The Pandemic Board Game: Why Aren't You Playing It?

If you aren’t playing the Pandemic board game during a pandemic, you should be!

TLDR: Pandemic has been one of my all-time favorite party night activities since it came out in 2008. I highly recommend this cooperative board game, especially if you’ve survived a pandemic.

Why the Pandemic board game is my desert island pick

If I could only have one board game on the shelf, it would be Pandemic.

The publisher says it’s for 2-4 players, but I have played it many times alone by just grabbing a few “role” cards and playing all the parts myself. It’s a cooperative board game, like Arkham Horror, and like the first half of Betrayal at House on the Hill. Everyone plays together to try and beat the game itself.

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Each player takes on the role of a CDC specialist, while four diseases break out around the globe. Get ready for excitement as you use your special abilities to discover cures and treat infected cities. It’s important to remember which cities have already been infected, so this game is a real memory-tester.

It’s also a colorful visual explanation of how Pandemics spread, which for those of us who just lived — or more accurately are still living — through one, can be informative, interesting, and surprisingly cathartic.

More reasons to love playing the Pandemic board game

If you don’t believe me because I’m the kind of nerd who loves the most difficult board games ever created, there are over 15,000 five-star reviewers on Amazon who agree with me

Each player has to rely on their fellow players to conquer the plague. The [Pandemic board game] is great in that it builds team building and cooperation in order to win. Everyone wins or everyone looses based on how they work as a group.
Five-star Amazon reviewer

The premise of the game is really cool (and relevant). You and your team of experts need to research the cure to four different colored viruses. Can you do it before it takes over the world? Can you save the world? You’ll have to play to find out.
Five-star reviewer on Amazon

While many games pit one player against the other, [the Pandemic Board] game encourages players to put their heads together in order to get ahead of four different diseases which threaten to infect the globe.
Five-star review on Amazon

Believe me yet? There are thousands of reviews like that. They are from families, board game experts, and people who only play the occasional board game at a party.

This is, according to many of them, their favorite game.

Learn on easy, play on hard

There are three levels of difficulty. I only played the Easy level once, just to learn the rules. And I recommend that as a strategy. Not just in this game but in all games that have levels.

But I like a challenge and, though I am competitive, I don’t mind losing to learn. It makes winning more satisfying. So I went straight to the Hard level after that one game, and have never gone back. I only win about half the time, but I always have fun.

Once you love Pandemic as much as I do, your next purchase should be Pandemic Legacy. There are “Legacy” versions of many games now. The idea is that the game itself permanently changes as you play it. Pandemic is the perfect game for the Legacy genre.