There were nine of us this week so two tables of five and four players was the order of the day. My group of five started off with Pandemic: The Cure which nobody other than I had played before. This is a very close reworking of Pandemic but with dice dictating what actions the players can take and the large map being replaced by six continent tiles. On a player's turn they roll their dice and take actions according to the symbols rolled, such as moving between continents, treating infections and bottling up samples. However, you can also potentially roll a biohazard symbol which increases the infection rate and can cause outbreaks to occur, bringing more disease dice into play. In addition, if you get more than three dice of the same type on a continent, an outbreak occurs and the disease spreads to a new continent. If you ever reach 8 outbreaks, you lose. If the infection rate gets too high, you lose. And if you run out of disease dice to bring into play, you lose. You win by finding cures to all four diseases and this is done by using the bottled up samples. All the sample dice you have collected are rolled and if you score thirteen or more pips, that disease is cured.

Our game was doomed from the start due to the ineptness of the scientist who only needs to roll 11 to cure a disease. However, I was the scientist and my dice-rolling was terrible. Even with five dice, I still failed to find a cure and all the time, more and more disease dice were coming out of the bag. The outbreaks were piling up and the dice bag was getting very low. Thankfully, king of the dice-rollers, Mark G, had a chance to find a cure, our second of four, and so everything would start to turn in our favour. But Mark's skill with the dice also failed him and the very next time we had to infect regions brought with it two further outbreaks and the world succumbed to its horrible disease-ridden fate. Good fun even though we lost - and that was on the easiest level of difficulty.