Z-Man Games, Pandemic Fall of Rome, Board Game, Ages 8+, For 1 to 5 Players, 45-60 Minutes Playing Time

Pandemic: The Cure is a 2014 dice derivative of the best selling cooperative 2008 game ‘Pandemic’. Notice Before COVID.Do not be overwhelmed with the many dice in the box. Different colours, each colour its own pips and each ‘technical’ role (player) have their own dice to roll. You roll your dice, to get actions: Treat disease dice, get to the right location, get samples, take dice out of the treatment center. Unlike the original Pandemic, in The Cure the actions you can take are determined by what action faces show up on your role's dice: If you roll airplanes, you can travel all around the world but what will you be able to do when you get there? Get samples, but you need disease dice in the treatment center to sample! You need treatments, which lets you put disease dice into the treatment center, and you must be where the virus is endemic!The beauty here is that you don't get stuck with what you rolled. You can re-roll as many dice, as many times as you want, Remember though, 5 of your 6 dice faces are helpful actions but 1 is ‘Biohazard’. If you roll a Biohazard, you miss out on getting to use that dice for the rest of your turn and it advances the infection rate, causes epidemics and more. So do you re-roll and try to get a sample, risking the Biohazard, or do you use whatever action is already up? If you re-roll, how many times will you re-roll? Once? Twice? These choices are what make this game fun!Each player gets unique coloured dice depending on their role. The Medic has special dice faces that are good at treating diseases while the Scientist has a higher probability of rolling samples AND only needs 11 or more to cure a disease on a Roll for a Cure. The Dispatcher lets you move people around the board more easily, though the board is much smaller than the original game with 6 regions. Cooperative games like this work well.I love the linen finish and the art on the cards. The event cards are like the original Pandemic and the role cards are like ID badges. The dice all seem to be of good quality. You also get a cloth bag and location disks that are nice. The central score tracker it is very useful for tracking info, as a place for region disks, as a treatment center area.The rulebook logical, has examples and is well written: An easy game to learn from the rulebook. The back page even has clarifications on some specific role and event cards. Familiarity with the original Pandemic helps but is not needed.Obviously there is a lot of luck in this DICE game. You have the luck of the action roll, the way disease dice come out on the board, and Rolling for a Cure. The skill part really comes in working together, leaning into the strengths of your role, and taking educated risks based on probabilities. Normally if you get some really bad rolls and everything crashes and burns, it's short enough and easy enough to set up (~3 minutes) that you can just play again! I do miss the big world map, but I get more tension from the rolls and the overall fun crammed into a 30 minute is beter than the original game of 'Pandemic', good as I think that game still is.This is alot of game for the price: There is a "let's play it again!" quality and fun .RECOMMENDED

Pandemic is a great introduction to the world of board games for all those people who expect you to bring out Monopoly or Cluedo when you suggest playing one. Pandemic is cooperative game for 2-4 players about travelling around the world and fighting four diseases and takes around an hour to play. This theme is portrayed strongly through all the elements in the box, from the different roles you can take, the disease cubes spreading if left unchecked to the epidemics that occur regularly throughout the game. The cooperative nature of the game leads to a sense of togetherness as you play, as well as promoting friendly conversation around the table, and will be a new experience for a lot of players.The rules of the game are tight, simple enough to learn and convey a sense of being able to affect the state of the game without wholly relying on random elements. A single turn consists of a player taking four actions which include moving, treating a disease, building a lab and curing a disease. After this the player will draw two cards, most of which are useful but a few (4-6 as determined at the start of the game) are epidemics which cause the disease to intensify through making them more likely to spread. Finally 2-4 more cards will be drawn from a second deck to determine which cities either became or increased their levels of infection this turn. After this play passes to the next player and they follow the same turn structure.The game is won when all four diseases are cured which you do by spending an action at a lab and discarding five cards of that diseases colour. Curing a disease does not, however, remove it from the game, if there are still cubes of that disease's colour on the board it can still spread. To stop a disease from affecting the board again you must remove all its disease cubes from the board and then that disease becomes eradicated. This is not required to win the game, but in certain circumstances can make your like much easier. Losing the game can happen in a number of ways. One way to lose is the card pool you draw from each turn works as a kind of timer, if ever someone can't draw at the end of a turn you lose. Another way is every time you are told to place a disease cube on a city with three disease cubes of that colour already there you cause an outbreak which puts disease cubes of that colour on each connected city. This, in turn, can cause a chain reaction effect making you repeat the action (although never back to a city that is part of the chain) and for every outbreak you move the outbreak marker along a track, if it reaches the last space you lose. Another way of losing is if you run out of disease cubes of a certain colour and have to place one, the disease is classed as having infected too many people and the game ends.So that's the basic overview of the game and if it sounds entertaining to you in any way you should try the game out. Having said that there are a few downsides to the game. Firstly, as I said, if you are a beginner in the world of board games it is a great starting point, but if you are more of a veteran it is harder to recommend the game. The content, for me, feels a bit too light, and after a game or two you'll likely have come up with a strategy that works unless you get unlucky with card draws or your role cards (this is more of an issue in the two player version). After about half a dozen games I also felt like I'd seen pretty much all the game had to offer and it was consigned back to my bookcase to be used only when there was someone new to introduce into board gaming. Of course, this in itself should make it a buy for even the most grizzled veteran, a game that successfully introduces new people to more complex board games without them looking for the exit. To some extent the problems would be fixed by adding a few more surprises to the decks, which is what the On the Brink expansion does, except I can't really recommend that expansion on the basis there is so little physical content in it for the same price as the base set.So, in summary, if you are new to the world of board games and this sounds good, get it. If you are used to board games, but have friends/family/significant others who you'd like to try board games, this is a really good choice (although there are other games that fill this slot). If you are a board gamer without any of that though it is a harder shout, you would really need the expansion to get more than half a dozen games out of it and then you are talking £40-50 which could, in my opinion, be spent on better games including its big brother, Pandemic Legacy.

My middle daughter is 16 and usually ambivalent about board games at best.But in completing this she said, "That was really good. Can we get the next one?"Which given her usual nonchalance is probably worth more than the loud acclaim of all the more usually enthusiastic Board Game Geek pundits put together.Speaking for myself, I found each game so intense that I don't want to play the next one for at least another year. But that, also, seems like veiled praise when I stop to think about it. How many board games make you feel so invested that the experience can be described as "intense"?For now, we've moved on to Journeys in Middle Earth. It's less intense because the effects of winning or losing any game within the campaign is a lot less pronounced than it is with Pandemic.I'm not going to describe the game and the mechanics as such reviews already abound. But I hope that this description of our experience is helpful if you're wondering whether to bite the bullet on this game that you can only play through once (well, 12 times or so) before throwing it away. Worth every penny, in my view, and highly recommended.That said, here's a final caveat. I think you should probably be reasonbaly proficient at board games in general, and regular Pandemic in particular before giving this a whirl. We did quite well but our group had a strong contingent of veterans. I got the impression that if an inexperienced group played, the game might be a bit merciless to them. And if that were to put them off, it'd be a crying shame as this is, in my view, a masterpiece of a board game; wonderfully conceived and superbly executed in every way.

Really enjoyable from an 8 yr old to grandparents