I really, really hate that game. Not just for its outdated design (the first question asked by every new co-op should be: “How do we AVOID all the problems of Pandemic?”), but mostly because to this day you STILL have people insisting on bringing it to the table. For some reason it has a reputation as a gateway game, but it totally isn’t unless you count letting the quarterback take your turns for you (in which case, Arkham Horror, Eldritch Horror, and Fury of Dracula are just as much gateway games).
Its one and only stand out attribute was being a forerunner of the board game renaissance but it’s so outdated and awful to play today. Seeing people play it in 5-1 BC (Before COVID) is like going to a video game meetup and having someone push for Goldeneye.
I’m going to speculate that if we could count the number of people who were brought into board gaming by Pandemic, it would totally disprove anyone’s claims that it’s not a gateway game. It’s supposed “problems” are problems for gamers, not for most casual or novice players. As I’ve said around these parts before, the solution to quarterbacking by experienced players is for experienced players to be experienced (and conscientious) enough to not quarterback! (Or, actually, “…to quarterback as much as their fellow players want/need them to.”)
It’s not hard to shut your mouth and let the team make some mistakes if you care more about everyone having fun and learning the game than you do about winning.
It’s a shortcoming, for sure. One that’s been improved upon since.
Boardgames are played by humans. If the design doesn’t hold up to humans acting like humans, then yeah a chunk of blame can be laid on the design.
Pandemic’s historical significance is an entirely different thing. It was a gateway game more for being released in 2008 because there wasn’t much else, and most hadn’t even heard of the concept of a co-op boargame before. Ticket to Ride could still be called a gateway game because it’s so damn simple, and few games have matched that kind of super simple addictiveness. So many games have surpassed what Pandemic does in the past 13 years that it doesn’t have much value outside a nostalgic museum piece, exactly what Goldeneye is to multiplayer shooters.
I’m with you on this. Complaints about quarterbacking are mainly a factor of social dynamics. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a design that allows or even encourages quarterbacking.
Frankly, it’s one of the most specious complaints you can make about Pandemic. I have my share of issues with that game, but the fact that one person can play it isn’t one of them.
What an odd claim. I guess I have relatively high standards for the people with whom I play boardgames. No boardgame is going to prevent someone from punching me in the nose if he’s a sore loser. But I would never play boardgames with someone who did that. And it’s not the fault of any game’s design.
But I stand by my point. It’s absurd to blame the design of Pandemic for the fact that some people thinking “helping” means “telling someone what to do on his turn”. That will be the case in literally every co-op game that doesn’t have a traitor mechanic or hidden information among the players. It’s a people issue, not a design issue.
I would call traitor or hidden information mechanics advancements in the genre for that very reason (how well games implement them is another matter).
Before trimming my post, I was going to cite your claim that Fury of Dracula is really a 2 player game. I fully agree, as the hunter team is always only as effective as their weakest member. Is it a people issue or a design issue that the game is worse off at higher player counts than 2?
Traitors don’t automatically fix the quarterbacking problem, as evidenced by my one and only play of Shadows Over Camelot, which was punctuated with “if you don’t do exactly this action, you must be the traitor!”
Never claimed they did. But they were an attempt at refining the genre to break away from a problem, and most of them were an improvement on Pandemic.
But you point out exactly why I avoid nearly every pure social deduction game. There IS a formulaic “must” strategy to a lot of them for the optimal way to suss out traitors. You could ignore it and risk losing for more fun. The question then becomes, how much do you have to dance around the best way to win in order to have fun? If a game isn’t fun when following the best strategy to win, how is that NOT a design issue?
In 2000, the arguable king of board game design at the time, Reiner Knizia, released a cooperative game based off of a beloved and widely recognized set of novels called The Lord of the Rings, published by the biggest board game publisher in the world, Hasbro. It didn’t become a gateway game and kick off a boom in cooperative gameplay.
And don’t say there “wasn’t much else” in 2008. 2007 had Agricola, Race for the Galaxy… I can’t even begin to list all the notable games that were around that year alone.
