Z-Man Games | Pandemic Rapid Response | Board Game | Ages 8+ | For 2 to 4 Players | 20 Minutes Playing Time

I recently got back into board gaming after many years not playing them and was looking for something different that could be played co-operatively rather than competitively. Pandemic was mentioned many times as a great example so I decided to give it a try. This is an excellent game. I've been learning the game and playing it 2 player with my wife and we are finding it very enjoyable. The core of the game is playing as two people with different roles trying to travel around the world treating disease outbreaks ( of four different diseases) and trying to find cures whilst the outbreaks of these diseases escalate and epidemics emerge. The game has a mechanic to provide the spread and escalation of infection and outbreak, it's very well done. My mind boggles at the game designer coming up with this. It's a clever game yet not too complex and we found it accessible and were grasping it quickly. Soon we'll be adding our friend as a third player and really look forward to it. It's a great game to get your working together, communicating and forming strategy to try to prevent a worldwide unbeatable pandemic. This is an excellent game. Very impressed.

If you are considering buying this item, then you will already be a fan of the Pandemic game series. Pandemic State of Emergency is the third expansion from Z-man Games for this amazing game. The three new games are: The Hinterlands Challenge, the Emergency Event challenge and the Superbug challenge. Of the three challenges Superbug is by far the most interesting and played in our household. The Hinterlands challege is played the least. I the Superbug challenge you not only have to cure the regular diseases but you also have to build vaccing centres and produce vaccines for the Superbug. Vaccines are the only way to treat the Superbug, you cannot treat it as you would a normal disease. It's very difficult but very enjoyable. The Emergency Events challenge essentially allows you to replace Epidemic cards with Events that work against you, these events can continue every round or may be one off events. The Hinterlands challenge expands the board by itroducing some new cities that can only be reached via certain locations. They represent cities that have animal diseases that have mutated to infect humans. At the beginning of each turn a special dice is rolled and depending on the outcome disease cubes are placed on Hinterlands cities. There are of course new roles including the veterinarian who works only in the Hinterlands challenge, the pilot who can travel much further than normal players and can transport another player along with him, the General who is capable of placing quarantine counters on cities, these essentially act to protect cities from infections. The quarantine counters can also be used without the General where placing a quarantine counter in a city becomes one of your actions. If you are reading this and do not have the base Pandemic game, buy it! Buy it now! It is the best game we have played and is also a co-operative game meaning all players work together to beat the game. If you already own Pandemic then buy this expansion, you will thoroughly enjoy the Superbug challenge, and the additional roles and features will enhance your gaming experience further.

Pandemic was the first game to introduce me to cooperative boardgaming. It became an instant favourite and still holds up very well. This should be a staple in every boardgame collection! In Pandemic, you must save the world by working together as a team to control viral outbreaks and cure diseases. How is it played? Pandemic is a turn based cooperative game where you can take up to 4 actions per turn. These actions involve moving around the world to different cities, removing virus cubes from infected cities, building research centres and curing diseases. After each turn, you draw cards to help you cure diseases (some of which may actually cause an epidemic which will spread a disease). And then you draw further cards to advance the viral outbreak. This finely tuned balance is what keeps the virus spreading so you have to work together to stop the spread as well as cure the disease. How do you win? You win if: - you cure all diseases (you don't have to eradicate them by wiping them off the map, but kudos if you do) You lose if: - You can't draw any more player cards - You run out of virus cubes and can't spread a disease further (it's out of control at this point) - You have too many outbreaks The key is to work together as a team and use each of your unique abilities at the most opportune times. It's a fantastic game that combines strategy, teamwork and luck! It's quite daunting the first time you play it, but after a few playthroughs, the mechanics become clearer and it can be enjoyed by players of all ages. If you have more than 4 players, it works quite well with one person acting as a host for the game and offering their insight to things you may have missed. It also has a lot of expansions which increase the replayability of the game, but in my opinion the core game is enough to start with for a while. This really is a great game!

