Pandemic: On the Brink - Tips & Strategies

I’ve used this strategy a few times and it makes me feel sorry about my friends. It’s really mean.

While playing as the bio-terrorist, use your first cards to spread some purple cubes near Atlanta and put yourself in a position of being easily captured. People will most likely try to get you, and by doing that they are just wasting actions when they should be positioning themselves around the world.

After that, don’t rush leaving prison. Draw as many cards as you can and spend the rest of the game destroying research centers and spreading purple cubes in remote places such a as Santiago or Johannesburg. You will be unbeatable, and your friends will constantly cry.

Good luck ruining your friend’s games!

One of the hardest strategies to beat the Bio-Terrorist is when he’s doing all he can to deny the purple cure especially when there is no Archivist or Re-examined Research event card in the game. The person playing the bio-terrorist(BT) needs to pay attention to the cities being discarded by the players, and build up his hand with those cities. The BT can then use remote infection to hit those discarded cities (or travel there), because the players need to have a card with the purple infected city for a cure. If played correctly, this will force the team to hunt down all those purple cubes to get a very difficult win.

In my group, when we play games with roles or characters, we prefer to be able to select which character we play. It only makes sense – if we’re going to invest our time to play, we want to play as what we enjoy. In Pandemic, choosing your Role can create very strong teams, but this can easily be balanced by simply making the game challenge level more difficult.

With 4 players, each selecting our Role, we use 6 epidemic cards, and the Virulent Strain. It makes for a decently challenging game despite the strong team we’ve put together. If we’re all veteran players, we’ll also add in the mutation challenge.

One of the strong points of Pandemic is the scalability. If you really enjoy a certain role os aspect of the game, don’t be afraid to bend the rules to get it – you can make up for it in many other ways.

We generally play challenging games, so it often seems pointless when there is little synergy between the character abilities. To handle that, we deal out two roles to each player and the group figures which ones to select for the game.

It used to be an argument when my 8 y/o daughter didn’t get the medic or the scientist but now we usually let her choose her role and then the rest of us draw randomly. We find she is much happier and willing to cooperate if she likes who she is playing and our randomly assigned roles still bring replay value to the game.

You’ve got enough to worry about with all the viruses to stop. Capturing the bio-terrorist doesn’t by you much except a turn or two as his hand is reset. You need to focus on the viruses and make sure the bio-terrorist doesn’t run out of his virus cubes either or set you up with another breakout.

The Field Operative (yellow pawn) is a very useful role. He can remove a cube from the city he occupies, and place it on his role card. That removes an infection cube from the board, which is always good. If the Field Op then collects two more cubes of the same color (once per turn), he can spend the three cubes and just three cards (of the same color) to discover a cure. This effectively increases the hand limit of the Field Op, as he can have two sets of three cards (two potential cures) and still meet the seven card limit.

In a cooperative game like this there always seems to be a type “A” personality that starts directing everyone’s turn. To avoid this simply make that person the bio-terrorist. This should give everyone else an opportunity to do what they want, not what type “A” wants.