Today we are talking about Pandemic the board game. We are going to discuss what themes and mechanics it has, why it is so popular and what makes it different to other board games.
Transcript
hello and welcome to the decking awesome
games podcast my name is owen and i’m
joined pretty awesome kyra and brian
hello today we are talking about
pandemic the board game
we’re going to discuss what teams and
mechanics has why it is so popular
and what makes it different to other
board games we’ve played pandemic loads
of times
some of my best board game memories are
with this game so why is pandemic
awesome pandemic is a really flexible
game
it’s perfect for people who have never
played
any advanced board games before and are
looking to get into something with a
little more substance than your
scrabbles and
old-fashioned board games it is it’s got
a really strong team
and it’s about getting rid of four
disease spreading throughout the world
and it’s a co-op game so it means that
it’s not so overwhelming
for people coming in but i guess there’s
kind of a lot of different elements
that are wrapped up in that i i think
its replayability is my favorite bit
about it because
every game is different where the virus
start and spread is set up by a
randomly drawn deck of cards and then
each new virus that comes out is always
random again on top of that and i know
the cards will start repeating
themselves as epidemics start coming up
but the fact that it’s different and you
have to focus on different areas and you
can play different roles and
different focuses and different
strategies for winning it means that
you’re never playing the same game twice
it does have massive replayability
without
complexity of changing around the setup
to make it different
yeah i love that i love that
replayability and variety it brings in
especially for a teamwork style game it
means that if you’re
you know advanced playing this game
you’ve played a couple of times you can
bring in new people to hobby
you can all work together and there’s no
sort of competitive edge to it
but it’s still a fresh and new game each
time you pick it up and play yeah and
for the casual or people coming in who
wouldn’t have maybe played so much
before
being able to adjust difficulty levels
and
adapt the game based on the characters
played and
loads of different mechanics put in it
while still keeping the game quite
simple
means that it can be approachable for
anyone starting out
yeah it also has a lot of spin-off games
coming out of it
pandemic’s been around for a while now
so it has a lot of different
types of add-ons and own separate games
in our own right
there are lots of games like that like
fall of rome where you’re fighting off a
horde of
marauders coming in to destroy rome
there’s also
legacy games where it’s got this kind of
compelling story arc to it where you
play over multiple games
there’s a whole bunch of different
spin-offs to pandemic which are really
exciting and
really kind of entertaining i love the
legacy games the
the fact that it’s basically just the
base game of pandemic
where there is consequences for your
decisions during the game
if you decide to go uh we won’t worry
about south america just leave that be a
problem unto itself
next game south america is going to get
you yeah i love that consequences and
stuff
that’s a it’s a very kind of new style
of board game you can only play it once
but by the end of that legacy game you
do get a copy of pandemic that you can
play with
yeah it’s just such a fun style of doing
that you do after you finish pandemic
legacy season one you get to
you get a pandemic game well we love the
game mechanics
they fit really well into the team and
that cohesiveness is what really draws
us to a game i think in general
the team is that a group of skilled
epidemiologists
travel around the world trying to save
it from a virus so your player board is
a map of the world it matches in
the viruses spread with tokens
so you can kind of see it spread like
you would on pretty much
any maps of pandemics that come out and
then
the cards give you a feel for time
traveling so as cards are drawn
you can feel the the pandemic lengthen
so it matches really well i like that i
like the kind of
you know you’ve only got a couple of
actions on your turn so you have to
use them wisely now are you going to go
and
deal with the outbreak that’s happening
across the world and try and get all the
way over there to just
mitigate it a little bit so it’s still a
problem but it’s not devastating
or you know do you try and cut off
another virus and try and get it cured
before
it starts growing out of control too so
you kind of have to make the decisions
on you know
sacrifice here in favor of here or try
and play the long game and hope you
don’t run out of cards and
as you said with the the time passing in
the game with the deck of cards that you
don’t run out of them before uh
everything goes to crap yeah because at
the start of
pandemic it gives you like a set of nine
locations
where the pandemic begins and so
hopefully they can be kind of grouped
together
you might have like a few in asia you
might have a few new europe and then
it’s up to you to kind of decide all
right well
there’s one kind of that keeps popping
up in south america
but like we can we’ve only got three
players here we can’t kind of deal with
that there might be other ways you can
kind of
get back those cubes to him so that kind
of choice you have to make is
very kind of cool very kind of
interesting and thematic yeah i think
that that
i guess africa and south america because
they
point outwards it can be really hard not
that we haven’t sacrificed asia a few
times yeah
um the only reason why i think about
europe so much is because there’s always
