50 Fun Facts About Pandemic (Board Game)

Pandemic's designer turned to co-operative games after winning a sour game of Chinatown against whom?

His wife, Donna, and he came away from that negotiation game on bad terms even though he had won, so in 2004 he began designing a game the two of them could win or lose together.

Which company first published Pandemic in 2008?

Z-Man Games has stayed its publisher through every expansion, spin-off and Legacy season, as one 2008 box grew into a franchise that had sold more than two million copies by 2020.

On the Pandemic board, a line running off the Pacific edge connects Sydney directly to which city?

Los Angeles and Sydney count as neighbours because routes that leave one edge of the map wrap around to the other, so a pawn can cross the whole Pacific in a single move.

What happens once Pandemic's fourth cure is found?

The players win on the spot, however many cubes are still on the board: the rules say outright that treating every city, or wiping a disease out completely, is not needed for victory.

Which Pandemic action lets a player discard the card of their current city to fly anywhere on the board?

Charter Flight costs the card of the city you are standing in, the very card needed to build a research station there, so every charter gives up a possible station.

Which disease scare does Pandemic's designer say had just erupted when he began the game?

SARS was fresh news when he began in 2004, and he later wrote that viruses struck him as the perfect opponents: uncaring, relentless and frightening.

Which Pandemic role can move other players' pawns as if they were its own?

The Dispatcher can also spend an action to bring any pawn straight to a city that holds another pawn, though moving a teammate always needs that player's permission.

In Pandemic, which diseases place no new cubes when their Infection cards are drawn?

Eradicated means cured and cleared of its last cube. A cure alone is not enough: a cured disease keeps infecting cities until then.

In which city do all players begin a game of Pandemic?

Atlanta is home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, America's real disease-fighting agency, which is why the game's first research station stands there before play begins.

Which Pandemic action passes a City card between two players?

Share Knowledge costs one of a turn's four actions per card, and the card must show the very city both pawns are standing in, which makes hand-overs hard to arrange.

Where do Pandemic's Infection discards go after an Epidemic?

Atop the deck, reshuffled, so the cities that have already been hit are the very next ones drawn. That is why trouble in this game keeps coming back to the same places.

Which Pandemic cards can be played at any time, costing no action?

Event cards cost no action, and they double as a safety valve: a player over the hand limit of seven may play one instead of throwing a card away.

In Pandemic, where does an Outbreak add one cube of its colour?

Every connected city takes a cube, and any neighbour already holding three has an Outbreak of its own, so one bad card can set off a chain reaction across a continent.

Pandemic is lost when which deck runs out?

The Player deck is the game's clock: it is never reshuffled, so every two-card draw brings the end closer, and the rulebook calls an empty deck the team running out of time.

Which Pandemic role can build a research station in its current city without discarding the matching card?

The Operations Expert builds for just an action and keeps the city card everyone else must discard, so the team can spread stations across the map without thinning its hands.

Which Pandemic role can treat every cube of one colour in a city with a single action?

The Medic clears a whole city in one action, and once a disease has been cured the role sweeps its cubes away just by walking into a city, at no cost at all.

Which base-game Pandemic role needs only four matching cards to discover a cure?

The Scientist saves one card on every cure, which matters more than it sounds: with a hand limit of seven, five cards of one colour fill most of a hand.

Which term do Pandemic players use for one person dominating a co-operative game?

Quarterbacking is harder when information is hidden, which Pandemic's own rulebook uses: beyond the beginner level players keep their cards private, so that everyone has something to contribute.

Which two roles did Pandemic's 2013 second edition add?

The Contingency Planner and Quarantine Specialist brought two new tricks: one takes a card already played back out of the discard pile to use again, the other blocks new cubes in her city and every city next to it.

Who co-designed all three Pandemic expansions?

Tom Lehmann shares the credit on every expansion box, though his own best-known design is a competitive card game, the opposite of the all-win-or-all-lose game he helped to grow.

Pandemic's first expansion, released in 2009, came with five of which lab item for storing the disease cubes?

Petri dishes with labels turned cube storage into a prop, and the same box gave players something to put in the fifth one: a new purple disease beside the original four.

Which role in Pandemic's On the Brink expansion pits one player against the rest of the team?

The Bio-Terrorist moves in secret, logging each step on a hidden location sheet, and only has to put a pawn on the board when spotted in the same city as another player.

What is the fifth disease in Pandemic's On the Brink expansion called?

Mutation is a purple disease that behaves differently from the other four: to win, the team must either cure it as well or leave not a single purple cube on the board.

Which challenge in Pandemic's On the Brink expansion swaps the Epidemic cards for nastier ones tied to a single disease?

Virulent Strain picks its victim at the first Epidemic: whichever disease has the most cubes on the board gets the title, and every later card adds a new rule that makes it worse.

Pandemic's second expansion, In the Lab, added which two modes?

Solo and team play both arrived in this box: a lone player gets help from a CDC card, while rival pairs race for prestige and can still all lose if one of them stops co-operating.

In Pandemic's State of Emergency expansion, which challenge has animals spreading disease to humans?

