Pandemic (Board Game)
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50 free Pandemic (Board Game) trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Pandemic is the cooperative board game that proved working together could sell millions. Matt Leacock designed it after competitive games kept ruining evenings with his wife, modelled the theme on the SARS outbreak, and Z-Man Games published it in 2008. Players start in Atlanta, race four diseases across 48 cities, and either cure them all or lose together. These 50 questions cover the base game in detail: actions per turn, the hand limit, what triggers an outbreak, how many outbreaks end the game, and what the Medic and Scientist can do. Then the expansions: On the Brink's Bio-Terrorist, Mutation and Virulent Strain, In the Lab's team mode, State of Emergency's Hinterlands and Superbug. There are spin-offs from The Cure and Contagion to Reign of Cthulhu, Iberia, Rising Tide, Fall of Rome and Rapid Response, the three Legacy seasons, the Pandemic System licences, and a few questions on Leacock himself and his Forbidden series. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a game-night tiebreaker.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Pandemic's designer turned to co-operative games after winning a sour game of Chinatown against whom?
His wife
His wife, Donna, and he came away from that negotiation game on bad terms even though he had won, so in 2004 he began designing a game the two of them could win or lose together.
Q 02Which company first published Pandemic in 2008?
Z-Man Games
Z-Man Games has stayed its publisher through every expansion, spin-off and Legacy season, as one 2008 box grew into a franchise that had sold more than two million copies by 2020.
Q 03On the Pandemic board, a line running off the Pacific edge connects Sydney directly to which city?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles and Sydney count as neighbours because routes that leave one edge of the map wrap around to the other, so a pawn can cross the whole Pacific in a single move.
Q 04What happens once Pandemic's fourth cure is found?
Players win
The players win on the spot, however many cubes are still on the board: the rules say outright that treating every city, or wiping a disease out completely, is not needed for victory.
Q 05Which Pandemic action lets a player discard the card of their current city to fly anywhere on the board?
Charter Flight
Charter Flight costs the card of the city you are standing in, the very card needed to build a research station there, so every charter gives up a possible station.
Q 06Which disease scare does Pandemic's designer say had just erupted when he began the game?
SARS
SARS was fresh news when he began in 2004, and he later wrote that viruses struck him as the perfect opponents: uncaring, relentless and frightening.
Q 07Which Pandemic role can move other players' pawns as if they were its own?
Dispatcher
The Dispatcher can also spend an action to bring any pawn straight to a city that holds another pawn, though moving a teammate always needs that player's permission.
Q 08In Pandemic, which diseases place no new cubes when their Infection cards are drawn?
Eradicated
Eradicated means cured and cleared of its last cube. A cure alone is not enough: a cured disease keeps infecting cities until then.
Q 09In which city do all players begin a game of Pandemic?
Atlanta
Atlanta is home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, America's real disease-fighting agency, which is why the game's first research station stands there before play begins.
Q 10Which Pandemic action passes a City card between two players?
Share Knowledge
Share Knowledge costs one of a turn's four actions per card, and the card must show the very city both pawns are standing in, which makes hand-overs hard to arrange.
Q 11Where do Pandemic's Infection discards go after an Epidemic?
Atop the deck
Atop the deck, reshuffled, so the cities that have already been hit are the very next ones drawn. That is why trouble in this game keeps coming back to the same places.
Q 12Which Pandemic cards can be played at any time, costing no action?
Event
Event cards cost no action, and they double as a safety valve: a player over the hand limit of seven may play one instead of throwing a card away.
Q 13In Pandemic, where does an Outbreak add one cube of its colour?
Every connected city
Every connected city takes a cube, and any neighbour already holding three has an Outbreak of its own, so one bad card can set off a chain reaction across a continent.
Q 21Pandemic's first expansion, released in 2009, came with five of which lab item for storing the disease cubes?
