Board Game Arena

I knew this sort of thing is possible in theory, but never actually saw it before.

For your amusement, here’s a game of Pandemic which finished in defeat after only one player had taken a turn…

https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=489204412

The first player to move didn't try to address any of the 3-block cities. Could they have? Or was this unstoppable?

Well - with perfect advance knowledge they could have gone to Chicago -> Los Angeles -> Mumbai and treated it once; after the Epidemic Delhi would still Outbreak on the first card and raise Mumbai to three infections; then on the second card Mumbai would Outbreak, chaining back into Delhi. Chennai and Karachi would be left with three infections each, but would not outbreak in that case.

In practice without knowing the deck there's no reason to have prioritised Mumbai over Essen, and as the only player with two yellow cards they might have expected to be trying to collect more rather than spend them straight away on a very speculative flight.

They should have played One Quiet Night.

Remkar wrote: ↑17 May 2024, 22:24 They should have played One Quiet Night.

Yeah, I definitely would have played OQN on a turn 1 epidemic, but even without OQN I wouldn't have expected the game to end turn 1 lol

I just had a turn 1 game over too, had no events to play and no way of getting to any 3 cube cities in less than 4 moves. Game started with 14 red cubes on the board, both draws after epidemic were red, cue explosion. Brutal

https://boardgamearena.com/14/pandemic?table=755143506

That's savage!

Hey all. Just started playing pandemic on BGA. Had an epidemic card after my first turn. I am an experienced player with several pandemic boardgames so looked at both rule books... Neither say to draw infect cards after an epidemic. So I don't understand why it made me infect after shuffling the 9 initial cards and putting them on top. Clearly the pandemic game on BGA does this. Am I missing an option setting...or is this a common interpretation of the rulebook that I haven't played before. Thanks for clarifying in advance. Thank you for any help.

Not much to interpret there I would argue. The infect cities is a different phase that comes after drawing cards. The rulebook would have to explicitly mention skipping that phase after an epidemic. It doesn't though.

Gunner008 wrote: ↑29 January 2026, 04:35 I am an experienced player with several pandemic boardgames so looked at both rule books... Neither say to draw infect cards after an epidemic.

1) As richyfourtytwo, it's doesn't have to tell you to Infect after an epidemic. Infect is a different phase. Resolving an epidemic occurs during the Draw Cards phase before the Infect phase even begins.

2) There actually is language in the (English) base game rules (both the 2012 edition that I own and 2015 edition linked to on BGA) when it explains what to do if there are two epidemic cards drawn at once that shows that you do in fact Infect after an epidemic:

It is rare but possible to draw 2 Epidemic cards at once. In this case, do all three steps above once and then again.

In this case in the second epidemic’s Infection card will be the
only card to “reshuffle”, ending on top of the Infection Deck.
An outbreak will then occur in this city during Infections (see
Infections, below), unless an Event card is played to prevent this
(see Event Cards on page 7).

If you skipped the Infections after an epidemic, the language "[a]n outbreak will then occur in this city during Infections" would make no sense. How can they say that? How do they know that on the next player's turn they won't get there to take a cube off to prevent the outbreak? Because there isn't going to be another player's turn until after the current player's Infection phase.

For good measure I checked the 2013 Spanish language rules and it says the same thing.