After receiving a number of recommendations from readers and questions about it from others, I asked for and received the cooperative board game Pandemic
In Pandemic, two to four players form a team fighting four simultaneous regional pandemics of diseases denoted by different colors – blue in the U.S./Canada/Europe, yellow in Latin America/Africa, black in the Middle East and south Asia, and red in east Asia. When the game begins, you draw Infection cards for nine cities that will contain cubes representing infected populations, with those cities containing one to three cubes apiece. More cities gain cubes as the game goes on, and there will be four to six new epidemics that create three-cube infection cells in new cities while adding cubes to cities that already have infections.
The players begin at the CDC Research Center in Atlanta and must work to cure all four diseases while preventing them from spreading to the point where they trigger one of the end game conditions – running out of cubes in any color, or experiencing an eighth “outbreak,” where a city with three cubes already is hit with another one. A player can cure a disease by collecting five cards in that disease’s color (there’s one card for every city on the board, with the corresponding color) and turning them in while standing at any Research Center. Players can build other Research Centers besides the one in Atlanta for easier mobility.
On each turn, a player can take four actions. An action can include moving from one city to an adjacent one; playing a city card to move to that city; playing the card of the city he’s on to move to any city; moving from one Research Center to any other one; treating (removing) one cube in the current city; passing a card to or taking a card from another player as long as both players are in the city on that card; or building a research center if he’s in a city and plays the card of that city. But each player has a role that makes one of those actions simpler; the Medic, for example, can treat all cubes in the city he’s in with a single action.
The complication, of course, is that diseases spread. The deck of cards contains four to six Epidemic cards that speed the spread of the four diseases, and reshuffle all the Infection cards you’ve already used to place cubes on cities. Thus cities that have already come up in the deck and received cubes will come up again, so players must split their time between collecting cards for cures and putting out fires to avoid outbreaks – especially since outbreaks can cause chain reactions that can advance you to endgame very quickly.
We played the Normal game with five epidemic cards and still found it extremely difficult. Even with four players working together, we won just twice in a more than a half-dozen plays, and both wins came just as we were about to exhaust the deck of city cards (the third possible endgame condition). It’s a massive operations research problem, where all four players jointly coordinate the movement and actions of four players to try to most efficiently balance the short-term needs to avoid outbreaks or a cube shortage and the long-term need to cure the disease. You can even choose to eradicate a disease you’ve cured – if you treat all cubes of a cured disease (any player can remove all cubes of a cured disease in the city where his pawn sits with one action), the disease is eradicated and all future infection cards in that color have no effect. But eradication costs actions you may need to use to treat uncured diseases or coordinate with other players to collect cards.
There is some luck involved – you can have a bad combination of epidemic cards appearing close together with a concentration of cubes in cities of one color and see a game spiral out of control unless you’re sitting in that region – but there are enough disparate chance-based elements that it tended to balance out in our plays, so that we generally felt like we had a shot to win every game. The real challenges are coordinating that many players and choosing when you can avoid a short-term problem and go cure a disease, but those were what made the game fun and intense. It’s also a fairly quick play for that many people, about an hour if we didn’t lose early, and very replayable even within an evening because the mix of diseases, locations, cards, and roles differs each time.
There’s also a well-regarded expansion called Pandemic: On the Brink
While the expansion adds some interesting game elements, the best thing about it is the petri dishes they give you for storing your disease cubes.
Once you’ve gotten your fill of Pandemic, I recommend Space Alert for your next cooperative. It might be the craziest, most chaotic game ever created – a real time cooperative.
Just played this game over Christmas at my cousins’ place. It was one of the best board games I’ve played in a long time. It is very different to other board games and well worth a shot. Great review!
One thing that makes things a bit easier is to use the revised operations expert instead of the one packaged in the original. The operations expert role has been changed in the expansion to have a second ability on top of the original power: He or she may play a city card of any destination to go to a city of his or her choice. This gives that particular role a bit of a boost, as it is lacking in the original. We use this version of the role even when we play vanilla pandemic.
And I agree with Anton, the Petri dishes are both aesthetically pleasing and a great way to keep the cubes handy.
As someone who has never played a cooperative board game, I guess I may have one question about the mechanics (especially for this game). What’s the difference between having 2-4 players vs. having a player playing this solitaire. When you have multiple players is there something that one player knows that the others don’t? Are their incentives for a given player to do something sub-optimally as compared to the global optimal.