an outbreak in europe so it’s always
safe
to send somebody over there to hang
around because there’s so many cities
that leaving somebody there is like a a
valid game move i think
you start and you start the game in
north america so north america does tend
to get
sorted out pretty quickly yeah unfairly
advanced fairly yeah
if you started off in south america or
started off in africa we definitely
would have sorted those out
yeah but you start off in america and
europe has too many cities
yeah and i think the some of the some of
the times
that i think have made the most
interesting games are when
you start off and the nine cities you
start with
are like in two continents so you’re
like we’ll focus on those two planets
and then the first 16 cards you draw
are all in like a third continent and
then you have to decide
am i going to sacrifice to like two
rounds it’s going to take to
send somebody to that continent because
you can’t build a center there
unless you’ve been there before so you
have to like go the long way
that first time and you really have to
like
sacrifice a cause of limited actions is
a feature of the game
you really have to like commit to
whatever you decide to do
yeah that way off between short-term
strategy and long-term strategy where
save your save yourself now and
potentially doing yourself
for the end game or you know take the
hit now take a couple of bruises in
hopes of having a
good strategy in the long run actually
that works quite well with the
cooperative side of it as well
because everyone has their own abilities
that differ from each other you know you
have to decide
should i use my turn to set up my
teammates
so that their turns are easier and they
can make a bigger difference or
should i spend my turn just curing the
area around me to
make it easier to to avoid an outbreak
where i am
so you kind of it’s one of those games
where you have to work together
but you also have to work for yourself a
bit as well yeah i think the
player specific roles comes into this
quite a lot as well so like each player
takes on whether they’re like a medic or
researcher
or a dispatcher that kind of brings it
in together
to make it a lot more thematic and
everybody has their own kind of role
inside the team at different strengths
and advantages and yeah
i love the medic you have to play with
the medic
he is so powerful you can’t win pandemic
if you don’t have a medic
it rhymes it must be true one of the
most
interesting mechanics in the game is the
cooperative element of the game
every player is working together so you
know teams that work together well
playing the game
really have a big impact on
how likely they are to be successful so
if you’re gonna have some vigilante
who’s just like
i’m gonna sweep into this set of cities
and be the hero and
save this area but that actually doesn’t
help your long-term goal
or if they have the cards you need to
win what you really need is for them to
not save a set of cities but actually
hand over their cards to you
that really has a really big impact on
on whether you’re going to win or not
you have to kind of give up a lot of
your individual goals
in order to to get the collective to win
yeah it’s a it’s a hard mental switch
for some players to do
i’ve seen it a couple of times where
players will still think hello to
cooperative game
they’re gonna try and be the best at
being the cooperative game and so
they’ll use their cards to help them get
the places and take things out and
they’re kind of doing a very good and
individual effort individual effort
doesn’t mean a whole lot in pandemic
you can’t win on your own yeah that’s
true because while you
may have made a devastatingly brilliant
move
you’re the person who’s going next can’t
do anything because you’ve just ignored
them and
they’re going to start taking scars and
injuries because you know there’s
outbreaks in there
in their area and you’ve just swarmed
off
saving the rest of the world while
abandoning them
the game has great replayability so i
think that
no matter how many times we’ve played
the game we’ve always found it
interesting
i don’t think we’ve ever won the
hard mode easily i don’t think it’s ever
been a walk in the park
because of the way it’s generated and
how big the world is
even if you constantly get clusters in
one area
and you can fight them off and you
dedicate your time fighting them off
there’ll always be one round where you
get
a bunch of cities that are nowhere near
anything that and
if just left untended that will
eventually lose you the game if you
don’t do anything about it
so i think that sort of strategizing
and having to decide on risk really has
an impact
on its replayability because there’s a
lot of variability
another big thing about replayability is
the epidemic cards it’s a very
kind of easy and simple way to
understand how to add in difficulty
so like you’ll have you know three
epidemic cards in a player deck want to
make it kind of easy and you can just
keep adding in more and more
as you want to play and changes the game
quite a lot because the less epidemics
you have the more chance you have to go
to different
locations around the world so if you put
in loads and loads of epidemics
you’re more or less saying that the
spread of the outbreak is going to be
concentrated onto the less locations
making it more difficult but in a
different way so you can have the focus
and it can be a little bit tricky for
new players to understand they have to
kind of split the deck
into like seven different parts if
you’ve got seven epidemic cards
and then kind of shuffle them in but i
just say just do it try it
you don’t really have to understand why
you’re doing it and then play
and then you’ll understand why it’s
there afterwards the instructions are
pretty clear like
