Pandemic Playthrough - Researcher, Quarantine Specialist & Researcher

A Sunday evening with some free time to kill. Score! While the wife is busy with writing her book (she has to meet her deadline), I thought I should rejuvenate my brain tank with a board game. The only solo game I currently own and enjoy is Pandemic, ergo another session report from me...

Solo 3-player Pandemic Playthrough
5 epidemics (normal mode)

Random roles according to sequence:

• Researcher
• Quarantine Specialist (QS for short)
• Scientist

Our starting lineup

5 Epidemic cards shuffled into the player deck

Board at the start of the game

I have heard that there is a power combo between the researcher and the scientist. The researcher would pass her cards to the scientist to find cures.

But looking at this lineup, I can see that I'm going to have a hard time moving around the board without an operations expert nor a dispatcher. And when it's hard to move around the board, the likelihood of the researcher and the scientist meeting up while treating diseases is highly improbable.

But I decided to take up the challenge anyway. So cards shuffled and cities infected. OMG, red cities are swiftly being infected? But I really shuffled my cards! Anyway it looks like the cities infected with 3 disease cubes are at different parts of the board - Chennai (black), Ho Chi Minh City (red) and Johannesberg (bottom yellow). Looking at my player hands, it is going to be very hard to reach all three critical cities.

Starting infections

Our researcher starts by ferrying from Atlanta to Tokyo and manages to treat the patient there who begs her to go over to Seoul to treat his cousins there. The quarantine specialist makes his move to Ho Chi Minh City but has no more moves to treat anyone there. Our scientist decides to use his flight ticket to Cairo, walking to Johannesburg and treating one patient there. Fortunate for out heroes, our quarantine specialist was able to prevent an outbreak from occuring in Ho Chi Minh City and also prevent a cube in hong kong.

I'll save you the trouble of reading the details so I'll just skip to the summary of the playthrough (though my mind is itching to tell you all the details).

Our scientist's first turn produced an epidemic. New York got critically infected but I used the event card Resilent Population to take that card out if the game. That way, it will never appear again in this game. One less city to worry about. 

1st epidemic by the Scientist

Playing the quarantine specialist, common logic would be to place her at critically infected cities. From previous experiences, the QS is most effective when we predict where the cities will infect so I decided to bring her to wherever there were plenty of not so critically infected cities around her. By knowing which cities were already hit, I positioned her where I thought the infections would strike next and this worked wonders like pitting Chuck Norris worth a bunch of diseases. Before her turn came again, she had already prevented 3 cities from having another cube.

I was lucky when during the 2nd epidemic that the QS was next to Kolkata and Kolkatta was drawn as the city critically infected. The QS kicked the disease square in the face out of that region. It's nice to have feelings like this when playing QS.

Our first cure was an amazing feat. I saw that I could cure two diseases in one turn if I moved the scientist to a research center and sacrifice any attempt to treat diseases. The photos show it all. My researcher went over and gave the scientist 3 red cards (the scientist now had 4). When the scientist's turn came, she found the cure for red, took two yellow cards from the researcher and found another cure for yellow. Holyacaroni, two cures in one turn! That's like hitting jackpot. I love having these moments of shear brilliance in Pandemic. 

Shear brilliance - Finding 2 cures in 1 turn! 

First cures. Woohoo! 

Our first outbreak happened 3 epidemics in, in Lima (yellow). The epidemic card pulled out Lima to critically infect and after shuffling the infection pile and placing on top of the deck, Lima was drawn again! Yes, there are always these moments where you will feel helpless no matter how you plan and strategize. Only an event card can turn these situations to "ha I got you this time, game system". So yea, I cud not do anything about it.

1st Outbreak in Lima

The QS managed to set up our second research station in Bangkok, so now we can fly from one side of the map to the middle of it. Our researcher took the opportunity to shuttle a flight over there and pass a blue card to the QS, who managed to find blue's cure on her turn.

After finding the cure, QS quickly ran to Mumbai to pass the Black card to the researcher on the researcher's turn. That's when the 4th epidemic happened causing an outbreak in Johannesburg.

Finally the researcher received the black card from the QS and ran to a research station to find the last cure clocking our win at 40 mins.

Researcher found the last cure

Victory!!!

Summary:

Play time - 40 mins
2 outbreaks
4 epidemics drawn and 1 left in the deck
4 cures found (VICTORY)
Scientist - 3 cures
Quarantine Specialist - 1 cure

Board view at the end

An awesome game for an awesome night with many memorable moments of brilliance and fortune.

I hope you enjoyed the session report. Click on "like" if you'd like to hear more session reports from me or drop me a comment on what you think about this session or about the Pandemic games you've played. Were they as exciting as mine?

Till next time, Kudos!