Matt Leacock is a game designer probably best known for creating the very popular game Pandemic. He has been designing games full time since 2014. Prior to that he was a user experience designer at Sococo, Yahoo!, AOL, Netscape, and Apple. Matt specializes in designing family games and have become known for cooperative games since the success of Pandemic and Forbidden Island.
In Pandemic, several virulent diseases have broken out simultaneously all over the world! The players are disease-fighting specialists whose mission is to treat disease hotspots while researching cures for each of four plagues before they get out of hand. The game board depicts several major population centers on Earth. On each turn, a player can use up to four actions to travel between cities, treat infected populaces, discover a cure, or build a research station. Taking a unique role within the team, players must plan their strategy to mesh with their specialists' strengths in order to conquer the diseases. For example, the Operations Expert can build research stations which are needed to find cures for the diseases and which allow for greater mobility between cities; the Scientist needs only four cards of a particular disease to cure it instead of the normal five—but the diseases are spreading quickly and time is running out. If one or more diseases spreads beyond recovery or if too much time elapses, the players all lose. If they cure the four diseases, they all win!
This game was probably the one that introduced the cooperative game where players get to work together rather than compete against each other. Although the theme of this game hits close to home with the covid pandemic, it is exactly this reason why this is such a good game to play to demonstrate the spread of infection and why it takes a strong global response to beat such a major crisis. Due to this game’s success, Matt followed up with more similar Pandemic-themed games that we will be sharing this week.
