Pandemic Solo Review

SOLO – YES, OR NO? – Pandemic

The best part of playing boardgames is often the social aspect, requiring people to communicate and collaborate with each other. This will quite often bring out sides in people rarely seen, whether it is the socially awkward turning into social butterflies as they take command of a social deduction game, newbies discovering just how vast the boardgame universe actually is, or merely just the small quiet unassuming individual, who quickly turns into a terrifying despot, hellbent on total card domination . . .

Indeed, getting together with like-minded individuals who all share a common interest is good for the mind, body, and soul, even if those same individuals spend the next few hours repeatedly destroying your meeples.

However, this does not mean that the world of board games is a ‘2 players or more’ domain only. With the all too recent events and lockdowns, there has been an uptake in board games specifically designed either for solo play (Final Girl anyone?) or games now coming with fully fleshed out solo variants hard baked into the rules.

With this in mind, and the fact that my partner (not a board game addict) is more than happy to banish me to the dining table, board game in hand, to give them and the dog a few hours peace, I looked through my collection and wondered which could be played solo, and are they any good?

First up, Pandemic.

The Game

For those not familiar with the game, the basic premise is that you are all members of a specialised team, all with specific traits and abilities, which must work together to develop cures for four diseases that are blighting the world, whilst also preventing infections and outbreaks spiralling out of control.

You take turns moving round the board, building research stations, treating outbreaks, and accumulating enough city cards to discover a cure, all before you either burn through your deck, run out of disease cubes or a total of eight outbreaks occur. It is notorious for often being difficult to win, with the many ways in which you can lose.

The Rules

I used the ‘official’ solo rules from the Z-MAN games website which also helpfully lists their other games that can also be played solo.

The main difference between the multiplayer game and the solo variant is the introduction of an ‘archive’ hand. This replaces the ‘researcher’ character and is a way of effectively allowing you to increase your hand, which is still limited to seven cards.

Instead of playing as one character in the solo varient of Pandemic, you play as three characters, drawn at random (I get my partner to choose three numbers between one and six that way I can blame them if\when I lose!).

You begin the game with three city cards in your hand, and three in the archive.

You then take it in ‘turns’ with each of your three characters following the usual core game rules and mechanics. The only exception is the share knowledge action, in which you use the archive to swap cards between hands as needed and when in the relevant city space.

The Result

So I lost – no surprises there! I would have put money on it being either running out of cubes or a chain reaction of outbreaks that did me in, but it was burning through my deck that was my undoing.

I drew the contingency planner, quarantine specialist and the operations expert (blame my partner for choosing numbers 1, 3 and 4) which isn’t the best combo, but it did allow me to strategically use the quarantine specialist to prevent cube placement, and being able to build research stations without the matching card (the operations expert) did help someway in mobility around the board – not as much as a dispatcher would – again blame the partner.

My undoing was not realising soon enough that my hand would soon breach the 7-card limit, and if I was nowhere a city that allowed me to deposit it int the archive, then I was faced with choosing which cards to discard. This is something that is much more impactful in the solo version, as you no longer have the buffer of other players taking actions before you reach the limits of your hand.

After coming to this realisation, I had a mid-game briefing with the rest of my team (the dog next to me wondering why I was sat talking to myself – my partner is used to it by now) and took a new approach of using cards to move around the board to get closer to ‘archive’ locations - I was only going to have to burn them anyway, may as well use them right?

That proved to be my folly, that and two back-to-back epidemic cards, resulting in having to divert attention into removing cubes - where is the medic when you need them? In carelessly spending cards to move around and forgetting the ability for the contingency planner to pick up discarded event cards and reuse them when needed, I soon found myself in a situation where I had plenty of cards in my archive, but unable to get to the cities easily to retrieve them, and with little to no cures found (I ended up with just two - where is the scientist where you need them?).

And that was that my crack team had failed, and as with most games of pandemic, it ended with arguing over who did what wrong -I think the dog is now also used to me talking to myself . . .)

Conclusion

As with most co-operative games, playing solo will work quite well, as they lend themselves to solo play with their mechanics. Often, the trick is in how to adapt any special abilities that would not necessarily work i.e. the researcher sharing cards, I mean who are they going to share cards with? The ‘archive’ I think is a clever adaptation for solo play, as well as having one limited hand of cards, which proves a challenge (as all good games of pandemic should be).

My takeaways for the next games are to keep track of which colour cards I am burning through (to understand he likelihood of how many are left in the deck and thus allowing me to better choose which cards to burn when I breach my hand limit), and by getting my partner to pick better numbers so I get the dispatcher, medic and scientist – AKA the solo dream team.

I am interested to hear other people’s thoughts and experiences with both pandemic and playing solo, and maybe some pointers of where I went wrong.

So, in conclusion, Pandemic SOLO – YES, OR NO?

It is a YES from me (but I am a sucker for punishment).