Pandemic is widely considered a modern classic and deservedly so. When it emerged on the scene in 2008 there was very little like it. Its triple threat of social puzzle solving, clever mechanisms, and fresh theming were, to forgive the pun, infectious. Melding co-operative hand management, variable player powers, point-to-point movement, and set collection to create a fast-paced game of disaster mitigation was a truly groundbreaking accomplishment. There had been co-operative games before, sure, but none that presented its players with such an immediately accessible and tantalizing scenario to overcome. That an entire game of Pandemic took less than a single hour was but the period at the end of the sentence declaring Pandemic a bona fide smash hit, an achievement that would be foolish to claim it did not deserve. But looking past its reputation, influence, and accessibility, is it truly a great game? A game that immerses its players in its system, that forges an intoxicating social contract around the table that demands to be returned to again and again? No, I regret to say that it is not. For every mechanical innovation or brilliant idea it brings to the table, there is another aspect of it that is overly random, clumsy, or tedious. And though Pandemic is undoubtedly an important work in the pantheon of tabletop games, it is also one that is hard to muster up the desire to play very often due to its multitude of issues.
Pandemic is a game about treating and containing the simultaneous outbreaks of 4 fatal diseases with the ultimate goal of curing them. It is played on a map of the world (notably missing New Zealand, as cartographers are wont to do) split into 4 colored regions with major cities highlighted throughout and lines connecting them. Before the game begins, a set of cards called the “Infection Deck” is shuffled and 9 cards are drawn. On each “Infection” card is one of the cities marked on the map, and they are color-coded to that particular city’s region. These 9 cards represent the origins of the 4 pathogens that have begun ravaging the world and the cities they denote are marked with “Disease Cubes” to track this: 3 cubes on the first 3 cards drawn, 2 cubes on the next 3, and a single on the final trio. These disease cubes are also color-coded by region, so a city in the yellow region will always generate yellow disease cubes and so forth. Once the stage is set, the players are each assigned a unique character with special powers, place their corresponding pawn in the starting space at Atlanta, and are dealt a hand from a separate set of cards called the “Player Deck”. Most of the cards in this deck, much like those of the infection deck, are also color-coded and correspond to the various cities across the game board, but there are also a handful of “Event” cards that act as single use abilities that can be played at any time. After the deal, the rest of the Player deck is then prepared by splitting them into a number of equal piles and shuffling an “Epidemic” card separately into each, the exact number depending on the difficulty level you’d like to play (we’ll be getting more into these Epidemic cards in just a moment, but for now just think of them as the embodiment of your worst nightmare and you’ll be on the right track). These piles are then stacked on top of each other and the game is ready to play.
A turn in Pandemic consists of three distinct phases: 1) player actions, 2) Player Deck draws, and 3) Infection Deck draws. Players are allotted four actions per turn of which there are a whopping 8 to choose from: 1) move from one city to an adjacent city, 2) play a card from your hand and move directly to that city, 3) play the card matching the city you’re currently in to move to any city, 4) move from one research station to another (there is only 1 research station in Atlanta at the game’s beginning), 5) play the card matching the city you’re currently in to build a research station there, 6) treat and remove a disease cube from your current location, 7) give/take the card matching the city you are in to/from another player in the same city, and finally 8) play 5 cards of the same color when you are in a city with a research station to cure the disease of that color. Once a disease is cured, instead of removing one cube at a time when treating it, you can remove all the cubes in a location with a single action. Furthermore, if you remove the last cube from the board of a disease that’s been cured, you have successfully eradicated that disease and it will not reemerge for the rest of the game. Nice work!
You may have noticed there are no actions in Pandemic that earn you cards, only ones that spend them. That’s okay, because after you’re done taking your actions you automatically get 2 free draws, adding two new cities to your hand or maybe an event card that will come in handy on a future turn. Hooray! But wait a minute… what happens if you draw one of those Epidemic cards you seeded the player deck with at the beginning of the game? A bunch of crap is what happens, that’s what. First, the “Infection Rate” goes up, meaning more infection deck draws will occur throughout the rest of the game. Then, you draw the bottom card of the Infection deck and add three disease cubes to it. Finally, you shuffle the Infection deck discard pile (at the beginning of the game there will be the 9 starting cards in it) and place it back on top of the Infection deck. That’s not so bad, right? What was all the crap earlier about nightmares? Wait just a minute. You’re forgetting the final phase of every player turn: Infection deck draws. According to the current Infection rate (it starts at 2), a certain amount of cards must now be drawn from the Infection deck. And each city that is drawn must now be assigned a fresh new disease cube. But if you just drew an Epidemic, that means the Infection rate may now be 3, or even 4! Even worse, the cities that have the most disease cubes on them are back on top of the deck, just waiting to be drawn and cause an “Outbreak”. Oh no, not outbreaks! The bane of every Pandemic player’s existence! How do they work?
Let’s back up for a moment and talk about game overs. There are three ways to lose a game of Pandemic. One is to deplete the Player deck before curing all 4 diseases, another is by running out of disease cubes for any of the 4 diseases, and the last is by having too many of the aforementioned outbreaks (which incidentally are also the likely culprit behind you running out of disease cubes). You see, a city in Pandemic can never have more than 3 disease cubes of the same color on it. If at any time you would place a 4th matching disease cube on a city, instead an outbreak occurs and every city adjacent to it gets a disease cube of the same color. Not good. Not good at all. Even worse, chain outbreaks can occur when multiple cities that are maxed out with disease cubes end up adjacent to one another causing multiple outbreaks to occur immediately one after the other. Indeed, things can go from peachy to catastrophic REAL quick in a game of Pandemic. So it’s up to the players to keep things under control as best they can, discuss the best course of action each turn, and skillfully manage their hands of city cards and events until they discover all four cures and proclaim victory over the scourge of disease before things get irreversibly out of hand.
