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Pandemic: On the Brink (2013)
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Description
Pandemic: On The Brink, from Z-Man Games, adds three expansion modules for Pandemic that are guaranteed to spice things up! It also includes a number of welcome additions including more roles and events.
In the Virulent Strain Challenge module, one of the four diseases will go out of control in horrible and unexpected ways. In this module you will ditch the normal Epidemic cards and replace them with the Virulent Strain cards, of which there are eight, meaning you will encounter different cards in a different order on different playthroughs.
The Virulent Strain effects can be immediate or persistent and can vary from having to turn in an extra city card of the Virulent Strain colour to cure the Virulent Strain, to making it necessary to treat the Virulent Strain before leaving a city. The Virulent Strain will become a real pain!
The Mutation Challenge adds a fifth purple disease to the mix - it appears in unpredictable ways and it has only half the number of cubes (12) as the other diseases! Mutation events can be drawn from the player deck and Mutation cards are added to the infection deck, so there really will be no avoiding this! The players will win if they can cure all five diseases or if they can cure the usual four with no purple disease cubes on the board. You might not like the colour purple after playing this challenge!
The Bio-Terrorist Challenge gives a completely new dimension to the game as one player plays as the Bio-Terrorist on the side of the diseases against the rest of the players, using a pad to plot their hidden movements and spreading purple disease cubes across the world - but players can work together to capture the Bio-Terrorist and stop their plans... That is until the Bio-Terrorist escapes!
Designers Matt Leacock and Tom Lehmann have also included six new roles (the Archivist, Containment Specialist, Epidemiologist, Field Operative, Generalist and Troubleshooter) to add new ways of working and the potential for great synergies and there are also eight new event cards to increase the breadth of the game.
Also included is a seventh Epidemic card so you can now play the game on "Legendary" difficulty! And last, but not least, are the wonderfully thematic petri dishes to store the diseases in!
Pandemic: On The Brink contains so much content it breathes years of life into Pandemic.
Player Count: 2-5
Time: 45 Minutes
Age: 8+
I still remember the moment in my first game of Pandemic when we drew an Epidemic card and after infecting a city drawn from the bottom of the infection deck I experienced a moment of realisation when we had to shuffle the discard pile then put it back onto the top of the deck – “Hang on, that means that all the cities previously infected could get worse or even outbreak!… Ohhh…” Pandemic’s global success was not a right-place right-time thing – it was the dawn of world-class co-operative gaming, setting the standard for tense, cinematic board gaming.
A year later, designers Matt Leacock and Tom Lehmann looked to build upon the game with a modular expansion, aptly titled On The Brink. The expansion includes three new modules that change an element of the game. It also includes more roles, events, an increased base game difficulty level and five petri dishes to store each disease in!
The three main modules of this expansion pit you against the Virulent Strain challenge, a Mutated purple disease and the dreaded Bio-Terrorist! Before looking at each of the modules I’d like to quickly look at the added extras.
Loads More Stuff
On the Brink adds six new regular roles (not including the Bio-Terrorist, which I’ll discuss later) that all add something a little different to your world-saving endeavours. The Generalist is nice, simple and effective – she gets five actions each turn rather than the usual four. Perhaps my favourite role is the Containment Specialist, who can remove a disease cube when he enters a city if there are two or more of the same colour – I call him the vacuum cleaner!
The eight new event cards in On the Brink are great and come with a new rule of dealing two event cards per player to the deck during setup (so the game isn’t overloaded with events). There are also a couple of blank event cards and role cards if you fell inclined to add your own creations to the game.
The expansion now allows for the game to be played with five players and also includes an extra seventh Epidemic card to play what is a near-unbeatable “Legendary” difficulty setting. While offering nothing to the game itself the plastic Petri dishes are a widely loved and thematic way to store the disease cubes.
One thing, which might get overlooked, is the On the Brink expansion comes with a plastic insert to organise and store everything from this expansion and the base game in a single box.
Virulent Strain Challenge
In the Virulent Strain challenge, one of the diseases has gone out of control and has become unpredictable and nasty. In this challenge the normal Epidemic cards are replaced with the Virulent Strain cards and the disease with the most cubes on the board at the time of the first Epidemic becomes the Virulent Strain – for the rest of the game, every Epidemic causes the Virulent Strain disease to undergo an immediate or continuing effect, which can range from “Complex Molecular Structure” (which makes it harder to cure), “Government Interference” (making it necessary to treat the Virulent Strain before leaving a city) and “Rate Effect” (adding more disease cubes!)
I really like this challenge as it ups the difficulty level while only adding slightly to the base game rules – everything you need to do is explained on the Virulent Strain cards so things don’t get too complicated. Game upon game, the colour of the Virulent Strain might be different from the last, which adds a different geographical test and makes this a very replay-able module. Plus you can alter the difficulty by adding different Virulent Strain cards to the deck, in the exact same way you do with Epidemic cards in the base game.