the i know there was a few very
technical questions probably more in the
legacy games than in the normal game
but it felt like the instructions
covered
everything if you just blindly followed
them for setup you were you got to the
end and you ended up with a good game
even if you didn’t understand why
you had to do some of this stuff okay so
what makes pandemic different
to other games i think pandemic has a
unique blend of you know
a cooperative element but an easy to
pick up game
so like if you sit down you’ve never
played a game before you’re playing with
one or two people who maybe who have
you can figure out fairly quickly how
how to play and what you should be doing
and
you know because it’s cooperative you
can work with those people and
be like oh you know what if i went over
here and they’re like oh well you know
we can we can get over there on our next
turn you probably need to focus over
here and then you can
you can kind of work together so you
feel involved in the game from the word
go
but also you don’t need a huge level of
understanding to get into the game
because it is
relatively straightforward and even if
you don’t win your first couple of games
you kind of your strategies start
getting better and better and you learn
where you need to
concentrate your efforts especially
depending on the different roles you
have
so it’s very easy to pick up and it’s
very easy to
get good at and then if you get too good
at it throw in a few more epidemic cars
ramp up the difficulty
yeah because it’s tricky to understand
that there’s very limited actions that
the player can make
they pretty much just can like move they
can take away cubes and they can play
cards
and then you also have this thing of
trying to find the vaccine
but the vaccine thing doesn’t come into
later so
it can be very easy for a new player to
come in and just start messing around
but those very small actions can build
up they can you can get yourself into a
bad position you have to have a good
long-term scope of it but for new
players they don’t they can just go
i have a disease i have a an outbreak
right beside me
i’m gonna go over i wanna sort it out
and it’s going to help and you have to
understand why
and then as the game progresses they can
kind of understand
the kind of meteor depth of the game
and i think that it rewards an
analytical approach
to solving how to do this so
maybe you want to stay on the border of
an outbreak
and kind of wander around the border
over to contain it or maybe you want to
go straight into the center
and wipe it out from the middle but it
rewards that your choices if they’re
logical
and if you you keep a clear head while
you’re making them so i think that that
that’s another thing that usually when
we pick a good
strategy and we stick to it that’s when
the games go smoothest
so it kind of shows that you’re kind of
a little bit in sync
and obviously the playing
things like your role your role which is
like a career
to your advantage so we’re all like the
medics and things like that
yeah there’s a couple of different
strategies for actually winning
and which is pretty good like most of
them are kind of pushing down
the outbreaks but you also have choices
you’re gonna make of
after you find the vaccine do you then
push it across the world
because the goal is to find the four
vaccines not to make sure everyone in
the world has the vaccine
so it can be tricky to weigh the pros
and cons
oh yeah do you focus on eradicating the
disease so none of those cubes can come
up again or do you
just go well it’s cured let’s just deal
with it as it pops up
and try and cure all the other ones so
once you have the vaccination for them
all you know you’ve won but
you know sometimes it’s worth taking
that extra couple of turns just to
eradicate it get all the like yellow
cubes off the board and then
bam don’t have to worry about yellow
cards coming up ever again yeah because
if
you start off the game and you’re
getting a lot of like re like red cards
that are coming from asia you’re
probably better off eradicating it
because then all those cards when they
come up nothing happens you don’t get
any more cubes in the board and you can
kind of focus on it
but like if you get a variety of cards
at the start you know you got to weigh
that up and down maybe it’s not worth it
it also depends on your roles
because you know different roles mean
different strategies so if you’re like a
dispatcher
you’re probably not going to be moving
around a lot you can be kind of giving
the advantage to someone else to do
stuff but it depends entirely on what
you want to do and you can also
make come up with your own strategies
yeah that’s it’s an interesting game
because you don’t see a whole lot of
great cooperative games like this so
it’s always a great
game to have in your board game
collection especially if you’ve just had
like a very competitive
few board game nights with your friends
and a lot of kind of aggressive fighting
and
like a lot of and you just want to like
retouch
as to why board games are awesome it’s
because you’re playing with friends and
you’re all playing together
pandemic is a great one to bring out to
realize that we’re all kind of just
having fun together
rather than trying to beat each other
save the world and save your friendship
it’s one or the other
like i think the quality of the game as
well like even though you know
the pieces are quite simple like you’re
just playing with pawns you’re not
playing with little
really elaborate pieces unless you’ve 3d
printed your own and if you have kudos
send us a few will you but you’re just
playing with little ponds and moving
around but like i mean
you’re not you’re not in it for the high
quality miniatures it’s the
you know the little kind of glossy
