Contingency planner sounds like it's got interesting possibilities, I'll take that.

Also, we should probably establish how many of us have never played this game.

I think Researcher and Medic are the most powerful roles. After that, I don't know. Those event cards can really save your bacon though.

Hey, Billytea, if you and Ryan are on board we're good to start a game. 4 is a really good number of players.

Hi Gud. Ryan does want to play, but not in a separate role; he'd like to play a combined role with me. His favourite role is Medic, so we'll go with that if that's ok.

Cool. Anybody else want in?

I'll take Researcher. Have you played the game before, chrismg? It sounds like billytea & Ryan are already familiar with it.

Nope, sorry. No clue.

Cool. It's a great game and it's fun to introduce it to people. It's a co-op game so we either all win or the game wins. The premise is that there are four diseases spreading across the world and our goal is to find a cure for all four before they get out of control.

The game board is a map of the world with cities connected by dashed lines. We all start at the CDC in Atlanta. Atlanta is also the only city with a research station at the beginning of the game. We'll get back to the board in a bit.

There two types of cards in the game player cards, and infection cards. The player cards are cards drawn by the player and consists mostly of cards with a city and color but also has a few event cards (always good) and a few epidemic cards (always bad, very bad). The infection cards are automatically drawn by the game (not literally in the board version, but literally in the computer version) and are all a city and color.

Now I mentioned colors, there are four colors, yellow, black, blue, and red and they represent the four diseases we are trying to cure.

There are disease cubes for each disease that are placed on cities on the board. Each disease has 24 cubes. Each disease has a region, so blue is North America and Europe, Yellow is South America and Africa, Black is central Asia, and Red is East Asia and the Pacific.

At the start of the game nine infection cards are drawn. The first three cities drawn get three disease cubes the same color as the card. The next three cities drawn get two, and the last three get one. The infection cards go into the infection card discard pile.

The number of cubes on a city is pretty important because if a city gets a fourth cube of a particular color, then it outbreaks, spreading a disease cube to each connected city (which can cause chain reactions if one of those cities has three cubes already).

To cure a disease, a player needs five player cards of the same color and be located at a research station. (The Scientist only needs four).

Once all four diseases are cured, the players have won.

So that's the basic overview of the game. Now we get into gameplay. On your turn, you can take up to four actions. You can move, you can treat disease, you can build a research station, you can swap cards, and you can cure (some roles will have a special action they can take).

There are three ways to move, you can move from a city to any directly connected city which counts as 1 action. You can discard a city player card to move to the discarded city or to move to any city from the discarded city. (A discarded city player card never comes back into play so there is a definite cost to moving this way). This also counts as 1 action. You can also move from a city with a research center to any other city with a research center and that this also 1 action.

Treating is pretty simple. For 1 action you can remove one disease cube. (The Medic can remove all disease cubes of a single color for 1 action). If a disease has already been cured, 1 action will remove all cubes of that disease. (The Medic can do this without spending an action -- which is awesome).

If two players are in the same city, you can also give or take one card to/from another player for 1 action. However, you can only exchange a card that matches the city both players are in (i.e. if you are both in Moscow you can only exchange the Moscow card). The Researcher can give (but not take) any city card (this makes the Researcher really valuable).

Finally, if you have enough cards of the same color you can cure a disease. A cured disease will still spread but is much easier to treat.

Here's a walkthrough of how the games works.

[link]