Pandemic is one of the more popular map based strategy board games around.
In fact, Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is currently the best rated game on BoardGameGeek.com.
Below we’ve taken rating from BoardGameGeek to come up with our list of the 10 best Pandemic versions and expansions rated from best to worst.
However, all the games score extremely well, so they’re all worth playing if you have the time.
1. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1
Description: The world is on the brink of disaster. In pandemic legacy, your disease-fighting team must keep four deadly diseases at bay for a whole year.
Each month will bring new surprises, and your actions in each game will have repercussions on the next. Will you let cities fall to the diseases? Will your team be enough to keep the viruses at bay for a whole year?
Craft your own unique pandemic experience with pandemic legacy.
Avg Score: 8.67
List Price: $69.99
Buy: Click Here To Buy Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 on Amazon
Alternative Box: Pandemic Legacy Blue (Please note that this is the exact same game as the red box above).
2. Iberia
Description: In pandemic Iberia, the year is 1848, and diseases are spreading fast under the burning sun of the Iberian Peninsula.
Take on the roles of a nurse, a Railway man, and a rural Doctor, among many others, and work as a team to push back the new threats that are malaria, typhus, cholera, and the yellow Fever.
From Barcelona to Lisbon, travel by carriage, by boat, or by train, and help the Iberian populace by developing railways and distributing purified water in this new version of pandemic.
Discover a unique part of the world during the historically significant time period that is the construction of the first railroad in the Iberian Peninsula called the spring of nations.
Being a collector’s edition, note that this game will have a one-time only print run!.
Avg Score: 8.18
List Price: $32.79
Buy: Click Here To Buy Pandemic: Iberia On Amazon
3. On the Brink Expansion
Description: Has saving humanity become routine? Spice Pandemic up with new roles and events. Add a fifth player, try Legendary difficulty, or add an optional challenge: What if one disease is particularly nasty? Or, if a fifth disease is wreaking havoc? Or, even worse, if that fifth disease is being spread by a hidden Bio-Terrorist?
Can your team work together to cure diseases in a world on the brink of disaster?.
Avg Score: 8.11
List Price: $54.07
Buy: Click Here To Buy Pandemic On the Brink Expansion 2nd Edition On Amazon
Previous Editions: On The Brink 1st Edition
4. The Cure – Experimental Meds Super-Expansion
Description: Face dangerous new threats in Pandemic: The Cure – Experimental Meds 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.
Avg Score: 8.06
List Price: $65.99
Buy: Click Here To Buy The Cure – Experimental Meds Super-Expansion On Amazon
5. In the Lab Expansion
Description: In Pandemic: In the Lab, the second expansion for Pandemic, you will use a new game board that allows you to move the pawns in a laboratory.
The goal of this activity is the same as in the base game – finding cures for diseases – but this time in a new way.
Behind sealed bio-hazard doors, scientists race against time to sequence diseases, take samples and test cures.
Pandemic: In the Lab includes four new roles, new Virulent Strain events and a Worldwide Panic Mutation scenario.
Players can compete individually or on rival teams (when playing with four or six players).
Can your team work together in the lab to save humanity?
Please note: You need Pandemic AND Pandemic: On the Brink in order to use it.
Avg Score: 7.99
List Price: $39.99
Buy: Click Here To Buy The In the Lab Expansion on Amazon
6. State of Emergency Expansion
Description: Saving the world just got a little bit harder!
Three new challenges await you in this new expansion for Pandemic:
- The Hinterlands Challenge: The diseases are spreading from animals to humans.
- The Emergency Events Challenge: Unpredictable Events have nasty effects on the game. Try to use Quarantines to stop the spread of disease across the board.
- The Superbug Challenge: A fifth disease that cannot be treated threatens the world!
Produce vaccine doses after finding its cure in order to fight off this threat. You must eradicate the superbug disease to win.
Avg Score: 7.68
List Price: NA
Buy: Click Here To Buy The State of Emergency Expansion On Amazon
7. Pandemic Board Game
Description: Note this is base version of the game.
Four diseases have broken out in the world and it is up to a team of specialists in various fields to find cures for these diseases before mankind is wiped out.
Players must work together playing to their characters’ strengths and planning their strategy of eradication before the diseases overwhelm the world with ever-increasing outbreaks.
For example the Operation Specialist can build research stations which are needed to find cures for the diseases. The Scientist needs only 4 cards of a particular disease to cure it instead of the normal 5.
But the diseases are out breaking fast and time is running out: the team must try to stem the tide of infection in diseased areas while also towards cures. A truly cooperative game where you all win or you all lose.
Avg Score: 7.67
List Price: $39.99
Buy: Click Here To Buy Pandemic Board Game On Amazon
8. Reign of Cthulhu
Description: Beings of ancient evil, known as old ones, are threatening to break out of their cosmic prison and awake into the world.
Everything you know and love could destroyed by chaos and madness. Can you and your fellow investigators manage to find and seal every portal in time? Hurry before you lose yourself to insanity.
Avg Score: 7.58
List Price: $49.99
Buy: Click here To Buy Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu On Amazon
9. The Cure
Description: Pandemic: The Cure, a dice-based version of the popular Pandemic board game, sets up in less than a minute and plays in 30 minutes.
As in the board game, four diseases threaten the world and it’s up to your team to save humanity. You and your team must keep the world’s hotspots in check before they break out of control, while researching cures to the four plagues.
Players roll dice each turn to determine the actions available to them. They can fly and sail between the six major population centers of the world, treat disease in their current region, collect samples for further study, and exchange knowledge to help them in their goal of discovering cures.
Each player takes on a different role that has its own unique set of dice and abilities – and players must take advantage of their specializations if they are to have any hope of winning the game.
Players can roll their dice as often as they like, but the more times they re-roll for the perfect turn, the more likely the next epidemic will occur.
At the end of each turn, new “infection dice” are rolled to determine the type and location of newly infected populations. If any region on the board is infected with more than three dice of a given color, an outbreak occurs, spreading disease into an adjacent region.
If too many outbreaks take place, too many people get infected, or the rate of infection gets too high, all the players lose. If, however, the players can discover the cures to the four diseases, they all win and humanity is saved!
Avg Score: 7.41
List Price: $49.99
Buy: Click Here To Buy Pandemic: The Cure On Amazon
10. Pandemic: Contagion
Description: You are the disease. There is no cure! For too long has the human race assaulted diseases. For too long has mankind found cure and other means to eradicate them from the planet.
Now, the diseases are fighting back and humanity doesn’t stand a chance! Will you be the disease that exterminates humanity?
A new, non-cooperative game in the Pandemic line! Become one of the diseases in this new game that reverses the roles and where you must now try to annihilate the human race.
Avg Score: 6.50
List Price: NA
Buy: Click Here To Buy Pandemic: Contagion On Amazon
Know a Pandemic fan? Share this list with them and see if they agree with our ratings:
Robert Permut says
Do you have to buy/play “Pandemic The Board Game (#7 on the list) first before you can buy/play Pandemic Legacy Season 1 (#1 on the list)?
Rob says
Technically, “no”, as the Pandemic Legacy games are all standalone. However, familiarity (and experience) with the original game will definitely give you a better foundation for playing the legacy games. I would recommend playing the originally game a bunch of times first. It helps you develop strategies on how the different roles can be leveraged most effectively.
Mason says
No, although I find that playing the original first makes learning the others easier.