Yes, this is going to be an entire blog post dedicated to Pandemic.
If you haven’t played Pandemic, its a cooperative board game with the goal of curing four diseases that have broken out in different regions of the world. Each player gets a different role (Scientist, Medic, etc) and everyone works together to prevent outbreaks (lift cubes) and ultimately find cures (aggregate cards). You win together, you lose together–kind of like frisbee but if you lose, the world ends.
The board traveled the 4,000+ miles from Boston and took up the majority of our downtime off the field and outside of team dinners. When I say our, I have to put an asterisk on that–me and Becky were borderline obsessed, at one point I quite seriously stated that I wanted to watch film…it might have gotten a little out of hand. Anyway, some of our teammates joined in for a few games, we lost a couple of heart-breakers in crunch time. Morale was getting low.
Then came Friday morning. Finals weren’t until early afternoon and waking up at 6:30 was the new norm, we went for coffee on the beach and decided that we had to save the world before we attempted to win it. We setup the board and were dealt the Dispatcher and the Scientist, the Scientist is money. We talked a little strat beforehand about aggressively curing vs. containing outbreaks, so we went with the former and cured all four diseases in record time. Needless to say this was a good omen for how the rest of the day would pan out.
With more time to kill, we setup three-player mode. Yes, there were only two of us and yes, we essentially were playing with an imaginary friend. Anyway, we lucked out with our roles again and got the most underrated of them all, the Quarantine Specialist. On the brink of a quadruple outbreak in Northern Europe, the QS posted up in Essen and literally saved the day. Incredible job. After a few clever moves from the Researcher and timely extraction of event cards from the Contingency Planner, we were on our way to victory.
The confidence gained from our two Pandemic wins were vital going into Finals. I would like to thank the makers of Pandemic and our teammates for putting up with us all week. Couldn’t have done it without you.
