The most dangerous part of the game, those who have played know, are the Epidemic Cards. These cards sit in the supposedly helpful player deck waiting to wreck all of your plans with the dangerous three actions: Increase, Infect, and Intensify. You can set the difficulty of the game by using any where from 4 to 6 cards (7 if you include the On the Brink expansion pack (I didn't)).
While changing the difficulty of the game makes it harder, it does provide a small advantage...
There are 3 ways to lose pandemic, the first is to have 8 outbreaks, the second is to use all 24 cubes of a color (not have any more to place). The last way is to not be able to draw player cards than needed, also known as "running out of time".
I have played six games of easy (4 cards), with the following results:
3 Wins!
1 Pandemic Loss (Out Breaks)
0 Plague Losses (Run out of cubes)
2 Time Losses (Run out of cards)
We have never had trouble working with the outbreaks or cubes, but running out of time is a big thing (one of the wins was on standard, where we had 0 cards left to draw, 7 outbreaks, 1 yellow, and 2 black cubes left). However, having more epidemic cards leads to having a larger player deck, which means more time....
Hypothesis: Adding more epidemic cards makes pandemic easier, since you have more time to reach the cure.
Maybe easier is a bit of a streach, but how much difference is there between difficulty levels?
Step One: The Difficulty Levels
In the player deck, there are 48 city cards, 5 event cards and 4 to 6 epidemic cards, depending on the difficulty, just how much does this affect the deck length and chances of epidemics?
| Epidemic Cards | Player Deck | Chance of getting an Epidemic |
| 4 | 57 | 7.02% |
| 5 | 58 | 8.62% |
| 6 | 59 | 10.17% |
Players always draw 2 cards and have 4 actions per turn, meaning that you can easily calculate how much time a team has to beat the game (this assumes a 4 player game).
We can see plain as day that there is no difference between standard and heroic (for those intrested, you get at least 1 more turn out of a Legendary game which requires the on the brink expansion, but I don't know the exact card count to come up with the other numbers). But how much does that one extra turn matter?
Step Two: How long to victory (or the more likely defeat?)
So is it actually easier to play on standard than beginner? For this, we need to look at how long it usually takes to win.
In pandemic, you need to have 5 cards of the same color and use an action at a research station to win discover a cure, 4 cures wins the game. It takes a lot of numbers to figure out just how many turns it takes for an average pandemic win, given different abilities and assuming that you are moving around, but will look at how often it takes to get all 5 cards of a color on the table.
| Chances of a Certain Color | # Of turns til 5 appear |
| 12 | (1/.13) |
| 21.05% | 8 |
| 20.69% | 8 |
Side Note: If you have the researcher and the scientist, you can theoretically win the game in 3 rounds, now, the chance of this happening is so small, it didn't even register when I calculated it in google calc.
Now this is actually low, since it doesn't take into account the first 2 draws of a player don't have epidemic cards (meaning about 22% chance for these).
This goes to show how intense pandemic is, it looks to take the entire game and luck to even have a shot at victory. From this angle, it looks like the extra turn would be benificial, as there is such a small margin for error, however, that extra turn would end with an epidemic, so we need to see...
Step Three: Chances of losing on the last epidemic
An epidemic has 3 steps, increase, infect, multiply...
- Increase...keep this in mind for later.
- Infect...an infection card you haven't seen yet
- Intensify...all discarded infection cards go back on the top of the draw pile
- And then the killer: Draw infected cities.
| Expected Outbreaks |
| 0.562269658821383 |
| 0.702837073526729 |
| 0.843404488232074 |
| 0.98397190293742 |
| 1.12453931764277 |
| 1.26510673234811 |
| 1.40567414705346 |
So if you've been doing your job, chances are you will be fine, now, these don't take into account chained out breaks, but it actually doesn't look that scary, unless you are down to 7 cities with 3 cubes in them (7*3 is 28, meaning at this point, the cubes are to be an issue as well).
Conclusion
First, lets look at some numbers we learned
20%, the chance of getting a card of a specific color
12, 6, and 5, You have 12 cards of a certain color, meaning if you burn more than 6 of these cards for research stations or travel, you can't win
20 or 21, the number of turns in a game.
After looking at the results (and using anecdotal evidence), I would have to say the standard game is just a little bit easier than a beginner game, overall, you get 4 more actions in a game where actions mean everything, and if you have been playing good prevention, you run a very small risk of outbreaking. Now, this being said, most of these differences (even in difficulty) are well within the 5% error that makes a result valid. So, it doesn't even really make the game that much more challenging, or easy.
However, telling new players they are playing on heroic will never stop being fun.
So I plan to try to do one of these every week. Next week, I will try to find out just how powerful Australia is in a game of risk, but until then, play smart!