Remember how, on my birthday, I delivered vegan cupcakes to my Saturday night time RPG session for the advantage of a fellow player who is a vegan? Well, reputedly, in case you solid your cupcakes upon the waters, they shall go lower back to you in surprising approaches. Our vegan cohort surprised us at that exercise session with a present: a brand-new duplicate of the board recreation Pandemic: The Cure. We're large fanatics of the unique Pandemic sport, which we have got played with our RPG agency and numerous others, so I bet he knew it modified into a few component we would love. Awww!
Pandemic: The Cure isn't an growth to the unique Pandemic sport, however as an alternative a stand-on my own sport based totally definitely on the genuine. The essential premise is the identical: the gamers are a group of scientists looking to fight 4 exceptional illnesses (represented on the board via cubes of numerous colorings) which can be threatening to turn out to be pandemics. The way the game plays is likewise similar in many procedures to the precise Pandemic. Most of the Roles (specific talents that character players can take) are similar to inside the true game?The Medic, the Scientist, and so on?Though there are a couple of new ones brought. And a number of the sport mechanics work the same as nicely, together with the manner you treat ailments (removing one dice at a time until a cure is observed, after which you could put off them abruptly) and the way outbreaks rise up (having extra than three sickness cubes in a vicinity motives the disease to unfold to neighboring regions). So every person who has played Pandemic will probably find it very smooth to investigate this new variant.
However, this version isn't always similar to unique Pandemic in three important processes:
- First, the game "board" is much simpler: instead of a map of the world with different cities on it, there are just six major regions, each represented by a cardboard circle, in which infections can occur.
- Second, there's an additional element of chance: each player has a set of dice to roll on every turn. That roll determines which moves the player is allowed to make on that turn (although they can be made in any order). It also determines how fast new infections occur: for each die that turns up with an "Infection" result, you have to add more disease cubes to the board. If you don't like the results of your die roll, you can try rerolling some or all of them, but each time you do you run the risk of getting more Infection results.
- Third, the infection cubes themselves are also dice, which can be used as "samples" to help the players find a cure. On your turn, if one of your player dice turns up a "collect samples" result, you can us that die to pull a cube from the board and add it to your personal collection. At the end of your turn, you can roll the dice for all the samples you've gathered, and if the roll is high enough, you've found a cure. That means that the more samples you gather, the better your chances of curing the disease. The downside is that collecting samples ties up your player dice, so you can't use them for other actions. So deciding how many of your dice to use for this purpose is a key element of the game, one that doesn't appear in the original Pandemic.
I'm not prepared to say that I actually like Pandemic: The Cure better than original Pandemic. They're both very enjoyable, and I think original Pandemic, despite its complicated setup, may be a more elegant game to play. But since they fill different niches in terms of how long they take and how many players they require, I think there's no need to choose one over the other. They're both well worthy of a place on our game shelf.
So, that brings my thrifty birthday bash to its conclusion (though I still have my free Starbucks drink to cash in at my leisure). I hope it's been enjoyable and instructive for you as well. Next week, back to the regular routine.
