#ralphkoster

     Pandemic has to be one of the most peculiar board games I have ever played. This puts it in company with such games as Dominion, Munchkins and Don’t Wake Daddy all of which are so odd in their own ways. How pandemic most sticks out is how it relies entirely on cooperation in play, the opponent is the game. This is an easy concept to grasp for any video gamer, however seeing how the game works without AI to guide the games moves, only luck of the draw or our intervention, is just fascinating to me. I can still remember how exciting it was to brain storm with people, trying to come up with the best moves to prevent “out breaks” or cure cities, and to find the cures to the four main diseases; black red blue and yellow. Move here to clear theses block get to this point so I can give you the color cards you need to cure the disease, but remember don’t let more than three block gather in one city or else out break. Amazing how little in game we actually used the words “disease” “epidemic” or “patient” nor did we ever really talk about the people in the cities being sick more often than not the phrases we would use would be “every time something goes wrong it’s Tehran, why Tehran” we called cities by their names and referred to them like they were opposing characters as unhelpful children getting in our way of collecting the cards we needed.

      Ralph Koster, one game theorist said that “People tend to dress up game systems with some fiction. Designers put artwork on them that is suggestive of some real world context.” He further goes to express a feeling that these “fictions” are just “side dishes” that they don’t serve the game at its core. Until I played pandemic I found it hard to even see what he meant but thinking back, as I played through the game the only connection I made to the theme of an epidemic were some of the terms used to refer to actions in the game, and even then I never thought of them on the level serious world diseases. Only cubes on a map that I had to remove, it did not surprise me then to learn that pandemic had a re-skin in a zombie game Pandemic-Z, as the theme, and the “Story” have no real effect on the game play or how I remember playing.