I’ve been toying with the idea of buying “Pandemic”, but I don’t want to shell out $40 for a game that’s just going to wind up sitting in the closet. So I have some questions.
First, is it worth $40? I guess that’s a subjective question, depending on how often you play and how much you enjoy it.
Can you play with only two people? Because the majority of the time, it would just be me and my wife playing. Is it better the more people you have?
Is it easy enough for a nine year old to play? My granddaughter likes games and if it is something she could play when she comes over, that’s another plus.
You can play with 2-4 players. I don’t recommend playing with less than the full 4, because a big part of the fun for me is getting everyone to work together and focus on one role or another and use teamwork to solve the crisis. But YMMV, you might enjoy it with 2.
It’s a very challenging game. I’ve played maybe a half dozen times over the years and I don’t think I ever won. Came close a couple of times. But it’s tough. A spate of bad luck can totally sabotage everything you’re doing. You could be one round away from a win, flip an epidemic card, and game over. It’s not my favorite game because so much depends on getting lucky with the cards.
It’s one of the most popular games out there though and I understand the appeal. It’s well-designed and you really do need to work together to succeed. I think it’s worth the $40 even if I’m personally not the biggest fan of it.
Oh I forgot to add, the game is rated 8+ so the 9-year-old should be fine. Just as long as she is good at handling losing at games. Because you’ll lose a lot.
I think it’s one of the better coop games. In addition to playing with my 9 year old son and some larger groups, I also like playing it solo controlling two or three characters myself.
It is a game that has some famously common mistakes that players make during setup/play that make the game much harder than intended. I’d google “common pandemic mistakes” before playing it the first time to save yourself some grief.
If you have an iPad or similar android device you can buy a software version for $5 and try it there before you spring for the hard copy.
One of the worst things about Pandemic is that it’s very susceptible to “quarterbacking,” where one player ends up telling everyone else what to do. However that can be good if your granddaughter is struggling since you can easily help guide her.
I’m going to be the dissenter; I didn’t really like Pandemic. It mostly felt like “Here are the optimal moves, do them and hope the cards don’t screw you over.” It’s got serious issues with quarterbacking, because usually there is an obviously correct move and everyone whose turn it isn’t is sitting there staring at the one person whose turn it is.
I also don’t think it would work very well with just two. On the plus side, it IS simple enough for a nine year old to play.
My counter recommendation for people looking for a good co-op that DOES scale well to number of players, and which suffers much less from quarterbacking is Spirit Island. It’s a bit more expensive than Pandemic (depending on where you shop) but it scales flawlessly from 1-4 players (yes, 1 is great too), has super modular difficulty tuning so you can make the game as challenging or as easy as you want, and is amazingly asymmetrical in terms of the abilities and styles of each of the different spirits. Super good, cannot recommend enough. It IS, however, more complicated than Pandemic and might be too much for a 9 year old.
I am really competitive, but, it turns out I really like co-operative games. I have both Pandemic and Forbidden Island.
I have two granddaughters who are of game-playing age. The oldest (now 12) is very competitive, and we would play games like Ticket to Ride in a no holds barred, cut-throat manner. Her younger sister absolutely refused to play any game which would end with her sister stomping all over her. Then, I found out about co-op games, and my oldest granddaughter and I went to the game store around the corner and scoped them out. We decided to get Pandemic, then she and I played a game to understand it, and then got the younger granddaughter involved. She loved it! We then went on to get Forbidden Island, and she loved that one, as well. She was 8 or 9 at the time.
The most fun I have had playing Pandemic was with my nephews, who were 11 and 13 at the time. One of them is very quiet and hardly ever talks. When I try to talk to him, he answers in monosyllabic grunts that are even more over-the-top than most teenagers’ responses. However, in one Pandemic game, it was like someone had turned on the “Charm” faucet. He and his brother took turns “quarterbacking”, and I was happy to sit back and watch them in action. It was fun to see both of them develop a plan and then direct all of us to try to achieve the plan. We lost one game by a little bit, and then won the next one.
I am currently developing my own co-op game, and one night, we were out to dinner with our neighbors, who are both very quiet, reserved people. I asked them if they played board games, and they laughed and said that they had played Checkers once or twice right after they got married, but that was about it. I asked them if they would like to try my game. They started playing it, and both of them started seeing different possibilities, and started making suggestions. It was really a lot of fun to watch as they helped to develop the strategy we were going to adopt.
So, even though the games lend themselves to quarterbacking, if you let the quieter ones quarterback, they can be a lot of fun.
Okay, so my husband and I play it just the two of us and there are modifications written right into the rules to make it work for two players. Use only 3 or 4 epidemic cards, for one thing. Occasionally I’ll lob 5 epidemics into the deck for a fiendish game, but we mostly play with 4. It’s fun and we enjoy it.
