Pandemic is designed by Matt Leacock and published by Z-Man Games. It is about the spread of diseases around the globe and the efforts of a disease control team to find a cure and save the world. It is another addition to the small group of interesting co-operative games released in recent years.

Each player takes on a different role, which gives them specific advantages in the choice of actions they take and the group as a whole needs to use these advantages to best effect in tackling the four diseases. On a player’s turn, he has four actions which will involve moving from city to city, treating a disease, building a research station or discovering a cure. He then draws two new cards, which will either aid the discovery of a cure or set off an epidemic in a new city. Finally, city cards are drawn which add to the spread of infection in the cities drawn. If a city ever reaches a fourth infection, an outbreak occurs and the disease spills over to each neighbouring city. Bad news especially as the players lose as soon as an eighth outbreak occurs. Each disease also has a finite number of infection cubes and, if ever these run out, the players are also deemed to have lost. The final way the players fail to beat the game is if the deck of player cards runs out. However, the players collectively win if they discover the cure to all four diseases before any of the losing conditions are met.

Pandemic will not be to everyone’s taste, like Nige who simply does not like co-operative games, but the theme is strong and there is certainly a large amount of tension when you see the infection cubes spilling out across the map. The game is also hard, even though there are three difficulty levels built in, and the combination of different roles adds to the replayability. We played with five players and all the roles were in use and selected the Normal (middle) level of difficulty. Being our first attempt, we didn’t play as efficiently as we might have done but still managed to find three cures before running out of player cards. However, we played the researcher slightly wrong, judging that the researcher’s ability could only be used as one of his actions, whereas it can be used when anyone chooses the Share Knowledge action. I did like Pandemic quite a bit once I had got into it and I think it would be a really good family game. I’d like to try this again soon with fewer players.