Review: Pandemic: The Cure

Pandemic: The Cure is a dice-based version of the board game Pandemic, both by Z-Man Games. Just like in the board game, the world is threatened by four diseases and it’s up to your team to save humanity. You’ve got to keep the diseases in check while also searching for a cure.

There are four colors of dice to represent the diseases. I don’t know what they are. Maybe gonorrhea or ebola. Maybe measles, since those are all the rage now.

When it’s time to infect (at the beginning of the game and at the end of every player’s turn) you randomly draw dice out of the bag, roll them, and then place them on the country tile that has the corresponding number on it. If any country ends up with more than three of the same color infection dice, then an epidemic occurs and one of those dice makes it away across to the next country tile. Too many epidemics and everything goes to shit, everybody dies, and you lose.

Each player gets a player card, a colored pawn, and a set of the same color dice. You roll those dice at the beginning of your turn. If you roll a plane, boat, or helicopter you can travel to another country. The syringe allows you to treat a disease cube, the container allows you to take a sample of an infection (with enough samples you can roll them to try to find a cure), the cross is used to buy helpful event cards, and the biohazard symbol causes the infection counter to move up and also releases all of the diseases you currently have in the treatment center back into the world. You can reroll the dice as many times as you want, unless it’s the biohazard symbol. That symbol makes the biohazard marker move up and the higher that moves up the more dice you infect with at the end of every turn.

I only played this once and we actually won, but by the random nature of the dice, things can go wrong very quickly. Let’s say you’ve treated ten dice and you’ve got them in the treatment center when someone rolls a biohazard dice… uh oh. All ten of those dice are now going to scatter themselves through-out the countries. That’s most likely going to cause at least one epidemic and those epidemics could easily snowball into more epidemics and before you know it, everybody’s dead. Nice going.

But if you can find the cure for all four diseases, congratulations, you’ve saved the world!

I loved this game. It was a lot of fun. I haven’t played regular Pandemic in over a year, so I’m making a half blind comparison, but I think I prefer this one.