Board Game Review: Quarantine

I recently picked up Quarantine, due to some reviews I’ve seen online, and my general enjoyment of tile-placement games.

In Quarantine, each player is running their own hospital, checking in patients, treating them, and sending them on their way. The patient cubes also are used as the currency in the game, so each cube you cure is another point you can spend to purchase new rooms to add to your growing hospital.

You gain new patients by drawing them out of a cloth sack. However, within the sack are also grey cubes, called “greysles”. These cubes represent a communicable disease which can spread throughout your hospital, effectively shutting down all operations. Beyond curing your own patients, you also need to decontaminate the environment from these dangerous greysles.

Bridget and I enjoyed the game quite a bit. She worked in a hospital for a few years, so she quite enjoyed a lot of the aspects of the game, pointing out points of accuracy or inaccuracy. We found that with a two player game, you often will spend quite a bit of time just trying to empty your hospital of the dreaded greysles. In a multi-person game, those greysles would be spread among all players evenly (more or less). Instead, her hospital was overrun and she had to spend a good portion of time just decontaminating. The game doesn’t have much player interaction beyond placing greysles in the other person’s hospital, and we wish that there were some more interesting ways to score at the end of the game. We found some interesting rules for scoring on here on BoardGameGeek, which we’ll be implementing in our next game to keep things interesting. Many posters suggested removing some of the greysles, as in a 2 person game, there’s just too many.

In addition, we picked up the expansion, which includes the Morgue and Public Relations Office, and we’ll be giving that a try.

We really enjoyed the game, and hope to give it another spin. It seems like it would pair well for an evening of Pandemic and Quarantine.