Gamewright Forbidden Desert vs Z-Man Games Pandemic

Forbidden Desert is Matt Leacock's follow-up to Forbidden Island, and the stronger of the two. Your team crash-lands in a desert city laid out as a grid of tiles and must dig up the four parts of a flying machine and escape before the storm buries you or the water runs out. Each player takes one of six adventurers with a special ability, such as the Climber who stands on buried tiles or the Water Carrier who refills canteens.

The clever part is the storm. A gap in the grid moves every turn, sliding tiles around it and piling sand on them, so the map you planned on is gone by your next turn. Water is shared and scarce, which forces conversations about who walks where. The storm meter starts at one of four difficulty levels, so a family can win the first game and an adult group can still lose on the hardest setting.

The weaknesses are the ones every co-op shares. A confident player can direct everyone else, and the game does nothing to stop that. Once a group masters it, replay comes only from harder difficulty.

Pandemic is the cooperative board game most others are measured against. Matt Leacock designed it in 2008, and the current Z-Man edition adds two roles for seven in total. Players are a team of specialists, such as the Medic, Scientist and Dispatcher, moving around a world map of 48 cities. Four diseases spread from city to city, and the team wins by discovering all four cures before outbreaks, cubes or the player deck run out.

The tension comes from the epidemic cards. You shuffle 4, 5 or 6 into the player deck to set the difficulty, and each one intensifies infection and reshuffles cities that already have cubes back on top of the infection deck. The cities you just treated get hit again, so the game keeps pressure exactly where you are weakest. Wins usually come down to the last few cards.

The common complaint is quarterbacking. All hands are open, so one experienced player can direct every move, and quiet players can end up watching. Rules variations help, but the box itself does not solve it. Pandemic also caps at four, and once a group wins comfortably at six epidemics, the base game has little left to teach.