Ladies and Gentlemen, Tomorrow (or today depending on when you read this) Saturday April 5th is International Table Top Day so I encourage you to celebrate! You can do anything from playing a game with your friends to finding the local game store and seeing what they have going on. If you’re not sure if your town has a store then I urge you to turn to the amazing Google, yes Google, for your gaming needs. I live in Santa Cruz County in California and we have four different locations that are celebrating so you’re bound to find a store near you. My hometown of Watsonville has a place called The Gamer’s Den where I will be attending the Tabletop Day festivities. It’s not a huge day, but it gets bigger each year and it’s my goal to help to bring tabletop games farther into the spotlight.
Dust off your board games that have been sitting in your closet. Take your magic cards out and play a quick hand. You could even go to a store and buy a new game! If you don’t have any ideas then check out the post Christmas blog I wrote entitled Play More Games! But you know what else I could do… I could write a new game review! Now there’s a thought! But what should I write about?
There are a lot of great competitive board games out there but I’m not sure I want to suggest a game like that for Tabletop Day. After all, I’m trying to encourage people to come together and play more games. Even though you’re all playing a game together it’s so easy to get wrapped up in your own strategy that you forget to talk and have fun. So today, let me talk about one of my favorite cooperative games. It just also happens to be one of my favorite games of all time. That game is: Pandemic.
If you’ve ever watched Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop or if you’ve ever set foot in a game store you may already be familiar with Pandemic. It was released by Z-Man games back in 2008 and it plays 2-4 players. If you have the first expansion On The Brink, then you can play up to 5. The third expansion In The Lab allows up to 6. For the purpose of this review I’m going to focus on the original game.
Pandemic is all about eradicating the four most dangerous viruses in the world. You have to go around the world working on a cure and fighting the spread. In this game you take on multiple roles like the scientist, operations expert, dispatcher, medic, and researcher. Each role is important and works best at different times of the game. The Operations Expert is amazing in the early game and the Medic is a beast near the end.
I’m going to be honest with you. The game isn’t all sunshine and holding hands. You’re going to lose most of the time. You’ll be so close to winning and then the very next turn could spell doom. There is only one way to win and that’s by wiping out all of the viruses. There are, however, four different ways to lose. You could get decked (no cards left to draw), you could run out of virus cubes (how the virus is represented on the game board), or have ten outbreaks.
The game works against you every chance it gets and you need to constantly talk to your friends to plan what you should do for that turn. That is why I love this game. It’s challenging so when I win I feel a great sense of accomplishment and my gaming group and I don’t want to push each other into traffic by the time were done. We have a good time even when we lose and more often than not we start a new game right away to try again.
If you have a copy of Pandemic then bust it out for International Tabletop Day! Or go to your local game store and pick up a copy. It’s a great game that’s challenging and fun. Allow me to give you some advice though. Get rid of the decked lose condition. It’s stupid.
