Lipstick and a Pig - Pandemic Review

That's a solid review. I don't think I can really disagree with it, at best I just think that I look for different things in a game.

I really like Pandemic, it's really fun to discuss strategy with the other players and plan what to do, specially since there's enough randomness and nuances that it's not really a matter of making the best move but how risky each move is. I also feel it's very thematic in a "experts discussing how to tackle emergency" way. The "control screen" aesthethic and simple components (Pawns, cubes) help with this too.

I don't really mind not having a character to call my own, because, well, I'm playing it for the discussion aspect. And the discussion is fun and clean, there's no need to debate over minutae nor is it too obvious. It has a good balance I think.

My only beef with Pandemic is that after a certain point it has nothing more to give. It's not a game you can keep playing "forever", once you beat it at the highest difficulty levels there's really not much to explore on it.

I fully endorse this article. Emperors New Clothes also comes to mind. Pandemic sucks balls, its never been a game, its a boring risk managing puzzle game driven by an admittedly elegant set of mechanisms and kudos to them for tapping into the boring humdrum "oo clever" appeal to the casual audience. Utterly broken as a co op since all of the decisions are trivially obvious and can just as well be decided by whoever can be arsed to tell everyone else the simple odds of a few cards and count nodes on a network map. Woop de doo. The Legacy addition seems cool but for gods sake, most of it is so obvious that anyone who hasnt played can certainly guess correctly most of the shit that will happen as you continue to play on rails with ooo new rules. I think egg has it right, this taps into people whove never realised that story/campaign/narrative can be put into boardgames.

Dont waste your time with this, play a GOOD game, say Tigris & Euphrates. Play it 15 or 150 times, its always awesome, each game tells a story, and your experience and understanding of the game will work as your "legacy"

I am crossing my fingers the game hits number 1 before new years day, it will be a fitting way to underline everything thats wrong with boardgaming as an online community for me (without in any way saying I'm "right", you make your own fucking minds up about this and the rest of it of course)

but Pandemic, in this form as in the old, is utterly fucking toss.

Solid arguments, but here's the rebuttal -- people like Pandemic.

Amongst light hobby gamers and non-gamers Pandemic is a pretty revolutionary play. Not everyone wants to play Paths of Glory.

I rebut your rebuttal by reminding you that I didnt say people dont like it. If anything I kind of said the same as you did, I know people like it. I still think its crap though and liked due to laziness. Like when people rib on Coldplay. Sure, it doesnt offend your ears when its playing in the car, but its still pretty crap. Pandemic is the Coldplay of boardgaming. Obviously theres an unwritten "this is just my opinion, I'm not claiming that this opinion is or should be shared by anyone else"

I said before that I was interested in playing P:L, and now I have. We just played through the first 3 months (4 games- W, W, L, W) in two days. We're going to be hovering around funding level 0 unless our luck runs out pretty hard. I don't know what April has in store, but I think we've been setting ourselves up pretty well. The jump to 3 objectives needed to win in May gets me excited and worried at the same time.

The story is uninteresting so far, but choosing your team for each game (which actually happens after you see your hand and some of the rest of the setup occurs) is cool. Looking forward to the end of game bonuses and objective(s) make you think about how you want to win as much as if you'll be able to win.

It still has the same issues with people telling each other what to do, but now that the cards are all open by the rules, I think that such talk is encouraged by the rules. We're all working together and what happens will matter for future games.

I've played a Pandemic game modified into a completely immersive and entertaining experience. Defenders of the Realm.

Jexik wrote: It still has the same issues with people telling each other what to do, but now that the cards are all open by the rules, I think that such talk is encouraged by the rules. We're all working together and what happens will matter for future games.

But this is one of my problems with co ops and Pandemic in particular, you're just chatting to solve puzzles, and by solve you're just making trivial decisions based on some simple odds between 2 or 3 things that can happen, this card or that card or this card, other than that you're still just guessing even if youre making a "best flexible" plan, it still boils down to either you can optimally arrange your dudes and resources to beat the sequence of cards which is sat there in front of you unchanging, or you couldnt beat the card sequence whatever you did, or you had a number of possible outs which you covered some of based on basic arithmetic. Changing up the rules and pasting on some very cliched (IMO) narrative and getting you to invest in "choosing shit" is all just more distraction from the fact that underneath it all Pandemic is just a shitty game, in fact its not a game, its a puzzle solving exercise, which sure can be fun for a while until you beat it or see the very limited number of levers involved but has no lasting value and doesnt provide any real narrative.

I mean these same people were ragging on Risk Legacy (what rank is that now?) for it "still being just RISK" with legacy stuff added but Pandemic is utterly shite and its still just Pandemic despite the legacy stuff. I cant say I am staggered it got to number one on TOS, but it still feels nonsensical to me that its not only highest rated but its got a huge amount of air between it and the next games. I'm sorry but this is some kind of weird hype / sheep / rationalising bullshit, but as I said, its OK, as it serves as a very handy red line under the collective mindset of TOS and how I feel about games, neither them or me is losing any sleep over it. I will be morbidly curious about the long term evaluation of PL I suppose.


this was one of my favourite quotes from opinionated gamers

A big contrast to Twilight Struggle, which my wife couldn’t even get past the first round. Not because of rules difficulty, but because of the amount of player vs. player aggression needed to do well. I rated it a 5 and it’s one of the few games I sold

I think this sums up pretty well a larger undercurrent of broader appeal of games driving the market now*, even with people getting fed up with the lack of interaction, the pasted on and nonsensical themes and the convoluted hot messes of spreadsheet solving just like the other thousand games doing the same thing, is this is what people want. And to quote Paul Weller

And the public gets what the public wants
...
And the public wants what the public gets

I wonder which is more likely / funny, PL slipping down the rankings later on, or it being released in several different seasons and all of them being up at the top of the BGG rankings so its just season after season all hogging the top spots.


* still love to reread Michael Barnes article on Princes of Florence and some of the reaction following it. So much butthurt in those threads but it was a fantastic fucking article that hit a home run about where the hobby would end up going in general, even if there are probably more than enough dissenters keeping the flag flying with good games, the swell of mediocre brown spreadsheet calculating politely semi cooperative pastimes is still growing. I guess theres nothing wrong with that as long as theres enough people making alternatives and I think for most people thats true. Me, I dont see the need to reinvent the wheel, those great "german" style games pre POF are as relevant today as ever, I've not interest or expectation in finding new games so quite happy if an odd game here or there tickles my fancy, but if anything these days its discovering stuff I missed out on thats more appealing .- Heroscape, Dune, Magic, that kind of thing

I always try to start this argument at work. If it's a genre that you don't like, why bitch about how bad it sucks? It's going to suck for you regardless of how good or bad it's going to be for its fans. My daughter likes hip-hip, and likes Drake. I...do not. I might tell her how bad he sucks once in a while, just to rattle her cage, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time telling her that she needs to throw all that shit in the trash and buy some Black Sabbath. My opinion of it doesn't really count, and that's okay.

Barnes, please post this on BGG, or give someone permission. This would pop the heads of several hundred people. I would love to see the destruction and mass chaos that would happen.