 epidemic cards) so far. You can scale the difficulty up by adding more epidemic cards in, but so far we havent seen the need to. The game is not too hard, and it is still fun. However, its nice to know that if we get to the point where Easy mode is too easy, we can always up the challenge. Speaking of upping the challenge, there are expansions to this game (sold separately) that add new elements into gameplay to spice things up. I havent played any of the expansions, but I look forward to trying them out in the future.

Okay, to start out, I love love LOVE Pandemic! I admit it, Im a bit competitive. I hate losing games. Im generally fine with competitive games where the best strategist (or luckiest) wins, but I really dislike games (like Settlers of Catan) where some players can gang up on others. You pretty much dont have a chance when every other player is specifically playing against YOU. Pandemic is fantastic because you cooperative with the other players and you all win or lose together. I just absolutely love sitting at the table talking about all our options and strategizing together. My son introduced me to Pandemic several months ago, and I was hooked. Weve spent several afternoons/evenings playing again--and again--and again. On many occasions when I am home alone, I play all by myself (playing two roles), and weve also played four players on several occasions. With two players and four epidemics, we win every time. With five epidemics, we win about 70% of the time. Weve tried six epidemics a couple times, but have not been able to beat that game yet. Still trying! Ugh! As you increase the number of players, the game gets more difficult. With four players weve only played with four epidemics, and we win probably a little over half the time. I honestly think it would be impossible with four players and six epidemics, but someone has probably proven me wrong. Weve even discovered another way to lose the game, which is not listed in the rule book! It says you can lose by having too many outbreaks, running out of disease cubes, or running out of player cards. Weve lost in all those lovely ways. However, a couple of times, weve had only a few outbreaks, had plenty of cubes of each color left, and plenty of player cards. Three diseases cured, with only one to go. One of those times, wed even gotten through all the epidemics, so there were none left in the infection deck! Weve got it made, right? Uh, no. Turns out we discarded too many of the same color city cards, and there were only four left total, including in our hands and in the player deck. Neither of us was the Scientist, so that was an automatic loss. This is a danger when you get dealt a nice hand at the beginning, say two or even three of the same color. You decide to collect those, so when you discard, you are discarding the other colors. If you happen to keep drawing you discard color and it takes too long to collect the color(s) you want, youve now discarded too many of the other color and you dont have enough left at the end to cure the disease. Beware. We have also managed to lose the game on the very first turn. We were very unlucky drawing the infection cards when setting up the game: three on Karachi and Delhi, and two on Kolkata. Our first player did not have any way to get to that location to do even a little treating, and the first card drawn from the player deck was an epidemic. After resolving the epidemic, the first card drawn was Delhi, which caused a double outbreak (Delhi/Karachi) and put the third cube on Kolkata. The second card drawn was Kolkata, which was a triple outbreak (Kolkata/Delhi/Karachi) and lost us the game as there werent enough disease cubes. Yep, lost on the very first player card drawn and there was not a single thing we could do about it. One slight change we sometimes make in the game is to draw 10 cards at the beginning instead of 9. The first nine infect the cities, and the tenth is where we place our player pawns and the first research station. It adds a level of difficulty to the game to not always start in Atlanta. We were noticing before that we always seemed to get in trouble with black and red, and we believe it was because all our players started so close to blue and yellow so those cities were easy to get to and treat. Now that we can start anywhere on the board, blue and yellow have become equal opportunity killers. There are a few things it is easy to get wrong. When the infection rate moves up, its easy to forget to start drawing three cards (or four) since youre so accustomed to the lower number. Its also easy to forget to discard, not noticing that you have more than 7 cards in your hand. One scenario weve encountered a few times involves having 8 cards for literally a second. You meet another player on top of a research station, and share knowledge by pulling that city card from her. You now have 8 cards in your hand, but 5 of one color. Your very next action is going to be curing a disease, which will leave you with only 3 cards. But, before you cure that disease, you have 8 cards, so we think you have to discard one even though literally on your next action you will be discarding 5 cards. This is a little frustrating, but the rules specifically say that if you EVER (my emphasis) have more than 7 cards in your hand, you must discard (or play an event card). We were also a little confused by the role of the Researcher the first time we played. To be clear, when the Researcher shares knowledge, she and the other player must be on the same city, and the card can only go FROM the Researcher TO the other player (on either players turn, as an action). She cannot take a card from the other player (and they cannot give one to her), unless it matches the city they are sitting on. It is also extremely easy to forget to infect cities after resolving an epidemic. Youve spent a bunch of time resolving, then strategizing based on where the board stands now, and you completely forget that you still have to infect before going to the next player. Lastly, you are not supposed to choose your roles. We played with one person who had played before, and he said they always choose which roles they want. I suppose you can play that way if you want, but the game would be far less interesting because people would probably tend to choose the same roles every time. The instructions say to shuffle the role cards and deal them to each player -- that means theyre supposed to be random. Its far more interesting and challenging when the roles change every time. A good part of the strategy is figuring out how to maximize the advantages that each role gives you in any given game. Pandemic is basically figuring out exactly how much effort you have to spend in each game sharing knowledge in order to cure diseases versus preventing outbreaks, all while maximizing the strategic use of whatever role you are playing. Spend too much time on one, and the other will get you. Sometimes you just have to say oh well and let an outbreak happen, even when you could have prevented it. It may just be more important to get to that one city in order to share knowledge than to get to the city where the outbreak is about to happen in order to prevent it. However we do try hard to prevent double outbreaks because things can get very bad very quickly when that happens. Okay Ive rambled enough. If youre on the edge, buy this game! Its awesome. Every game is different and it never gets boring. It is equally fun with two or more players, although the more players, the more challenging it is. You can control the difficulty level by player with fewer or more epidemic cards. A+

Rare that I come across a game that is conceptually well thought out, quickly learned, and a lot of fun to play! Pandemic (original and not expansion) was all of that and more. Board setup was fast and rules intuitive, so a quick learn and you encounter all scenarios within a game or two so makes it easier to become familiar with the situations. Everything very well constructed and high quality. A super fun cooperative game for 2-4 players.

We love playing Pandemic and saving the world together as a team. There is a learning curve and definite strategy involved. After a few rounds, your strategies will change and you will figure out all of the super powers of the different roles and how to use them to your advantage. Great fun!

I bought this for a lesson on cooperation during a group session. It was used with 11-14 year olds. Half of them absolutely loved it & asked to play it again. The other half declared it too hard & refused to participate. At first, there was a learning curve & I had to be the deciding factor in whether they were following the rules. After that, they caught on fast & played many times by themselves. It was a really great way to teach cooperation as everyone has to work together to win.