Pandemic
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Category: Toy
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Product Summary
Brand: Z-Man GamesAudio: English (Unknown); English (Published)
Model: 7021ZMG
Product features:
- 2 to 5 Player Game
- 60 minutes to play
- Race against time to cure the world
- Takes 45-60 minutes to play
Toys and Games Reviews of Pandemic
Customer Review: See? I told you that would happen!
Summary: 5 Stars
"You have to treat Tehran on this turn. If you don't, we could be looking at a double or triple outbreak and we'll run out of black pieces!"
"SEE? I knew that would happen! You should've just treated the F'ing city! A lot of good your research center does us now!"
This co-op game is more about working together to come up with strategies on the fly more than it is about winning the game, and that's part of the fun of it.
The other part that makes this great is the fact that bad news hits so often and so quickly in this game, you don't have time to rest on your laurels and you don't have chances to waste moves. And a bad move or a bad strategy seems to often be a precursor to losing, because you just can't keep up with the infections and, inevitably, the outbreaks.
The object of the game is to cure four diseases before too many outbreaks occur. There's one other way to lose, which I'll mention in a bit.
Your board is a map of the world with large cities noted on the map (LA, NY, Paris, Hong Kong, etc). Infections come in the form of little wooden blocks, and there's four colors of them representing the four diseases. The game starts out with 9 cities being infected, some more than others, and you have to treat those cities while finding cures for the four diseases. A city cannot hold more than 3 blocks. When a fourth block needs to be added to the city, what you have is an outbreak, and then you have to place a block on each city that neighbors the city that cannot take another block. There are red lines connecting neighboring cities on the board, making it easy to figure out which cities need blocks added for the outbreak. What happens when you have 3 blocks on a city, the city gets infected again causing an outbreak, and then another neighboring city that already has 3 blocks on it needs a fourth as a result of the outbreak? All Hell done broke loose, is what! Because now you have to add blocks to the neighboring cities as well. Pretty soon, you're running out of blocks! And when you run out of the blocks of one color, you lose the game as well.
Every turn, you have to draw a couple cards (draw four or five of the same color, and you have the means to cure a disease), and very often, one will be an Epidemic card, which immediately adds three blocks to one city. Now you have a panic in a city that you haven't had do deal with thus far. At the end of your turn, you have to draw 2 or 3 infection cards, which adds a block to the city on those infection cards. These cards get discarded, but when you draw an epidemic card and infect a city with 3 blocks, then you have to take the discarded cards that you've already put infection blocks on, shuffle them with the epidemic city card, and put them back on the top of the pile....so the same cities, over and over, will keep getting infected! And then new cards will be infected as you draw epidemic cards! And you'll draw epidemic cards often! And that makes disease spread fast, far and wide!
Everybody takes a role card so you'll have some special abilities that other teammates won't have. For instance, a medic can wipe out three blocks of a city with one action while it takes 3 of a researcher's 4 actions that they get on a turn to wipe out 3 blocks on a city. Inefficient! But a researcher needs only 5 blue cards to cure the blue disease, whereas a medic would need 5. You only get 2 cards per hand, so waiting till you have enough of a group of cards to cure a disease could take a long time...AND YOU DON'T HAVE A LONG TIME!
The longer you play, the greater the game's advantage at whoopin you and your team. But you'll find that quality cooperation, trust, and respect among your teammates, even in a loss, feels a lot better than lack of cooperation, egotism, and rudeness even in a win.
It's a stressful game where smart strategy and good cooperation reigns supreme, and if you have all this and you WIN, then...I don't know what. I'll let you know when I get there. :)
Description of Pandemic
Four diseases have broken out in the world and it is up to a team of specialists in various fields to find cures for these diseases before mankind is wiped out. Players must work together, playing to their characters' strengths and planning their strategy of eradication before the diseases overwhelm the world with ever-increasing outbreaks. A truly cooperative game where you all win or you all lose.Board Games Toys
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