Pandemic has a couple of different expansion packs, but we're only going to talk about setting up the base game today. The base game includes: a game board, seven pawns, seven role cards, six research center tokens, an outbreaks marker, an infection rate marker, four cure markers, 24 red disease cubes, 24 blue disease cubes, 24 yellow disease cubes, 24 black disease cubes, 48 infection city cards, and 59 player cards (including 5 event cards, 48 city cards, four reference cards, and 6 epidemic cards.
Set up is less complicated than it first looks. I usually start by placing the outbreaks
marker on he 0 spot of the outbreaks counter, the infection rate marker on the first circle labelled 2 in the infection rate section at the top of the board. The cure markers are placed at the edge of the board, underneath the cured disease tracker at the bottom of the board. all of the four different colors of disease cubes should be placed to the side of the board, but don't mix the different colors of cubes together. We should place the research station tokens in a single location off of the side of the board. We will then place one of these research center tokens on the Atlanta spot on the board.
We then need to shuffle the 48 infection cards and place them at the top of the board, on he spot labelled infection deck. Next, the top three cards need to be flipped off of the top of this deck. We take three cubes of the corresponding disease color on the cards and place them on the cities shown. Once each of the three cities on the cards have three cubes placed on them, these cards go face up into the discard pile, directly beside the infection deck. The next three cards need flipped from the infection deck. The three cities depicted on these cards will receive two of the corresponding color of disease cubes. Place those three cards face up on the discard pile as well. Flip three more cards from the infection deck. These three cities will each receive a single cube of the corresponding color before being placed face up in the discard pile.
This part of the game set up will vary slightly based on how many players you have and how difficult you want your gameplay to be. Firstly, we need to shuffle the role cards and distribute a role to each of the 2 to 4 players, and give each of the players a reference card. We then need to place the corresponding color of player pawns on the Atlanta space, with the research center token. We then need to take the player cards to prepare the player deck. We need to shuffle together the city cards and event cards, keeping the epidemic cards separate during this process. We then deal cards to every player depending on how many players there are. For a two player game, each player gets dealt 4 cards, a three player game gives each player 3 cards, and a four player game has every player starting with 2 cards. The rest of this deck is then split into piles, depending on what difficulty the players want to play on. If playing on the easiest game mode, the deck needs divided into four piles. The next level of difficulty has the deck split into five piles, and the highest level of difficulty sees the deck being split into six piles. It's important that all of these piles are as evenly separated as possible. An epidemic card is then placed on top of each of these piles, putting any extra epidemic cards back in the box. Shuffle each of these piles individually before stacking the shuffled piles on top of each other, with the pile with the fewest cards being placed as the bottom of the deck. Once you've done this, place the deck you just created on the spot labelled Player Deck at the bottom of the board.
Congratulations, you're now ready to learn how to play Pandemic!
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