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Face dangerous new threats as a fifth virus spreads across the globe and Hot Zones make their entrance, changing the rules? for the worse! Fortunately, new medical experts have joined the fight to help you. Experimental Meds is a healthy dose of expansion contents to Pandemic: The Cure.
Cheesechick
I like the the way the Hot Zone dice work generally. They're probably fairly situational - they didn't really swing things too much one way or the other in our game, but I'm willing to bet depending on the state of your board they could make a big difference. I also like the purple dice, but here's where we get into tricky territory. It feels weird to say, but I think the systems in The Cure may actually be [i]too[/i] interconnected. The great thing about original Pandemic's expansion challenges is that they each push your strategy in a different direction - generally by making one of the ways you die more likely. The concerning thing to me here is I'm not sure how we could have played differently. The loss conditions are so entwined that making progress against one generally means you're making progress against all of them. If you love The Cure, this is probably a good addition. If you're a veteran Pandemic player who found it a little too swingy, though, I'm not sure this will do much to change your mind. Personally I'm somewhere in between, so I'm happy to keep this, but it's not [i]quite[/i] the game-changer I wanted.
Eeeville
If you have The Cure, you need to own this. I felt the base game had a lack of variety among the roles and an extreme lack of variety among the events. This expansion has more roles than the base game and the same number of events. This alone makes the expansion a must buy. I also like that 3 of the 'curing' type roles make it so that less of your dice are likely to be locked up when gaining samples. The mutation challenge is interesting. There is an unpredictability with this challenge which mirrors the normal Pandemic game. It does make the game take longer due to needing a 5th cure. I feel it can make it the game easier in two ways: (1) I feel as though you're much less likely to lose the game due to the dice bag being empty, due to the 12 additional dice being added to the bag. Even though the purple dice can remove dice from the game, I don't think you're likely to remove 12 over the course of the game. (2) With the removal of some dice from the game, it may be harder to get an outbreak in those colours, depending on how you can balance their distribution between locations and the CDC. That said, I think it also makes the game harder in 2 ways: (1) It can make outbreaks more likely when the x2 is rolled often, depending on what's in your bag and the game state. (2) Needing 5 cures does make the game longer, and this means you can hit more epidemics and roll 5 dice during the infection phase more often than playing without the module. Overall, I think I would rather play without this module, due to the extra time it requires. The Hot Zone module is, in my opinion, the better of the two challenges in this game. I feel this way for 3 reasons: (1) It doesn't add time to the game, (2) It makes the choice of how to spend your CDC dice even harder, (3) It makes movement characters more useful, turns where players a rolls nothing but movement a more satisfying turn, and tougher decisions with regards to movement. This is a fun module that usually makes the game harder and makes decisions more difficult. Excellent. Includes: 08 Roles (1 more than the base game) 10 Events (1 'make your own' blank card)
elwatoplus
Excellent expansion. It adds more characters to increase the replayability and a few modules to Make it more difficult.