Pandemic - Tips & Strategies

When my wife and I play this two player, we found the Medic+Dispatcher to be highly useful. Once you have a disease cured, you can have your Medic simply move to a city to automatically remove any disease cubes from there with a single move. On the Dispatcher’s turn, you can then move the Medic. You can eradicate diseases very quickly this way.

Just a quick tip for anyone starting out with this game:
Balancing all of the elements and mechanics of this game is tough as players, and we found in our early games that we got very sidetracked trying to stop outbreaks and keep on top of the virus growth. This led to a lot of losses, especially from the draw pile running out. It sounds obvious, but you can only win by curing all the diseases. Take positive risks and get those cures out – this is your best strategy. Sometimes it is good to let a few outbreaks happen if it means you can get a cure or two on the board. We have found a win at this is always a close shave!

This tip is about the second of two new Roles included in the Pandemic 2nd Edition (as well as the App version of the game): the Quarantine Specialist.

The Quarantine Specialist is a support role, preventing any additional disease cubes from being added to the city she currently occupies, as well as any adjacent cities. In contrast to the Medic, who can quickly tamp down rampant diseases, she is a passive support role, acting best to stop localized Epidemics, re-infections, and/or Outbreak effects.

This Role works best with mobility effects, such as Dispatcher and Operations Expert — being able to quickly deploy to a suspected hot spot will help keep things under control. The Quarantine Specialist prevents even full Epidemic infection, should you be fortunate enough to pull a city that she is in or near. The real value, though, is in preventing re-infection. By keeping careful tabs on the discard pile, you will know what cities are due to pop up again after a new Epidemic, and can try to get them quarantined. Stay near a location that is likely to cascade Outbreaks, and you can neuter the usual pain of re-infection. Outside of that, move her in circles if not sending her across the map, cleaning up disease cubes in a radius around her protected area.

The best Event cards to combine with the Quarantine Specialist’s ability are Forecast, which will let you decide where the problem areas will be, and Airlift, which will move you quickly to a troubled location. Since this Role needs to be mobile, it will be more challenging to use her to transfer needed cards — it may be more beneficial to use her as the collector of one color and to attempt to connect with other players wherever possible. She is one of the better Roles to use cards from hand for air travel, since she may not be able to pass cards to others without other support.

Quarantine Specialist is a challenging but rewarding Role, allowing a player to slow down the game just enough to allow their team to save the world.

Don’t be will-nilly about your event cards. Most of them need to be saved for the right opportunity. Remember that anyone can play them that has them and it doesn’t have to be your turn to play it.

1. Government Grant – probably the only card I would play right away as soon as I get it. Plop a station near a hot zone to get cures faster and help expedite air travel.

2. Airlift – save to help get someone with cure to a research station ASAP. If you can’t wait that long, use it to get someone to a place that is about to cause a chain reaction of outbreaks.

3. Quiet night – save this for when things get really bad to give yourself a breather. Preferably when an epidemic card has occurred and you know that it’s not going to be good during the next infection phase.

4. Resilient Population – save this for at least when a couple of epidemics have occurred. That way you know which cities are giving you the most trouble for potential or past outbreaks. Remove that evil city from the game with this card! You still need to remove some cubes from said city to prevent chain reaction of outbreaks.

5. Forecast – definitely save this if you’re dealt this at the beginning. This card only works once enough infections have been drawn, and works even better after one or two epidemics. Being able to plan the infections really helps things out as opposed to not knowing what’s coming next. You can position your people better and slow down potential outbreaks.

In my ongoing search for new and exciting variants that add to a games theme and narrative I present to you this new, exciting, and simple variant set up. Note: This variant does not require the Bio-terrorist rules included in the expansion.

When setting up the game, instead of drawing 9 cards from the Infection deck and placing Disease Cubes (3 lots of three, 3 lots of two, and 3 lots of 1), draw only one card.

