Game 131: Pandemic

 

It's rather hard for me to believe that in the 3 years I've been working on this project of playing through all the games on our shelves that we had not yet played this game.  It seems especially strange to me that we had not played Pandemic in the last 15 months, given that we've been living through one!  Pandemic (the game) is a cooperative game, one that we had often played but always with 4 people, and which we have almost invariably won.  This is our first time trying the 2-player version; we played last night and this afternoon, and we lost both times!  I'm not sure yet if the 2-player version is just that much harder or if David and I are just out of practice.  Despite our losses, we are eager to play again, and we have just left it set up on the table so we can get in another game tonight.  We do want to save the world, after all! And we are particularly motivated to do so given the times in which we live!

Above and below are a couple of pictures of the board early-on in the game.  The colored cubes represent infections, and the house-shaped cubes are research stations.  The goal is to find a cure for all 4 strains of the virus; what complicates that is that you're kept pretty busy trying to keep outbreaks from happening as you try to collect enough cards of each color to discover the cure for each strain.
In the 2-player game you start with 4 cards from the draw pile.  I started last night with 3 cities and a special event card.  I also had the role of Operations Expert.  The other card is a reminder of what constitutes an action; you get 4 actions per turn.
Here are the action reminder cards.
Last night David and I found two cures before losing (by emptying the "player cards" pile).  You can also lose by having more than 7 outbreaks occur or by running out of infection cubes of one or more colors.  I really thought we were going to win this afternoon.  We discovered cures for 3 of the 4 strains, and we even completely eradicated 2 of the strains, but 1 strain remined elusive, and we, once again, ran out of "player cards" to draw before we  found a cure for that 4th strain.
I felt like last night David and I weren't really on the same page in our game-play and that that's why we lost this cooperative game.  We were much more in sync this afternoon, and, like I said, I thought we were going to win quite easily, but it didn't happen.  So, tonight we venture forth again in our attempt to save the world.  Hopefully the third time is the charm!


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