Episode: 2569
Title: HPR2569: Pandemic: Reign of Cthulu board game review
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2569/hpr2569.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 05:53:05

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This is HPR Episode 2,569 entitled Pandemic, Ray Monsey Through Award Game Review, and
is part of the series' tabletop gaming.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 19 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
The summer is Klaatu Reviews Award Game.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair, at AnanasThost.com.
Everyone, this is Klaatu, you're listening to Hacker Public Radio.
I'm going to do a game review because I haven't done a game review in a long time, so this
game is called Pandemic, but it's not probably the Pandemic that you are used to, if you're
used to Pandemic at all, so I guess I should back up.
So there's this series, guys, and it's called Pandemic.
Pandemic is an interesting board game because it doesn't pit player against player.
It pits player against sort of an artificial intelligence, if you will, or against the
game mechanic itself.
Really fun game, and the setup is that there's a biological threat.
Now I've heard a lot of people describe that as a zombie threat, but I think the game
itself is actually fairly generic.
It's just something is happening, a pandemic is occurring, and it's up to the players
to contain the biohazard.
The way that you contain the biohazard is that you've got characters on the board, and
you have a certain set of movements each turn.
So as you can move to different reports of an outbreak in some region on the board, and
once you get there, then you can spend some movement turns on containing the biohazard.
Once you've kind of locked down a location, that location is quarantined and safe and secure,
and then you can move on to other locations.
Now if you're the only player, then that's what you do.
If you've got two players, then you both can attack different or contain rather different
areas in tandem, so that possibly you're reducing these outbreaks sooner or faster.
Now the mechanic working against you is the spread of the disease itself, and so for
each movement that the players make, the game itself gets to make some.
Now that of course is executed by you, the player, so you draw a card from sort of the
threat deck or whatever, and certain things happen, and more outbreaks occur.
So you're up against kind of this unpredictable rate of outbreak that occurs as you play
the game.
Now, having described all of that, I don't even know if I've played the canonical
version of Pandemic before, that the game that is Pandemic, I've never actually played.
There is however a variety of Pandemic that I have played, and it is the so-called
Cthulhu edition, and I chose the Cthulhu edition because I'm a big lovecraft fan, I've read
probably all of his work at this point, and so I figured, well that could be a fun twist
on Pandemic.
So in the Cthulhu edition of Pandemic, you've got your board, and there are different regions,
Arkham, Dunwitch, Innsmouth, Kingsport, and probably another one that I'm forgetting.
But there are names that you would probably recognize if you were a lovecraft, an
avid lovecraft reader.
So in each region on the board, there is a portal, a mystical portal.
This portal is meant to be opened by a group of cultists, and once the portal is opened,
lets an elder god in from the other side, it manifests them into the world.
You want to prevent this from happening, you do not want the portals to be opened, you
want to decommission each portal.
As you are working to do this, however, cultists are gathering in each region on the board,
and when I think three or four of them at a time gather in one location, then they perform
a ritual that has some evil effect.
At the same time, they are summoning shogoths, which are big, ugly monsters that can move toward
the portal and open a portal and let an elder god into the world.
So you are doing a race against time as cultists gather, summon horrible beasts, and attempt
to release the elder gods, the evil elder gods into the planet.
The way that this works is really interesting, and it's one of those really great studies
on single player game design that I think I just, I love analyzing how this stuff works.
So when you start the game, you get to play, you get to choose a character.
The characters are each a little bit different, and that's kind of nice because in board
games a lot of times with the players, it's just a superficial difference between one
player and another.
And this they actually have different abilities.
So for instance, you might play a driver who can move one extra space during their turn.
Or you might play a detective or a police, I forget what they are, but there's some
kind of official which implies that they have a little bit of extra power.
I mean, they carry a gun, for instance.
And so when they go to clear out space with a bunch of cultists on it, they can clear
out two cultists instead of just one.
There's something like that, don't quote me on any of these rules, don't play by these
rules, but that's the gist of it.
There's some little ability within each character that lets them do something a little
bit special.
And that's kind of nice because it makes you think, okay, well, this actually matter in
terms of which character I play.
Once you've chosen your character, you get to draw some cards, and each player starts
with some number of cards, but the cards are location cards.
So there's a card set for Kingsport, there's a card set for Arkham, there's a card set
for Innsmouth, there's a card set for the other one, Kingsport, oh, Dunwich.
Yeah, so you have these, and once you collect enough of them, then you are able to go to
a portal, spend those cards in order to secure the portal.
But you have to have, like, I think four cards of the matching of a matching set before
you can go close a portal.
So cards are valuable.
You want to get cards.
Now, as long as you're playing with another person, I've played two players before, no
more than that.
As long as you're playing with another character and another player, then you can each,
you can swap cards, you can trade cards with each other, but only as long as your characters
on the board actually meet up in the same location.
