Board Games
How to play Pandemic
Cooperate to discover four cures before outbreaks, cube shortages or the player deck defeat everyone.
What you need
Base board, roles, pawns, two decks, cubes, stations and markers
Set up the game
- Start pawns and a station in Atlanta. Assign roles. Infect three cities with three cubes, three with two and three with one.
- Deal four/three/two player cards each for two/three/four players. Divide remaining cards into four piles, shuffle an Epidemic into each and stack. Set the printed track starts.
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Playing Pandemic
- Take up to four actions: travel, treat, build, share knowledge or discover a cure. Role text modifies specific actions.
- Road movement follows connections; direct flights spend destination cards, charters spend your location card, and shuttles link stations.
- Normally treat one cube. At a station discard five same-color city cards for its cure. Sharing normally needs both pawns in the named card’s city.
- Draw two player cards, resolve Epidemics, then infect at the current rate. Hand limit is seven. Epidemics raise rate, infect the bottom city, and shuffle infection discards onto the deck.
- A fourth same-color cube instead causes an outbreak to connected cities; no city outbreaks twice in that chain. Win immediately with four cures. Lose at eight outbreaks, unavailable required cubes or inability to draw required player cards.
The fourth cure ends the crisis
You hold five blue cards at a station with one action remaining. Discovering the fourth cure wins immediately, even with red cubes elsewhere. Treating a red cube instead would leave the actual objective unfinished.
Keep every player involved
Discuss the next likely outbreaks, needed cure cards and possible routes, then let the active player decide. A helpful plan names a bottleneck and asks how that role could solve it. Dictating every turn can leave teammates watching one person’s puzzle. Review public threats together without treating a first-time player’s suggestion as an interruption.
Beginner decisions
- Plan exchanges by the city on the card, not merely a convenient meeting station.
- Before flying, check whether someone needs that card for a cure. Saved movement can cost the team a critical color set.
Common rule mix-ups
- Requiring eradication for victory.
- Drawing the top infection card for an Epidemic’s bottom-city step.
Questions about this game
What does curing change?
Treatment removes all cubes of that color in a city. A cured color with none left on the board is eradicated and no longer adds infections.
Do we place the fourth cube?
No; resolve the outbreak instead.
Sources and edition notes
Base Pandemic, introductory four-Epidemic setup. Legacy, Hot Zone and expansions differ.
Sources and stated format checked October 14, 2026. This records a document check, not a claim of hands-on testing.
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