looking cubes and
the pawns running around knocking them
off the board and
stuff like that it just feels like a
good quality game with very simple
pieces but
that work perfectly for the game itself
and they
this it seems like it was played has
play tested very thoroughly before it
was released
like it seems that the different areas
on the on the map
all have different kind of attributes
but they’re all balanced like
you can make a lot of different choices
in the game and it feels like you do
have an impact based on what you choose
and also that that impact is kind of
matches what you would expect
the impact to be and the the trackers
make logical sense it kind of the cards
tell you when to move them and things
like that so you don’t forget about them
as much
as like sometimes it can be hard to
remember a tracker
or were terrible for forgetting to move
first player tokens around
but in this game it seems like it
logically happens as part of the flow
and there’s not too much keep track of
there’s only two trackers outside of the
actual
map and then everything else you’re
putting or cubes on the board so you
kind of feel like
it’s quite easy to follow and the cues
are
quite a good visual indicator of how
well you’re doing
yeah and you don’t want too many cubes
the board just full of them and you’re
going well we’re definitely dead in two
turns
yeah because so much is done with the
cards and
going through the card deck and that
adds a lot of variety and stuff like
that
it’s quite easy to keep track of then
without having extra mechanics in to
show events happening or time passing
yeah i love it it’s kind of simplistic
very well done and kind of clear are
there any other areas of pandemic that
show off how awesome it is
i mean i know we talked about it a bit
earlier but the legacy games
i like i actually think i prefer the
legacy games to the base game as
as amazing as the base game is the
legacy games are amazing because
it does have consequence it does have
follow-on
you know you’re you’re basically playing
pandemic over the course of 12 months
so you play january february all the way
up to december
and the first game is just you know a
basic game of pandemic but
you know maybe the virus mutates or
maybe there’s extra complications or now
you can’t
build in this area or now you move on to
february and
now all of a sudden the areas that
you’ve let get out of control
now they’re very problematic because now
the mutated virus can’t be cured and
now you’re struggling to find a way to
beat it and i
don’t want to give too much away from
the legacy games but
it just gets crazy out of hand and just
when you think you’re on top of us
the game throws you another twist like
oh open box h there nothing to worry
about and then you open up
oh my god this is going to destroy us in
the next game i cannot believe this
or you choose a strategy and you are
like this is a great strategy we are
sorted
and you paid three months with that
strategy and you invest heavily in that
strategy because
a lot of the decisions you make have an
impact later so like you have to invest
in some things you have to invest in
like building things or you have to
invest
in doing things but one of the
strategies we chose
on one of the types of actions you could
take we invested in for months
and and only to read one of the boxes
and go
oh no yeah that has a really big impact
on destroying our strategy
if you chose this strategy
you’re screwed yeah and you might think
like listening about
the legacy games especially with
pandemic that you’re just kind of like
playing january and then you rip up a
lot of cards
and you put in new cards for february it
really does depend on what you do in
january
when it comes to legacy games so you’ve
got like site objectives and you’ve got
like other things you can do
and depending on how far you get to them
or what happens in your game
board state then you’ll start to like
read parts and then it’ll be like kind
of
different things will happen to your
game than it would someone else playing
in january
it’s like when we finish legacy there’s
lots of boxes that weren’t opened for us
that’s because there’s things that we
didn’t let happen or things that we
didn’t push
and then so then that makes our game
totally different and also on each
location and everything else you can you
know you know do buildings and outbreaks
might happen and stuff for death so
you can then affect the boards that when
you start the board again and you play
in february
the outbreaks might happen worse in some
places and they wouldn’t
or the city might be like more damaged
yes it is easier to kind of take over
and you can invest in trying to fix
things that you might mess up in one
game yeah you can spend the next few
games giving
any benefits that might happen at the
end of the game to a particular area on
the board
that maybe suffered because you ignored
it for one of the games
yeah you might feel bad if you’re like a
normal board gamer looking at legacy
games going i don’t want to rip up
board games i don’t i don’t want to get
to like you know july and then find out
that
we’ve lost and we can’t do anything but
i wouldn’t worry too much about it i
just
like play the game you won’t get into
that issue you know if you lose twice i
think it tells you
that you’ve lost but yeah you just keep
playing if you lose twice it just goes
here open a box that makes this easier
move on to the next month pretend
everything went well yeah you can’t you
can’t lose like just try and try and
just go with the flow
don’t take it all too seriously and i
just kind of
enjoy the experience of playing a living
game yeah
and i know like some some out there
might be hesitant to go look i don’t
wanna i don’t wanna drop this money on a
