Pandemic: On The Brink Second Opinion

Summary

Pandemic: On The Brink is a great expansion to the original Pandemic game! I would highly recommend this game to any Pandemic fans who have been playing the base game on maximum difficulty and consistently achieving the objectives, as it adds extra layers of difficulty that you must keep on top of. Less experienced players will also find the new additions fun to play, but I would recommend starting out with just one of the two new challenges so you are not overloaded.

Game Set Up

I focus predominantly on the Virulent Strain and Mutation Challenges in this review, as the Bio-Terrorist Challenge requires a bigger group to play, and I’ve not tried this as yet. William Moffat covered this element of this expansion in his original review of Pandemic: On The Brink – go check it out!

The biggest addition to the base Pandemic game setup from this expansion is the inclusion of the new Mutated strain (and it’s purple, yay!). A cure vial indicator sticker is added to the bottom of the base Pandemic game board to track cure creation, along with a purple cure vial indicator and purple disease cubes to add to your stash. For all strains, there are also plastic petri dishes included in the box for your to store your disease cubes in.

If you are playing the Virulent Strain Challenge, you must replace the standard green Epidemic cards with the new red Virulent Strain Epidemic cards. You can increase the difficultly by adding a higher number of Epidemic cards, in the same way as the base game, but I would recommend starting with 4 cards as the new Virulent Strain effects can make things very tricky! The “virulent strain”, defined during the first Epidemic, is the disease strain with the most disease cubes on the board at that moment in time. In addition to the usual impacts of an Epidemic, the new Epidemic cards also have one of the following impacts shown at the bottom of the cards in the image below.

It’s easy to see from the effects how these new Epidemic cards can very quickly cause problems, particularly if you have multiple continuing effects in play. Government Interference can be particularly problematic, in my experience, as it severely inhibits player movement when there’s a lot of Virulent Strain infected cities. Unacceptable Loss can also be an immediate “game over” if it’s drawn at a time where you have a high level of Virulent Strain infection!

If you’re playing the Mutation Challenge (either as a standalone or in addition to the Virulent Strain Challenge), it’s important to know that you only have 12 Mutated Strain cubes, so keep an eye on your infection levels. You also have some new cards to add to the decks during setup:

· Mutation Event Cards: in addition to the Epidemic cards, the Mutation Event cards cause smaller outbreaks of the Mutated Strain. These can either add 3 Mutated strain cubes to a single city, 1 Mutated strain cube to 3 cities or add an additional cube to any cities already infected with 2 Mutated strain cubes.

· Mutation Cards: these cards start in the Infection Discard Pile and are shuffled into the Infection deck at your first Epidemic. These cards force you to draw a card from the bottom of the deck and infect that city with a cube of the Mutated Strain. Interestingly this can have a slight dilution effect on infections of the other four strains as, when the deck is reshuffled for the next Epidemic, the cards drawn for the Mutated strain don’t have any of the disease cubes related to the cards’ colour.

In addition to the new challenges, you also have new Role cards and Event cards to choose from. My favorite new Role card is the Epidemiologist: she can take a City card from any player that she’s in the same city as, irrespective of whether the City card matches the city they are in. This removes the need to travel halfway across the board to be in the same city as another player to exchange a specific City card, which can be the difference between getting a cure developed in time and not. I also really like the Mobile Hospital event card: you cure a single disease cube from every city you pass through on that turn. This basically acts like the Medic Role card (once a disease is cured) and can help knock a pocket of infection on the head quickly in a time of crisis.

Playing the Game