The strange joy of failure in Pandemic

[Administrator]

Whenever I get the chance to speak to strategy game designers, I always ask them about victory conditions. What's the best way - the right way - to let a player bring to a close a game that may have eaten up an entire weekend?
Strategy designers tend to be ceaselessly honest and self-critical, and they'll often admit that there is no right way where victory is concerned, just a series of wrong ways that all contain a certain distinct merit. If you look at Civilization, for example, the victories tend to shift around from one iteration to the next. Even Domination - kill every other player - has changed a little over the years. Winning is tricky stuff.
Last weekend I spent an evening playing the board game Pandemic, and I'm starting to wonder if I've been asking the wrong question all of this time. Pandemic is an unusual strategy game for sure: it's co-operative, for one thing, so it's a case of all players fighting against the board. It's also a pleasantly swift business. We had two matches over the course of the evening, and given my peculiar ability to misunderstand every rule I'm told about in a board game, that's borderline miraculous. Here's something else that's miraculous: we lost both games, and it was still amazingly satisfying.
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