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Strategy games tend to be of the ‘take over the world’ variety, whether by force, diplomacy, economics—or a combination of the three. The classic ‘world on a board’ game is Risk, favoured of long, rainy Sunday afternoons and engendering countless and never-ending family feuds. Hah! South America is mine! you exult, before you realize that great aunt Margaret has slowly but successfully annexed all of Asia and has now run out of ’10s’ so has to make do with whatever you can find in the kitchen drawer.

A game that asks you to save the world isn’t that new, but one that tasks you to cooperate in that worthy endeavour is one to take note of. Especially if it’s a scientific game into the bargain. And here it is.

Pandemic is a multiplayer cooperative board game, in which you have to save the world from four deadly diseases that have sprung up simultaneously across the globe. There are no dice: the random element comes from shuffled decks of cards—and how well you get on with the other players.

The game can be played by up to five people, and you start at a research lab at the CDC in Atlanta. You have a deck of city cards, which can be used for transport, building research labs and curing the diseases. There are special bonus cards in there too—and up to six ‘epidemic’ cards that guarantee added frisson to the game (an epidemic at the wrong time can cause a chain reaction of outbreaks that can end the game really quickly, if you’re not on the ball). There’s also a deck of infection cards, which specify which city is unfortunate to get affected by a disease.

You travel around the board, building research labs and collecting enough city cards of the same colour to cure a disease. You may also treat (but not cure) diseases as you go, to keep them in check until you’ve researched a cure. Each turn, more cities get infected and staying on top of that, being on the right place at the right time, is an important skill for winning. Fascinatingly, each player has a special skill or power: there is a medic, who may administer cures for free and who can ‘treat’ infected cities more effectively; a researcher, who can exchange cards easier than anybody else; a dispatcher, who can move other players’ tokens as if their own; an operations manager, who can build research labs in any city; and a scientist, who needs only four cards of the same colour instead of five to discover a cure.

The key to the game is to play to the strengths of each different character, using each one to perform distinctively different tasks as you travel the board. For example, using the researcher to pass city cards to the scientist, who can then go to the labs built by the ops manager would be a sensible strategy.

Pandemic is surprisingly absorbing and addictive. I’ve played it several times with a 10- and a 13-year old, and occasionally another adult as well. The ten year old picked up the—somewhat complex—rules straight off, and we turn to her over matters of procedure. Suggesting we play doesn’t result in the “oh, dad” response I feared, and both girls get quite agitated when things are not going well! Although the game does stress cooperativity, to make it more realistic we could see how it could, quite easily, be made into a competitive game, perhaps with a ‘Nobel’ for the player who cures the most diseases. Maybe there could be other variations, such as grant funding being cut or whole cities refusing to accept a cure…

The last game we played, we ran out of tokens for the ‘black’ disease (although we had already cured ‘red’ and ‘yellow’)—which means, according to the rules, ‘game over’. As we were packing away, we discovered another five black tokens, which meant we could have carried on, and we were all surprisingly disappointed. It’s that sort of game.