Pandemic
For those who don’t know, the yearly gaming convention Origins in Columbus, Ohio coincides with the Game Manufacturer Association (GAMA) announcing their best games of the year in a large variety of categories – the Origins Awards. Last year’s winner, Pandemic, the board game wherein players fight the spread of rampant diseases, just happens to be my game of the year as well, and is certainly deserving of its award and more reviews. Pandemic is designed by Matt Leacock and published by Z-Man Games in a slender and understated blue box that could easily find itself on the shelves of mainstream game stores. Add the fact that the box art shows scientists instead of bloody axes or big guns, and I can see more than one parent or school teacher putting this one in their cupboard.
They’d be served well with the results. Pandemic is a game that exercises the brain in a mathematical way but never appears to be doing so. The gameplay remains fun and engaging, the counters are kinesthetically pleasing and the setting exciting and fun: to wit, stopping the spread of international diseases manages to have a scientific feel as well as action-movie excitement, and up-to-the-minute relevance thanks to the fame of Avian Flu and Swine Flu. But this isn’t just a game for teachers and families: this is a game every board gamer will enjoy.
In the last decade – thanks to games like Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride – board games have gone mainstream. Games with the kind of clever design normally reserved for Germanic hobby games and production values normally reserved for art books have filtered onto the dining tables of the Average American Family. The last time this happened, a few counselors with deranged minds feared competition so much they created the travesty known as The Ungame, which is like Trivial Pursuit only the questions ask things like “how do you feel right now?” and “what’s a memory you like?” and everybody wins through sharing. The point is that families and children (not to mention other people trapped together for a long time, like astronauts) tend to be wary of competition. They aren’t all going to start roleplaying, so the world needs more co-operative games and fast. Pandemic is one of the first to fit the bill, and that alone makes it worthy of note.
As mentioned, it also gets points for not featuring guns and swords on its cover – or alien beasties or monsters or spaceships. Granted, that does make look a little lackluster but it also makes it free of the taint of genre fiction. Like it or not, fantasy still belongs to children and science fiction to nerds, and hardly anyone in the mainstream has even heard of Call of Cthulhu. If you’re going to sell a game to the Average American Family, it needs to be set in the real world, with real things like trains or battleships or silver dogs the size of cars and top hats that pay for hotel rooms.
Pandemic is set very much in the real world, and in the news headlines. The board depicts the globe, crisscrossed with connections between major cities (good for learning geography – parents take note!). A random selection of these cities begins play with one to three colored cubes on them. The color represents both different strains of disease and different areas of the world – Asia gets red cubes, Europe and the states get blue, and so on. The aim of the game is to cure all four diseases before the spreading cubes reach plague proportions.
By collecting cards of the corresponding color and taking them to a research station, players work together to cure each disease. The problem is that you only get two cards a turn and passing them between players is not easy. You’re also going to want to use many of your cards to move around between cities, because sliding around on the connected lines takes time. And time you do not have, because each turn you only get four actions. After that you get two more cards, but then the board’s deck of cards generates two cards of its own. These increase the disease in the cities that are turned over, and if a city ever gets more than three blocks, it causes an outbreak, spreading the disease to each neighboring city. Too many outbreaks worldwide, and you all lose. Too many cubes on the board, and you all lose. Take too many turns, and you all lose. Saving the world from disease isn’t like dusting crops, boy.
Adding to the pressure is the really clever mechanic of rebooting the card deck: the player’s deck contains semi-randomly seeded Epidemic cards. When they appear, the disease cards you’ve turned over so far get shuffled and put back on top. This ensures that the diseases keep hitting the same cities over and over again, so random deck scatter can’t lead to a cake-walk scenario. There will always be cascading diseases, coming over and over again. This reboot also gives you some idea of what’s coming though, allowing you to better plan your strategy. It also provides a difficulty-scaling mechanic: you can increase the number of Epidemics from three (very easy) up to six (extremely hard). I’ve been playing for a year now and we’re still afraid of the six level.
Which is to say Pandemic is a game you can learn. Key survival strategies and danger points become obvious quickly. Other, more subtle tactics come a bit slower. Barring bad luck, your average board game geek will win all the time on level four and after a while be hitting 70-80% on level five. Yet it still maintains its appeal. Players get different roles, each with their own unique special rules, changing how you play, if not the overall strategy. The randomness of the cities that come up and the timing of the Epidemics keeps each game unique – the challenge can become pulling back a game from a bad start, or seeing how completely you can succeed after a good run of luck. Of course, randomness has its downside: those who love tactics may find it annoying that even the best strategy may not survive really harsh luck, but you can always just start over and try again – and the simple fun of moving the blocks around is engaging enough to ensure you’ll want to.
Best of all – and maybe most importantly of all – the game is quick to set up and always plays in less than 45 minutes. Thanks to the full-color, well-written rules it is also a breeze to learn and easy to teach. Yet it is still a worthy intellectual challenge and an engaging bit of gaming fun. For a game which, like Ticket to Ride before it, has awesome “cross-over” potential, this simplicity and speed are probably its greatest assets of all. In a world where games seem to be getting longer and longer and bigger and bigger, quick and easy become even more precious commodities. It’s an advertising cliché bordering on the hideously patronizing but it’s still true, whether you’re talking about game design or marketing potential: sometimes the simplest things really are the best. Pandemic is as simple as catching the flu, but is also as clever as a clinical epidemiologist and as addictive as a morphine drip. Gotta cure ‘em all.