Pandemic - anybody here played it yet?

I love co-op games and the theme on this one looks very cool. I'm curious to hear thoughts on it from the FATtie crowd.

Look for the Gameshark review in the next couple of weeks.

I've played a couple of games and it seems like it could be this year's THEBES. It has a cool theme, easy gameplay, it's under an hour, and there's some pretty neat tension. It seems like it is definitely designed with the theme in mind but it is a little disappointing that the diseases are just "blue disease", "red disease" and so on. Cool graphic design too, the box looks like a 1980 AH game. So far it looks like a pretty great Euro design.

I haven't played the boardgame, but I'm living it. Or at least it feels that way with everybody in the household getting sick the past couple of weeks.

--Mike L.

I've played about 9 games so far. It was a hit when I brought it to my area's monthly game marathon last weekend, one session went 4 games straight. The theme is nice and grim, the mechanics for the spread of disease and outbreaks are very good. In a nutshell: 9 cities start infected, 3 of them at the full capacity of a particular color's disease. Each player's turn 2 or more cards are drawn to add on disese cubes to specific cities, if a city has the max of 3 cubes there's an outbreak and every adjacent city gets another cube. If those adjacent cities already have 3 cubes a chain reaction of outbreaks start (fucking nasty). Cities already infected are much more likely to receive additional cubes. Scales well with level of ability with a greater number of epidemic cards (they add a new uninfected city at full capacity of infection cubes and may increase the number of cities where disease spreads per turn). VERY cooperative, at least half of a players actions will be interacting with the other guy's pawns with a little discussion about it every turn (with minimal downtime). Find cures to all 4 diseases and you win, you're removing diease cube along the way. Not a lot of cube confusion the rules are simple and well-written. A very good boardgame. If you lose the world dies. Looking forward to Barnes' review.

Excellent. Sounds like a game I can pull out with folks who wouldn't go for the longer stuff like Descent or Starcraft, but still prefer something with a good theme over your typical ultra-dry Euro. I think I'll give it a try.