Pandemic State of Emergency

Pandemic State of Emergency

Pandemic: State of Emergency consists of four variants to Pandemic along with several new roles and events. Overall it is a decent expansion which has met my expectations in that each variant results in a different feel in the overall game play.

What comes with it

Quarantines
This is a simple variant that adds in four quarantine markers which, as an action, can be deployed on a city on order to prevent the next two infections there.

Hinterlands Challenge
The Hinterlands Challenge adds in some rules that make the game harder and others that make it easier. What makes it harder is that there are four new remote locations and a die is rolled every turn to infect those regions. In addition to simply having more locations to worry about, infecting the hinterlands with a die means that if one of the hinterland locations gets a third cube, it is open to the possibility of outbreak every turn thereafter. What makes Hinterlands easier is the fact that the Share Knowledge action can now be done with any card matching the Hinterland color when in a Hinterland space.

Emergency Events
The Emergency Events are a set of cards which get added to the player deck, one Emergency Event per Epidemic. As opposed to normal Events, these Emergency Events are bad for the players. Some have an immediate one time effect, such as drawing the bottom infection card and placing three cubes there, while others have a continuing effect, such as only allowing players to hold 6 cards. The continuing effect cards only remain active until the next Emergency Event is drawn at which point the new card takes effect.

Superbug Challenge
This variant adds a fifth purple disease, the superbug, that is untreatable before it is cured. This disease spreads through two cards in the infection deck that cause the player to place a superbug disease rather than the normal disease. Once a cure has been found, research stations can be converted to vaccine factories and vaccines must be obtained from the factories to treat the superbug. Then, in addition to finding all the cures, the Superbug must be eradicated in order to win the game. To offset the added challenge, extra cards which are helpful to the players are added to the player deck. Finally this variant must be played with quarantines because there is no way to stop the spread of the Superbug before it is cured.

Other Stuff
Also included in this expansion are extra roles and events, although this time around some are limited to specific scenarios.

Contents: