Pandemic is a modern-day classic — you can buy it at WalMart right next to Monopoly. It’s widely praised for its cooperative gameplay, making it a great introduction for people put-off by the competitive nature of board games. Working together to stop a global pandemic — how hard can it be?
You’ll sometimes play unwinnable scenarios.
Like many other fully-cooperative games, Pandemic pits the players against the game itself. Therefore the game is randomly generated based on some simple systems, to present new challenges as the game progresses.
Naturally, the randomness can yield small problems that aren’t solvable, or worse, whole games that aren’t winnable. For a game that is praised for its systems, situations like these shouldn’t be possible. The fact that they are makes losing a confusing process. Did you do something wrong that you could learn from, or was the round just unwinnable?
Heroic difficulty is challenging even to the most experienced players, which is the result of harsher results from the random decks. This makes it clear that unwinnable games are more frequent in Heroic. Surely you want more of a challenge after beating lower difficulties, but increased impossibility seems like a defect of the system.
Weirdly enough, it can be played solitaire.
The base game of Pandemic is two to four players, yet it can be played with just one. One person can self-deal two to four roles, with an appropriate amount of hands at the proper sizes. From there, they can just play the game start to finish.
Competitive games require other players to play against, but cooperative games don’t have that necessity. A well-designed cooperative game would have players depending on each other to complete an objective. Pandemic presents players with a puzzle to solve together, but they really don’t require each other.
As the most experienced Pandemic player at the table, you wouldn’t need or want the input of less experienced players — it would just be less optimal, especially in Heroic difficulty where there is very little room for error.
Unfortunately, this means there will be a lot of leader-bullying in Pandemic. It makes sense to allow the most experienced player call all the shots, since they probably know what to do. As the most experienced player, you’ll want to tell people what’s optimal, but you wouldn’t want to run the game, because then you’d be playing it solitaire.
Fail-states reveal manufacturing shortcomings.
You can lose Pandemic in three ways: If eight “outbreaks” occur, if you run out of player-cards or if you run out of disease cubes. Eight outbreaks feels arbitrary, but at least it’s a clear losing-criteria. The rules refer to an empty player deck as “running out of time,” which doesn’t make much sense — Does time elapse faster in games with more players? That doesn’t quite justify it.
Then there’s disease cubes. If disease cubes need to be placed, yet there’s not enough to do so, the players immediately lose. This seems like a cop-out. There should be more cubes included in the box, after all, they’re just tiny pieces of plastic. This reads as cost-cutting from the publishers, not a game mechanic.
The verdict is in…
The cooperative aspect of Pandemic doesn’t matter at all, therefore is less of a game and more of a puzzle. And at that, it’s a puzzle that is sometimes unsolvable, making it a bad puzzle. There’s no way that Pandemic is worth playing as a puzzle, let alone as a game. Therefore, I reluctantly must sentence Pandemic to death.