Pandemic

Today's review is of the 2008 release, Pandemic.  For 2-4 players, this cooperative game takes 45 minutes.

Overview
Four viruses have broken out across the world.  You and your team are charged to stop the spread, find cures, and save the world.  Are you up for it?

In Pandemic, each player has a role (like medic, scientist, researcher) granting special abilities, and a hand of cards, each with a city/color on it (or special card).  Random cities (chosen from a separate deck) are given differing numbers of disease cubes to start the game.  The goal is to cure 4 viruses (blue, red, yellow, black), regionally located.  Each player starts the game at a research station in Atlanta.  On your turn, you perform four actions total from the following list (you can do the same action more than once, just keep the total to four):
- move to another city (following game rules)
- build a research station (by being in city [x] and discarding the matching city card)
- remove one disease cube from your current city
- give/take a card from a player in your current city (by being in city [x] and transferring the matching city card)
- cure a disease of color [x] (by discarding 5 cards of [x] color at a city with a research station)
Your special ability helps you with the above- the medic, for example, removes all disease cubes from a city rather than only one.

game components; image from here

At the end of your turn, draw two cards, which are either city or epidemic cards; if the latter, one new city is infected with three disease cubes.  After drawing, two more cities are revealed, which are given one new disease cube each.  If at any point, a city receiving disease cubes already had three, and outbreak is triggered, adding one cube to each adjacent city.

There are multiple ways to lose (hit [x] outbreaks, run out of disease cubes, run out of cards to draw) and only one way to win (cure all 4 diseases).  Will you prevail?

Review
This is a great game- there's a reason it's the third-most reviewed game on boardgamegeek and has spawned multiple variants.  It's challenging (you're going to lose sometimes- no getting around that), full of meaningful choices, and suspenseful.  The different special abilities give each game a new twist.  All in all, highly recommended.

Rating: A