A busy time for plague doctors

I love interesting themes in gaming. Pandemic is one of my favorite games, and Pest has a sliver of it in its DNA - but as a competitive euro game! 😮 Pest is played in a dark medieval setting. A cataclysmic plague 🐀 has brought a once great empire to its knees. You play as the leader of a noble house, trying your best to navigate these difficult times, traveling around, curing survivors, inventing new technologies, erecting buildings and of course gaining influence and renown so after this all blows over you are deemed the savior of the empire. 🥇

As Years (rounds) begin in Pest, a revealed Pest card will dictate how the plague spreads. 🤢 This is the part that reminds me of pandemic. ✌ ️ Little sick meeples are placed all over locations, and wherever 4 meeples accumulate, the city is destroyed and the meeples scatter in every direction.

To understand what the game is about, I can easily describe the general game flow: 👉You move your plague doctor figure around the map, spending food to collect sick people, and you can construct buildings using wood and stone. By spending herbs you can cure people in your quarantine. Healthy people can then be assigned to your buildings to produce resources, or sent to the capital city to vye for majority. 🧐 While doing this you are influenced by the board state and you try to fulfill the Agenda and Imperative given by the current Era’s decree card.

To steer all these things, you have a nifty action selection at your disposal: a 3x3 grid on your player board where you can place assistant meeples to trigger 2 actions according to the row and column - also blocking that action pairing for the rest of the year! It’s a fun constraint to have to work around and plan for! 👍

The dark setting and plague-ridden world comes alive thanks to the beautiful illustrations and components. 🤩 So from a coolness-standpoint it’s very well done, however for gameplay purposes less so. The game board can be really hard to read, as everything is so dark. 🙉

We can dig more deeper into gameplay details, so definitely expect a follow-up post! 😉