GAME OF THE WEEK & NEW GAMING RELEASES: Week of 11/10/14 The timing of the release of this weeks Game Of The Week is quite ironic given the recent concerns over the Ebola virus, but seven years ago Z-Man games released Pandemic, a board game in which several virulent diseases had broken out simultaneously all over the world and the players were disease-fighting specialists whose mission was to treat disease hotspots while researching cures for each of four plagues before they got out of hand. The game took the gaming world by storm and is considered by many to be the best co-operative game ever made. Pandemic spawned two major expansions (In The Lab & On The Brink) and a third is on the way (State Of Emergency in 2015). There is also a game which puts a different spin on Pandemic. Pandemic: Contagion reverses the theme of Pandemic. In Contagion, the players ARE the diseases and are competing against each other to exterminate humanity! But this article is about a brand new Pandemic licensed game – Pandemic: The Cure. It is essentially Pandemic lite. Unlike Pandemic the board game, which is card based and takes an hour or more to play, Pandemic: The Cure is driven by dice and plays in approximately 30 minutes while retaining the feel and the tension of the board game. The following is a description of the game from the Z-Man games website: “In Pandemic: The Cure, a dice-based version of the popular Pandemic board game, sets up in less than a minute and plays in 30 minutes. As in the board game, four diseases threaten the world and it’s up to your team to save humanity. Each player takes on a different role that has its own unique set of dice and abilities — and players must take advantage of their specializations if they are to have any hope of winning the game. Players can roll their dice as often as they like, but the more times they re-roll for the perfect turn, the more likely the next epidemic will occur. If, at any time, any region is infected with more than three dice of a given color, an outbreak occurs, spreading disease into an adjacent region. If too many outbreaks take place, or the rate of infection gets too high, all the players lose. If, however, the players can discover the cures to the four diseases, they all win and humanity is saved”! The following is a review from “The Third Person” website: “Setting up the game is a breeze. All of the bits are laid out as prescribed in the instructions. Then, you draw 12 dice from the infection bag and roll them. You’ll place all of the dice on the six different locations based on the number rolled on each die. Once that’s done, you’re ready to play! Your ultimate goal as a team is to find the cures for all four diseases before the infection rate is too high, before too many outbreaks occur and before the infection bag runs out of dice. You’ll do this by treating diseases in different regions, which puts the disease dice into the Treatment Center. Then, you’ll collect multiple samples of the same disease type. Once you have three or more dice of the same color, you can roll them after you’ve done all your actions for a chance at curing that disease. If you roll 13 or more, you’ve successfully cured that disease. If you come up short, you’ll have to wait till your next turn to try again. As you can imagine, this can get really tense after a series of failed attempts. As if doing all of that wasn’t stressful enough, the diseases continue to do their dirty work throughout. At the end of each turn, you must take dice from the infection bag and infect regions based on the numbers you roll. If three or more of the same color land in the same region, an outbreak is triggered. Each time you do this, all of the extra dice of that color move clockwise to the next region and the outbreak counter is increased. If moving the excess dice causes there to be more than three of the same color to exist in that region, you’ve just set off a chain reaction, which increases the outbreak counter and moves the excess dice yet again. The scariest cruel twist of fate is the epidemic, which is triggered by rolling too many biohazards. When this occurs, you must take all of the dice from the Treatment Center and a handful of dice equivalent to the infection rate and redistribute them across the different regions based on how you roll them. If you had a stockpile of disease dice sitting in the Treatment Center when this happens, these epidemics can make your situation turn south real fast. Just like the board game version, teamwork is crucial if you want to have any shot at winning. Each player has different strengths that are conveyed through a special ability that appears on their character card. Each character’s dice also feature different die faces. Certain characters are more likely to score specific actions, while others have access to powerful actions that are unique to them. For instance, when the Contingency Planner rolls a cross, they can use it to take a disease cube from a region or the Treatment Center and bank it in the CDC to spend on special Event cards. My personal favorite character is the Generalist, as they can to roll seven dice and their first biohazard roll never counts. As a means of speeding up the process of curing diseases, you can also give your samples to another player if they’re in the same region. Finding ways to work best as a team regardless of how bad the circumstances may be makes this one an entertaining challenge throughout. Once I got over the fact that this isn’t classic Pandemic, I grew to really like Pandemic: The Cure based on its own merits. You still get most of the disease-fighting thrills of the action, but in a game that moves quicker and makes great use of dice as a gameplay component. If you’ve played the original a ton and want a fresh take on the Pandemic formula, The Cure is just what the doctor ordered. My only caveat is that if you haven’t played the original, I highly recommend playing that first to fully grasp what this dice game is trying to do”. Pandemic: The Cure is playable by 2-5 players, aged 8+, in approximately 30 minutes. NEW GAMING RELEASES & BACK IN STOCK: It was a BIG week for new releases!!!! In addition to PANDEMIC: THE CURE, this week we received the empire building game IMPERIAL SETTLERS, the role playing game FIASCO and its’ companion book, the western DOOMTOWN RELOADED, the tactical special forces card game WARFIGHTER, the empire building game EMPIRE ENGINE, the STAR WARS: EMPIRE VS REBELLION card game, the castle building tile laying game CASTLES OF MAD KING LUDWIG, the push your luck dice game DRAGON SLAYER, the 2014 WORLD CHAMPION DECKS and BEST OF BLACK AND WHITE TINS for the POKEMON collectible card game, the medieval city expansion game THE WALLED CITY: LONDONDERRY AND BORDERLANDS, the third edition of KNIGHTMARE CHESS, the TYRANNY OF DRAGONS – THE RISE OF TIAMANT book for the 5th edition of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, the 2014 MAGIC THE GATHERING HOLIDAY BOXES, and the highly anticipated monster invasion game KING OF NEW YORK (a standalone follow up to King Of Tokyo). BACK IN STOCK: Back in stock are the UNQUIET DEAD expansion for GLOOM, both the FINN VS. JAKE & PRINCESS BUBBLEGUM VS LUMPY SPACE PRINCESS sets for the ADVENTURE TIME CARD WARS game, the basic edition of RISK, the original PANDEMIC board game, the OUTSTANDING OSHAWOTT and CHARIZARD EX box sets for the POKEMON CARD GAME, and ONE copy of BETRAYAL AT HOUSE ON THE HILL!!!!!!!
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 15:43:49 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015