The game I chose is Pandemic, by Matt Leacock. It is a cooperative board game where players work together to stop global disease. The target audience is players who enjoy strategy, teamwork, and problem-solving, especially those interested in high-pressure decision-making scenarios, as well as people who are bored with quarantine due to COVID-19. Pandemic is a board game, but I also found a digital version online. This game has the same concept as my team’s game because we are also designing a cooperative game where each player has different abilities and must collaborate to achieve a shared goal.
My central argument is that while Pandemic and our game share the same cooperative foundation and role-based mechanics, Pandemic is a really complex game and strategy-based, whereas our game prioritizes accessibility and ease of play. They create very different player experiences. Pandemic creates an intense environment where every decision matters and players must carefully plan ahead. In contrast, our game is designed to be less predictable; you don’t know what is going to happen when you flip one card over. This allows players to quickly get to the game instead of thinking and planning. Our plan is to make the rules without a long learning curve. While Pandemic excels at creating a rich and challenging system, it can also feel overwhelming, especially for casual players who just want to relax, and our game focuses more on creating randomness and less thinking, doing the action when you encounter something instead of planning ahead.
Pandemic’s mechanics include limited actions per turn, role-specific abilities, and a system that constantly escalates tension through infection. These mechanics lead to dynamics where players must coordinate closely, often engaging in intense discussions about optimal moves. The resulting aesthetics are feelings of tension, urgency, and shared accomplishment when a cure is found. One particularly effective design choice is how the game simulates the spread of disease, which creates a constant sense of pressure. However, this also reveals a flaw: sometimes there’s one dominant player who dictates all decisions, reducing others’ play experience. The game models global disease outbreaks, which can feel especially relevant during COVID-19 period. It can help players understand the complexity of managing pandemics. Compared to other games in the genre, Pandemic stands out for its storytelling and systemic complexity, but it is less flexible in supporting different play styles. Our game attempts to address this by simplifying mechanics and encouraging more individual decision-making within the team structure.
The formal elements in Pandemic mainly involve outwitting the system, solving for the possible solution, rescuing cities, and racing against the spread of the virus. The game constantly creates pressure because players need to think strategically and make decisions that consider the disease spreading out of control. It is also a good game to spend time on, since one full game can easily last around an hour. In comparison, our game is a little different. It also involves outwitting challenges and solving for a solution, but it is designed to be much simpler and does not require such a long time to understand or complete. Both Pandemic and our game are non-zero-sum games because players work together toward a shared objective rather than competing against one another. This comparison helped me think more critically about design trade-offs, especially between depth and usability, and how those choices affect player engagement.
There are several pieces of evidence that support my argument. I spent a long time just learning the rules before even starting the game, which already shows the barrier to entry and how complex Pandemic can feel for new players. During gameplay, there was a moment where multiple outbreaks chained together, creating a sudden spike in tension and forcing our team to completely rethink our strategy. This moment demonstrates how the game’s mechanics successfully create dramatic and engaging dynamics, but also how overwhelming the experience can become. These experiences clearly illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses of Pandemic in comparison to our simpler and more accessible game concept.