Pandemic is one our perennial favorites on game nights, particularly with the On The Brink expansion which allows for a potential added player, several new roles and Special Event cards, as well as some optional challenges and playing mechanisms. (I also have In The Lab but have never played it, nor any of the spinoff games, nor the Legacy games.) It is a challenging game that requires a high degree of coordination in strategy, particularly in handing off cards so that players can cure diseases, which can be particularly challenging if you don’t have the Researcher or Dispatcher. You can’t just wait to get the right combination of cards to cure, because the odds are against all characters drawing a complete set of one color before near the end of the game (if playing with four or more players); you actively have to coordinate sharing the appropriate cards and/or building research stations in strategic locations early in the game. If just playing with two people I’d recommend each player taking two roles, as it is just too difficult to cover enough of the board to prevent outbreaks with two characters.
In terms of preventing “quarterbacking”, there are a couple of recommendations. One is that the player can only speak, and initiate conversations during his or her turn, thereby preventing one player from directing everyone else. Unfortunately, this also limits social table talk, so another is giving all players a set amount of tokens (usually the number of cards in the deck divided by the number of players, so that every player gets one token per action turn they may take) and can play a token to recommend a course of action. A bossy player will run out of tokens quickly and have to remain silent. However, we’ve found that by the time someone has played the game three or four times they have enough of a grasp on the tactics of the game to be active in participating in a collective discussion without being dominated by other players. There is no real strategy for playing the game except how much to focus on building research stations and fighting outbreaks versus aggressively pursuing cures, and therein lies the challenge of the game because both a crucial to winning, and will depend on the initial distribution of disease cubes and the roles that the characters have. So, once a player has a certain level of experience, they’re going to be just about as good as everyone else. I find that experienced players can win about 70% of the time on the Normal level and about 30% to 40% of the time on Heroic, depending on roles.
I do find the game eminently replayable, more for the challenges and failures than successes. I once played with a group of professional virologists and immunologists who spent the time to give each of the diseases a designation and backstory, which didn’t do anything to change the game mechanics but was enormously entertaining, especially since anyone entering an infected city had to describe a new symptom of the disease that emerged from their “research”.
If you want a really frustrating time playing a cooperative game, try Red November.
The thing with Pandemic is it is absolutely best to start playing with someone else (or many someones) who has also never played before. Part of the fun is “figuring out” Pandemic. If you play with someone who has played before (or worse, many times before) then it runs the risk of strategy being explained rather than discovered. I find the discovery part the most interesting.
We got pandemic and played 2 player exclusively at first. It takes a while to figure out strategy and how to use characters effectively, what combos are more or less powerful. But discovering that together was part of the fun. We were both uninformed at the start and we made mistakes together.
Then we moved up to using 4 characters even though there are just the 2 of us. That was eye opening -more complex, and more difficult.
It’s a great game, but don’t begin play with an ‘expert.’ Absolutely worth 40 bucks to me. We’ve played it many many times. We now play with friends who also picked up the game for themselves and have great fun, especially since one of them loves stacking the deck to make it super hard (you can adjust the difficultly of pandemic, which is a great feature) and on the rare occasion that we win it is quite exhilarating.
We are also halfway through Pandemic:Legacy which costs 70 dollars and you destroy the game in the process of playing it. So in the course of 12-24 plays the game is done forever. We are only halfway through and at 70 dollars, I still say worth it. It’s an amazing experience. So if you try regular pandemic and find you like it, you might want to check that out. But do NOT start with Legacy. No No No.
[Actually, you can start with Legacy, but play the original version with the legacy board until you are up to speed. Instructions for that are included with the game.]
I’ve played regular Pandemic, am now playing the legacy version, and I’ve enjoyed them both, especially the legacy version. You can definitely play with two people (or even one, which I’ve done) and you have the option of playing two characters at once (thus virtually playing as 4 people). If you’re not adverse to spending the money, I’d recommend getting the legacy version. You can play the regular version just fine and then when you get tired of it play legacy. (If you’re careful you could also play regular after legacy).
Pandemic is an excellent game, and it plays well with two players. There is perhaps additional social enjoyment by have more people involved, but the game itself works fine with two. If you enjoy optimizing and puzzling out the best moves, you can do that more easily, actually, with two people since there’s less concern of an alpha player pushing out the other voices. At boardgamegeek.com, 90.4% of people tag the game as either “best” or “recommended” with two players.
The game is a little easier the fewer players you have, but on the hardest setting you will still lose often enough.
As God is my witness, just last night I was looking for a cool game for my wife and I to play, looked up “Pandemic,” and was appalled at the cost. Even on Amazon, it was pricey.
