1495: Epidemic!

I really enjoy the board game Pandemic, as has been fairly well established on these very pages, but I was a little skeptical about trying the iOS version. After all, I have a perfectly good copy of the board game on my shelf — plus its expansions — so what use is a digital version?

Well, it’s easier to simply start playing, for one thing; for another, it has a somewhat different “feel” to it than gathering around a board with friends to play. The board game can be played solo too, of course — particularly with the solo rules introduced in the In the Lab expansion — but the iOS version is particularly friendly to either solo or pass-and-play formats. I’d argue that it feels more “right” to play it as a single-player, multi-character strategy game on the iPad, actually; it’s much easier to collaborate on cooperative multiplayer moves when the board is right there in front of you, whereas passing an iPad around isn’t nearly so practical from that perspective.

I think the thing I like the most about the iOS version, though, is the presentation. Drawing most of its futuristic aesthetic from the newer edition of the board game that came out recently, its visual style is simple but effective, and the background music is excellent. Building in intensity as the Infection Rate increases over the course of a game, it keeps things feeling exciting and dramatic — and the special, super-intense music that plays when an Epidemic card is drawn really drives home the whole “Uh-oh, we might be fucked now” nature of the experience.

The other thing worth considering about the iOS version is that it’s a good way for people to try the game out without having to invest in the considerably more expensive board game version. It has a good interactive tutorial that explains the rules to you as you play, and a comprehensive in-game reference manual that goes into full detail about the game rules and all the available cards for special events, player roles and the like. It is, in short, like many iOS adaptations of board games, an excellent way of learning the game before jumping into a session with live tabletop players, or to refresh your memory on how it all works before teaching it to a group of newcomers.

Plus, you know, Pandemic is just a great game, too. It is, for many people, their introduction to truly cooperative gaming — a team of players against the board — and at less than an hour for a game to unfold (considerably less for the digital adaptation) it’s friendly to groups who tend to play on “school nights”, too.

Give it a shot. And don’t worry if you doom the world to oblivion at the hands of Radical-6 (or whatever you call the Blue disease this time around) — it happens to the best of us.