Graham Dean
United Kingdom
Bedford
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Pandemic
Session report
One of the members of the Thursday night games club had emailed around to ask if anyone was interested in a game of Pandemic, and I had got in quickly as this is a game which I have been curious about for quite a while. My wife is highly competitive, but rather strangely usually prefers to play non-competitively so that she won’t look stupid if she loses. Pandemic is potentially a game I could buy which she would be happier playing, and I was keen to test it out.
The group was
Simon: Provider of the game. Works in IT in the same firm that I work in, although we’d never met before I started attending the games club at the British Legion. Pandemic is a current favourite with him, although he confessed to having an appalling record with it – about 1 win out of 10, I think he said.
Julian: I’d not met Julian before sitting down to play, and he was very understanding about the fact that I kept calling him Jeremy. He had never played Pandemic before.
Richard: Again, someone I had never met before. 2 or 3 years younger than me, as well as being thinner, but seemed like a good sort despite these drawbacks. Like Julian, he had never played Pandemic before.
Graham: Myself. Like Julian and Richard I had also never played Pandemic before. I had read through the rules in preparation for games night, so I wasn’t completely unprepared. As mentioned above I was interested to try out this game to see whether it might be one I could play with my wife, who prefers to play non-competitively.
Game session
Setup
Even though three out of the four of us had never played Pandemic before, we agreed unanimously to play at the standard level of difficulty (5 Epidemic cards). Simon went through the rules with us, which didn’t take too long. The biggest complexity in the rules is the setting up, and making sure that cards get picked up and put down to and from the right places (taking cards from the bottom of the infection deck, and shuffling and placing cards back on top are different from most other games I’ve played and take a little getting used to).
We then selected for roles, and I was slightly disappointed to see that I had drawn the Researcher. I had been hoping to be the Dispatcher, which seemed to me to be a role which would always be at the centre of events and heavily involved. Simon drew the role of Dispatcher, Julian got Operations and Richard got Scientist.
On reflection this seemed like quite a good distribution of roles. Researcher and Scientist have an obvious synergy between their special abilities (passing cards and using fewer cards to find a cure), as do Dispatcher and Operations (both with different ways of helping movement). I think it was probably also a good thing that Simon was the Dispatcher, given that he had played the game before.
We gave the different diseases names – yellow was called Swine Flu; red was called Asian Flu; Black was called Bird Flu; and then as we were running out we called blue Man Flu, which as I keep telling my wife, is a very nasty disease indeed.
The Early Game
The initial set up gave us two potential hotspots of man flu in Toronto and Washington which looked nasty as they could together lead to multiple outbreaks. I can’t remember where the other hotspots were, although I do remember being concerned about Beijing and Jakarta in Asia, Madrid and Milan in Europe and Rio in Latin America in the early stages.
Simon and I tackled the potential problem in North America and Canada to start with, while Julian and Richard went to Asia and Central Europe respectively, where they tackled as many of the other hot spots as they could manage. Even so we couldn’t prevent a few early outbreaks when Richard drew the first Epidemic card, and we quickly went up to three outbreaks.
In fact, Richard got a bit of a reputation as a disease vector, since he always drew the epidemic card throughout the game. A certain amount of humour was derived from this.
In the early stages I didn’t do much with my special ability – in fact at one point I said it seemed a bit useless, as we were too busy travelling the world and treating diseases in order to prevent an outbreak to take the time to put our pawns in the same place. However as we got a few turns further in we began to build up hands of cards which could be used as a cure, and discussions turned more towards what we needed to do to find a cure.
The Search for our First Cure
As chance would have it, our team Scientist Richard had drawn a couple of yellow cards, so we put our efforts into getting extra yellow cards to him. I passed him one, and we had quite a long discussion about how to get him the fourth yellow card he needed. Julian was our best bet since he had drawn a few yellows already, but as luck would have it Richard drew the fourth yellow card he needed on his turn, and the cure for Swine Flu was achieved.
This left Julian with a lot of yellow cards in his hand which were now no longer required. This made him the ideal person to travel to Africa and South America to treat Swine Flu there, since we had already had several outbreaks there.
I was drawing lots of the special cards – in fact I think I was the only person to draw them throughout the game. I remember we used one of them to make Beijing a resistant population to disease, as its location made it quite difficult to get to.
By this time we had reached 6 on the outbreak scale, which was causing us some concern. Outbreaks in Madrid and Algiers had worsened our situation. However, importantly we had managed to prevent any outbreaks spilling over into a chain reaction of outbreaks in other cities.
We had reached a point where we were only a couple of outbreaks away from defeat, and with only one cure on the board. However on the plus side we had conserved our cards well and weren’t too far away from a couple of other cures.
The Final Push
A comment from Simon reminded us all that one of the ways of losing was to run out of cubes of one of the colours, and yellow was getting dangerously low. Possibly we had taken our eyes off that disease after finding the cure. Again, Julian travelled to South America and took some of the pressure off.
At this point we took stock of the cards in our hands. With a jolt I realised that I had three blue cards in my hand, and Richard (who, like me, was positioned in a Research Station) had 1. We had a cure for blue! All I needed to do on my turn was travel from my research station to his, and then pass him my three cards using my Researcher special ability. Then on his turn, Richard would be able to cure Man Flu.
At the same time as Richard and I made this realisation, Julian pointed out that he was only 1 card away from a cure for red (Asian Flu), and then Simon pointed out that he was only 1 card away from a cure for black (Bird Flu). We were close to finding a cure for all 4 diseases – the only question was whether we could manage it before further outbreaks ended the game.
I used one of my special action cards to check the infection pile and rearrange the next six cards in the order we wanted, and another to miss the infection phase of my turn. This left us with the certain knowledge that one removed red cube from Jakarta would remove all risk of another Outbreak for the next few turns.