The Hinterlands shares the box with the Superbug, a fifth disease that cannot be treated at all: the team has to find its cure, produce vaccine doses and then wipe it out to win.

What rises each time an Epidemic card is drawn in Pandemic?

The infection rate sets how many new cards are turned over against the team at the end of every turn. It starts at two and tops out at four, however many more Epidemics follow.

The 2018 tenth-anniversary edition of Pandemic came in a metal box styled as what?

A first aid kit that can hang like a real one: the steel box comes with fittings for mounting it on a wall, and its wooden pieces hark back to the 2008 first edition.

Which Pandemic spin-off replaced cards with dice in 2014?

Pandemic: The Cure gives every role its own set of dice. Players may re-roll as often as they like, but each extra roll makes the next epidemic more likely to strike.

In Pandemic: Contagion, players take on what role?

The diseases themselves are the players' side in this card game, and for once nobody co-operates: each one competes to spread furthest, with the end of humanity as the shared aim.

Who co-designed Pandemic Legacy: Season 1?

Rob Daviau introduced the legacy idea at Hasbro with a version of Risk, picturing a one-time campaign that evolves as it is played, then brought the same system to this game.

In Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, each game represents what span of time?

One month is all each session covers, and the calendar never waits: lose a month twice and the campaign moves on regardless, through what its co-designer called a very bad year for humanity.

Pandemic Legacy: Season 2, set 71 years after the first, has players hand out cubes that stand for what?

Supplies are placed on the board rather than taken off it in this sequel: the plague only breaks out in a city once its stock of cubes has run dry, so the job is to keep everywhere topped up.

Pandemic Legacy: Season 0, released in 2020, is set during which era?

The Cold War setting turns the series into a spy thriller: players are agents building up false identities to stop a bioweapon, while the CIA watches and grades their work in the field.

In the Pandemic spin-off Reign of Cthulhu, investigators risk losing what as the horrors mount?

Their sanity frays as they race to seal every portal in Lovecraft's New England towns before the Old Ones awaken, the task that takes the place of finding cures.

In Pandemic: Iberia, what do players build to speed their travel?

Railways were brand new there: the game is set as the peninsula's first line is being built, and a Railwayman is one of its roles beside a Nurse, a Sailor and a Rural Doctor.

Pandemic: Rising Tide is set in which country?

The Netherlands is saved in this version by building four modern hydraulic structures, because the enemy is not a disease at all but the sea trying to take the land back.

In Pandemic: Fall of Rome, what spreads in place of diseases?

Barbarian tribes pour over the empire's borders: Anglo-Saxons, Goths, Vandals and Huns, whom players can meet with armies or win over through alliances.

In the real-time spin-off Pandemic: Rapid Response, players fly aid to cities struck by what?

Natural disasters, not diseases, drive this game by Kane Klenko: a sand timer keeps running, and each time it empties another stricken city calls for help.

Where is the first Pandemic: Hot Zone game set?

North America came first, with three diseases instead of four and about half the playing time, and it launched with a free print-and-play kit for anyone stuck sheltering at home.

Which MMORPG got a Pandemic System adaptation in 2021?

World of Warcraft became Wrath of the Lich King, in which the heroes of Azeroth fight the Lich King's ghouls: the undead spread across the map the way the diseases do in the original.

The 2022 Pandemic System game set in a galaxy far, far away covers which conflict?

The Clone Wars casts the players as Jedi, fighting the Separatists' battle droid armies across a map of the galaxy's planets and settling the fights with dice.

Which award did Pandemic win in 2009?

Golden Geek Best Family Game was voted for by BoardGameGeek's own users. Germany's big prizes passed it by that year: a Spiel des Jahres nomination, and third place in the Deutscher Spiele Preis.

Which difficulty level, played with seven Epidemic cards, did Pandemic's first expansion add above Heroic?

Legendary deals the cards into seven stacks with one Epidemic shuffled into each, where Heroic uses six, so each Epidemic comes round sooner than at any base-game level.

Which country did a 2018 newspaper report point out was missing from Pandemic's world map?

New Zealand's own Herald listed the board among the worst offenders in a long line of maps that leave the country off, then found a bright side: at least nobody there would get infected.

Pandemic Legacy asks players to break which board-game taboo as its story unfolds?

Destroying cards and components is part of the design: players also write on the board and cover it in permanent stickers, so each copy tells one story and can never be reset.

Which 2010 Gamewright game began Leacock's family co-op series?

Forbidden Island sends a team to grab four treasures and escape by helicopter while the island sinks tile by tile beneath them. It earned a Spiel des Jahres nomination in 2011.

What is the theme of Daybreak, Leacock's game with Matteo Menapace?

Climate change is fought by players each running a world power: if the global temperature climbs too high or too many communities are put in danger, everybody loses together.

Leacock did UX work for which two internet companies before going full time?

AOL and Yahoo paid the bills while he designed games, his most famous one included, in his spare time. He only went full time in July 2014, six years after it came out.

Which 1960s TV series got a Leacock-designed board game for its 50th anniversary in 2015?

Thunderbirds puts the players in International Rescue, the Tracy family's secret outfit, sharing out its land, sea, air and space craft to save lives, in a co-operative game from Modiphius.