Day 6 - Pandemic/Cuarenta

Today I finally got to play Pandemic. I've been wanting to play Pandemic for at least 2 years now and I was not disappointed. I haven't played many cooperative board games, and I found that I really like that style of gameplay. And Pandemic was so fun in and of itself that even though we lost horribly (and by that I mean we lost the game, decided to keep going to see how much longer it would've taken to beat the game, and lost 2 more times) I had a blast and I instantly wanted to play again. I think part of what makes it a great game is that with each player's role and special abilities the game never feels hopeless, even though there are 4 different ways to lose and only one way to win. It always feels like you're just a few turns from victory and then an epidemic hits and suddenly your workload has tripled. But you don't feel like "oh well, I'll just throw in the towel now." Maybe it was just the people I was playing with, but we were very optimistic throughout the game. I think Pandemic and other cooperative games are also more fun because everyone feels like they are contributing whereas when it's a competitive game sometimes if you have a bad start you'll never catch up to everyone else and then you just feel frustrated for the rest of the game. But it's really hard to fall behind in cooperative games because it usually only happens if the whole team falls behind.

For the second half of class we learned to play Cuarenta, which is a card game from Ecuador. At first I didn't really understand the rules but eventually our group figured it out. It was fun, but I'm not really a huge fan of card games centered on tricks, like Hearts or Rook. But it is a game that makes you think more than most other card games and it takes very little time to play. I found it harder to play with teammates in this game because you don't deal out all the cards so it's hard to try and figure out how many of a certain type of card is left and then try to figure out if your partner has them. I 'm not really sure if you even can strategize or read your partner at all in this game unless they claim that they have 3 of a kind at the beginning of the round.