And there are, so there are regions, the Dunwich Arkham, Kingsport, Innsmouth on the board,
but then within each region, there are locations, there are spaces that you can go.
So as long as you're both on the same space, then you can swap cards back and forth as
a move action.
So it costs, but it is something that you can do, such that if you know that there's
a portal in Arkham that needs to be closed, you have three Arkham cards, and your partner
has one, then you can meet up, swap card, or, you know, collect the cards in such a way
that one of you has all four of them, and then that person can run off to the portal in
Arkham, and the other player can run off to Innsmouth to contain a gathering of cultists.
How do cultists gather?
Well they gather at the end of each, at the end of, once both players have gone, the
game gets to take a turn, and the game takes a turn by adding some number of cultists to
the board, and that is, the number of cultists gathering on the board depends on how many
players you have.
So it scales.
So if you're just one person playing a single-player game, you don't have eight cultists manifesting
on the board, and you try to contain them all, that would be a little bit much.
So it'll scale with the number of players.
So some number of cultists manifest on the board in some location.
If three, I think three cultists manifest in one space, not just in one region, so there
can be like, there can be six cultists in Arkham, but if they're all on a different space,
it's at the theater, and one's at the asylum, and one's at the, the, the, the, the, the
wharf, and one's at the bus station, it doesn't matter.
But if they all congregate in one spot, then they do a ritual to summon a showgoth, and
the showgoth appears somewhere and starts moving around, and then you have to kind of take
care of it before it reaches a portal, something like that.
Okay, so that, that populates the board with a threat.
Additional to physical threats on the board, there are certain cards that summon a, a curse
or I think actually an elder god.
So at the top of the board, there are about seven different cards faced down, randomly
chosen from a, from a special stack.
And if a particular card is drawn during the game's turn, then you reveal one of these
cards along the top of the board.
They can be any number of lovecraftian style gods, and I don't believe all of them are
actually mentioned a whole lot in lovecraft.
Some of the names are completely foreign to me, so I don't know if they're just made
up, or if they're just in stories that I haven't read, I'm not sure.
But most of them are at least lovecraftian, and they, they have some kind of lasting
effect on the board, you know, they, they, they might make it so that one extra cultist
is summoned each, each round, or, or it might mean that, that each player takes some kind
of penalty, which I'll talk about in a moment.
So, so these are sort of lasting effects that, that now occur during the game, so they're,
they're rules that you're just stuck with, additional rules that you're stuck with,
and that hurts.
And if all seven cards along the top of the board get turned over, then you lose all the
elder gods have been summoned, they've taken over the world, and everything descends into
madness.
And that's another mechanic of the game, is the madness mechanic.
A big part of lovecraftian horror is the idea that a normal human just can't, can't
take the, the sheer absurdity and grotesqueness of, of primordial reality.
And so if you come face to face with a showgoth or an elder god, then you would probably just
go completely insane.
And in this game, there is a mechanic for that.
So under certain conditions, you'll need to roll a, a sanity die, and it's a special
die with, with little symbols on it, and you, you roll that, and if, if sometimes it
just rolls to nothing, a blank side, but other times it, it displays a symbol.
And you only have, you have some number of sanity tokens, and once you go insane, then
you turn your player card over and your, your abilities, your player abilities have changed.
So maybe you have fewer turns that, that round, your each round, or maybe you've lost
your special ability that you got as, as, as that character, maybe both, who knows.
So that also hurts.
Now, you can spend some turns to go to a sanctuary and restore your sanity, but that requires
you to spend the time to go restore your sanity.
So whether you want to do that or not, it depends.
In addition to all of that, there are relic cards, and relic cards are things that, they're
items that you find along the way.
And they give you special bonuses, special power-ups that you can play during your turn.
Sometimes a relic is powerful enough to force you to roll your sanity die to make sure
that you don't go insane, whilst invoking some ancient, forgotten lore.
Other times that's not that big of a deal, and you can just use the card for free.
Either way, their, their power-ups, they help you do something special, like maybe you
can defeat a show-gatherer, maybe you can wipe away all the cultists in a square on one
turn instead of three turns, or whatever.
So actual gameplay goes a little bit something like this, you and your partner, or your, your
group of friends, however many people you're playing with, I think you can play up to six.
You guys can sort of discuss who should go do what?
Initially, you've got some cultists on the board that get manifested, you know, before
everything happens.
So that's usually your first target, is let's go to where those cultists are, and take
some cultists out.
And in order to do that, you simply have to be on the same space as a cultist, and then
you use another move action to get rid of the cultist.
I don't know what happens to the cultists, not really explicitly said.
I don't know if we're killing them, or if we're just arresting them, or what.
But I mean, that's also good opportunity for you and your friends to come up with exactly
what you've done as well, and that can get a little bit wacky.
But either way, the cultist, it gets displaced from the board and is no longer a problem.
So that's usually your first, your first angle of attack is to, to go deal with any cultists
out there.
