Are you looking for a cooperative game to help with learning world geography? If so, you’ve come to the right place! Pandemic is just that – a fun cooperative strategy game that takes you around the world.
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Pandemic has a moderately-sized board with most of a world map on it, but unfortunately, it doesn’t include New Zealand. Country lines are not drawn, but you’re going from city to city. While I think this game is most useful for developing strategic thinking and working on resource management, it has helped all of us with geography.
Premise of Pandemic
The idea is that you work for the CDC in Atlanta and are one of seven possible specialists: Contingency Planner, Scientist, Medic, Operations Expert, Quarantine Specialist, Researcher, or Dispatcher. Diseases break out in nine different cities, and you and your colleagues rush to find cures for the four different diseases.
How to play
To find a cure, you need to collect five city cards of the same color (disease) and discard them together at a research station. Research stations can be built in any city on the board, but you do have to travel to that city. Eradication of the diseases is not required to win the game, just finding the cures.
However, with each turn, more cities are infected. If more than three disease cubes (of the same color) are placed on a city, there’s an outbreak and the disease spreads to the surrounding cities. If you have eight outbreaks, you lose the game!
One of the most important things to remember is to use the special abilities that come with your role. Those really make or break the gaming experience, so remember your unique ability and try to use it as often as possible.
Pandemic is a family favorite!
Pandemic is definitely a favorite in our family, and for many reasons! It’s a genuinely challenging game, even without doing it at a “difficult” level. This is not a game that we usually win. It can get frustrating. However, I like that. I enjoy being challenged, and I think it’s important for my kids to be challenged. Pandemic helps us teach our kids determination and perseverance, which I feel is so important. I also love having a really difficult cooperative game in our repertoire. We’re not always up for competition, even if we still want the challenge!
Ways to make the game easier
I introduced my kids to Pandemic when they were four and five. Yes, that’s really young, but we “cheated” to make it easier and had a lot of fun!
First, instead of adding four Pandemic cards (as the directions instruct for an introductory game), I think we only added one, or maybe two. The Pandemic cards increase the difficulty by quite a bit, so this really helped.
Second, instead of beginning the game by infecting nine cities, we only infected six: three cities each got two cubes, and three cities each got one cube. (The instructions say to also give three cities three cubes each.)
Finally, we ignored the hand limit of seven cards rule. Limiting your hand to just seven cards makes it difficult to get the five needed for a cure and have enough to travel to different cities. By ignoring this rule, we greatly increased what we could do.
After this initial game, we’ve been able to play by the printed rules and still have fun. It really helped us have that initial win, though. (My husband and I had already been playing the game for years when I introduced our kids to it, but it was so fun to have an easier win than usual.)
There are three different ways to lose the game:
1) If you get more than seven outbreaks.
2) If you run out of disease cubes. It’s important to stay on top of treating the diseases so you don’t run out.
3) If you run out of player cards. The player cards (you draw two each turn) do not get reshuffled when you run out. If you take too long to find the cures, you’ll lose the game.
Other versions
There are several other versions of Pandemic, too: Rapid Response, Contagion, and The Cure are standalone games. The Hot Zone games are shorter, more compact versions featuring specific continents (so far it looks like they have North America and Europe produced, but I’m sure more are forthcoming). On the Brink, State of Emergency, and In The Lab are three expansions. There’s sure to be at least one version of Pandemic that’s perfect for your family.
As you can see, Pandemic is a complex game with a lot going on. However, it’s so worth it to learn! Having a challenging, cooperative game has been so invaluable for my family, and there’s the added bonus of learning major cities around the world.
