28

I understand that you need to cure all four diseases to win the game.

But the next step beyond curing a disease is eradicating it. Why do this? After you cure a disease, how are you helped by going to all the trouble of eradicating it?

The only advantage I can think of is that since no more cubes get placed, you don't run the risk of an outbreak which moves the counter. Is that correct?

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
50

Eradicating a disease relieves pressure on the game board. Those infection cards that correspond to the eradicated disease remain in the deck, and continue to get drawn but have no effect other than counting as a drawn card.

If a quarter of your infection deck is red and you are drawing 3 infection cards each turn, and you eradicate red, then a quarter of the infection cards have no effect, and your effective is 3/4*3 = 2.25 cards per turn.

If the top of the infection deck is weighted to a particular colour, the change can be more noticeable. If 2/5 cards are of the same colour and you eradicate it, your effective draw rate at 3 cards per turn will be 1.8 cards per turn.

The less infections on the board, the easier your team will have managing the rest of the infections. The game has a limited number of total actions possible (by the number of cards in the player deck) by the players, and removing a colour from the board frees actions that would be spent controlling the disease and allows more actions spent on other colours. It's a fine balance between how many more actions it takes to eradicate a disease and what that frees up in the future.

As James mentioned in a comment below, there's another factor for eradicating a disease:

You also care if you run out of blocks of a particular color and are required to place another one, because that is a game loss.

And as gambler22 says, you get a potential relief on the Infect step of the Epidemic cards:

You don't only get potential relief at the top of the deck, but at the bottom of the deck as well if an Epidemic card is drawn.

Improve this answer
9
  • 1
    And just to be clear, the only reason I care about infection blocks is that they don't become outbreaks, correct? One block or two blocks I or even three blocks s no big deal, except that at four blocks, an outbreak happens, and that's bad?
    – Deane
    Jun 10, 2019 at 12:51
  • 14
    @Deane: You also care if you run out of blocks of a particular color and are required to place another one, because that is a game loss.
    – James
    Jun 10, 2019 at 12:58
  • 3
    You don't only get potential relief at the top of the deck, but at the bottom of the deck as well if an Epidemic card is drawn. Usually if I draw an Epidemic card, and the bottom infection card is of a color I've already eradicated, I exclaim 'And that's why you eradicate!"
    – gambler22
    Jun 10, 2019 at 22:46
  • 2
    @James Usually it isn't feasible to eradicate a disease that's in any danger of running out of cubes though. When I'm weighing up whether to spend actions clearing the last few cities of a disease, the possibility of running out of cubes is never on my mind!
    – Ben
    Jun 12, 2019 at 4:03
  • 3
    "going to all the trouble to eradicate it" is sometimes easy when there are only 2 or 3 cubes of a disease on the board - at other times there are so many cubes that it would be a waste of actions to do any more than contain outbreaks. The decision of what will work best is part of the game.
    – Sir Adelaide
    Jun 13, 2019 at 6:09

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .