The board game World of Warcraft Pandemic deserved better

Back in the summer of 2021, with the world still reeling from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I imagine the team at Z-Man Games was quite desperate for a rebrand. The company’s popular game, titled Pandemichas long been a welcome entry into the fun of modern board games. But the whole “millions of people dying and the burgeoning culture war where we risked our own neighbor’s life to prove a political point” thing really got people using the term “pandemic.” Something had to be done. So why not a license?

I reviewed it. It was fine, but it didn’t really feel like that Pandemic for 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 infamous bug in history Wow‘s long history, which spawned one of the most famous unwritten incidents in any online game. Corrupted Blood was a debuff applied to players during the climactic boss battle of the Zul’Gurub raid, and it was transferable between characters who were close to each other. Due to the bug, the debuff escaped the confines of the raid and quickly spread across the area Wow‘s world of Azeroth, becoming a real in-game pandemic. Non-player characters could carry it asymptomatically, while lower-level player characters were instantly killed by the powerful debuff. Some players attempted to mount an organized healing response, while mourners devised ways to further spread the disease.

Much of this storied part of gaming history would have made for an interesting take on the classic tabletop game, perhaps even an older style game like Pandemic Legacy Season 1. But instead we got a bright blue box filled with slightly squishy miniatures and a blonde elf lady on the front. But who knows, maybe someday in the future we’ll get the meta-meta-metatextual reinterpretation of the Corrupted Blood Plague that we so desperately deserve. I have confidence that Z-Man knows how to get it done.