Z-Man GamesPandemic: Hot Zone North America, Board Game, Ages 8+, For 2-4 Players, 30 Minutes Playing Time

Pandemic: The Cure is a 2014 dice derivative of the best selling cooperative 2008 game ‘Pandemic’. Notice Before COVID.Do not be overwhelmed with the many dice in the box. Different colours, each colour its own pips and each ‘technical’ role (player) have their own dice to roll. You roll your dice, to get actions: Treat disease dice, get to the right location, get samples, take dice out of the treatment center. Unlike the original Pandemic, in The Cure the actions you can take are determined by what action faces show up on your role's dice: If you roll airplanes, you can travel all around the world but what will you be able to do when you get there? Get samples, but you need disease dice in the treatment center to sample! You need treatments, which lets you put disease dice into the treatment center, and you must be where the virus is endemic!The beauty here is that you don't get stuck with what you rolled. You can re-roll as many dice, as many times as you want, Remember though, 5 of your 6 dice faces are helpful actions but 1 is ‘Biohazard’. If you roll a Biohazard, you miss out on getting to use that dice for the rest of your turn and it advances the infection rate, causes epidemics and more. So do you re-roll and try to get a sample, risking the Biohazard, or do you use whatever action is already up? If you re-roll, how many times will you re-roll? Once? Twice? These choices are what make this game fun!Each player gets unique coloured dice depending on their role. The Medic has special dice faces that are good at treating diseases while the Scientist has a higher probability of rolling samples AND only needs 11 or more to cure a disease on a Roll for a Cure. The Dispatcher lets you move people around the board more easily, though the board is much smaller than the original game with 6 regions. Cooperative games like this work well.I love the linen finish and the art on the cards. The event cards are like the original Pandemic and the role cards are like ID badges. The dice all seem to be of good quality. You also get a cloth bag and location disks that are nice. The central score tracker it is very useful for tracking info, as a place for region disks, as a treatment center area.The rulebook logical, has examples and is well written: An easy game to learn from the rulebook. The back page even has clarifications on some specific role and event cards. Familiarity with the original Pandemic helps but is not needed.Obviously there is a lot of luck in this DICE game. You have the luck of the action roll, the way disease dice come out on the board, and Rolling for a Cure. The skill part really comes in working together, leaning into the strengths of your role, and taking educated risks based on probabilities. Normally if you get some really bad rolls and everything crashes and burns, it's short enough and easy enough to set up (~3 minutes) that you can just play again! I do miss the big world map, but I get more tension from the rolls and the overall fun crammed into a 30 minute is beter than the original game of 'Pandemic', good as I think that game still is.This is alot of game for the price: There is a "let's play it again!" quality and fun .RECOMMENDED

This standalone game is set in the Lovcraftian universe of other worldly ancient ones trying to break through into reality with the help of cultists, casting madness before them. Having played ‘Pandemic’ or any of the spin-offs is not necessary to enjoy this romp around Arkham, Dunwich, Kingsport and Innsmouth.Each town is connected by both traditional transport and a gate network through which the ancient ones are trying to break. The players take the role of investigators, each with a different ability to aid the team defeat cultists and prevent the shoggoths reaching the gates. Each turn consists of three phases: action, where each investigator may travel, trade cards or possibly use their special ability; draw cards which may be either location, mystical power or one of the four nasty evil stirs cards; and finally the summoning phase where cultists are added to the board and shoggoths may move closer to the gates.The aim of the game is to close all of the gates before all of the six ancient ones waken (which happens when evil stirs or a shoggoth reaches a gate and bad things usually ensue) or the game runs out of further cultists to place. It is a difficult game to win. My wife and I play two players each and it is still difficult to win. The key is co-operation between the investigators and planning ahead so that a player with four location cards can get to that location’s gate and close it. We often play our ‘no sanity’ house rule to make the game easier – investigators don’t lose sanity (when they become insane they are distinctly less useful) and to balance it we don’t have gate travel. After many games playing the house rules we now win more often than lose but it is still not easy and depends a lot on the four investigator characters in play. We have never won playing the ‘proper’ rules.The rulebook is very good with no ambiguities, the board is not enormous and the quality components are detailed and robust. The mechanics are easy to learn and the game flows at a decent pace. A fun game to play but difficult to win. With the range of investigators and the randomness of the card draws, no two games are the same although due to the relative simplicity of the gameplay, it can start to feel a bit ‘samey’ if played too much. Having said that, we do have quite a good collection of two player co-op games so we always have a variety from which to choose and ‘Reign of Cthulu’ does get played quite a lot.Rulebook: 10/10 Complexity: 5/10 Component quality: 10/10 Replayability: 9/10 Gameplay pace: 9/10