SPIEL 2016 II: The Matt Leacock Show — Chariot Race, Thunderbirds: The Hood, Pandemic Iberia, and Pandemic: The Cure

• Designer Matt Leacock had four different releases at SPIEL 2016, so instead of trying to arrange demo times with the three publishers involved, we just arranged time with him and let him worry about the details of getting everything to the right location at the right time. That's what Pandemic is all about, right? So let's have him see what it feels like!

We started with Chariot Race, which Pegasus Spiele debuted at the show and which Eagle-Gryphon Games plans to release in the U.S. in November 2016. I am amused that the release from German publisher Pegasus (which includes rules in English) uses the English-language title "Chariot Race" and the German subtitle "Das große Wagenrennen" — which essentially means "The great chariot race", which is precisely the subtitle EGG used on its release, which means that "chariot race" is used twice in the title, yet not in an intentionally amusing way such as Greater Than Games' Time Management: The Time Management Game.

Surely other, better options were available, yes? Maybe Chariot Race: You're Probably Going to Die, or Chariot Race: Suck a Caltrops, or Chariot Race: The Horses Curse You in Their Sleep. So many possibilities...

• The 2015 release Thunderbirds from Modiphius Entertainment was crowdfunded for both the base game and several expansions, with those expansions being released to retail outlets bit by bit to keep the game present in the minds of the game-buying public. Has that strategy worked? I don't know, but I can say that it worked well enough that we featured Leacock talking about the third expansion, Thunderbirds: The Hood, which transforms the game from cooperative to one vs. many, with the lone player now taking the role of the Hood.

• The 2016 Pandemic Survival World Championship takes place in Barcelona, Spain in December, and perhaps not coincidentally Z-Man Games has released a new version of Matt Leacock's Pandemic titled Pandemic Iberia — this time co-designed with Jesús Torres Castro — with the players traveling back in time to the mid-19th century when they couldn't fly around everywhere and when you were more concerned with providing citizens with purified water than with curing the diseases outright.

• Leacock teamed up with equally famed designer Tom Lehmann for the two Pandemic expansions On the Brink and In the Lab, and now the two have gotten together again for Pandemic: The Cure – Experimental Meds, which more than doubles the number of roles available in Pandemic: The Cure while also adding a fifth virus, hot zones, and more in expansions that can be mixed and matched for use with the base game.

SPIEL 2016 II: The Matt Leacock Show — Chariot Race, Thunderbirds: The Hood, Pandemic Iberia, and Pandemic: The Cure – Experimental Meds

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