If you desire to read the original rule book, it is available here.
Pandemic is a game in which players must work together to discover the cures to 4 diseases that are ravaging the world.
The four diseases are known by their colors: red, yellow, blue and black. To win the players must discover the cures for all of them.
The game is played on a game board representing a world map with 48 different cities spread throughout the board with different paths connecting them. The cities may get infected by different diseases which are represented by colored cubes in the game board. Players may treat the diseases to remove disease cubes from the cities, or leave them alone, risking the chance of an outbreak happening and the propagation of the disease.
The players will also have access to players' cards (which are drawn at the end of each turn) that allow them to perform a variety of actions and are a requirement to discover the cures for the diseases.
The players lose the games if any of these three conditions is met:
The game is divided by turns and each turn consists of different phases:
First the current player must perform 4 actions (explained in the next subsection), then if the game hasn't finished the player must draw 2 cards from the players' cards deck, if a player were to have more than 7 cards in their hand then cards must be discarded until there are 7 left; finally, cards are drawn from the infection deck and the specified cities are infected with one disease cube of their respective colors.
The number of cards drawn from the infection deck depend on the current infection rate of the game, which increases after the third and fifth epidemic.
An epidemic happens when an epidemic card is drawn from the players' cards deck. During an epidemic the bottom card of the infection deck is drawn and the specified city gets 3 infection cubes added, then all the cards in the infection deck discard pile are shuffled and added on top of the infection deck.
If during the infection phase or during an epidemic a city would add cubes resulting in more than 3 cubes of one specific color in the city, then the amount of cubes in the city is capped at 3 for that color but an outbreak will occur.
During an outbreak all neighboring cities will get one infection cube of the color of the city suffering the outbreak. This can generate an outbreak in those cities, which will create a chain reaction (but cities previously hit by an outbreak chain won't outbreak again).
As previously stated, during each of their turns the players must perform 4 actions. This actions may vary from player to player depending on their role (which varies from game to game) and also on their available player cards.
Each player has the same 8 basic actions:
When you start playing a new game, the browser will automatically load the WebGL Player but this may take some time depending on your Internet connection (~10 seconds in a 10Mbit/s connection).
If this does not happen please verify that your browser and the web page have the requirements and permissions needed to run WebGL applications.
The game will automatically load, entering directly into your new game. This game is not saved in your computer in any way and if the web page is reloaded then a new game will start.
Also keep in mind that idle games (>30 minutes since the last action) are removed from the server and will not be accessible.
Once a game starts, the game will show the world map similar to the following image:
If the game layout shows a "Thinking..." message in red, it means the game started on the computer's turn and the turn is being processed; but your turn will start shortly!
If for some reason the game couldn't contact the server (or if your game stopped existing) an error message would appear.
The game information can be read as seen in the following image:
As stated previously, additional information can be obtained by pressing any of the CTRL Key and can be read as follows:
Learning to keep track of what's happening is important to success.
The game has a series of animations which play after each specific action or event to help keeping track of what is happening. These icons will appear in the game when a specific event happens:
Icon | Description |
---|---|
![]() | Appears when a city is being infected by the blue disease. |
![]() | Appears when a city is being infected by the black disease. |
![]() | Appears when a city is being infected by the red disease. |
![]() | Appears when a city is being infected by the yellow disease. |
![]() | Appears when a city is suffering an epidemic. |
![]() | Appears when a city is suffering an outbreak. |
![]() | Appears in cities that are currently under quarantine or when an infection is prevented in a city. |
![]() | Appears when a player discovers a cure to a disease in a city. |
![]() | Appears when a player builds a research station in a city. |
![]() | Appears on cities with a research station built in them. |
![]() | Appears when a player treats a disease in a city. |
![]() | Appears when a player manages to eradicate a disease from the game. |
Any card exchanges (through sharing knowledge), card discard and player movement will be presented in the game with the visual movement of the cards and the players' pawns/meeples.
Performing an action is perhaps the most crucial step in controlling the interface: at any given moment you will be either waiting for the AI to perform its action or the game client will be expecting you to perform an action.
There are two main turn phases in which you will be requested to perform an action:
City | Card |
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![]() | ![]() |
After you have finished the game (shown by a message informing you of your victory or defeat) you will be asked to fill out a survey or skip it if you don't wish to participate. If you choose to participate in the survey you will answer a few questions about your experience and then will go to the credits, were you may choose to play again if you like. If you choose to not participate in the survey you will be taken directly to the credits were you can choose to play again.
Some of the icons made by Freepik, Good Ware, Kiranshastry and Smashicons from www.flaticon.com