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Pandemic: Iberia
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Description
Fans of Pandemic and newcomers to the series alike will find plenty to enjoy in Pandemic: Iberia, a historical take on Z-Man Games's hit co-operative game from designers Matt Leacock and Jesús Torres Castro. As in Pandemic, two to five players will be working together to try and cure four diseases. In Pandemic: Iberia, these diseases are actually four real ailments that afflicted the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) in the mid-19th century - the era this game was set in. You and your teammates will take on unique character roles in order to combat malaria, typhus, the yellow fever and cholera. In a further departure from Pandemic, Iberia also introduces the importance of infrastructure. You can’t just get in a plane and fly to the next city in 1848, after all. Developing the peninsula’s rail system is key to victory in the game and distributing purified water around its towns and cities is also important. Leacock and Castro also built a couple of different scenarios into Pandemic: Iberia so that you can change up your experience from time to time. The Influx of Patients variant increases the importance of hospitals as patients rush to get to them. The hospitals themselves are more powerful in this version, so managing them is much more important than normal. You can also play the Historical Diseases variant, which gives each one of the four diseases different characteristics based on its history and medical effects. This variant forces you to adapt the way that you treat each one, learning their different behaviours so that you can keep them under control. There is plenty to enjoy in Pandemic: Iberia, with a theme and mechanics that will appeal to a wide range of players. Fans of Pandemic will be able to engage fully with this fresh take on the game, even if they’ve played the original over and over again, and the fresh take on the system is a great reason to take a look even if the original isn’t your thing. Order yours online today. Player count: 2-5 Time: 45 minutes Age rating: 8+
Here at The Game Shelf, we are huge fans of Pandemic, however we took quite a big break from playing it after finishing Pandemic Legacy Season 1. Playing 15 back-to-back games of Pandemic did, admittedly, give us some burnout.
When Z-Man Games released two variants in 2016 we didn’t take much notice, but eventually we tried Pandemic: Reign of Cthulu at a board game café and then Pandemic Iberia at a convention. Pandemic Iberia is the version we’ve chosen to add to our collection.
Pandemic Iberia is set in 1848, in the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal), and players take on the roles of nurse, railwayman, rural doctor, sailor, and more. You and up to four friends must cooperatively find the cures to malaria, typhus, yellow fever and cholera. The game introduces new thematic mechanics, most of which help you to cure disease, for example building a railroad, providing water and sailing round the coastline, but unfortunately there is no way to eradicate the disease in this version of the game.
The new variants add even more flavor to the game. The first introduces specific characteristics for each disease which make them harder to control in different ways. The second is a variant where patients (your cubes) flock towards hospitals, making outbreaks an even more pressing concern.
Gameplay
Much like the original game, Pandemic Iberia has you wandering a map trying to prevent disease outbreaks while researching cures. Each turn you get four action points that can be spent moving from place to place, removing disease cubes, setting up hospitals and researching cures. Afterwards, you will draw two player-deck cards. These are either event cards that allow you to perform instant powerful actions, epidemics which infect cities and cause you to draw infection cards quicker, or city cards five of which is a colour can be combined to cure a disease, or they can spend for several different standard actions.
After this you will unveil a number of cards from the infection deck, the amount increasing as more epidemics occur, and add disease cubes to the cities revealed. Should a city ever get a fourth disease cube then it will outbreak, infecting every city it has a land route to. This can cause a chain reaction and should you get enough outbreaks or run out of any of the cubes then you lose the game. The game is won by researching a cure for all four diseases before the player deck runs out of cards
Being set in 1848, there is a great difference in the available infrastructure and medical skills of your team. In the original, you could dart across the world in commuter jets to quickly get to disease hotspots, in 1848 the Wright Brothers are yet to be born.
Instead, Pandemic Iberia allows you to set up the first rail networks of Spain. This will take valuable time early in the game to lay down a track, but later on, you will be able to speedily react to outbreaks in ways that would otherwise be impossible. To compensate for your slow movement, Pandemic Iberia allows you to purify water, by providing regions of the map with clean drinking water you can prevent the spread of disease (and cubes), if only temporarily. This allows you to leave a cured area behind, confident that it’s going to remain so, or simply provide a patch job as you pass through to prevent outbreaks.
Pandemic Iberia Review – Game Components (Credit: Z-Man Games)
Amy’s Final Thoughts On Pandemic Iberia
Original Pandemic is a fantastic game, it’s a great co-operative experience that works well with different player counts, gives each player unique, but useful, abilities and has a good sense of difficulty balance. Pandemic Iberia is a fresh, modern take on the game. It is a little harder than the original, especially when you use the optional patient or named disease rules, but in return you feel much more rewarded for playing well.
Setting up a rail network early in the game encourages you to take risks you wouldn’t have taken in the original, but in return you get huge rewards when you can traverse the entire map for one action!
The inclusion of two extra game modes feels like you have a free expansion for the game, keeping the replay-ability high, and allowing you to further fine-tune the difficulty. If you are playing with new or younger gamers then you can put them aside and play with fewer epidemics, but if you are playing with seasoned veterans then you can throw everything in and create a game that is really out to get you! Pandemic Iberia is a true upgrade to the original game and well worth a play.
Fiona’s Final Thoughts On Pandemic Iberia
Setting aside Pandemic Legacy, which I count as my best ever gaming experience, Pandemic Iberia is my favourite version of the game. The co-operative game system is still the classic Pandemic experience, but the addition of the railroad and purifying mechanisms really elevate this to more of a gamer’s game. In addition, whereas in the original game the only way to increase the difficulty was to add more epidemic cards, Pandemic Iberia offers you many more options which not only adds variability to your games but also brings in some stronger thematic elements.
The other big appeal of Pandemic Iberia for me is the art style. Everything about the game is high quality, from the lined box to the colour printed insert, the beautiful, unique card backs for each deck, the lovely board and the unique tokens, such as the wooden microscopes for the board. This game is just a pleasure to have on your table.
Pandemic has always been a well respected co-operative experience, which works well at all of the player counts, so long as you don’t have an alpha player around your table who wants to plan the moves on everyone’s behalf. You won’t enjoy Pandemic Iberia if you don’t enjoy the original game, but if you do or if you’re looking for a new co-operative experience then Pandemic Iberia is definitely worth a look.
This blog was originally published on Aug 23rd, 2017. Updated on May 18th, 2022 to improve the information available.
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 acard 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 MinutesEase of Learning – Simple to learn and player reference cards are extremely useful.
Play Time – 45-60 minutes
Zatu Score
You might like
- Beautiful art and components.
- Enough variation from original Pandemic to keep Pandemic addicts interested.
- Many different game modes providing variability.
Might not like
- Core mechanisms are still derived from Pandemic if you dont enjoy Pandemic then you wont enjoy this.
- When playing with variants, the difficulty level can be very high.