Petri dishes
Petri dishes with labels turned cube storage into a prop, and the same box gave players something to put in the fifth one: a new purple disease beside the original four.
Q 22Which role in Pandemic's On the Brink expansion pits one player against the rest of the team?
Bio-Terrorist
The Bio-Terrorist moves in secret, logging each step on a hidden location sheet, and only has to put a pawn on the board when spotted in the same city as another player.
Q 23What is the fifth disease in Pandemic's On the Brink expansion called?
Mutation
Q 14Pandemic is lost when which deck runs out?
Player deck
The Player deck is the game's clock: it is never reshuffled, so every two-card draw brings the end closer, and the rulebook calls an empty deck the team running out of time.
Q 15Which Pandemic role can build a research station in its current city without discarding the matching card?
Operations Expert
The Operations Expert builds for just an action and keeps the city card everyone else must discard, so the team can spread stations across the map without thinning its hands.
Q 16Which Pandemic role can treat every cube of one colour in a city with a single action?
Medic
The Medic clears a whole city in one action, and once a disease has been cured the role sweeps its cubes away just by walking into a city, at no cost at all.
Q 17Which base-game Pandemic role needs only four matching cards to discover a cure?
Scientist
The Scientist saves one card on every cure, which matters more than it sounds: with a hand limit of seven, five cards of one colour fill most of a hand.
Q 18Which term do Pandemic players use for one person dominating a co-operative game?
Quarterbacking
Quarterbacking is harder when information is hidden, which Pandemic's own rulebook uses: beyond the beginner level players keep their cards private, so that everyone has something to contribute.
Q 19Which two roles did Pandemic's 2013 second edition add?
Contingency Planner and Quarantine Specialist
The Contingency Planner and Quarantine Specialist brought two new tricks: one takes a card already played back out of the discard pile to use again, the other blocks new cubes in her city and every city next to it.
Q 20Who co-designed all three Pandemic expansions?
Tom Lehmann
Tom Lehmann shares the credit on every expansion box, though his own best-known design is a competitive card game, the opposite of the all-win-or-all-lose game he helped to grow.
Mutation is a purple disease that behaves differently from the other four: to win, the team must either cure it as well or leave not a single purple cube on the board.
Q 24Which challenge in Pandemic's On the Brink expansion swaps the Epidemic cards for nastier ones tied to a single disease?
Virulent Strain
Virulent Strain picks its victim at the first Epidemic: whichever disease has the most cubes on the board gets the title, and every later card adds a new rule that makes it worse.
Q 25Pandemic's second expansion, In the Lab, added which two modes?
Solo and team play
Solo and team play both arrived in this box: a lone player gets help from a CDC card, while rival pairs race for prestige and can still all lose if one of them stops co-operating.
Q 26In Pandemic's State of Emergency expansion, which challenge has animals spreading disease to humans?
The Hinterlands
The Hinterlands shares the box with the Superbug, a fifth disease that cannot be treated at all: the team has to find its cure, produce vaccine doses and then wipe it out to win.
Q 27What rises each time an Epidemic card is drawn in Pandemic?
The infection rate
The infection rate sets how many new cards are turned over against the team at the end of every turn. It starts at two and tops out at four, however many more Epidemics follow.
Q 28The 2018 tenth-anniversary edition of Pandemic came in a metal box styled as what?
A first aid kit
A first aid kit that can hang like a real one: the steel box comes with fittings for mounting it on a wall, and its wooden pieces hark back to the 2008 first edition.
Q 29Which Pandemic spin-off replaced cards with dice in 2014?
Pandemic: The Cure
Pandemic: The Cure gives every role its own set of dice. Players may re-roll as often as they like, but each extra roll makes the next epidemic more likely to strike.
Q 30In Pandemic: Contagion, players take on what role?
The diseases themselves
The diseases themselves are the players' side in this card game, and for once nobody co-operates: each one competes to spread furthest, with the end of humanity as the shared aim.