Pandemic

• Place game board in centre of table
• Place 1 research station in Atlanta
• Place outbreak marker on 0 space of outbreak track
• Place cure markers vial side up on the discovered cure indicator spaces
• Place the infection rate marker on the leftmost 2 space on the infection rate track
• Shuffle the infection cards and flip over 3 of them
• Put 3 disease cubes of the matching colour on each revealed city
• Flip 3 more cards over and put 2 disease cubes on each of these cities
• Flip 3 more cards over and put 1 disease cube on each of these cities
• Discard the 9 revealed infection cards into the infection discard pile
• Place the rest of the infection cards on the infection deck space
• Give each player:
  • 1 reference card
  • 1 random role card
  • 1 pawn matching the colour of the role card given
• Remove any epidemic cards from the player card deck
• Ensure that there are 2 event cards in the player card deck per player
• Shuffle the player card deck and deal cards to each player according to player count:
  • 2P: 4 cards
  • 3P: 3 cards
  • 4P: 2 cards
• Shuffle epidemic cards into the player card deck:
  • Based on desired difficulty:
    • Introductory => 4 epidemic cards
    • Standard => 5 epidemic cards
    • Heroic => 6 epidemic cards
    • Legendary => 7 epidemic cards
  • Split the deck into 1 pile for each epidemic card
  • Shuffle a epidemic card into each pile
  • Stack the piles on top of each other to ensure good spacing of epidemic cards
• The starting player is the player who has the city card with the largest population written on it

The game takes place over a series of rounds where players will take do the following things on each turn:

• Do 4 actions
• Draw 2 player cards
• Infect cities

After a player has infected cities, the player on the left takes the next turn

During a turn, any player may play event cards. Playing an event card is not considered to be an action. After the event card is played, it is discarded.

Players should freely give each other advice, and there is no need to withhold information from others to help formulate a cohesive strategy. This is not an official rule, but it might be the stupidest rule in the history of board games that you should keep your hand secret in Pandemic, so I choose to ignore it completely.

• The game ends when one of the following occurs:
  • To win the game:
    • All 4 diseases have been cured:
      • NOTE: This does not mean that they need to be eradicated. They only need to be cured to win
  • You lose the game if:
    • The outbreaks marker reaches the last space of the board
    • You cannot place a disease cube for a disease because you ran out
    • If you cannot draw 2 player cards after doing your actions