I love board games. I've been playing Pandemic and its expansions for a couple of years and it's my favourite, so I was intrigued by the idea of Legacy but put off by the fact that it can only be played once and that you have to "deface" the board, some cards and so on. And it's relatively expensive. However, justifying the purchase as a gift for another couple with whom we regularly meet to play Pandemic, my girlfriend and I bought Legacy Season 1, and I'm so very glad that we did. Over four separate days and around 18 hours of game play we had a huge amount of fun. Any reservations we had about having to mark the board permanently or make changes to cards were alleviated almost immediately by how exciting it was to see the game evolve as we played it. Objectives and goals changed as we played out an interesting story with shocking twists and turns. There was one shock in particular which genuinely affected me as much as the biggest movie twists I've ever seen - the kind that you don't see coming at all and leave you reeling for days afterwards. When it was all over we all felt sad and perhaps my only criticism of this game is that, at the end, all you can really do is throw away the beautiful board and game components (some you could keep as spares for the original game). I haven't been able to bring myself to do that yet and maybe I'll think of some interesting way to preserve it. On a practical level, the rules are quite involved - some would say complicated - and, of course, they change as the game goes on (stickers are revealed with new rules which must be stuck into the rule book in designated spaces), but for the most part they're well explained and the rewards make it worth the effort. It's a lot easier to get to grips with if you've played the original Pandemic game before, and some of the early game play will be familiar to you if you've played some of the original game's expansions. Not only in terms of the hours of game play and huge fun that this game delivers but also in terms of the quality and quantity of things that the box contains which are added to the game as it progresses, Legacy Season 1 is unquestionably full value for money even at £55. We've now got Season 2 and will be starting that next week!

Pandemic is a great introduction to the world of board games for all those people who expect you to bring out Monopoly or Cluedo when you suggest playing one. Pandemic is cooperative game for 2-4 players about travelling around the world and fighting four diseases and takes around an hour to play. This theme is portrayed strongly through all the elements in the box, from the different roles you can take, the disease cubes spreading if left unchecked to the epidemics that occur regularly throughout the game. The cooperative nature of the game leads to a sense of togetherness as you play, as well as promoting friendly conversation around the table, and will be a new experience for a lot of players. The rules of the game are tight, simple enough to learn and convey a sense of being able to affect the state of the game without wholly relying on random elements. A single turn consists of a player taking four actions which include moving, treating a disease, building a lab and curing a disease. After this the player will draw two cards, most of which are useful but a few (4-6 as determined at the start of the game) are epidemics which cause the disease to intensify through making them more likely to spread. Finally 2-4 more cards will be drawn from a second deck to determine which cities either became or increased their levels of infection this turn. After this play passes to the next player and they follow the same turn structure. The game is won when all four diseases are cured which you do by spending an action at a lab and discarding five cards of that diseases colour. Curing a disease does not, however, remove it from the game, if there are still cubes of that disease's colour on the board it can still spread. To stop a disease from affecting the board again you must remove all its disease cubes from the board and then that disease becomes eradicated. This is not required to win the game, but in certain circumstances can make your like much easier. Losing the game can happen in a number of ways. One way to lose is the card pool you draw from each turn works as a kind of timer, if ever someone can't draw at the end of a turn you lose. Another way is every time you are told to place a disease cube on a city with three disease cubes of that colour already there you cause an outbreak which puts disease cubes of that colour on each connected city. This, in turn, can cause a chain reaction effect making you repeat the action (although never back to a city that is part of the chain) and for every outbreak you move the outbreak marker along a track, if it reaches the last space you lose. Another way of losing is if you run out of disease cubes of a certain colour and have to place one, the disease is classed as having infected too many people and the game ends. So that's the basic overview of the game and if it sounds entertaining to you in any way you should try the game out. Having said that there are a few downsides to the game. Firstly, as I said, if you are a beginner in the world of board games it is a great starting point, but if you are more of a veteran it is harder to recommend the game. The content, for me, feels a bit too light, and after a game or two you'll likely have come up with a strategy that works unless you get unlucky with card draws or your role cards (this is more of an issue in the two player version). After about half a dozen games I also felt like I'd seen pretty much all the game had to offer and it was consigned back to my bookcase to be used only when there was someone new to introduce into board gaming. Of course, this in itself should make it a buy for even the most grizzled veteran, a game that successfully introduces new people to more complex board games without them looking for the exit. To some extent the problems would be fixed by adding a few more surprises to the decks, which is what the On the Brink expansion does, except I can't really recommend that expansion on the basis there is so little physical content in it for the same price as the base set. So, in summary, if you are new to the world of board games and this sounds good, get it. If you are used to board games, but have friends/family/significant others who you'd like to try board games, this is a really good choice (although there are other games that fill this slot). If you are a board gamer without any of that though it is a harder shout, you would really need the expansion to get more than half a dozen games out of it and then you are talking £40-50 which could, in my opinion, be spent on better games including its big brother, Pandemic Legacy.