Place 3 cubes in this city. Next place 2 cubes in all cities directly connected to it (as if there had been an Outbreak in that city, but with 2 cubes instead of 1). Lastly place 1 cube in each city directly connected to a city with 2 cubes in it that does not already contain a cube (so if a city is connected to two cities with 2 cubes in it, it gains only 1 cube). Overall this should create a “ripple effect”.

All the cubes placed during the set-up should be of the type generated by the city card drawn, regardless of the city that they are being placed in.

Other than this adjustment to the original set-up, the game plays normally.

The impact of this set-up does allow the players to concentrate their efforts into one area, which is beneficial to them but, with far less cards in the Infection Discard Pile and the concentration of cubes in one area, any early Epidemic draw is likely to be devastating. So all in all, I suspect that this variant will lead to a game that offers a greater level of challenge, that will vary only based on the initial city card drawn.

Intuitively, outbreaks are “bad”. Any player, with basic rules knowledge, knows to prioritize eliminating cubes from locations with three cubes to prevent an impending outbreak.

With experience, we learn that some outbreaks won’t lose us the game and can be tolerated (ie. locations bordering other colors and/or ones that will spread to minimum locations).

The opposite occurs when there are two potential outbreak (3 cube) locations adjacent to each other. This becomes a top level threat. Should either of these “burst” during the infection phase, you will have a chain reaction that could rapidly take you from minimal outbreaks to losing. Deploy your relief efforts to this area as soon as possible.

It’s very easy to get all riled up and distracted by the inexorable spread of the diseases from city to city, but it’s important to remember that to win the game, you only need to find the cures, not exterminate the diseases. I’ve been surprised by how many times my friends and I have let disease clean up take us off track.

Even though it would be nice to completely wipe out a cured disease, it can distract you from keeping the main active viruses in check. Only sunset a disease if it’s almost gone, and the opportunity for it arises where it doesn’t cost much in actions to complete. Otherwise, keep focusing on the hotspots.

People often miss that the Researcher can give away location cards on her turn **or on another player’s turn** when characters are in the same place (see rulebook at the bottom of page 5 if you don’t believe me). This makes it easy for the Researcher to load the Scientist up with needed cards to cure diseases quickly.

Use the Researcher to collect cards from other players (the normal way) and then dump them on the Scientist. Don’t waste Researcher cards on traveling unless absolutely necessary.

The 2nd Edition of Pandemic includes two additional Roles, which are also represented in the App version of the game. Contingency Planner is one of those, a Role that is simultaneously very powerful and very narrow.

The Contingency Planner is able to take an action to retrieve an Event card from the Player Discard Pile. They can only hold one retrieved Event card at a time, but it does not count towards their maximum hand size. When the retrieved Event is used, it is removed from the game. This allows each Event to be used twice — up to a total of 10 uses in the base game.

Multiple uses of Events can shine when your team has notable deficiencies. Government Grant and Airlift re-use can make up for not having either the Dispatcher or the Operations Expert. It can also avoid catastrophe, by using One Quiet Night earlier in the game to stop an outbreak before one of the diseases is cured, only to still have the card available for the late game push. Resilient Population can remove cities where you won’t have presence for a while, if you suspect an Epidemic is close to being drawn, and using it twice can really soften the blow if you hit two Epidemics in a very short span. Forecast is always good immediately after the epidemic hits to hold off the worst disasters for a turn or two, and having the option of doing it again may make the difference between success or failure.

The downside to Contingency Planner is that without Events, he’s a warm body — someone to move around, share cards, and remove disease cubes. If you aren’t drawing Events, or if you’re holding onto a stored one for a while, he doesn’t do very much. Make sure that you know which Events to retrieve earlier rather than later — there’s no downside to letting one sit in the discard for a while, since it won’t leave before you can retrieve it.

Contingency Planner lets you use Events from the group’s hands earlier, which can be useful when attempting to collect the number needed to create a cure. Any Event in a player’s hand counts against their limit of seven, but a retrieved Event doesn’t.

Finally, the value of the Role increases sharply once the expansion(s) are mixed in, as the number of Events in the deck increases.