The Seven Pandemic Roles and How to Play Each One

New players often treat their role card as a small bonus on top of a normal turn. It is closer to a job description. Every role in the base game breaks one rule, and the team that leans on those broken rules wins far more often than the team that plays four ordinary turns.

The rules for each role below come from the role cards and the role notes in the current rulebook. The base game has seven. With 2 to 4 players, some always stay in the box, so the team you get changes every game.

Medic: the cleaner

The broken rule: Treat Disease removes 1 cube. For the Medic, it removes every cube of one color in his city. Once a disease is cured, he removes that color just by entering or standing in a city, with no action at all, and cubes of a cured color cannot be placed where he stands.

Where he shines: walking through a cluster of 3-cube cities and clearing one per action. After a cure, every step he takes through that color is free cleanup.

The common waste: parking him in one place to treat the same city again and again. The Medic is a mover. If the Dispatcher or an Airlift moves him, his free removal happens on that player’s turn too.

Scientist: the curer

The broken rule: a cure takes 5 City cards of one color. The Scientist needs only 4.

Where she shines: being the team’s main collector. One card fewer per cure means fewer meetings and an earlier cure, and with 12 cards of each color in the deck, she can still cure a color even after 8 of its cards are gone.

The common waste: spending her actions treating far from a research station. Her turns are best spent near a station, gathering cards.

Researcher: the card hub

The broken rule: Share Knowledge passes only the card that matches your city. The Researcher can give any City card from her hand, and a player who shares with her on their own turn can take any one of her City cards. The card still has to move from her hand to another player in the same city.

Where she shines: standing next to the collector. Every meeting with her moves exactly the card the team needs.

The common waste: treating her like any other pawn and wandering off. A Researcher far from the collector is just a fourth pair of hands.

Dispatcher: the mover

The broken rule: you move only your own pawn. As an action, the Dispatcher can move any pawn to a city that has another pawn in it, or move another player’s pawn as if it were his own. The owner must agree each time. When he flies another pawn, the card comes from his hand, and for a Charter Flight it must match the city that pawn is leaving.

Where he shines: making meetings happen. One action can put the collector next to the Researcher, or drop the Medic into a hot cluster.

Limits worth knowing: he only moves pawns. He cannot make another player treat, share, or build, and he cannot use the Operations Expert’s special move on that player’s pawn.

Operations Expert: the builder

The broken rule: building a research station costs a matching City card. The Operations Expert builds one in his city with no card. Once per turn, as an action, he can also move from a research station to any city by discarding any City card.

Where he shines: building the station network early, where the team will need it. The movement and stations lesson shows where.

The common waste: building stations evenly around the map because he can. Six stations is the limit, and a badly placed one is an action spent for nothing.

Quarantine Specialist: the wall

The broken rule: infections and outbreaks put cubes on cities. Not in her city, and not in any city connected to it. She stops both cubes and outbreaks there. She does not remove cubes already on the board, including the ones from setup.

Where she shines: standing still. Placed in the middle of a cluster of dangerous cities, she protects several of them every turn without spending an action on them.

The common waste: moving her every turn like a normal pawn. Each move can leave a dangerous city unguarded at exactly the wrong time.

Contingency Planner: the second chance

The broken rule: Event cards are used once. As an action, the Contingency Planner can take any Event card from the Player discard pile and store it on his role card, one at a time. It does not count toward his hand limit. When he plays it, it leaves the game.

Where he shines: later in the game, once strong Events have been used. A second Resilient Population or One Quiet Night at the right moment can save a game.

The common waste: spending that action early, when the discard pile has no Events in it. Until then, he plays as a flexible extra pair of hands.

Playing the team you are dealt

The rules deal roles at random. Some teams lean toward cleanup, others toward curing. Two plain questions help:

1. Who is our collector? The Scientist if she is here. If not, whoever holds the most of one color.
2. Who controls the danger? The Medic or Quarantine Specialist if you have one. If not, plan to share treating as the team moves.

The opening lesson, next, puts these roles to work in the turns before the first Epidemic.