At its core, Pandemic is a game of attrition. For every disease cube you remove from a city, more will appear elsewhere on the map at the end of your turn. This gradual tug of war is the primary source of tension in the game, and the system that determines the diseases’ spread across the globe is exceedingly clever, as delineated above. The problem with it is that attrition really isn’t all that fun. Taking a turn just to have the game largely undo your actions at the end of it gets tiresome fast. And as clever as it is, contending with the game’s “AI”, so to speak, feels just as often arbitrary as it does suspenseful. All in all, it is a less than equal replication of the dynamism of a real life opponent. This issue, alongside the fact that players have absolutely ZERO control over which cards they collectively acquire and therefore lack the necessary information to really strategize or plan ahead, turns the entire experience of Pandemic into a monotonous turn-by-turn optimization puzzle. Survive until you draw the cards that let you do the thing you want to do, basically. Yes, it can be enjoyable to figure out the best way of getting all the right cards into the appropriate player’s hands. And yes, the randomly assigned characters help with this issue by allowing a thin layer of proper strategizing to take place, even though the tactical use cases for each character are mostly quite obvious (the Researcher, who can give cards to other players without them matching the city they are in, and the Scientist, who only needs 4 cards to discover a cure instead of 5, is a particularly potent combo). Regardless, the winning condition of a co-operative set collection game being so mechanically intertwined with random card draws is a flaw that is very hard to ignore for someone like me that endlessly promulgates the virtues of player agency. Don’t get me wrong, the puzzle that Pandemic presents is still punchy enough to consider it an overall enjoyable experience, but I can’t help but feel a certain futility set in every time I play it.
One thing I find strange about Pandemic is that although it’s an exceptionally popular game, it consistently takes flak for its quarterbacking “problem”. I put problem in quotes, because I really see this as a non-issue. Groups naturally form hierarchies when they are trying to accomplish tasks together as a team, and the people ON such teams naturally slot themselves into said hierarchies in ways that suit their personalities. These unspoken hierarchies will of course look flatter or more vertical depending on the group. True, they may result in some interpersonal conflict from time to time, but that is an inherent potential consequence of any co-operative game. Just because these roles are not bound by the rules of the game and some may find the hierarchy of their particular group unpleasant does not mean this is symptomatic of a design flaw any more than an unpleasant meta that forms around ANY game. I feel largely the same way about king-making in competitive games, but I digress.
Let’s get back to the flaws that Pandemic actually DOES have. Here’s one: too much admin. Many games have a little upkeep to deal with at the end of every round; Pandemic has upkeep at the end of every turn. I don’t know about you, but I get bored of flipping cards and placing cubes and moving trackers every thirty seconds. Seriously, I think about a third of any given game of Pandemic is admin. When am I supposed to think, darn it!? And don’t you dare say on my turn, you uncivilized rube! Yes, I am well aware that players can just split the admin duty, but in my personal experience games tend to move along much more smoothly when one person takes the reins on these sorts of things. Pandemic is the rare exception to this. Regardless, the point stands: admin after every single turn is too much admin.
The last issue I’d like to point out is relatively minor, and that’s the theming. For all of the freshness of Pandemic‘s theme and clever ideas around its mechanical representation, there are some pretty jarring inconsistencies that push the game further into the abstract territory than you might initially think. The main offender is the player deck. These cards are acquired randomly, so what do they represent? I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ve never landed on a convincing answer. Information about a disease in Asia is as readily available in Buenos Aires as it is in Shanghai? Weird. It may seem like a small complaint, and it is, but it’s enough for me to disagree with anyone who praises Pandemic unreservedly for its thematic implementation.
And that’s Pandemic as far as I see it. A solid, if somewhat unexciting, co-op puzzler that spread through the world like a viral outbreak due to its standout marketability and accessibility. Undoubtedly, its immense popularity is at least partly due to the amount of categorical boxes it checks: it’s co-operative so approachable to newcomers, has a unique theme that appeals to gamers and non-gamers alike, is simple enough to be played with the family while still offering a crunchy set of mechanisms for those more experienced, is quick enough to get to the table on all but the most crowded game nights, etc. These are all laudable qualities in a game, I agree, but none of them make the game good. What makes the game good is the social experience it creates at the table, the satisfaction of coordinating and implementing effective tactical methods with your team and the shared joy of victory or shame of defeat. What keeps the game from being great is that so many other games are more stimulating, more challenging, have better pacing, are less repetitive, create more tension, contain more interesting choices, let you interact with deeper, more flexible systems, and — most importantly of all — create more exciting and memorable social experiences. Pandemic is a good game, and it earned its commendations fair and square. I would never dispute that, despite there being dozens of other games I would rather play at any given moment in time. I salute Pandemic for the reputation it has acquired for itself. It truly deserves it. I don’t even blame it for not living up to it.
Pandemic gets a rating of THREE out of FIVE, indicating it is WORTHWHILE.