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

I bought Pandemic on the premise that it was one of the higher rated co-op games and Ive never played it before. That being said the rules are incredibly easy to follow and it was slightly challenging but highly dependent on what characters you got and the order of the Pandemics. Finding a cure can range from being incredibly difficult to extremely easy. There really isnt a reason to eradicate a disease with the base set, just set up a route to get a cure as fast as humanly possible. Maybe my group is too smart for this game but I think people are giving this game too high a rating. In the hands of gaming experts, it was a nice change of pace but I wouldnt buy it if I had to do it over again. We will just stick with Agricola, MTG, Twilight Struggle and Revolution for our core 4. tl;dr Let someone else buy it.

This game is very addicting. Our family has not beat it. It the game versus the players. You are playing together to beat the infections in each city.

There is a bit of a learning curve with this game, but dont let that deter you. My 9-year-old niece got the hang of it in one playthrough with my teaching her, and my family of widely varying ages really enjoys this game. Pandemic is suitable for both casual and serious gamers, ages 8+. I absolutely love this game! I love the cop-op/team work aspect of it, as well as its overall theme/story (the CDC vs. infectious disease outbreaks). I love the rules of this game, how it plays out, and that it can be played in less than an hour. Also, the board, cards, disease cubes, and box are gorgeous! This game looks great on the table and on a shelf. Pandemic is quite easily one of my favorite games of all time!

My husband and son (8 years) have played this game at least once a week since I gave it as a birthday present. I love it that they can play on the same team. No accusations of cheating or unfair moves, no getting upset when he loses (the boy not the husband, lol), and the game has different roles they can play so its fresh each time. Definitely recommend.

Love this game. It’s really hard to understand the first time, there’s a lot going on. But we watched a YouTube video on how to play and it all started making sense. Good strategy and teamwork game.

I was looking for a Christmas gift for a 16 year old boy, and my nephews recommended Pandemic. I really hesitated, as the idea of fighting disease somehow didnt appeal to me, and I wasnt sure it would appeal to the person I was buying the gift for, but finally, based on my nephews recommendation and the good reviews, I went ahead and bought it. We spent Christmas holidays with the family of the teenager I bought the game for, and we all ended up playing many many times. The kids - 11 to 16 - loved it, and so did the parents. A great alternative to computer games for the whole family! And, the cooperative approach - the players try to beat the game, not each other, was a great change from listening to the kids squabbling with each other while playing Mine Craft, where they were stealing from each other and killing each other in their virtual world (yes, I know there are other aspects to Mine Craft...). When we came home from the holiday I bought the game for our family too.

Pandemic is legendary. Its tense, but its a lot of fun. This is a great game for 2 to 4 players, but you can also play it solo by controlling more than one of the character roles. Your mission is to cure epidemic breakouts of four different types of disease before they spread out of control. You work together with other types of medical professionals to travel the world learning how to treat and ultimately cure the diseases. Pandemic is one of my favorite gateway games. A gateway game moves a non-gamer toward becoming a gamer. Or introduces someone who has only played mass market games like Monopoly or Clue to the world of games that are actually good. Pandemic is also a good introduction to cooperative gaming, where all the players work together as a team to beat the game rather than competitively trying to beat each other. This has become my wifes favorite game. She loves it because it is challenging but not impossible to beat, it is quick and easy to set up and put away, and 2-player games last anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes. Whenever we pull it out (which is frequently) we normally play it two or three times. Pandemic has inspired many other similar games, but it remains a classic. Highly recommended.

Purchased after watching a live play session, I ended up being rather disappointed with the difficulty and replayability. The game is often won by the skin of your teeth, not allowing a large margin of error. While this sounds good, it unfortunately means that whoever the smartest, most aware, most veteran player in the game is is usually the one telling everyone what to do. If even one person makes the wrong move, it can cost the game, so to have any chance of winning, less capable players need to be babied, and this is not fun for them. Ive had some games ending with very upset players because they didnt get to play so much as do what they were told for an hour to two hours. The game doesnt really get better as your skill improves, either. One person will always be stuck running clean-up duty on diseases to keep them in check, maybe even two or three depending on the difficulty, and certain characters are practically indispensable (medic, dispatcher) compared to others (contingency planner). So much is left to luck, yet somehow still ends up being highly predictable; the same cities keep getting infected again and again and you know within a two-or-three turn margin of error when they will become more diseased. A game where you have Bangkok, Shanghai, Taipei, and Sydney erupting over and over can be pretty easy to beat since they are so close together, but not so much when you have Santiago, Johannesburg, St. Petersburg, and Seoul, forcing you to send your team globe-trotting and wasting precious moves every single turn. The first game was alright, but it quickly wore out its welcome and lost favor. No group Ive played with has wanted to try it again and, quite frankly, Im done suggesting it.

Weve played this twice now and while its a pretty good game, the instructions are just terrible. Ended up watching 3 youtube videos to learn how its played. And I had to watch 3 because no one video (nor the instructions) covered all the issues and rules. With that said, you can ignore some of the rules and the game will still play and play quickly and you can win easily. But if you or your kids have a short attention span, skip this game for now. Games like Pit or Primeclimb are very easy to learn and both teaching games. They will not teach strategy like this game, but it takes 5 minutes to learn them and you can play for hours w/o getting tired of them. This game we played twice, 2nd time following the rules, but even then it seemed a little boring. (Won both times.) But it seems dominated more by luck than skill. It does require strategy, but even good strategy can be thwarted by bad luck. Well play it a few more times and Ill update this review, but the cost of the game is high and the value pretty low IMHO.

This is a great game due to the fact that it is cooperative! Everyone is on the same team and trying to reach the same goal. There is a lot going on and it seems pretty complicated at first, but after a couple games your really get the hang of it. It is very easy to pick up if playing with someone who already knows how since theres quite a bit of instructions and asking them questions is much easier than finding the answer in the multi-page manual. Every time you play is different due to how the cards fall and the individual role cards involved. There are 3 difficulty settings and to be warned, it can be quite challenging to win (especially on the hardest setting). By that just makes winning so much sweeter! I highly recommend this game as its a great one for fun, planning, teamwork, and communication.