Pandemic Contagion Board Game - Become the Disease in This Standalone Strategy Game! Cooperative Game for Kids & Adults, Ages 13+, 2-5 Players, 30 Minute Playtime, Made by Z-Man Games

My family is a BIG game-playing family - cards, board games, party games, word games... We love them all! At least 3/4 of our free time together is spent playing a game. Because of this, we are always looking for new games to try and can be pretty picky about gameplay, time it takes to learn the game, and quality of the pieces involved. I was first introduced to this game when it was given as a Christmas present to an older sibling while we were all home visiting our parents for the holidays. I had previously played the original Pandemic game with some friends while I was in grad school, and I quickly realized I was not a fan of the co-op style of that game and I missed the me-vs.-you style I was used to! This game brought me back into my comfort zone while still keeping true to Pandemic's roots and style. It was not very hard to learn, although I had to keep the rule book nearby for the first couple games to help walk me through scoring properly. II have never played with children, though I imagine it could be a little difficult for younger children to learn because of all the options you have during your turn and the bigger words used in game-play (like the different mutation levels). I have played this game with 2 players a number of times and with more players a few times. Both are very fun was to play! It is a quick game when you play with 2 players (less than 30 minutes), but that makes it easy to play multiple rounds! With more people, the game takes longer, but we have never hit more than one hour. More people also make the strategy a bit different, so it is great to mix it up! I also love thee quality and design of the pieces and the board. I am confident that all the materials will hold up well to lots of game play as they are made of sturdy materials! The design (coloured cubes to represent your virus infection, a Petri dish to keep everything organized, and the cities and infection cards) is brilliant! Overall, I love this game! After playing someone else's copy and a few times in a board game cafe in Toronto, ON, I just had to buy it for myself! I would highly recommend this game to anyone (whether you're familiar with Pandemic or not) looking for a new, quick game to play.

as seen from the reverse of the table; it's quick and easy to set up, and you play the bug, not the bug-hunter. Play is concise, nicely paced; one to five people can play; each game averaged about an hour, and multiple games were great. We play the spectrum of Pandemic games a LOT and this takes the portable vote since it has smaller footprint (no big board), quirky angle of playing the 'killer bug', strategically complex enough to satisfy intelligent competitive play, yet small enough to take along on a trip or evening as opposed to some of the bigger board games. My favourite is still Pandemic: Iberia, but Pandemic: Contagion has tied with it! Very happy with entire Pandemic range, great gifts for board game fans with co-operative and competitive play games. One caveat: marker cubes' colours are oddly not easy to differentiate, and cause confusion. We're going to find some to replace, or paint ours!

Pandemic: Contagion is a nice variation of the original Pandemic game. In this game, you are no longer working cooperatively with your fellow players to irradicate disease--- instead, you take on the role of the disease and you're trying to infect more people than your fellow competitors. Once you're familiar with the rules and scoring, this game is actually a fairly quick play (30 minutes, maybe). From an aesthetic standpoint, the designers of the game did a great job of creating a fun "disease-centric" game--- each player gets a petri dish to store their individual disease cubes. This is definitely a good addition to any game enthusiast's game collection. Replay value is high!

One of our favourite tabletop games is Pandemic, so we bought Contagion to mix it up a bit. We don't like this standalone quite as much as standard Pandemic but it's fun enough that we still play it often, and usually as a somewhat-quick game to follow-up Pandemic. Contagion's premise is so much fun - you play AS the disease (obviously the opposite as regular Pandemic). It has a nice physical set-up, too. We looove the Petri dishes for the disease cubes and regularly use them in regular Pandemic too (I can't believe it doesn't come with them!). The player disease cards are a great concept. The game mechanics sometimes seem to go a bit slow but it's fun. It's also a very easy game to introduce to non-regular tabletop gamers.

This is a really cool version of pandemic because most of the other versions all of them actually are cooperative and this one is competitive. It comes with cool science jars they keep your samples or the cubes. I labeled mine to be certain diseases but it looks really cool like I'm in a science lab and I'm excited. The box is great everything is good about it I got it on time. I suggest playing this game.

This is a brilliant game that is competitive rather than cooperative like Pandemic. It's designed to make each game you play relatively short, and balances strategy and chance very well. There were three small changes we'd make to the game materials: 1. We found that we needed to use a coin or some other binary object to keep track of whether or not we had to calculate death toll (which occurs every other time you turn over a particular type of card), 2. we marked up some specific cards that weren't clear on whether or not an action they allowed counted against the player's normal allotment of actions per turn, and 3. we crossed out "less" and wrote "fewer" on some cards, because we're grammar fiends.

Pandemic games have yet to fail me. This is a very fun, quick, and simple game to play with two players. There is certainly strategy involved, but not nearly as complex as the regular co-operative pandemic games. It's a nice little break to play when you want to be the only winner.

Like other people, I bought the game because of it being a part of the "Pandemic" series. Contrary to the other games, instead fighting the disease you are the disease trying to kill off as many people as you can. The game box and pieces have fantastic artwork and are of very excellent quality. The theme in the artwork and pieces carry over from the original game nicely. But once you start to play, the theme really just kind of fades away. At the end of the game I feel I was just chasing the colors and numbers of the cards. There is no interaction between players. The mechanics of trying to raise your infection and incubation rates does give a little twist in the game, but overall the game is just middle of the road good. This game would be best as a filler game that would be played from time to time.