Still Can't Save the World

Tonight's family game night choice was Pandemic. It's not a game that we play very often because it's rather depressing. It is a cooperative board game where the players try to cure four plagues that are ravaging the world.

Unfortunately, we have never been able to save humanity. We are getting better; tonight we were one turn from victory before time ran out.

The board at the end

One thing that has helped is playing the game correctly. We erroneously thought that we had to wipe out all diseases to win. That is not the case; the players only need to find all the cures. So, for example, Santiago, Chile has 3 yellow cubes. Because yellow has been cured, we don't need to worry about Santiago.

Because we played correctly this time we focused on finding cures and did much better . At the end of the game, there are very few diseases (colored cubes) on the board and we had no outbreaks at all. We managed to cure 3 of the 4 plagues and were 1 turn away from curing the last. Then the deck ran out and the game ended.

We're still trying to get the knack of this game. Obviously, we managed our hands inefficiently. We used some red cards to fly to Asia and treat some diseases. This left us a bit lacking in red cards near the end of the game. If we were a little more conservative, we may have won. Still, this is a very annoying way to lose (and it's the second time in a row its happened). The board looks like we were doing well, but we still lose. Probably why we don't play this game very often.