Z-Man GamesPandemic: Contagion

My family is a BIG game-playing family - cards, board games, party games, word games... We love them all! At least 3/4 of our free time together is spent playing a game. Because of this, we are always looking for new games to try and can be pretty picky about gameplay, time it takes to learn the game, and quality of the pieces involved. I was first introduced to this game when it was given as a Christmas present to an older sibling while we were all home visiting our parents for the holidays. I had previously played the original Pandemic game with some friends while I was in grad school, and I quickly realized I was not a fan of the co-op style of that game and I missed the me-vs.-you style I was used to! This game brought me back into my comfort zone while still keeping true to Pandemic's roots and style. It was not very hard to learn, although I had to keep the rule book nearby for the first couple games to help walk me through scoring properly. II have never played with children, though I imagine it could be a little difficult for younger children to learn because of all the options you have during your turn and the bigger words used in game-play (like the different mutation levels).I have played this game with 2 players a number of times and with more players a few times. Both are very fun was to play! It is a quick game when you play with 2 players (less than 30 minutes), but that makes it easy to play multiple rounds! With more people, the game takes longer, but we have never hit more than one hour. More people also make the strategy a bit different, so it is great to mix it up!I also love thee quality and design of the pieces and the board. I am confident that all the materials will hold up well to lots of game play as they are made of sturdy materials! The design (coloured cubes to represent your virus infection, a Petri dish to keep everything organized, and the cities and infection cards) is brilliant!Overall, I love this game! After playing someone else's copy and a few times in a board game cafe in Toronto, ON, I just had to buy it for myself! I would highly recommend this game to anyone (whether you're familiar with Pandemic or not) looking for a new, quick game to play.

as seen from the reverse of the table; it's quick and easy to set up, and you play the bug, not the bug-hunter. Play is concise, nicely paced; one to five people can play; each game averaged about an hour, and multiple games were great. We play the spectrum of Pandemic games a LOT and this takes the portable vote since it has smaller footprint (no big board), quirky angle of playing the 'killer bug', strategically complex enough to satisfy intelligent competitive play, yet small enough to take along on a trip or evening as opposed to some of the bigger board games. My favourite is still Pandemic: Iberia, but Pandemic: Contagion has tied with it! Very happy with entire Pandemic range, great gifts for board game fans with co-operative and competitive play games.One caveat: marker cubes' colours are oddly not easy to differentiate, and cause confusion. We're going to find some to replace, or paint ours!

I was only ever mildly interested in this game, but it was at a good price so I bought it. I like that it's small and a short game. It's pretty straight forward, but there are some little details you have to remember and it took us a few games before we remembered everything.Cons: The box: I cannot get everything to fit beautifully like it does in Pandemic, so I'm usually frustrated when putting the game away. Second, I wish there was a better way to do the death toll. For the first skull card I put it in the discard pile a little lower so the skull sticks out. When the second skull card comes out, I see the first one and then do the death toll. It's kinda messy. Also, I think there is a little bit more luck in this game and how you do really depends on your hand.I definitely enjoy playing regular pandemic a lot more. There's more interaction between people. This game can easily be made into an app and you can just play solo against the computer.

This is a brilliant game that is competitive rather than cooperative like Pandemic. It's designed to make each game you play relatively short, and balances strategy and chance very well. There were three small changes we'd make to the game materials: 1. We found that we needed to use a coin or some other binary object to keep track of whether or not we had to calculate death toll (which occurs every other time you turn over a particular type of card), 2. we marked up some specific cards that weren't clear on whether or not an action they allowed counted against the player's normal allotment of actions per turn, and 3. we crossed out "less" and wrote "fewer" on some cards, because we're grammar fiends.

This is a really cool version of pandemic because most of the other versions all of them actually are cooperative and this one is competitive. It comes with cool science jars they keep your samples or the cubes. I labeled mine to be certain diseases but it looks really cool like I'm in a science lab and I'm excited. The box is great everything is good about it I got it on time. I suggest playing this game.

Pandemic: Contagion is a nice variation of the original Pandemic game. In this game, you are no longer working cooperatively with your fellow players to irradicate disease--- instead, you take on the role of the disease and you're trying to infect more people than your fellow competitors. Once you're familiar with the rules and scoring, this game is actually a fairly quick play (30 minutes, maybe).From an aesthetic standpoint, the designers of the game did a great job of creating a fun "disease-centric" game--- each player gets a petri dish to store their individual disease cubes.This is definitely a good addition to any game enthusiast's game collection. Replay value is high!