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[Trogdor the Burninator]

Anyone have any ideas for how to best use each role in Pandemic (including expansions) and best use combinations of roles?
Of particular interest: Has anyone found a way to make use of the Contingency Planner so that it's not completely pointless? It (the Contingency Planner has become the butt of all Pandemic jokes among me and my small group of friends that I play Pandemic with)

Thanks,
Trogdor the Burninator

[Kirian]

Hmm... remind me of the Contingency Planner's power again.

Dispatcher is so nice and always has been.  That said, generally we try to see how roles mesh when the roles are picked... it's the interactions between roles that is important.

[Jimmmmm]

I've only really played Base. My favourite role is the Dispatcher and my favourite combo is Dispatcher/Medic with a cure.

[Trogdor the Burninator]

Contingency Planner allows you to basically keep an event card and use it a second time, removing it from the game when you've played it a second time. That's it's only power and compared to the rest of the roles in the game it basically sucks.

[Tables]

I always found the Contingency Planner pretty useful, but only in 3-5 player games when you're more likely to see Special Events earlier and have more events in the deck to find and take advantage of (also because of the nature of the role, it taking a relatively lower proportion of the actions in the game is an advantage). It is of course a luck dependent role, based on what events are in the game and how soon they come out, but they're generally useful. I don't think it's one of the best roles, but I think it's pretty decent.

Basic general use I'd say is, be a little more liberal with special event use over the game, since the CP can pick it up later. When you don't have anything especially good to do with an action, grab whatever special event seems most likely to be useful in the upcoming turns.

[markusin]

I had made a thread about my first (and so far only) playing Pandemic sometime ago. We played for hours trying to beat the base game with the max number of epidemic cards (I think 6) with 4 players. Throughout the night, the dispatcher was praised, while the operations expert was the butt of all jokes, and contingency planner was considered too inconsequential to even be analyzed too deeply. I thought my playgroup was underestimating the contingency planner. We finally won with an unlikely set of roles: Medic, a quarantine specialist, an operations expert, and a contingency planner. The contingency planner is pretty useful if you get the event cards early, as the event cards are quite strong in general.

[Trogdor the Burninator]

Huh, funny you should mention the Operations Expert as being the butt of all your jokes, especially since in the second edition they added an ability allowing it to do direct flights to any city by discarding any city card at a Research Station. Even without the added ability I think that the ability to just pop out Research Stations whenever is extremely useful, especially when the Bio-Terrorist can sabotage them in On the Brink...

[markusin]

Huh, funny you should mention the Operations Expert as being the butt of all your jokes, especially since in the second edition they added an ability allowing it to do direct flights to any city by discarding any city card at a Research Station. Even without the added ability I think that the ability to just pop out Research Stations whenever is extremely useful, especially when the Bio-Terrorist can sabotage them in On the Brink...

We played second edition, and yeah the op expert was crutial. First off, he can discard a card at the very start to travel anywhere, then build a research facility at the remote location. We ended up needing a lot of research facilities later on to beat the clock with fancy plays.

[Trogdor the Burninator]

Personally, I've found (from the base game) that Medic, Operations Expert and Researcher have been the best role combination for a number of reasons:
1) The Medic is amazing!
2) The Operations Expert can quickly build a network of Research Stations that people can Charter a Flight to and from to immensely speed up movement around the board
3) The Researcher streamlines Sharing of Knowledge so much so that it can be used as a sort-of "middleman" shuffling needed City Cards between the other players to make cures come to fruition much easier
*I have yet to play much with the Dispatcher even though one of my friends (who introduced me to the game) seems to echo the above mentioned sentiments about it

[Titandrake]

Dispatcher is great because you can basically get another turn for your best role, or get two players to get to the same city in one turn to exchange cards, and it's just all around great to cut down on time.

[Trogdor the Burninator]

I guess you're right on that, and in that respect it may be slightly better than Researcher in most situations, but I just haven't played enough with the Dispatcher to find that out yet