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Disaster has struck! Cities around the world are in desperate need of food, water, vaccines, and other supplies. You and your team belong to the Crisis Response Unit (CRU), an elite team of doctors and specialists. With a specially equipped plane, you are uniquely capable of providing life-saving aid — anytime, anywhere.
Pandemic: Rapid Response is a race against time. Roll dice to create supplies, fly the plane, and make deliveries to cities in need. As the timer counts down, you must quickly coordinate and work together to react to new disasters. Will you and your team be able to respond in time?
The nations of the world have pooled their resources and assembled a diverse crew. Each of the seven unique role cards features its own ability. The Analyst, Adjoua Soro, is able to re-roll the dice up to two additional times. The Engineer, Soojin Sohn, can change any die result with a plane to a different symbol. Take turns as quickly as possible, using your role’s unique ability and strategically allocating your dice to be as efficient as possible when creating supplies.
When you’re ready for a new challenge, adjust the difficulty level or add crisis cards for a greater variety of obstacles to overcome. Now hurry — the timer is counting down and the world needs your help!
—description from the publisher
Ages | 8+ |
---|---|
Players | 2 Players, 3 Players, 4 Players |
Play Time | 20m |
Designer | Kane Klenko |
Mechanics | Cooperative Play, Dice Rolling |
Theme | Real-time |
Publisher | Asmodee Italia, Z-Man Games, Inc., Asmodee, Rebel |
Cheesechick
Based on 1 play with 2 players: Mmmm... too early to tell. Initial impressions are positive. but not as positive as I'd like them to be. I LOVE the idea of a realtime Pandemic game, but is this really the best we can do? I'm not sure. The only other Kane Klenko game I've played is Fuse, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Compared to Fuse this just feels a little flat. Fuse is chock-full of interactivity and tension... [i]Pandemic: Rapid Response[/i] has some of the tension, but almost none of the interactivity. Sure, it's co-op so you have to strategize, and yes, it's under a time limit which creates pressure. On paper, it sounds like the very excellent [i]Escape: The Curse of the Temple[/i] and its siblings, but in practice? Not so much. [i]Escape[/i] is PURE real time - no turns, just constant dice rolling, praying, and shouting. The results are riotous. Here the handoff between player turns feels awkward at best, annoying at worst. It's a real-time game with downtime, and for some folks that's definitely going to be a deal-killer. And when someone doesn't prematurely end their turn even though it's the better play you wind up just resenting them. Strategic mistakes in a realtime game should be [i]funny[/i] or at least hair-pullingly dramatic. Watching someone make a bad play in this game just breeds either a shrug or contempt. I suspect this is in part due to the fact that what you're doing, turn-to-turn, isn't all that interesting. The most interesting decisions are in trying to figure out which cities (and thus which supply stations) to prioritize, but that decision largely happens as a group effort before a player really starts to make moves. Movement is a Big Deal in this game, so often players decide in advance what they're going to do (maybe pivoting based on the first roll), move to a spot, then stay there and re-roll and pray. Pivoting strategy mid-turn is often tricky, because you have to spend your dice to get around. Wait-and-pray isn't exactly compelling to watch [i]or[/i] do. The meat of the game, then, is really in planning out turns together as a group... but even here it falters because again, there's not much to base your decision on pre-roll, and unless you roll a yahtzee your roll rarely affects The Plan. The map is small, so players are often close enough to every point of interest. And player powers are, as always, a highlight - but their applications seem more straightforward than usual. All that said, everything works [i]just enough[/i] to make this a compelling experience. It's sort of just the magic of timers and of co-op puzzles; it's inherently fun try and coordinate something with other people under time pressure. Neither a truly great Pandemic game nor real-time co-op game be, but Good Enough? Aye. Oh and final note - the production quality is a letdown. Why is the board so ugly? This is easily the ugliest Pandemic game. I like the marbled effect on the pawns and dice, but it's not enough to make up for the eyesore of a board. And a sand timer in a realtime game? No one is going to notice that. An app-based timer with some cool music, ala [i]Escape[/i], would have gone a long way toward making this game more exciting.
bolivina
I love Pandemic. I don't like this game as much as I love regular Pandemic, but if I wanted to play something Pandemic-ish in a short amount of time I will probably pull this off the shelf. I'm not a huge fan of real time games which require more decision making that Curse of the Temple, but this wasn't too bad in that respect.
AlexanderVanhulsel
This is a cool real-time cooperative game. The dice are among the nicest I've ever seen. For a real-time game, this might be a bit overproduced though... Theme (artwork/story/...) 1/2 (1 for the dice!) Gameplay (smooth play/player interaction/strategy&tactics/depth) 3/5 Fun factor (can you afford a smile during play?) 2/3