Board Game: Pathogenesis

Also, the other night I told Cael to pick a board game to play, and, after being told it had to be something he hadn't played (i.e., not Munchkin), he picked this one:

The Game: Pathogenesis 
The Publisher: WIBAI Games
Players: Me, Al, Michelle, Cael
Time: This game took us nearly three hours, but we were learning it. I think a game in which we weren't constantly re-reading the rules would be closer to an hour

Game Play: Pathogenesis is a deck-builder in which you're all diseases trying to kill the host body. Said body has three tracts (respiratory, tissue, and gastrointestinal), and after you break through a tract's barriers, you can attack it directly. Attacking it requires pathogens, which you can buff with various enzymes and proteins and so on.

A very chipper sort of illness.

The body fights back, however; the immune system throws all kinds of shit at you. The immune system has a deck, and once it runs through, it gets reshuffled, but with more powerful cards in the mix (like t-cells, which will typically annihilate whatever pathogen they attack). When the deck runs out again, game over, the host body fights off the infection.

But, if you manage to remove all the damage tokens from one of the tracts, you win! (That's in a four-player competitive game; you can also play 2-v-2 competitive or some kind of cooperative, but we only played once.)

A growing pathogen

Opinions: It's a deck-builder, so if you don't like those, you won't like this. I personally think the game has a lot of potential, but there is a wrong way to approach it, and that's kinda what we did (to wit, the immune system doesn't kick in until all of the barrier cards are gone from one tract, but we did that too soon rather than taking the time to build up our decks, so we didn't have enough buffs to fight through the immune system once it happened).

The artwork is really cool looking, although most of the cards have medically accurate titles, which means they're hard to say at first. Fortunately there are symbols on the cards that tell you what they do at a glance.

The rulebook could have been clearer on a couple of points; I suspect it's easier to watch the how-to-play videos for the game. I'd like to try it again with a better sense of how the hell it works.

Keep? Yep.