Game: Pandemic

I bought yet another board game, this one is called Pandemic.

Its excellent.

Its cooperative, meaning everyone playing is working together instead of trying to beat each other. It makes for a very positive experience.

There are 4 diseases making their way across the world, and the players have to work together to find the cures before its too late. Each player gets a different role which gives them special abilities that help the other players. There is alot of discussion during the game about the best way to spend your moves each turn.

At the end of each turn, 2 to 4 new cities get infected with one of the 4 diseases. If any of them are already at max infection, it causes an outbreak which infects all the cities around them, and if any of them are already at max infection, it causes another outbreak. Hence you could have a very bad chain reaction of outbreaks causing mass infections all over the board.

So the object is to strategize together on how to minimize the outbreaks while at the same time trying to get the cures.

If you run out of diseases markers of any 1 of the 4 diseases, you lose. (this would only happen if you had alot of outbreaks and the whole board was covered with diseases)

If you run out of player cards (which allow you to find cures) you lose. (this happens if you spend too much time worrying about the outbreaks and not enough time trying to find the cures)

If you have 8 outbreaks, you lose. (this happens if your not careful about the cities getting hit the hardest, you HAVE to contain the outbreaks long enough to find the cure)

If you find all 4 cures, you win. (I have no idea how to do this since I have won zero times in 5 games.)

Me and Amy played 2 games and lost both.
Me, Amy, Mom, Daniel played 3 games last night and lost all 3. But we came very close to winning the last one.

The difficulty, the intensity & frustration the outbreaks cause, the strategizing, and the cooperative aspect of it make for a blast of a game.