Pandemic (the Game)

If you are looking for a great game to play during your sheltering period, I highly recommend one of the versions of Pandemic. Since you are playing against the game, rather than each other, it has great replay value and, since you can adjust the difficulty level, as you get more familiar with gameplay, you can adjust the difficulty level to make it harder to beat.

Get tired of fighting Pandemics with modern technology? Then you can venture into the past with Pandemic Iberia, set in the 19th century or Fall of Rome, set during the, well you can guess.

Want to venture into fantasy? Then choose Pandemic Cthulhu in which you work to stop the gods of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos from decimating the world.

Finally, there is Pandemic Legacy in which not only can you adjust the difficulty of the game, but customize it as you play, making your own personal version of the game.

Boardgame of the Week: Pandemic Legacy 2

Normally I focus on older games for the Boardgame of the Week but wanted to call your attention to the 2nd season of Pandemic Legacy since this one differs somewhat from Season 1. In Season 1, players worked together to stop the pandemic and removed cubes from the board to show how effectively they had stopped the spread of the disease. Well, guess what? You failed.

In season 2, the pandemic spread, wiping out much of the population. You and your team work together to get supplies to the survivors, bringing back civilization from the brink of collapse, placing cubes indicating successfully delivered supplies. You are still the heroes though.

Z-man Games: A Brief History

Z-man Games was launched in the mid 1990s to produce the  Shadowfist trading card game, one of the early TCGs and one that  drew upon themes from Chinese martial arts movies.  Z-man  then released what was for the store the much more successful line of B-Movie card games, starting with Grave Robbers from Outer Space, which parodied the horror films of the 1950s and 1980s and branching out into other genres such as the Western, fantasy,  pirate, blaxspolitation, Asian cinema and Christmas. Though not commonly seen in stores in recent years, a decade or so ago, the B-movie card games were a ubiquitous offering in game stores and I saw many a game of them played at gaming conventions throughout the Midwest.

Z-man Games biggest hits, releasing several years after the B-movie card games peaked, were Agricola and Pandemic, both posting respectably steady sales for several years until the advent of Wil Wheaton’s TableTop web series, which featured Pandemic in one episode, giving it the “Wheaton Bump”, quadrupling, at least for us, sales of the game and allowing Z-man to create a Catanesque line of expansion for Pandemic. The success of other games such as Tragedy Looper and The Walking Dead (based on the comics, not the television series. Cryptozoic has the rights to that and puts out its only line of TV series based games) likely attracted the attention of Quebec based game publisher/distributor Filosofia, which bought Z-man in 2011.  

More on the Pandemic Pre-release

The annoying thing about the early release of Pandemic 2^nd edition to Target is that, unlike broken street dates on Magic and Yu Gi Oh products, theoretically, Z-man Games had much more control over the release of the second edition game and therefore should have managed to keep the February 6^th release date.  WOTC and Konami both have a number of distributors to deal with regarding street dates and each distributor has hundreds of stores to deal with as well.  In the Pandemic case, Z-man had only one distributor with which to work and that distributor only had one account carrying the product.  I am not privy to the inner workings of that particular channel of distribution but I would imagine it not too difficult to make certain that Pandemic did not arrive in Target’s distribution center until just before the release date, or even after. 

I really doubt the amount of sales generated by the extra week of early release amounted to even a fraction of a rounding error on Target’s income statement.  Meanwhile, it cost stores in the game channel sales, generated negative publicity for the company,  and likely annoyed to no end Alliance Distribution, Z-man’s official distributor to the specialty game channel, and likely the recipient of hundreds of emails and calls from perturbed retailers, wondering why Target had the hotly anticipated reprint a week ahead of the scheduled release whilst they did not.