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Summary:
Based on the highly successful Pandemic, Pandemic Iberia takes you back to 1848. Using the same core mechanics as the original game, you struggle to find the cures for Malaria, Typhus, Yellow Fever and Cholera. If you are familiar with how to play Pandemic then this will be very easy to pick up, however, I will explain as though you are brand new to the Pandemic series.
How to Setup:
Setup is fairly straightforward. Put all of the disease cubes into piles, separated by colour, to the side of the board. Then create piles of purification tokens, railroad tokens and the 4 hospitals. Place the research markers below the board near the researched disease spot, place the outbreaks marker on the first spot of the outbreaks track and infection marker on the left most spot of the infection track.
Next, shuffle the infection deck. Draw 3 cards and put 3 of the disease cubes matching the colour on the card on the cities shown on the card. Then draw another 3 cards, putting 2 matching cubes on each city. Finally, draw 3 more cards, putting 1 matching cube on each city. Place the 9 drawn cards on the infection discard spot and the remainder of the infection deck on the infection draw spot.
Next, give each player a character (which can be done at random or by having the players pick the character they would like to play). Each player should have a role card, a matching coloured pawn and a reference card.
Remove the Epidemic cards from the player deck and add a number of event cards based on the player count. Shuffle the player deck and deal out a number based on the number of players. Each player then looks at their cards and picks one of the cities in their hand to be their starting location, placing their pawn there. If you only have event cards in your hand then you can start at any city on the board.
Finally, players will need to decide the difficulty level they want to play at by selecting 4-6 epidemic cards. Once done, divide the player deck into piles equalling the number of epidemic cards you are playing with. Then put an epidemic card on each pile and shuffle each stack individually before stacking them into one pile and placing it on the player deck spot.
How to Play:
Each player takes a turn which consists of 3 phases. Once a player has completed all 3 phases it moves onto the next player in a clockwise order and you keep going until you win or lose.
1) Do 4 actions – These can be any combination of the available actions and you can do the same one more than once. These are outlined on the reference cards as well and are all generally straight forward. (playing an event card does not cost an action and can be played by any player on your turn)
Move by Carriage or Boat – Move to a city connected by a brown line (solid or dashed)
Move by Train – Move to a city connected by continuous chain or rail tokens
Move by Ship – Move between two port cities (cities with an anchor on them) by discarding a
card matching the colour of the city you are travelling to.
Build a Railroad – Put a railroad token down coming out of the city you are currently in. They cannot go on dashed lines and if there are no tokens left, this action can no longer be taken.
Build a Hospital – Discard a city card matching the city that you are currently in. The hospital you build must match the colour of the city that you are in. If the hospital is already on the board then move it to your current location.
Treat Disease – Remove 1 disease cube from the city you are in, regardless of whether the disease has been researched or not.
Share Knowledge – Both players need to be in the same city space to do this action. You can either give the city card matching the city you are in to the player there or you can take the card matching the city you are in from the player at your location. Remember that if the player receiving the card now has more than 7 cards then they will need to discard down straight away.
Research a Disease – Whilst at a hospital, you can discard 5 cards matching the colour of the hospital. Move the research marker onto the researched disease spot on the board to show that is has been researched.
Purify Water – You can discard a card matching the colour of a city in an adjacent region to put two purification tokens into that region. Alternatively, you can discard a card matching the colour of a researched disease to put the two tokens in any one adjacent region. Each purification token prevents the placement of 1 disease cube into a city adjacent to the region that contains it. If there are no purification tokens left then this action can no longer be taken.
2) Draw two cards from the Player Deck.
Add these cards to your hand unless you draw an epidemic card. If you draw an epidemic card, reveal it and complete all 3 steps of the following steps in order:
- Increase – Move the infection marker one space to the right
- Infect - Draw the bottom card of the infection deck and add three cubes of that colour to it, or enough so that it has three on it.
- Intensify – Shuffle the Infection discard pile, including the card just drawn and place on top of the infection deck.
Once all epidemic cards have been actioned, if you have more than 7 cards in your hand you will need to play event cards and/or discard down until you have 7 cards in hand.
3) Infect cities
Draw a number of cards from the top of the infection deck according to the infection marker and add one cube of the colour to the city. If there are already 3 cubes, do not place a 4th ,instead an outbreak occurs.
An outbreak occurs whenever a 4 th cube would be placed on a city. During this, move the outbreak marker one space on the outbreak track and then put a cube of the disease colour on every other city connected to the city, this can trigger further outbreaks!
How to Win….. or Lose!
The players win as soon as all of the diseases have been researched, regardless of whether there are cubes still on the board.
The players lose in three ways: If the outbreak marker reaches the last spot, if a player tries to draw two cards but there are not enough left, or if a disease cube needs to be placed and there are none left.
Key details:
Setup Time – 5 Minutes
Ease of Learning – Simple to learn and player reference cards are extremely useful.
Play Time – 45-60 minutes