Pandemic: The Cure

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. The Dispatcher, for example, can spend dice to fly others around the board, while the Medic is particularly adept at treating disease. 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! Part of the Pandemic series.

{
  "game_id": 150658,
  "name": "Pandemic: The Cure",
  "core_verb": "roll, lock dice, treat disease",
  "decision_shape": "mixed:probabilistic+combinatorial",
  "reward_schedule": "mixed:immediate+delayed",
  "aesthetics": [
    "Challenge",
    "Fellowship"
  ],
  "core_loop_pitch": "Roll role dice to fly, treat, or research; push your luck for re-rolls before triggering an epidemic.",
  "mobile_translation_difficulty": "Easy",
  "translation_difficulty_reason": "Dice-based, short turns, and small map make it phone-native; Asmodee Digital had a Pandemic port (since pulled).",
  "direct_digital_port": null,
  "direct_digital_port_kind": null,
  "closest_loop_translation": "none yet",
  "primitive_tags": [
    "push_your_luck_rerolls",
    "role_specific_dice_pool",
    "infection_dice_bag",
    "co_op_action_economy",
    "epidemic_escalation_clock"
  ],
  "confidence": 0.7
}

{
  "game_id": 150658,
  "name": "Pandemic: The Cure",
  "mechanics": {
    "core_verb_long": "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.",
    "core_loop_long": "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.",
    "decision_space": "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.",
    "skill_expression": "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.",
    "tactile_dependency": "low",
    "tactile_dependency_reason": "The dice are dramatic in person — the clatter and the biohazard reveal land harder physically — but every die face is pure information that maps cleanly to a digital roll-and-lock UI. The 6-region map and dice-on-region infection encoding are legible at a glance and lose nothing when rendered as cells with counters."
  },
  "theme": {
    "promise": "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.",
    "setting": "modern, medical-disaster, global-thriller",
    "narrative": "none — pasted-on theme; the diseases are abstract colors, the cities are abstract regions, and the drama is in the dice probability curve, not a story.",
    "audience": "gateway, family",
    "art_direction": "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."
  },
  "translation": {
    "digital_meta_layer_ideas": [
      "Roguelite outbreak run: 7-day campaign across procgen disease bags, between-day relic drafts (custom dice faces, role swaps), run ends if any single disease cures fail twice",
      "Async cooperative daily: fixed seed per day, 3 friends each take one role, asynchronous turn submissions, leaderboard ranks teams by epidemics-triggered",
      "Idle/incremental cure-research layer: passive sample collection while offline, active push-your-luck cure attempts when you log in, season pass for new pathogen archetypes"
    ],
    "closest_mobile_genre": "roguelite dice-builder",
    "live_service_potential": "medium"
  },
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "extraction_version": "v3"
}