Blossercubbles

Firstly, the petry dishes are just adorable. Secondly, the best things about this expansion are the new roles. the five base roles were (and still are) fantastic, but these new roles all embody something different that the core five wouldn’t have dreamed of, home in Atlanta. Flying around like crazy isn’t a bad thing, anymore, since there’s a role for that! Discarding cards isn’t quite so taboo, since there’s the Archivist for that! Finding cures with five cards getting you down? The Field Operative would like a word with you!

On top of the additional roles, we also gain a few different ways to play (and make the game a bit more difficult). The Mutation option adds a fourth (purple!) disease the game, which can be cured by a combination of any five location cards, so long as at least one of them shows a location with a purple cube. It spreads…in interesting ways, as well as the standard outbreak. Whenever a card is drawn from the Infection Deck, if it has a purple cube on it, add another one. There are also special Mutation Spreads cards in that deck, which work similarly to Epidemics. In the Hero Deck, the mutation can also…mutate, by adding one cube to all spaces with one purple cube, etc. It’s an interesting shift.

Additionally, there is the option to make one disease way worse than the others, by naming it the Virulent Strain. This disease will spread faster and harsher than the others, thanks to special epidemic cards with added text, many of which link together to cause mayhem for every turn to come.

Finally, there’s the Bioterrorist method of play, which lets one player become the antithesis of what Atlanta bred, and he/she will spread disease around the board (moving in SECRET), while the others try to find HIM, as well as cure the diseases.

Of course, all of these can be combined at once for an exciting game of Virulent Mutated Bioterrorists. This just takes a great game and gives it more options. There isn’t anything that hampers the original at all. Like a good expansion, it only expands the best!

I’m sure others have mentioned this before, but co-ops sometimes have a fault tied to them. You see, when everyone works together, sometimes a leader emerges, and the game can devolve from a team, into one person playing the game, others doing as he/she states. Pandemic, unfortunately, can easily fall into that, having a Supreme Science Expert detailing possible choices for each player…helpful? Yes. Necessary? Not at all.

The game itself is fantastic. Players are dealt one role, which bends a single basic rule for them. You were told you needed five cards of a colour for a cure? Not if you’re the scientist. You can heal only one cube per action? Not if you’re the medic. It’s nice to have each player focused on one aspect of the game. The Researcher is a powerful character, made even more so by the help of a Dispatcher. The way the roles interact is fun and exciting!

After you deal with how your role affects the game, you may notice that there are an awful lot of diseases around the world, and that’s when the real game starts. The goal is to fine a vaccine for each of the four diseases, and doing that requires a small bit of thought from our trusted team of scientists. Utilizing their hand of cards (which are in limited supply, and should be used sparingly), players can move swiftly around the board, keeping the cubes at bay. For, when one disease accumulates too many cubes (a fourth would be added), it spreads to all adjacent locations, causing a headache for everyone. (In my experience, Asia hates us the most, and will accumulate more disease cubes at the start than anything else.)

After all the good actions of quelling the disease, finding cures, being happy, there is a second phase of bad-ness. The Infection deck has a card for each location. After the happy turn, players draw cards from this deck relative to the Infection Rate (which increases as Epidemics are drawn from the ‘Good’ deck) and place one disease cube of that cities colour on the city pictured. So, the plague continues! Yay!

This game is really excellent. The Roles are great and different, the disease forms in a variety of ways, and while each game has a similar feel to it, you’ll never get the exact layout you had before. The only thing that hampers this game is the possibility of an Overlord becoming rampant, but the little people can revolt if that happens.