Pandemic: The Cure

On your turn you scoop up your role's unique set of 5-6 custom dice, shake, and roll. The faces resolve into actions: airlift symbols (fly to any city), boat symbols (sail to an adjacent region), treat symbols (remove a disease die from your region), sample symbols (pick up an infected die for later cure research), and a biohazard face that locks immediately and accelerates the next epidemic. You re-roll any non-biohazard dice as many times as you want, push-your-luck style, until your hand of action faces feels acceptable.

Phase 1: roll your action dice, re-rolling at will but locking biohazards. Phase 2: spend revealed faces in any order to move (boat/fly), treat disease dice in your region, hand off samples to teammates, or attempt a cure. Phase 3: cure attempt — roll all collected colored sample dice and add their pips; total of 13+ on a single color cures that disease. Phase 4: end of turn, advance the infection rate by the number of biohazards rolled this turn (across all players this round), then roll the infection dice from the bag and place them on regions; any region holding 4+ dice of one color triggers an outbreak that cascades to adjacent regions. Players collectively win when all four diseases are cured; they lose if the bag empties, the outbreak track maxes, or the infection rate runs out.

The headline tradeoff is push-your-luck pressure: each re-roll inches the global infection clock forward, so you must decide when 'good enough' beats 'optimal'. You also juggle role-specialization handoffs (the Dispatcher's transport faces let teammates skip movement; the Medic's treat faces clear whole regions) and sample-stacking versus immediate triage (carry samples to attempt the cure now, or treat the burning regions and risk losing the dice to the bag). The option space per turn is small — usually 3-5 distinct face-allocations after a roll — but the real decisions are inter-turn: which color to commit the team to curing next given the current bag composition and where the Nazgûl-equivalent infection hotspots sit.

Top-tier play is dominated by probability literacy — knowing the expected pip total of N held sample dice and when to attempt versus stockpile one more. Secondary is team coordination under information asymmetry: who carries which color samples to which city for the cheapest handoff. Risk modeling under push-your-luck (when to stop re-rolling) is the third axis. Almost no spatial planning depth (only 6 regions) and zero memory load. Strong players hold the cure-attempt math in their head and treat re-rolls as a metered resource rather than a free retry.

You're a CDC strike team racing to cure four global plagues in 30 minutes, gambling on every dice roll while outbreaks spread across the map.

Chris Quilliams clean modern infographic style — bright primary-colored disease tokens, a stylized globe-as-pie-chart map, custom etched dice. Visually closer to a CDC public-health poster than to horror or thriller cover art; functional, legible, deliberately clinical.