I realize that I may need to play this once to fully understand the nuance.
Keith, do you have any philosophies regarding competitive versus cooperative board games? I’m an occasional poker player who read an interview a couple of years ago with a tournament winner and excellent player who was also a businessman, and he said that the zero-sum nature of poker where someone always won and someone always lost got kind of one-dimensional after a while, perhaps compared to the cooperative nature of building a business where everyone can succeed, etc. It really changed the way I look at games and gaming, though I don’t have a lot of opportunity to play board games. (And ironically I’m playing more poker than ever of late, though that zero-sum nature of the game is always in my mind and I imagine I’ll move on to other, more cooperative enterprises at some point.)
Just wondering if there’s a game that is a good balance between competitive and cooperative. For example, the classic AH game Republic of Rome has both elements, i.e.. each player is a family trying to create the most prestige, but if Rome falls because there’s too much self-interest, then no one wins. Maybe it’s me, but it just seems a little bit anticlimatic if it’s “All Winners” vs. “All Losers” In some ways it feels like it is more of a puzzle (one that constantly changes) than a game.
We’ve always played Pandemic by taking the city cards and spreading them into 5 piles, putting one epidemic card in each pile, and then shuffling them up so as to prevent the possibility of getting a bunch of epidemics back to back (though, sometimes you’ll still get two pretty close together). Pretty sure this is what the official rules suggest. I’d say we win 65-70% of the time though I think it’s a much easier game with two or three people than it is with four.
The out of print card game Red Empire was also a blend, Tim – everyone had to cooperate to keep the Soviet Union from falling apart, but if you managed to keep it together there was a single winner at the end. Of course that inevitably leads to situations where someone feels they have no shot at winning and decides to take everyone down with them… 😉
Can’t think of any recent examples though, other than things like the Bioterrorist option in Pandemic or the secret traitor in games like Shadows Over Camelot – but even there, it’s either the ‘bad guy’ wins or everyone else wins as a group. There’s no current ‘first among winners’ game that i can think of.
Pandemic is fantastic. Glad to hear you enjoyed it. Like Jason, I suggest using the Operations Expert’s expansion ability even when you’re just playing the normal game (I think he can only use it from a research center, but since he can put one down anywhere that’s not much of a problem).
Five is definitely the right number to play with. Even when you get good at the game, I don’t really suggest going up to six – it’s too much of a random crapshoot, where you can lose the game without really having a chance to do anything about it due to cascading outbreaks.
Strategy-wise, I suggest focusing on curing the diseases as fast as you possibly can. If you can see a way to cure a given disease in the next couple of turns, no matter how convoluted the plays you need to make are to get the person in question the right cards, it’s usually worth it unless there’s a real danger of cascading outbreaks that needs to be cleaned up right away. When we play, losing via ‘the deck ran out’ is usually not much of a worry because of this, and we can sometimes avoid hitting the fifth epidemic.
Tim: The game can effectively be played solitaire, but it really helps to have a group because other people will inevitably come up with a strategic ploy to cure a disease quickly that you didn’t think of yourself.
Nick: That’s how we play as well, but if one Epidemic card is at the bottom of one pile and the next pile has its Epidemic card near the top, you’ve got trouble.
Tim: I can see that analogy – Pandemic as a large, ever-changing puzzle. I viewed it more as a sort of relay race, as all four of us had to work in concert and agree on strategy to beat the “clock” of the cards. We found the everybody-wins/everybody-loses outcomes compelling, and when we lost the conversation always turned to how and why we lost, which is something no one really wants to do when one person just trounced the rest of the field.
First of all, happy New Year!
Question on Pandemic – do you think that this could be played successfully and enjoyably by a group of fairly talented Middle School girls? The school I teach at does a three day “mini week” for the Middle Schoolers where they take one specialized class for those days, and the biology teacher last year did a course on infectious disease. It seems like this could be a great activity as long as it could be explained reasonably easily and they would have a decent chance of winning. Thanks!
Tim: The Battlestar Galactica board game is a great example of what you are looking for. It is a fantastic and highly-acclaimed board game, even to people who aren’t fans of the show. The players are desperate humans must work together to escape the evil cylon robots. The twist is that one or more of the players is secretly a cylon agent (a human robot, essentially) who wins if the humans lose. The players must work to find the traitor while surviving the repeated attacks of the cylons and escape before they run out of resources.
More info here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111/battlestar-galactica