Cooperation and Teamwork, Pandemic Style
If there is a board gaming system that I have grown quite fond of over the years, it must be the Pandemic engine from 2008. That is already eighteen years ago today in 2026. The original game spearheaded the evolution and general take-up of the cooperative tabletop genre. It is fair to say that every cooperative engine designed after it, has tried, to some degree, to recapture the magic that made Pandemic so unique and brilliant at what it does.
The first time I played it, I think it was roughly two or three years after it came out, and I was immediately smitten. I loved the idea that the game had a built-in mechanism, a simple AI, that felt as if it were actively fighting back against every move you made. It did so like some Formula One driver, shifting gears, gaining speed and momentum with each click of the gearbox while you try to catch up, hopefully overtake, and race on for the win.
This might sound overwhelming and yes, occasionally the AI wins and you are left scratching your head, wondering what on earth you could have done differently. Yet, speaking from personal experience, you find yourself dead set on a rematch. The challenge is just that good. Plus, I have always loved the way these games expose the way we reason when faced with challenges quite beyond our control. It’s precisely during these moments that you learn to really appreciate the actions you can take and to do them to the best of your ability.
Cooperative games are not without their critics, and I am not blind to the pitfalls that can make a good game feel stale. First, there is the perennial danger of having a single player play daddy and overrule everyone else. When this happens, it stops being a team effort and becomes more like watching daddy play to the finish. Not good!
Thankfully, that has not happened often in my experience. The group I normally play with can cooperate brilliantly, and they know that teamplay is vital. If I have a card my teammate could use, I will pass it on. If they see me make a suboptimal move, they might try to convince me of a better path. I may or may not agree, but that information is on the table, making my decision far more informed.
I will not bore you with how basic “vanilla” Pandemic works. If you need a refresher, pop over to YouTube where you will find all the tutorials you need. However, in a nutshell, Pandemic is driven by cards. You have locations and events. You have a specific AI turn at the end of each player turn, which complicates life as it rightly should. Then the next player takes over, does their actions, another AI turn follows, and the game moves along.
Over the years, the creators behind the original game released several expansions and standalones using this engine, with varying degrees of success. Personally, I also had the opportunity to play the original with the addition of the “On the Brink” expansion thanks to a fellow gamer, and then, drawn in by the theme or the mechanics, I added the stand-alone “Wrath of the Lich King” and “Fall of Rome” to my collection. Of the two, the latter is definitely the better pick in my opinion.
Maybe another time I will dive deeper into what made me buy Wrath of the Lich King and why it works, mostly, but today I want to focus on the other Pandemic game in my stash, Fall of Rome.
Fall of Rome does something that feels bold. It modifies the base game to build a strong link between the rules and the theme which is built around the historic twilight years of the Roman Empire. Instead of viruses, the game introduces barbarian hordes. Instead of curing diseases, you really want to turn these hordes into allies and Roman citizens. You do this using a finite supply of Roman troops, fighting units you carry with you. You will build fortifications, garrison troops, and engage in dice driven combat against the invaders. In short, you will experience, through heavy abstraction, what the Roman Empire went through as its command structures began to crumble.
Now, I must say I have played this version four times in a live setting with friends, and I have only one loss to report. Mind you, this is not an easier version of Pandemic by a long shot. If anything, it is slightly more complex and introduces combat dice, which ups the randomness. So, what was the reason for that single loss to date?
As mentioned earlier, the entire Pandemic franchise relies heavily on the cooperative model. It assumes the players around the table share a common goal to see the game through as a team. The real crux of the matter is that all players need to focus on the team objective above their own minor in-game conflicts or achievements. There is competition, of course, but you are competing against the board. My home board-gaming group manages this dance beautifully. They work well together, everyone is open to suggestions, and everyone gets a fair hearing. The situation changes completely when even one player is not properly invested. When this happens, you get into a tricky situation. It might not be a deliberate attempt to sabotage things, but the outcome is just the same: defeat.
When you sit down at a table, you will run into all sorts of players. Some will seek high octane games that push your brains to the limit, tracking multiple variables at once. Others care more about the look and feel, taking pleasure in the thematic story. Some appreciate casual games with light to moderate difficulty. Basically, these latter guys would just be looking to have a good time where winning or losing is just an added perk.