Because as I said, they're going to multiply at the end of everyone's turn when the, when
the game gets to go, more cultists are going to appear.
Now, once that starts happening, once the cultists start appearing more often, generally,
I think what I'm not making, I'm not giving advice here, but I'm just saying in the way
that I've been playing it, is that one person or one group of people deals with the cultists,
just man, you know, crowd control essentially, and someone else goes around and deals with
the portals.
Because the portals have to get closed off in order to, well, in order to win the game,
that's the win condition for each portal in each region.
So that's four portals have to get crossed off.
Like you have to secure them with a special ritual as long as you have all the cards that
you need that you can do that.
So one player has to do that.
Now the, the back and fourth part usually happens when you realize that, well, I've got two cards
that I need and you've got one and you've got one.
So let's all figure out how to meet up.
But every move is precious, right?
So if you, if you're going to go meet up with someone else to trade cards or if you're
going to go restore your sanity or whatever, these are moves that you cannot use to do
something that probably needs to get done, for instance, killing a monster or a cultist.
So the, the turn management becomes a part of the, is probably one of the main mechanics,
a player mechanics of the game.
That's the, that's the thing that you really have to think about as well.
How many turns do I have to use up to get from here to, to, to there in order to get
something that I need and then, and then go back to the portal to finish the job, that sort
of thing.
The card drawing that happens when the game, at the games, you know, at the end of the,
the player's turn is kind of the, the wild card.
It can, it could summon a monster.
It could summon an elder god.
It can do lots of different things.
Something usually, something bad happens and you, you're never quite sure what it's going
to be.
That's, that's, that's the elements of complete unpredictability.
The game is a lot of fun and there are a couple of different editions of it.
There's, there's pandemic, the, the canonical original version.
There are spin-offs like pandemic, Cthulhu, rain of Cthulhu, pandemic survival, pandemic,
rising tide, pandemic, legacy, pandemic contagion.
There are a lot of different versions and a lot of different spins on the same theme,
because it's a good mechanic.
It's a mechanic that works.
And there's also a lot of stuff online where you can, you know, there are like little
additions to the game to make it more challenging, less challenging.
And in fact, it's kind of built into the game that there's a little bit of an adjustment.
If you find that as you get good and get to know your partner really well, that you're
getting maybe too good at the game, you can just, you can adjust the, the hard level, you
know, you can just say, okay, well, instead of, instead of playing by the rules for two
people, we'll play by the rules for three people and, and, and kind of increase the rate
of, of propagation and generally turn up the difficulty level.
So it's, it's kind of nice that way too.
And something that you don't really often see in board games, I don't think.
I feel like a lot of times that the board game is, is, is what it is.
And, and, and that was designed that way and that's it.
But this, I mean, it, it, it scales for people so you can just kind of fudge it a little
bit and, to make it more difficult as needed.
Their expansion packs and things like that too.
And, and I mean, it's, it's a game.
So you can always create house rules to, to make them a little bit more interesting.
But there's a big following online for this game.
So you're, you're bound if you, if you look up on the internet for, for, for mix, you
know, remixes of a pandemic or, or, or add ons to pandemic, you will find really interesting
ways to make the game fresh and new, which is probably an argument for getting the original
pandemic.
Because in terms of, of the game being forked and modded, a lot of that is happening
for, for pandemic proper rather than something like, Cthulhu, I mean, I don't know, maybe
they port.
I'm not sure.
I haven't really looked into it.
But that's just something to be aware of.
You should definitely try this game if you've never played a, a game where you are playing
against the game mechanic.
A lot of people I've met, more people than I, I've met than I had expected have, have
thought that board games were always player against player.
And that kind of surprised me.
I don't know why it surprised me because for most of my life, I thought board games
were necessarily player against player as well.
But I think it's really a lot of fun to be able to play a board game where you're playing
with your friends rather than against your friends.
And a lot of people that I've met have really found that puzzling.
Like why would I ever want to not play against someone?
But once you try it, I think you'll find that it's a lot of fun to be able to play with
your friends against a mechanized villain rather than doing the whole, okay, now we're
going to play against each other and see who wins, which, I mean, you know, if you have
a certain relationship with your friends, maybe that's fun.
Maybe you guys have a lot of fun rigging each other about who's going to win and stuff
like that.
But if you've never tried it, I'm just saying you should try it because sometimes that
shift in psychology of, okay, everybody, now we're going to work together and we're going
to, we're going to support each other in tackling this common problem and work against this,
this, this mechanic and see if we can solve the puzzle together.
It's a lot of fun and it brings out a lot of surprising, a lot of surprising emotions and
feelings as, as you work together to solve a problem rather than working against each
other.
I'm not saying it's bad to work against each other.
I know it's just a game.
I'm just saying, if you've never tried working together at beating a game mechanic, then
it's worth, it's worth a shot and pandemic is one of the better ones.
So give it a try.
That's about it for this episode.
Thanks for listening.
I'll talk to you next time.
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