game that i’m just gonna end up ripping
up and then throwing out when it’s over
i mean you could frame the board some
people apparently frame the boards
ours is sitting in a box up in our study
so
but like at minimum you get 12 games out
of it and if you
only get 12 games out of pandemic legacy
you have played a phenomenal game
you have not lost you’ve had nothing go
wrong for you and you’ve made all the
right decisions from start to finish
pat yourself on the back that was well
worth the money you dropped but
if it didn’t go as great for you you
know maybe you get
14 16 18 games out of it because you
know you’ve lost a month so you have to
replay it
and it’s actually it’s it’s brilliant
you never feel like
it’s a waste of money because it’s a
game you just keep coming back to and it
just keeps evolving and
changing so i think it’s i think it’s a
great investment if you’re
looking for a legacy type game to play
yeah i wasn’t as impressed with season
two as i was with season one i
really i’d recommend season one to
anybody see the production quality was
actually better and the components and
the
visuals were a lot better but i don’t
know i thought season one
it was just more kind of compelling i
think in season two they had to bring in
quite a lot of complex rules
so they kind of i guess there’s only so
much
there is a limit on what you can do with
pandemic so they brought in
a different situation and those rules
added a little more complexity then
i think the simplicity of pandemic is
where like
real beauty lies and some of that had to
be lost in season two to make it more
interesting and more different
yeah so if you’re considering starting a
legacy game go for
season one and then build up to season
two because season one is still just the
base game
with added complications whereas season
two is a
is a whole other ball game unto itself
yeah when it comes to
like other pandemic games i really enjoy
pandemic to cure because i love dice
and so they’ve added in dice into
pandemic it makes it much easier to take
out and kind of play
you know it’s a smaller board you kind
of have to roll dice and
based on those you kind of get different
actions you can do so it’s got to kind
of push your look
kind of element to it so it’s a
different kind of game than pandemic
but i think people who enjoy pandemic
and enjoy dice games
would really like pandemic to cure it’s
a little bit less strategic
doesn’t take as long so i think don’t go
into expecting a more deep game
it also takes up less table space so
it’s good for moving around
i think i quite like it because it kind
of focuses on that simplicity there’s
kind of a very limited area it’s not as
strategic
but good if you just want to burn a
short amount of time playing something
that you really enjoy
i suppose it makes sense this own you
just love
the cure with your you know what let’s
call it spade a spade your dice
addiction
it’s an addiction it’s not doing me any
harm
in a hobby
[Laughter]
that’s just because he rolls well just
normal for a person i have hundreds of
dice in their houses
pandemic fall of rome was another one
that we played it’s
probably more i don’t know it’s
very good game bush it’s very different
from normal pandemic
i would say that it because it’s about
armies and moving them around
it’s a little more aggressive and yes
i guess the virus in pandemic does act a
bit like an army moving forward
so maybe it’s not i guess the team
i don’t associate with the team as much
but i definitely
like like the gameplay like the gameplay
is good having to move troops around
getting places
takes time and you have to open up
corridors so all that strategic and
long-term view
impacting your short-term plans like
that that stays true
in the fall of rome version but yeah i
guess the only thing that i say is i
probably don’t
associate as much with the team as i
would to pandemic
yeah pandemic tried to branch out to
other different types of teams
because the same principle of the game
applies this is not to be about
outbreaks of diseases it can be about
anything so they have one where there’s
like water going over
amsterdam and you have to kind of build
dams all over the place
and then you have a hamster damn yeah
[Laughter]
and so that’s kind of because like
disease kind of spreads like water so it
kind of makes sense from a
mechanical point of view they’re just
trying what teamwork works for this and
then obviously for
follower on the team has had this so
they’re trying different kind of teams
see what works there’s a lot of cool new
mechanics in fall of rome that if you’ve
played
pandemic before you’ll understand them
really well but you’ll also be
entertained but it’s new kind of
mechanics and how they link in so if
you’re feeling like
you don’t want to get involved in a
legacy game or you finish the legacy
game and you don’t really want the
kind of um standard version of pandemic
definitely check out fallout rom or
these other ones
yeah i think we’re just mentioning
follow him it just needs to be the best
one out of the mix
of these new team pandemics
but i think that’s maybe that’s just my
opinion because it’s got dice in it
when you attack stuff you can roll a
dice to see if you win rather than
previously where you just it’s an action
to win
in pandemic yeah i have to say i’m very
excited to see what uh
what comes out of the pandemic family of
games next but
they they seem to keep pitching winners
so yeah we are recording this as
coronavirus is spreading through the
world we hope everyone stays safe out
there
wash your hands wear a mask and socially
distance look out for the most
vulnerable in society
that pretty much wraps it up for
pandemic the board game if you enjoyed
it
share it we’ve been decking out some
games thanks for listening see ya
bye
