 Pandemic is an awful goddamn game. This game is garbage. I'm not even gonna hold back. Pandemic is completely awful. So on the surface, pandemic is supposed to be this co-op game where you work together with your friends to sort of save the world from the horrible virus. In reality, it's a game, it's a solitary game. One person saves the world from the horrible virus. One person among your friends who is best at pandemic. Pandemic is bad at being a cooperative game. The thing that it's trying to be. Because the rules are set up such that it's a cooperative game, not game theory cooperative, which is an entirely different kind of game. But like, me and Scott, we're trying to beat the board together. Because of the way the game works, there's no real communication rules, or other games like Shadows Over Camelot, similar game, Battle of Galactica, same problem. Same problem. Those games give these soft bullshit rules. Like, you can't say the card you got in your hand, but you can kind of wink and nod and nod. You're like, I'm feeling good, I'm feeling too good about this hand right now. Yeah, yeah, I'm feeling, I'm feeling pretty blue. Oh, I'm also, I'm also feeling blue and really sad. I'm too sad. Sad equals blue, I have two blue cards. Right, so I mean, that's the one thing that's supposed to keep you from sort of just turning into solitary games is hidden information, but they don't actually prevent you from sharing it. And it ends up just being solitary. The other way to do that is what the new XCOM game does. We played it in the last packs, where there's a timeline, but there's a computer saying, Space Alert does the same thing. Go, go, go, RIM, you've got eight resources, spend them now. Oh, two late fuck you, it's gone, now the aliens are coming. What do you do? Like, yeah, you don't have time to talk with your friend and be like, yeah, three, three resource aliens killed you. You know, XCOM works, I was the, like, CO whatever, so I'm dilling out money, right? The money I pass around doesn't mean anything. Scott says, I need four money. I say, you get three, deal with it. And then after... If I spend the four money, it's spent. He can spend it. And at the end of the round, that money tokens that he's using, those are just helpful. They're not the real deal. You calculate at the end of the round how much money you spent as you went over budget. Oh, Scott spent more money than he said he did because he was in a hurry, didn't listen to RIM. Oh, yeah, you guys are fucked now. The other game that solves this problem perfectly is Field Desjardt winning Hanabi, the greatest co-op game to ever exist. Hanabi. It means fireworks in Japanese. The way Hanabi works if you haven't played it is everyone gets a hand of cards. And you are simply trying to play the cards in order in the different colors, like one red, one green, two red, one blue. And there's five colors, and you're just trying to count to five in each color. You hold your hand facing all the other players. You never see your own hand. You may not look at the own cards in your own hand, but you have to play them. And the game has very strict rules. On your turn, you either play a card, sight unseen, throw away a card, sight unseen, or spend a token to tell someone one of two things about their hand. Rym, you have three blue cards. Three blue cards. All right. All right. Why would Scott have told me that? So Scott, you have one red card. Oh, I do. That one. All right. All right. It's my turn again? Yep. I'm going to play this red card that I haven't seen ever in my life. I hope it's the next one we need to play. See what happened there? Why would I tell Scott about that fucking red card right then and there? Unless I had some reason for it. That game is a true cooperative game. You're all trying to read each other's minds. And the rules are very explicit. You can say the number or the color of a set of cards someone has, and that's it. Right. And it costs an extra. And you can't conceal, right? So Rym had three blue cards. I can't be like, you have one blue card when he has three. Now let's just play this one. He can't say you have one blue card. Because he has three. I have to say all three. I can't be like, yeah, that one. If he has three ones and I wanted to play one of them, I just got to be like, well, you have three ones. Harabi and XCOM are the only good cooperative tabletop games I've ever seen. Space Alert's okay. Space Alert's pretty good. The problem with Space Alert is you need to be much smarter. Everyone needs to know how to program a computer. Fine. Harabi and XCOM are the only great co-op games I've ever seen. Pandemic literally just becomes one guy knows what's going on. And so if the person who's good says, oh, do that, what are you going to do? You're going to say, no, man, I'm doing something different. I'm going to make us lose. I'm going to do a worse move because I want to do my own turn.