Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Boardgame roundup: Pandemic, Longshot

[quote name="Last"]Pandemic: POSITIVE! Pandemic is a co-op game where you play a team of international disease control specialists attempting to prevent four deadly diseases from overtaking the world. It plays on a Risk-style map of the world and the diseases are represented by pea-sized wooden cubes (blue, yellow, black, and red). There's a stack of Player cards that you draw from each turn which act as either a plane ticket (the Osaka card lets you fly directly to Osaka, for example) OR as a piece of research (the Osaka card is red, you need 5 red cards to cure the red disease). The player gets to choose how to use each card, but you can only do one or the other. You win by finding cures for all four diseases. If too many cubes get on the board or if you run out of Player cards in the stack then you lose. There's also a stack of Infection cards that you draw each turn and they represent which cities the diseases are spreading to. As the game progresses, the diseases spread more rapidly so there's always an exciting pressure on your team to stay ahead of it. The diseases have identical characteristics and are not given names, so you can choose to rename them whatever you want except for black, because it's funny to hear someone innocently exclaim "I'll go to Atlanta and get rid of all the blacks!" or "Pretty soon we'll have a cure for black." RACISTS. Each player has a Role card, which gives them a unique way to break a rule. For example, one Role can cure diseases with only four cards, one can treat (remove cubes from) affected cities faster than normal, one can help other players travel around the board faster and so on. The base game only has 5 roles but the expansion adds ~7 more. The difficulty is easy to adjust with the presence of special cards that cause sudden outbreaks when drawn from the Player deck. A normal game will have 5 of these shuffled in but you can increase/decrease the number to make the game more/less challenging. The downside of the game is that the ending is anti-climactic. During play, the threat escalates and your capabilities escalate, so you establish a plan and adapt to new developments but it always feels like you have a fair shot at winning if you play smart. Then, the last turn is either that your plan succeeds as expected (eliciting a rousing "oh, it's over? we won? all right.") or you draw a couple unlucky cards that wipe you out. The first turn and the last turn are lukewarm but all the turns in-between are incredibly fun. Another downside is that once you have the hang of it, you have to be careful introducing new players because the more experienced players will tend to boss them around rather than let them figure out what the best move is for the current situation. But, that's not the game's fault, it's just what happens when people play co-op. The best part of the game is the cooperative nature. The Role abilities are all useful enough that even weaker players feel like they are playing a crucial part of the overall effort. Also, regardless of outcome everyone remains on good terms and nobody feels like they got screwed. Because of this, it's a particularly fun game to play with women (also maybe because the theme of the game is saving the world, not conquest). Another benefit is that there are only a few rules to learn so new players can pick it up in just a couple minutes. There are even little reminder cards for each player so your parents don't have to keep asking the same questions every time game night rolls around. Pandemic takes 30-40 minutes to play and provides a lot of entertainment for such a small investment. Longshot: Negative. Longshot is a horse-racing game. The board is an overhead view of a horse track sub-divided into about 20 wedges. There's 10 lanes and 10 plastic horses. The players are gamblers that can bet on any of the horses and/or purchase any horse outright. There is a card for each horse that gives their name and details, and there's a stack of player cards that have "Community Chest"-like effects. The game ends when three horses have completed one lap around the board. The winner is the player who has the most money after all bets are resolved. The horse move around the board due to dice rolls. There's a d10 and a d3, on your turn you roll both and advance the indicated horse the indicated number of spaces around the track. Then you either play a card from your hand ("You win $10", "Take a card from your neighbor", "Advance a horse 1 space"), place a bet on any horse, or purchase a horse (more on this later). You can place bets on a horse up until they have made it 3/4 of the way around the board. The horse cards show the payoff odds for each particular horse depending on how they finish. The game is technically playable even if no one purchases a horse, but the benefits to doing so are so great that it's a good strategy for everyone to buy as many as they can afford until all ten are gone. One advantage is that the owner of a winning horse gets a lump sum bonus in addition to whatever bets they made. Another advantage is that each horse has a special ability that only takes effect after they are purchased. For example, one horse says 'if this horse is tied with at least two others, advance him one space", another says "if this horse is in last place, advance him four spaces", another says "if this horse is in first, draw an extra card." Those effects happen at the beginning of the owner's turn and generally speed the game along. A third advantage to owning a horse is that they have extra opportunities to advance. Each horse has a unique number but their card has a series of additional numbers at the bottom that take effect if they are purchased. If horse 3 has a 2,7,8 at the bottom then it can advance whenever the owner rolls any of those numbers. This speeds up all of the owned horses to a huge degree compared to unowned ones. The upside is that the game plays really fast (except for the very end more on this later) and is easy to learn. The betting is simple, you invest in $5 increments and the payouts are straightforward 7-1, 4-1 stuff. Nothing complicated like at a real track. I also like that even if your horses get unlucky dice you can win by making smart bets on your opponent's horses. Raking in a larger pot than the guy who owns the winning horse makes you pretty smug. Also, the stack of Player cards is really enormous, like 5 inches worth of cards and while there are some repeats there are also a shocking number of unique cards in there. That makes it a lot of fun when you've played the game a half-dozen times and there are still surprises lurking in that deck. The downside, mainly, is that there are too many cards that allow you to move a horse backwards. Of course, everyone holds on to these until it comes down to the finish line, which means that the horses streak around the track in the first 30 minutes of the game and the last 30 mintues is spent with a bunch of pussies fighting over the same 1-2 spaces in an attempt to ensure that their horses win. Maybe the game is designed to be this way on purpose, to create the feeling that it'll always be won 'by just a nose'? In reality, it feels like Xeno's fucking paradox where each incremental advance takes disproportionately longer than the one prior. I usually get to the point where I'm sick of the dilly-dallying and I just want some horse to win so that the game can be over already. Longshot is not a bad game. It's better than half the games out there just by being unusual and accessible, but there are a lot better choices available that are a better use of your time.[/quote]