Great game!! Complicated to set up the first time we played, but found a video that talked us through. We then enjoyed it so much we've played it every day since! You need to work together to cure the virus as opposed to beating other players.

This standalone game is set in the Lovcraftian universe of other worldly ancient ones trying to break through into reality with the help of cultists, casting madness before them. Having played ‘Pandemic’ or any of the spin-offs is not necessary to enjoy this romp around Arkham, Dunwich, Kingsport and Innsmouth. Each town is connected by both traditional transport and a gate network through which the ancient ones are trying to break. The players take the role of investigators, each with a different ability to aid the team defeat cultists and prevent the shoggoths reaching the gates. Each turn consists of three phases: action, where each investigator may travel, trade cards or possibly use their special ability; draw cards which may be either location, mystical power or one of the four nasty evil stirs cards; and finally the summoning phase where cultists are added to the board and shoggoths may move closer to the gates. The aim of the game is to close all of the gates before all of the six ancient ones waken (which happens when evil stirs or a shoggoth reaches a gate and bad things usually ensue) or the game runs out of further cultists to place. It is a difficult game to win. My wife and I play two players each and it is still difficult to win. The key is co-operation between the investigators and planning ahead so that a player with four location cards can get to that location’s gate and close it. We often play our ‘no sanity’ house rule to make the game easier – investigators don’t lose sanity (when they become insane they are distinctly less useful) and to balance it we don’t have gate travel. After many games playing the house rules we now win more often than lose but it is still not easy and depends a lot on the four investigator characters in play. We have never won playing the ‘proper’ rules. The rulebook is very good with no ambiguities, the board is not enormous and the quality components are detailed and robust. The mechanics are easy to learn and the game flows at a decent pace. A fun game to play but difficult to win. With the range of investigators and the randomness of the card draws, no two games are the same although due to the relative simplicity of the gameplay, it can start to feel a bit ‘samey’ if played too much. Having said that, we do have quite a good collection of two player co-op games so we always have a variety from which to choose and ‘Reign of Cthulu’ does get played quite a lot. Rulebook: 10/10 Complexity: 5/10 Component quality: 10/10 Replayability: 9/10 Gameplay pace: 9/10

Bought this game after watching it played on Wil Wheaton's Tabletop and have been very pleased to add this to my stack, prior to this game I had not owned a truly co-operative game and to be honest I am not sure I will find another to beat it. First off the quality of the board and pieces is top notch, the look and feel is lovely and having played it a fair few times now no sign of wear and tear has appeared on any of the pieces or cards. The game mechanics are simple to understand and each player has access to a card that gives a quick run down of the basic turns rules/actions on a general level as well as any character specific rules on their cards. This neatly means once you've played it a couple of times you don't need to refer back to the manual. Which is nice. The game has one way to win, which is curing every disease, but many ways to lose which means even when you're a seasoned player and think you've worked out a solid strategy how to win you can be blindsided and lose. The difficulty level of the game can be altered as well using the number of Epidemic cards which is a nice touch so that you can gradually increase the challenge. Also the different player roles make each game different as skills you may have relied on previous games are now unavailable - the random selection process ensures people are forced out of their comfort zone which adds to the variety of the games. All in all this is a brilliant game to bring people together, especially in a regular group of gamers who spend their time working out ways to screw each other in a desperate attempt to win, you won't be disappointed to spend an hour playing this.