So this is my first review, but this game has been such a hit with me and my GF, I felt I needed to say something about it, even if others have already.

Summary
Pandemic is a cooperative game in which you play a research and crisis management team fighting the spread of four diseases, labeled by one member of my group as Yellow Fever, Red Death, Black Plague, and Bluemonia.

Play is driven by two decks of cards, both labeled with the cities on the gameboard. One deck provides the players with the cards they use to fight disease. The other dictates the infection pattern of the diseases throughout the world.

Players have four actions each each turn and must choose between five options and roles are randomly distributed at the beginning of the game, each of which augments one action option in some way (The medic treats infection better than the other roles, etc.)

An Elegant Game
After merely reading the rules, I had one reaction: This game is elegant. The rules are very simple and intuitive, there are only five actions to choose from, and play is quick. Yet the choices for resource deployment are juicy and complex: Find cures or to treat the sick? Go after Yellow or is red the bigger danger? Should I spend X cards to travel, just to get you Y card you need?

Couple that with VERY clever infection deck manipulation to simulate disease proliferation, and you've got an elegant little card game.

Theme immersion
But that's not Pandemic's main strength. More than any game of it's weight, Pandemic immerses you in it's theme. You really feel responsibility for the fate of the world. Primarily, this is due to the tension that builds gradually throughout the game until you are holding your breath with each infection card flip. And you know, the only reason that outbreak happened in Hong Kong was because YOU thought it was more prudent to deliver cures in New York. Now we're all screwed... Thanks a lot.

I love games that can really immerse you in their theme, so this is a big plus for me.

25 games in 1
Each time I play, (and I'm at about 10 plays right now), I marvel at how much which role cards you get affect the strategy you need to take. If you get the scientist and the researcher, you need to get the cures out there fast, because you won't have any mobility to control epidemics, a long game will kill you. With the medic and the dispatcher, you can move around more and keep outbreaks under control, but where will you get the cards for a cure?

Because the roles lend themselves to such different strategies, you really have 25 games in one since you can play with 2-4 players and choose from five roles. This makes the game extraordinarily interesting to replay, even discounting the random distribution of disease, which also drives strategy.

But it's a cooperative game...
All my gaming friends hate cooperative games. I cannot say that I've ever played another one, but the major objection is that one player can take over the game, telling the others what to do. I haven't seen that much in Pandemic. With four people, you would have to keep track of everything in peoples hands, the discard decks, and on the board. What seems to happen more often than not is consensus decision making. One person will be concerned with establishing mobility logistics, one with what is most likely to be infected next, one with making sure we don't use too many cards we can't find a cure, etc.

A player may dominate for a turn or a round when they have a good strategy with dealing with some crisis, but they then seem to slink back to the background and yield to discussion and consensus when the next, different crisis arises.

Anything you don't like?
Well, no... But there are two things that are going to bother some people. The first is the mildly disappointing endgame. As I said, the theme is very immersive, and when you find all four cures but there are still sick people all over the world, it is disappointing that you don't get to heal them. You think I'm kidding here, but play it and find out.

The second item is randomness. My GF and I have played three Heroic games so far, won two handily and were crushed in the third. I think we might just be better at some roles than others, but Amy is convinced that the third game had a strange epidemic distribution. Only more games will tell... and I eagerly look forward to playing them.