A rash of diseases have broken out around the word and only one team of highly trained specialists (Ben, Mike, Owen and me) can find the cures before mankind is wiped out. That’s the premise behind Pandemic, a new game that we played last night. This is a co-op game where each player has special abilities to help combat the spread of the diseases while ultimately trying to find a cure for each disease. But be careful, there is only one way to win and many ways to lose. You win by finding the cure for the four diseases. But while you are doing this, the entire group must also work together to keep in check the diseases in cities all over the world. Failure to do so causes outbreaks (very bad.) An outbreak is where the disease suddenly spreads to surrounding cities. This could cause more outbreaks and if you are not careful, you could lose the game this way–like we did during the first game. Once again we all blamed our loss of the first game on Ben. This is a common theme. The only slightly less common theme is the rest of them blaming me for losing the game. Something I have yet to understand.
We were better able to manage the diseases in our second game. This one we won but it was very close. Only one player card remained in the stack. We would have lost at the end of that turn. Fortunately Mike was able to cure the final disease so we saved mankind and went on to become medical celebrities.
Pandemic is a pretty quick game, about 45 minutes for normal folks. That makes it about one hour 15 minutes for our group. We had time for one more game, so Mike pulled out Key Largo. You can read all about Key Largo in last week’s blog. This was pretty even-keeled game. No terrible turns for anyone. I thought I was doing spectacular. I was rolling in money and that’s how you win. Unfortunately, so was everyone else. In the end, I came in last. Last! How could this happen? Ben snuck by Mike and Owen for the win.