Pandemic The Board Game: Part 3

While it is probably unfair to judge a game that I have only won once on introductory level and lost once on regular level, I believe there are some overall points to be made.

Firstly, the idea of a cooperative game is rather new, or for me it is. All the board games I have played over the years have been player vs. player and if there was any kind of cooperative play it was often team vs. team rather than players vs. game. It makes sense to develop games that use this form of play as it is seen more often in digital games such as MMORPGs where players fight the ‘environment’ or the CPU. Despite all this, the game form doesn’t appeal at all to me. Whether it’s a flawed game form or if it’s just personal preference I did not enjoy the experience much. It didn’t seem as if we were playing a game, rather just we were discussing actions and the best things to do, much like a form of Model-United Nations. Since we weren’t competing against each other there seemed to be nothing at stake. Why wouldn’t we cooperate with each other? For me personally, I’d like to see a feature where players have to decide whether to help the team as a whole or help themselves for personal gains. This would add more realism to the game in my opinion, as certain people might only be willing to help in return of a favor or exchange of goods. This would really push the main emphasis of the game – cooperation.

The second design value that Leacock seems to have designed his game after is the idea of strategy. Player must work together in a strategic way. They must choose the right actions, go to the right locations at specific moments or otherwise they may risk losing. Extra strategy is added through the use of player roles. Each player has strong points that must be used cooperatively in order to achieve the objectives of the game. This is a really strong point of Pandemic.

Although this has little to do with the mechanics of the game, but I would have liked to see the player pieces that are connected to the player role cards to have been more interesting. A green player piece doesn’t indicate that it’s the operations expert. Using player pieces like in Monopoly would have added to the artistic and emotionally experience of the game. Players start to see themselves as their roles through the role cards that feature small drawings of each role but it stops as soon as they see that their researcher in full scrubs is instead a brown player piece.

Even though the cubes aren’t really visually appealing or interesting in any way, they are practical and serve their purpose. It is easy to spot when a city has three cubes on it that it is on the edge of an outbreak or epidemic. I do believe though that the names of the disease are a bit too generic. How unoriginal is the name “blue disease”?