Richard and I followed our plan without a hitch, and announced our cure for man Flu. Richard then finished his turn moving a couple of spaces to a city which Simon could get to on his turn. There then followed a discussion on the best way of getting another red card to Julian, but fortune favoured us and he drew one, and announced a cure for Asian Flu. Then on the next turn Simon moved to where Richard was, took the final black card and announced a cure for Bird Flu, and sealed the win.
Analysis
My usual approach is to think through what happened after a game to try and work out what worked and what didn’t during a game session to try and improve my chances should I ever play it again.
With that said, it’s very difficult to isolate an individual strategy in a co-operative game like Pandemic. The strategies involving the combinations of roles is fairly obvious – Researcher and Scientist work well together, as does Dispatcher and Operations. The main point with this game is that the players communicate and work well as a team. I think I was lucky that my first experience was so positive on all fronts. I have read that Pandemic suffers when one player tells the others what to do and dominates the game, but this didn’t happen here, despite us having three players who had never played before. Everyone had ideas, and all ideas were listened to and discussed, so it was a real team effort which gave us the win.
I think I have seen Pandemic at its best. I can imagine it getting very frustrating if you play with someone who won’t listen to you, or tells you what to do all the time. Similarly I can imagine how frustrating it would be for someone who knows how to play well to be playing with people who insist on sticking to a course of action which won’t work. Neither situation happened with this game session and I enjoyed my experience with this game.
Thoughts on the game
 Use your special abilities.
 Conserve your cards.
 Work as a team.
 To enjoy the game, listen to others.
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Matt Tonks
United Kingdom
Milton Keynes (one stop away on the train from Arkham & Dunwich...!)
Bedfordshire
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Hi Graham,
Good session report - didn't realise you had actually won last week!
While I'm a believer that being able to plan ahead is very hard since you cannot foresee which cities will come off the bottom of the deck when a Epidemic card is drawn, I find that trying to build at least two more research stations early on in the game helps with getting around quickly & saving cards.
Seeing as you were also potentially interested in buying it, I think Pandemic works really well for 2 players & even solo (playing 2, 3 or 4 roles simultaneously). Although the solo version basically reduces it down to a puzzle, rather than a co-op game... for the obvious reasons!
Cheers,
Matt...
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Graham Dean
United Kingdom
Bedford
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tonksey wrote: Hi Graham,
Good session report - didn't realise you had actually won last week!
We were trying to be dignified in victory!
tonksey wrote: While I'm a believer that being able to plan ahead is very hard since you cannot foresee which cities will come off the bottom of the deck when a Epidemic card is drawn, I find that trying to build at least two more research stations early on in the game helps with getting around quickly & saving cards.
We found that too. Conserving cards is clearly vital in getting any cures, so building research stations saves enormously.
tonksey wrote: Seeing as you were also potentially interested in buying it, I think Pandemic works really well for 2 players & even solo (playing 2, 3 or 4 roles simultaneously). Although the solo version basically reduces it down to a puzzle, rather than a co-op game... for the obvious reasons!
That's good to know. This is still a strong contender for a future purchase, although funnily enough I think it is one my wife would prefer to me - and I like it.
I've been trying to articulate why it felt strange to me, but I haven't found the right form of words to convey it properly, so I left it out of the session report. Basically it felt really strange at the end of the game to see that we all had achieved the same thing. Usually there's an asymmetry to how people feel after playing a game together and that is what I'm used to dealing with. With Pandemic it's completely different (which is, of course, the whole point of a co-operative game).
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Gordon Adams
United Kingdom
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Co-operating with your fellow players is essential and that makes the game special for me. Curing and eradicating the diseases can make it really exiting and an element of anxiety for all concerned.
Needles to say, I think this is a must buy for those who like co-operative gaming.
As for the Special Cards, weird but I nearly had the same experience..drew three of them in a space of a few minuits and worse; two epidemic cards one after another.
Having played this game more than any other new ones of late, I have not yet got bored with it and that for me spells a great game. 
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Graham Dean
United Kingdom
Bedford
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elfrododumbo wrote: Having played this game more than any other new ones of late, I have not yet got bored with it and that for me spells a great game.
This is really good to know. The one thing I was still wondering about was the replayability. I'll need to have a few more plays under my belt to find out for myself, but it's good to hear that some people such as yourself rate the replayability so high.
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Danny Nielsen
Denmark
Ølstykke
Ølstykke
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I play this game with the wife and we have played 20 games so far and it is still great.
one question about your session report.
Quote: There then followed a discussion on the best way of getting another red card to Julian, but fortune favoured us and he drew one, and announced a cure for Asian Flu
Curing cost one action. Julian draw cards at the end of his turn, so he could not cure it until his next turn.
but great session repport.
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Steve Duff
Canada
Ottawa
Ontario
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Whoops. Uncle G was cheating, Uncle G was cheating...
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Graham Dean
United Kingdom
Bedford
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 UnknownParkerBrother wrote: Whoops. Uncle G was cheating, Uncle G was cheating...
All rules were rigorously enforced by the games owner, and he works in IT so it must have been done correctly.
Although now I come to think about it, I do believe that Ontario, Canada was completely wiped out by a malicious strain of some virulent disease or other during our game.
Can't think how I didn't remember it earlier.
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Matt Tonks
United Kingdom
Milton Keynes (one stop away on the train from Arkham & Dunwich...!)
Bedfordshire
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Uncle G wrote:
All rules were rigorously enforced by the games owner, and he works in IT so it must have been done correctly.
I'm afraid eagle-eyed whoever that spotted the mistake is correct; Julian couldn't have declared a cure until his following turn. Nice try to justify it though ! You'll have to blame Simon for your 'win' being hereby declared null & void now...!
Shame... better luck next time  !
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