Avidly Reads Board Games excerpt: Pandemic Mobile saved Pandemic … from me

Reprinted from Avidly Reads Board Games by Eric Thurm with permission from NYU Press, © 2019 by New York University.

A good game of Pandemic is like a frantic, multiplayer game of Tetris. At any given moment, there are several crises threatening to take over the board: Beijing teetering on the edge of an outbreak, a low supply of yellow cubes, only a few cards left in the deck. There are three different ways to lose a game of Pandemic and only one way to win. In this high-pressure environment, it’s easy to miss things — a connection between two cities that will cause a chain reaction in case of outbreak or the fact that getting to a research station in time to cure one of the diseases necessitates discarding one of the cards that made up part of the cure. If you’re playing it right, that game slowly transforms into your own B-movie, with equally dramatic stakes. Imagine a scene in Outbreak or Contagion in which the government is forced to engage in desperate triage, allowing certain cities and people to fall victim to the outbreak in order to ultimately secure a cure and save humanity. In my experience, the strategizing that goes into an exciting game of Pandemic rivals that of any finely balanced Eurogame.