Pandemic stood out because it is a well conceived game, well executed. It has a theme that is relatable to a wide swath of potential players and fits nicely with cooperative mechanics. It has a board design that makes a map of the world readable and navigable. It has a challenge level that results in you failing most of the time–until you’re well practiced, anyway–but still wanting to try again rather than give up. It has systems that leave you with a sense for where the turning points in each game were, and often what you might have done differently. None of these are trivial accomplishments.
You are free to enjoy other games more. You can point out games that have consciously built on Pandemic, or were designed in response to it. But you can’t just label it a historical curiosity that came around at the right time.
Pandemic was great, read awesome, for bringing my group in to larger and more complicated games. They love co-op. We play Dead of Winter these days, but there are just some games I would not play with some people. I know who they are. For newcomers, I just start with different games to read how competitive and social they are while playing.
Pandemic is still played though. We didn’t leave it behind entirely.
I guess we’re still pushing for Goldeneye then! The friends and family that we can get together with with any kind of frequency all enjoy Pandemic, to the point where it often gets requested. There are other games I’d much rather play but so many folk we’ve played it with (who are relatively new to boardgames) have had a great time with it and as a result wanted to play more boardgames. This is in recent years too so I’d say it’s still a gateway game.
Quarterbacking is a people problem though. I should know, I want to quarterback but I’m not an arsehole!
Well said, and that’s a really good point about the turning points because after most games we discuss how if we’d done X or Y that would have led to Z. The mounting tension and despair as another epidemic card is drawn is shared around the table (and some of the locations you’ve just played being dealt back out again is a really cool mechanic). For folk who are only familiar with things like Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Cluedo/Clue etc. Pandemic is very exciting and dramatic, but accessible, and because it’s co-op it’s not so intimidating either.
I like the epidemic mechanic in Pandemic. It’s clever, and the only thing in the game that actually feels like it has anything to do with the theme.
Count me another person who thinks quarterbacking is a people problem. At their best, cooperative games are fun because you are brainstorming problem solving with other players. One person just running everything is a failure of that social dynamic based on the personalities involved. I do think the game design is relevant, of course. Pandemic, I think, gets a particular rap for it because it has a relatively limited possibility space for moves in which there are not infrequently clearly right moves and those moves are often dictated by the role you’re playing. I think this makes it a pretty uninteresting problem to solve, and one which can be much more consistently and fully solved than in many other coop games. So, there’s just much less for people to collaborate on and more incentive for the person who has solved it to make the calls. But that still doesn’t mean that’s Pandemic’s fault. Even with that limitation, plenty of people don’t have that problem at their table.
I gamed with a group a while back who had one guy that quarterbacked constantly during co-op games. It was just, infuriating. In response I would intentional make sup-optimal moves to sabotage the group only to spite him. It was the only way I could still have fun after he would consistently tell me exactly what I should do on my turn. Of course he would complain to death about it throughout the rest of the game if we were on the path to failure.
I adore how Pandemic handles pacing with Epidemics. The board starts with a few 3 disease locations that give players clear danger areas to solve. These areas aren’t even really in danger because their cards are in the discard, but the stress is there. If you’re lucky, card draw may also give new players an early goal (ie “Can anyone get me a blue card?”), but if it doesn’t, the 3 cube locations do a great job giving an easy to accomplish early goal.
Then an epidemic hits and puts the discard back on the deck. It’s never too many cards, so new players are card counting already, roughly remembering what’s in the deck. These known incoming cards give clear goals and concerns for players to share usually right around the time when someone asks what they should be doing. Maybe some groups need a bit more direction? No problem, one new location is getting 3 cubes to give very clear direction again.
New players will probably lose their first game, but they’ll also have coordinated on shared goals and succeeded at multiple of them, which is more than enough encouragement to try again. They might spend a few games getting the hang of holding on before really focusing on trying to cure diseases, but at some point someone is going to luck into a hand that forces them to engage with the curing half of the mechanics, and now they’re fully engaged in a pretty deep game. I think that’s the magic of Pandemic. It eases you in with small wins, constantly encouraging you to keep playing until you get that first big victory.
Going through that experience with new players is incredibly fun for me.
