In the summer of 2021, as the world was still reeling from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I imagine that the team at Z-Man Games was rather desperate for a rebranding. The company’s hit game, titled Pandemic, had long been a welcoming entrypoint into the joy of modern board games. But the whole “millions of people dying and the budding culture war where we risked our own neighbor’s lives to prove a political point” thing was really gettin’ folks down on the term “pandemic.” Something had to be done. So, why not licensing?
Variations on the theme, like Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu and Pandemic: Iberia, had been attempted back in 2016. But along came one of the world’s most popular video game franchises, and Z-Man went all-in on a lavish game with a ponderous title — World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King – A Pandemic System Board Game.
I reviewed it. It was fine, but it didn’t really feel like Pandemic to me. You can still buy it — but it’s a big missed opportunity, if you ask me. What the game should have been about is the legendary Corrupted Blood Incident. I’ll let my colleague Oli Welsh take it from here:
The 2005 Corrupted Blood plague is perhaps the most notorious bug in WoW’s long history, which birthed one of the most famous unscripted incidents in any online game. Corrupted Blood was a debuff applied to players during the climactic boss fight of the Zul’Gurub raid, and it was transmissible between characters in close proximity to each other. Due to the bug, the debuff escaped the confines of the raid and quickly spread across WoW’s world of Azeroth, becoming an actual in-game pandemic. Non-player characters could carry it asymptomatically, while lower-level player characters were instantly killed by the powerful debuff. Some players tried to set up an organized healing response, while griefers contrived ways to spread the disease further.
So much of this legendary part of gaming history would have made for an interesting take on the classic tabletop game, maybe even a legacy-style game like Pandemic Legacy Season 1. But instead we got a bright blue box filled with somewhat squishy miniatures and a blonde elf lady on the front. But who knows, maybe some day in the future we’ll get the meta-meta-metatextual reinterpretation of the Corrupted Blood Plague that we so badly deserve. I’ve confidence that Z-Man knows how to get it done.
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