In Pandemic, the players work together to discover cures for four diseases. Their pieces move between cities on a world map, where colored cubes show the diseases present. Players use actions to travel, remove cubes and collect the cards needed for cures. The team wins when it has found all four cures, even if cubes remain on the board.
Each turn ends with infection cards adding cubes to the cities they name. If a city already has three cubes of that color, it has an outbreak instead of taking a fourth: one cube spreads to each connected city. Those cities can also have outbreaks if they are full. Eight outbreaks lose the game, so preventing one can matter well beyond the city where it starts.
The infection cards give you some warning about where trouble may return. An epidemic, drawn from the separate deck that supplies players with cards, puts recently used infection cards back on top. A city you have just treated can soon be infected again.
Five cities go back on top
Imagine a moment after an earlier epidemic. Since that epidemic, the infection cards for Essen, Taipei, Kinshasa and Santiago have been drawn and placed face up in the discard pile beside their deck. Now a player draws another epidemic card.
First, move the infection-rate marker forward. Its position tells you how many cities to infect at the end of a turn. Then draw a card from the bottom of the infection deck. In this example it is St. Petersburg, which has no disease cubes and whose disease is still active. Put three cubes there and add its card to the four in the discard pile.
Now shuffle those five discarded infection cards and put them on top of the remaining infection deck. All five will be above the rest of the deck. You know the cities in this group, although you do not know their new order.
The usual infection draws happen after the epidemic has been dealt with, on that same turn. Without an event or special ability intervening, those draws will come from the five cards you just shuffled. St. Petersburg could be hit again immediately, while it already has three cubes.
Removing one cube can prevent an outbreak
Treating disease removes cubes from the city where your piece is standing. It leaves the infection card in the deck or discard pile. Clearing a city now therefore does not stop its card from adding cubes later.
For an uncured disease, a normal treatment action removes one cube. Suppose you can reach a city with three cubes before its card is drawn again. Removing one leaves two. If the next infection adds one cube of that color, the city returns to three without an outbreak. If you had left all three in place, that same draw would have spread cubes to its neighbors.
You do not have to empty that city to prevent this particular outbreak. That can leave actions for moving elsewhere or working toward a cure. Other infections and special abilities can change the calculation, so check what could happen before that city’s next card arrives.
A cure and an empty city do different jobs
Finding a cure normally means collecting five player cards of one disease color and spending them at a research station. Once cured, that disease becomes easier to treat: a treatment action removes all its cubes from your city. But infection cards can still add new cubes of that color.
If the disease is cured and every cube of its color has been removed from the board, it is eradicated. Its infection cards then stop adding cubes. Eradication can help, but finding all four cures is enough to win; the team does not need to clear the whole map.
When deciding where to go, look at both the cubes on the map and the cards that an epidemic could bring back. A city with three cubes deserves particular attention when you know its card may soon return. Removing just one cube can buy the team another draw without an outbreak, giving someone else time to finish collecting a cure.
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