Mutation Challenge
The Mutation challenge adds a fifth (purple) disease to the game that can appear unexpectedly and mutate! The Mutation challenge comes with 12 purple disease cubes, three Mutation Event cards that are shuffled into the player deck and aid the purple disease in spreading. Two Mutation cards are put into the infection discard pile, so they won’t come into play until after the first epidemic occurs, but once that happens things get interesting and tough!
You can cure the purple disease by discarding five city cards in a mix of colours (as long as one of those cities contains at least one purple disease cube), but curing the purple disease is not essential – you just need to cure the other four diseases and have no purple disease cubes on the board.
This challenge adds a nice dilemma as you may feel like you can largely ignore the purple disease early in the game as it takes a while to establish itself but the mutations can be devastating and there are only half as many purple cubes as there are of the other diseases, which means if you become complacent you will lose the game in a flash, as I have found out myself!
Bio-Terrorist Challenge
This challenge pits one player, the Bio-Terrorist, against the rest. The Bio-Terrorist’s movements around the world are hidden from the team (and secretly logged on a location sheet) as he/she manually spreads the purple disease around the world. The Bio-Terrorist takes their turns in the gap between player’s turns and can take Infection cards and use them much like the players use Player cards to take flights or even infect cities remotely, but must also announce an airport sighting when doing so.
The Bio-Terrorist can also be spotted when in the same city as another player, and for an action that player can capture him/her (the Bio-Terrorist must then discard all their cards and perform an escape on a subsequent turn).
The purple disease also spreads through infections when a purple disease cube is in a city when that city card is drawn (just like in the Mutation challenge), but when the disease outbreaks it “flares-out” and the city that just had the outbreak is reduced to only having one purple cube on it – small mercies…
The team wins in the same way as the Mutation challenge and The Bio-Terrorist wins if the players lose and there is at least one purple cube on the board. The Bio-Terrorist instantly loses (and is out of the game) if the players ever eradicate the purple disease, which means he/she must plan well. In a nice twist, everyone loses if the players lose and there are no purple cubes on the board.
The Bio-Terrorist challenge often polarises lovers of Pandemic as some feel this game should be fully co-operative, but I love it! The hidden movement is intriguing and ratchets up the stress levels on the team as the Bio-Terrorist clings onto their location sheet with an evil smile.
Final Thoughts on Pandemic: On the Brink
The On the Brink expansion takes an already great game into the stratosphere and gives more modular options that take the gameplay and experience into new realms of fun and longevity. Simply essential.
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
There are no major changes to game play for this expansion: players take turns in performing actions, drawing cards from the player deck and infecting cities. For the Virulent Strain challenge, make sure that you mark which of the strains is the Virulent Strain when you draw your first Epidemic card so that you don’t lose track of what strain is impacted by the new effects. I’d recommend using the petri dishes that come with this expansion and popping the Virulent Strain one beside your Epidemic cards so you know this one behaves differently.
For the Mutation Challenge, the cure is developed in the same way as for the base strains (i.e., trade in 5 City cards to discover the cure (or 4 if you’re playing the Scientist)). As there are no purple city cards, you can use any combination of 5 other City cards. Bear in mind when you’re trading in City cards for this cure that you must still have enough of each of the other disease strain colours to complete their cures: choose wisely! As noted above, you only have 12 Mutated Strain cubes so you do have to be quite conscious of the level of infection present and how this will be compounded by the Mutation and Mutation Event cards.
Playing the Virulent Strain and Mutation Challenge simultaneously is very doable, but you are living a lot more dangerously than playing each of them independently! You can be very quickly defeated by a combination of Epidemics pulled close together, which both increase the impact of the Virulent Strain and compound the Mutation strain cards in the Infection deck.
Pros & Cons
Pros
· Higher level of difficulty when adding one or both of the Virulent Strain and Mutation Challenges.
· Developing 5 cures takes longer and therefore you usually get longer gameplay than you would with the base Pandemic game.
· Component quality is consistent with the base game and integrates seamlessly.
· Negligible increase in setup time.
Cons
· It would be useful to have a card for each of the strains to denote the Virulent Strain. Be sure to find some way to mark which strain is the Virulent Strain during the first Epidemic, or you’ll forget which strain the Epidemic effects apply to.
· Mutation cards for the Infection deck are a slightly different shade of green, so you can tell when they’re coming!
Final Verdict
I really love the Pandemic: On The Brink expansion as it gives the game a lot more depth and increases the replayability. The new rules are easy to pick up and there’s not a significant increase involved in the game setup to incorporate the expansion. Overall, I would highly recommend this expansion to Pandemic lovers who are looking to challenge themselves!
Game Scores
· Overall Score: 80/100
· Artwork: 3/5
· Complexity: 3/5
· Replayability: 5/5
· Player Interaction: 5/5
· Component Quality: 3/5
Zatu Score
You might like
- Three expansions in one package, plus loads of extras.
- More roles and events.
- Plastic box organiser/insert.
- The Petri dishes!
Might not like
- The one-vs-many aspect of the Bio-Terrorist challenge.
- The difficulty level is certainly higher (but surely thats what you want from an expansion).