Up in the air

The next Pandemic game has been revealed as Rapid Response, a real-time dice game from FUSE creator Kane Klenko.

Set on-board a high-tech plane bringing aid to disease-struck regions of the infected world of Matt Leacock’s board game, Pandemic: Rapid Response sees players working together to create supplies and deliver them to major cities.

What makes Rapid Response a significant shift for the Pandemic series is not only the prominence of dice, which are spent to perform actions in different rooms of the plane, but the fact that the whole game is played against a sand timer in real time.

Players take turns during each two-minute round, but are forced to discard a time token and draw a new city card when the timer runs out, adding another location in need of aid. Successfully providing cities with supplies earns a time token – if all the cities in the deck are helped, the players win. If the time tokens run out, they lose.

Cities will request different combinations of vaccines, food, power, first aid and water, all of which can be created by players allotting dice to the relevant areas of the plane. Dice can also be spent to move a player pawn between rooms and fly the plane to a new location in order to drop off supply crates. Unwanted results can be re-rolled a limited number of times per turn.

As in Pandemic, each player’s character has a unique ability to help the team succeed. For the first time, Pandemic’s roster of heroes are defined by more than just their job titles, with Rapid Response establishing seven brand new named characters in the universe.

You can find out more about Pandemic: Rapid Response in June’s issue of Tabletop Gaming magazine, out this Friday, May 24th, which features a world-exclusive interview with designer Kane Klenko about the making of the upcoming game.

Rapid Response will be released in the UK on June 23rd.