Right now, it’s 2020 and we are living through the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in 2008, the only pandemic we had to worry about was the cooperative board game designed by Matt Leacock.
I played a lot of the role playing game Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in middle school. For a little while I dabbled in the strategy game BattleTech. The collectible card game Magic: The Gathering ruled my gaming life throughout high school. Then in college I pretty much stopped playing all tabletop games in favor of video games. After college, I studiously avoided tabletop games after being intimidated by heavy board games like Power Grid and Puerto Rico. That all changed in 2008.
I met my wife in 2006. She was not an avid gamer but we did like playing some party games together. She isn’t very competitive at sports or games. When I heard about a cooperative board game, I sought it out. I figured a game in which we worked together would fit better in our relationship.
That game was Pandemic. For the uninitiated, Pandemic has the players working together to move around a map attempting to rid the world of four diseases. Each disease is localized to a region of the world. If too much of a disease builds up on a single city then that city outbreaks and spreads the disease to adjacent cities. Players have to balance keeping each disease under control while researching cures to eradicate the diseases. There are multiple ways to lose but only a single way to win.
The rules of Pandemic are relatively simple to me now, but when we first played the game it was all shiny and new. There are two different decks of cards. There are all these cubes to put all over the map. Each turn offers a selection of actions to choose rather than a mandated set of actions. And each player has a unique power. Even then, though, the system was smooth enough that we played and enjoyed the game from our first session. Which we lost, of course.
Being able to play a game cooperatively was a game changer. I had never seen a game that had all the players on the same team working against the game itself. Sure, you could gang up on someone in Risk, but Pandemic doesn’t even have the option to attack the other players. Everyone wins or loses together. This experience led us to other cooperative games, such as Castle Panic, Flash Point: Fire Rescue, and Matt Leacock’s other major cooperative milestone, Forbidden Island.
Pandemic was the first game I actively tried to get my friends to play. Back then, no one else had heard of the game, so I felt like a trendsetter. To this day, I take a small amount of pride in being “first” to the Pandemic party. It was also the first game for which I bought an expansion, a concept I associated with video games but not tabletop games.
Before Pandemic became the franchise it is today, you couldn’t find it in mass market stores like Target. I had to find a tabletop game store. Walking into that store for the first time was a revelation. I knew games existed outside of childhood classics like Monopoly and Clue; I had friends that played plenty of Eurogames. But the folks that ran Family Game Store were welcoming and more than willing to talk about any game. Soon I was picking up other games to play as a couple. When our kids got old enough, they joined us on excursions to Family Game Store, joyfully playing demo games and assuring me that my closet full of games would not gather dust.
Thanks to Pandemic, I discovered this whole wide world of tabletop games. Thanks to a game about a pandemic, my family has endured a real life pandemic thanks to our ever growing collection of games bringing us together.
If you want to read about the game that started me on the path to hobby gaming, go here.
This article is part of the 2020 Tabletop Writers Diversity Initiative. Use the tags “Tabletop Writers Guild” and “2020 Diversity Initiative” to find more.
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