The Untold Truth Of The Pandemic Board Game

We've established this is a ridiculously popular game about diseases, but let's delve deeper. While the game is now available in a variety of flavors, the vanilla concept goes something like this: You and your gaming buddies are a crack squad of disease-busting, stethoscope-slinging geniuses. Drawing from unique skill-sets, your mission is to work together to rid the planet of a freak show of horrific plagues strutting about as though they own the place. The Legacy version of the game takes the story to a new level. Plot twists and unexpected challenges morph the shape of the game again and again. 

This is where it gets kind of odd, though. Although the game lays no claim to depicting how an actual pandemic goes down, there's something very real about the cooperative energy behind it. So much so that, as described in this Q and A session in the Chicago Tribune, Pandemic is used in classrooms and medical schools to illustrate some of the basic strengths and shortcomings of the human condition. Something about the game feels real, from the sterile scientific names attributed to its evil diseases, to the visual of the world's major cities tumbling into a pathogen-storm of chaos, to the gradual mental deterioration of its primary characters under a relentless death-sniffle onslaught. Pandemic builds intensity like few other board games can. 

The power of Pandemic, and especially in the more story-driven Legacy version of the game, lies in creator Matt Leacock's willingness to repeatedly break a cardinal rule of board game design etiquette: Pandemic is unfair. And not just a little bit unfair, like a devious yet ultimately trustworthy dad who steals pineapple from his kid's extra-chunky slice of Hawaiian pizza. No. We're talking evil supervillain level unfairness here. Time and again, a twist of board gaming fate will pee (figuratively speaking, of course) in your kettle. The thing is, the harsh twists and turns of Pandemic aren't just Leacock being a great big meanie. Leacock is making a game where art closely imitates life.

Here's an example. Early in the Pandemic Legacy game, you gain access to an awesomely powerful military character. He's precisely the square-jawed, camouflage-trousered chap you want in your corner when the animal byproduct hits the propeller-driven air-circulating cooling device. Until that is, he betrays you, and the game politely instructs you to rip up his card. It hurts. It's infuriating. And It's glorious.

Writing about the betrayal, one incensed player confessed: "(It) was the most visceral moment I've ever had in a board game. I went and wrote rude things about him on the bathroom tiles ... and muttered ... under my breath for a week."

It's here that Pandemic, the board game evokes some eerie parallels with a real pandemic, AKA, the very real situation everyone is dealing with in 2020 whether they like it or not. A big part of the game is about managing a growing sense of simulated-panic. With your fellow intrepid plague-busters, you somehow have to figure out how to respond to a rapidly escalating situation without — to use a technical term — losing your potatoes. Losing control is inevitable. At some point in every game, players will experience that sinking sensation of a pandemic outbreak cascading out of control. There is no moment of complete containment, and this fraught tension lasts right through to the final moment of victory (or, of course, abject failure).

The way you win this game is very similar to how we "win" against COVID-19. We "flatten the curve" — and if that phrase isn't on a t-shirt yet, it should be! A recent Washington Post article offered readers a fascinating set of simulations for how social distancing can slow the spread of contagious disease, and it's almost horrifying how closely Pandemic the board game illustrates this same principle in slow, fully interactive motion. Of course, it's just a simulation, but it's hard not to feel a tightening in your chest as you watch your cities fall. Pandemic challenges players to panic sensibly. This is probably an excellent skill-set to have these days.

Swizzle together the squirming discomfort of recognizing some of our species' worst fallibilities, the virtues of panicking calmly and the dangers of arrogance, and what are we left with? Oddly, civilization-busting sniffles aside, Pandemic is a strangely upbeat experience. It's a game of relentlessly tested cooperation, where your most significant asset is one another, and your darkest threat is a shared failure to collectively adapt. This is a very deliberate design feature. Speaking about cooperation in an interview for Chicago Tribune, Matt Leacock said, "I think the best thing about cooperative play is it promises a safe space where you can experiment without (those qualities) affecting actual life."

Intriguing! So Matt's vision was a cooperative simulation almost? We'll circle back to that, but let's linger for a moment on cooperation and optimism. We're seeing examples of both with the real pandemic we're enduring. In the World Economic Forum website, Douglas Broom reports of kids offering an impromptu concert for a neighbor in self-isolation. In Wales, local councils are recruiting volunteers to go grocery shopping for the elderly and infirm. Kindness rocks. It's hard to imagine any upsides to COVID-19, but maybe if there's anything, this is it. You win together or lose together, or as Matt Leacock put it in an interview on YouTube, "Each player shines in their own way."

With some problematic realities on our doorstep, do games like this actually "help?" To be clear, no-one said these games actually should help. They're games. Expecting a game to achieve a higher good is as unreasonable as expecting generosity of cats or fiber from grape-flavored bubble gum. 

But Pandemic is, to some extent at least, a simulation. In the nay column, there's the argument that board games like this push us into dwelling on negativity. As Jorge Albor states in Pop Matters, "If you weren't already paranoid about the latest threat to your health ... then Pandemic: Legacy will move you one step closer to hypochondria." In the yay column, the field of psychology is continually uncovering new information on how simulations can prepare us for stressful situations, from dealing with loss to making snap decisions on the battle-field. Perhaps it's a stretch (OK, OK, it's definitely a stretch), but when push comes to shove, one argument is that games like this might be building a behavioral muscle memory that just might serve us in good stead. Sure, it's grossly simplified, but Pandemic pushes players to ask questions, most notably among them, "What would I actually do?"

Whichever column you side with, it looks like we'll be talking about our species' relationship with pathogens for a long time to come.