I remember one particularly frustrating game where the first draft of quests was 4 super hard ones (IIRC one required 2x3 glyphs to complete ; one had a 4 (!) glyph node including a 5 or 6 investigation score one ; one was 2, then 2, then 2 ; and the last one was “if you get a Terror, fail immediately and you get a doom token for your trouble”) and one doable one.
So we kept doing the lone doable quest and replaced it every turn, and we were lucky enough that the replacement were doable as well but **none **of them gave clues. Like, 10 or 12 quests in a row, not one clue for reward ; so even though they were much more doable than the 4 other we still struggled to make real headway or do much more than break even. Then FINALLY we reveal one that gave out 2 clues… only to have it immediately riddled with monsters as the clock advanced.
I had never been told “fuck you. No, I mean it, fuck ALL OF YOU” by pieces of cardboard before
I LOVE pandemic. I think it is a great game. It defiantly rewards thinking ahead.
One of the really interesting aspects of the game is how different it plays with different numbers of players. 2 Player games generally have a harder time dealing with outbreaks and removing cubes on the board because 2 players have a more difficult time covering the globe then 4 and thus end up spending more cards on traveling.
4 Players games tend to lose more because they ran out of time on player cards. This is because with only 11 cards of each color the odds of a single player getting 5 of one color are significantly worse than when only 2 players are drawing.
In my experience 4 player games are significantly harder than 2 player games. Particularly if you don’t have the Dispatcher. The Dispatcher is the single most powerful role in 4 player games. Their ability to put two pawns on the same city helps both with traveling to locations to remove cubes but even more importantly the ability to put two pawns in the same city so that they can trade cards.
Trading cards is absolutely essential to winning the game.
The previous advice has all been accurate as well. I would add that when you use the special cards is critical. One Quiet Night is far more effective late in the game when you are drawing 3-4 cards a turn and Forecasting is better early when you are only drawing 2 or 3.
In one of the best Pandemic games I have ever played, my two nephews (ages 14 and 12) were on our second game. We had lost the first one.
In the second game, one my nephews was the Medic (I think it was). Anyway, we had a real hot spot going on around Europe and North Africa. We somehow got him into the middle of that hot mess and he was able to go down to a city, clean it up, and then move to another city to be ready for the next round of infections. He spent 5 or 6 moves just floating around and removing disease cubes while my other nephew and I raced around the globe trying to find cures.
Having the one guy float around and clean up the hot spot really helped!
My daughter got this game on Friday, and we played at least 8 games over the weekend. We’re still playing with just 4 epidemic cards. I’d say you definitely have to change up the strategy as the number of players increases. In our last game yesterday, we tried a 4 players game for the first time - Researcher, Scientist, Medic, and Dispatcher. We were cruising through things - had 3 diseases cured, only a single outbreak, had already had 2 epidemics, and had 3 event cards to play. But somehow we screwed up - sent 2 players to clean up cured diseases and left the last 2 to research the final disease, had a plan in place to get the required cards to someone, and wound up losing because we didn’t realize we were low on player cards. We were literally one card away from winning. Given we only had a single outbreak, we should have essentially ignored cleanup and just concentrated on getting that final disease cured.
And does anyone else name the diseases after family members?
Certain combinations of roles are particularly potent; the researcher-scientist is one such pair. Also having the dispatcher seems to be critical with more players involved. By rights you should have one, but that is just the sort of last second disappointment we’ve come to appreciate. I can’t count how many games have come down to going over on outbreaks one lousy turn before discovering the fourth cure.
As for the disease color/names we usually play it;
yellow = yellow fever
blue = flu
red = ?
black = zombie apocalypse disease
Yeah, researcher/scientist is great, as is dispatcher/medic, and we had both of those. Our loss was so heartbreaking - we had someone with 5 cards for the last disease, one move away from a research station, all epidemics played, 5 outbreaks. All we had to do was have everyone else take their turns moving and treat diseases, and we’d win. But we ran out of cards on the player before her, so we lost.
I think we fell too much in love with dispatcher/medic - the dispatcher kept moving the medic around because we were afraid of more outbreaks, while we should have been moving the scientist & researcher around to get cards from people to cure that last disease.
Bang on, in those circumstances you have to “use” those outbreaks as resource to be consumed and also to be keenly aware of of when you are down to your last two “rounds” of cards. That’s where the bulk of our playing time comes from. At the tail end we try to wargame the moves quite a way ahead in terms of cards still to come, outbreaks to allow etc. and it can often be a very convoluted plan with many contingencies that you have to juggle in your head. Curiously it is actually my little boy (9) who has come up often with the most genius of plans of linked moves, card swaps and special power moves that allowed victory when no-one else could see a way out. I think the game aligns neatly with the way his little brain works and I think there’s a lot to be said for game playing as family to encourage lateral and creative thinking. The recent resurgence in co-operative and family friendly board games can only be a good thing in that respect.
And we haven’t named our diseases yet but I fancy that’ll be a topic of discussion for next game night.
When I played recently, the first disease to be named was red - since it was aggressively spreading at the time, we named it “The International Communist Conspiracy”. Its cure, quite obviously, was to drink pure grain alcohol, rainwater and distilled water exclusively.