Across all these player types, there is a common thread that tends to run through them all, a baseline competitive streak. A smidgen of competition is essential regardless of the game. When you sit down to play, there must be some small desire to solve the puzzle in front of you, otherwise there is no game at all. Yet this same competitive spirit can change dramatically depending on how players express it.
So, now let's go back to the game we lost. To protect the anonymity of those involved, I will not mention where or with whom I played the session I am about to describe. Suffice to say, it was not my usual home board gaming group.
I had not met up with this group of players for quite some time, to tell the truth, and I was keen to sit down for a proper game. I took my copy of Fall of Rome along, though to be honest, I was not sure it would even make it to the table. I was perfectly happy to play whatever was put in front of me; it made no difference to me.
The chaps took a bit of time to arrive, and after some debate about what to play, we settled on Fall of Rome after all. In truth, I think a couple of players were quite keen on the idea. I got the impression they were looking forward to seeing the extra mechanics in this pandemic spin-off. I feel confident that one player in particular wanted to see a successful run. Yet at least one other player was not as invested.
Mind you, the “indifferent” player is very clever, logical, and smart. That much I can say without a shadow of a doubt. However, he is also intensely competitive, and his brand of competition does not appear to mix well with cooperative settings. There was no obvious negative body language or snarky comments, far from it, but there was a distinct feeling that he was dissecting the game to see what it had to offer, and he simply did not fancy what he saw.
So, turn after turn, play dragged along. Everyone did their bit, and the AI did what it was supposed to do. Yet where he was concerned, it felt as though he was playing solo against the board. He used language like "I need to go there" or "I need to do this to achieve that objective", notice the pronoun. From my experience with the original base game, every player is vital to achieving the goal of beating the game. Everyone needs to understand the strengths of their chosen character, as well as the weaknesses. The others must do the same. Together, each player needs to see how their character can cover for the weaknesses of others and be willing to step in for the good of the team.
If even one player fails to do this, it becomes like playing three-handed in a four-player game for instance. You burn through the draw deck faster, but your useful actions simply do not match the pace. At the end of the game, when we eventually lost, I felt properly drained. Drained not so much because we lost, but rather because the team never worked together as a unit. It felt as though we could have never won to begin with.
Ironically, I suppose, history did repeat itself on that day. The Roman Empire fell again after all, right there on the gaming table.
This year has been a period of personal exploration for me. I have been looking into Stoicism, so I always try to catch myself whenever my thoughts go against the basic ideas of that ancient philosophy. First, regarding my reaction when the game ended, my response was emotional, though I kept it under wraps. I felt as though someone had done me wrong, but that was just an illusion. Even if the defeat was down to the lack of engagement by one or more players, it was never personal. I could not fault my own play either; when my turn came, I did my best, and when others needed my help, I gave it. Those were things within my control, and I did them. What others chose to do on their turns was entirely out of my hands. Nor could I change the mindset of a player who had checked out of the game early so-to-speak, any more than I could change the direction of the wind or the way a river flows.
In the end, Fall of Rome did what the best Pandemic variants do best: it held a mirror up to the table, not just the board. The barbarian hordes were never really the threat that day, a player quietly playing his own game inside our game was. And maybe that's the truest thing this engine has taught me over eighteen years, the AI is only ever half the opponent. The other half is whether a group of players can keep wanting the same thing, turn after turn. When they do, Pandemic is the best cooperative experience on my shelf. When they don't, no amount of clever fortification rules will save Rome...or the evening. I walked away from that table without the win, but with something more durable, a sense of what I can and can't control, and an even greater respect for the friends who choose to fight “the empire's collapse” together rather than alone.
Links to consider
Local retailers where you can get the original Pandemic game as well as some other expansions.
https://gamebreakermalta.com/product/pandemic-board-game/
https://modelshop.com.mt/shop/toys/board-games/pandemic-on-the-brink/
https://gamebreakermalta.com/product/pandemic-state-of-emergency-2/
Please note that I do not receive any sponsorships from any of the aforementioned retailers, availabilities of the above valid as at 2nd Aug 2026.
