Z-Man Games, Pandemic on the Brink, Board Game EXPANSION, Ages 8+, For 2 to 5 Players, 45 Minutes Playing Time

Pandemic: The Cure is a 2014 dice derivative of the best selling cooperative 2008 game ‘Pandemic’. Notice Before COVID.Do not be overwhelmed with the many dice in the box. Different colours, each colour its own pips and each ‘technical’ role (player) have their own dice to roll. You roll your dice, to get actions: Treat disease dice, get to the right location, get samples, take dice out of the treatment center. Unlike the original Pandemic, in The Cure the actions you can take are determined by what action faces show up on your role's dice: If you roll airplanes, you can travel all around the world but what will you be able to do when you get there? Get samples, but you need disease dice in the treatment center to sample! You need treatments, which lets you put disease dice into the treatment center, and you must be where the virus is endemic!The beauty here is that you don't get stuck with what you rolled. You can re-roll as many dice, as many times as you want, Remember though, 5 of your 6 dice faces are helpful actions but 1 is ‘Biohazard’. If you roll a Biohazard, you miss out on getting to use that dice for the rest of your turn and it advances the infection rate, causes epidemics and more. So do you re-roll and try to get a sample, risking the Biohazard, or do you use whatever action is already up? If you re-roll, how many times will you re-roll? Once? Twice? These choices are what make this game fun!Each player gets unique coloured dice depending on their role. The Medic has special dice faces that are good at treating diseases while the Scientist has a higher probability of rolling samples AND only needs 11 or more to cure a disease on a Roll for a Cure. The Dispatcher lets you move people around the board more easily, though the board is much smaller than the original game with 6 regions. Cooperative games like this work well.I love the linen finish and the art on the cards. The event cards are like the original Pandemic and the role cards are like ID badges. The dice all seem to be of good quality. You also get a cloth bag and location disks that are nice. The central score tracker it is very useful for tracking info, as a place for region disks, as a treatment center area.The rulebook logical, has examples and is well written: An easy game to learn from the rulebook. The back page even has clarifications on some specific role and event cards. Familiarity with the original Pandemic helps but is not needed.Obviously there is a lot of luck in this DICE game. You have the luck of the action roll, the way disease dice come out on the board, and Rolling for a Cure. The skill part really comes in working together, leaning into the strengths of your role, and taking educated risks based on probabilities. Normally if you get some really bad rolls and everything crashes and burns, it's short enough and easy enough to set up (~3 minutes) that you can just play again! I do miss the big world map, but I get more tension from the rolls and the overall fun crammed into a 30 minute is beter than the original game of 'Pandemic', good as I think that game still is.This is alot of game for the price: There is a "let's play it again!" quality and fun .RECOMMENDED

This a good cooperative game and the components are well made. The instructions are not that easy to understand initially, so would recommend watching YouTube play through alongside rules. It’s a pity Covid has tainted the title, as it’s a great game.

Another expansion, do we need it? The answer is a huge YES! We love Pandemic and all the spin offs. Having been through the 3 legacy boxes, Iberia and our own homemade board, England and Wales, we brought State of Emergency to add to our collection. A good game with added Hiterland boards, new variants and lots more cubes and meeples. Go on, treat yourself before the next real Pandemic. At least then you’ll have something to play in the lockdowns.

My middle daughter is 16 and usually ambivalent about board games at best.But in completing this she said, "That was really good. Can we get the next one?"Which given her usual nonchalance is probably worth more than the loud acclaim of all the more usually enthusiastic Board Game Geek pundits put together.Speaking for myself, I found each game so intense that I don't want to play the next one for at least another year. But that, also, seems like veiled praise when I stop to think about it. How many board games make you feel so invested that the experience can be described as "intense"?For now, we've moved on to Journeys in Middle Earth. It's less intense because the effects of winning or losing any game within the campaign is a lot less pronounced than it is with Pandemic.I'm not going to describe the game and the mechanics as such reviews already abound. But I hope that this description of our experience is helpful if you're wondering whether to bite the bullet on this game that you can only play through once (well, 12 times or so) before throwing it away. Worth every penny, in my view, and highly recommended.That said, here's a final caveat. I think you should probably be reasonbaly proficient at board games in general, and regular Pandemic in particular before giving this a whirl. We did quite well but our group had a strong contingent of veterans. I got the impression that if an inexperienced group played, the game might be a bit merciless to them. And if that were to put them off, it'd be a crying shame as this is, in my view, a masterpiece of a board game; wonderfully conceived and superbly executed in every way.

We’ll yes the instructions need a bit of decoding but, it just added to the enjoyment of the evening. It’s a good quality set which we will definitely be playing again.It’s small enough to take on holiday as well.