Pathogenesis - Review

First solo playthrough of PATHOGENESIS. A cool new highly thematic deck-builder where you build pathogens to infect various parts of the human body. Build powerful pathogens to resist the human body's immune system in order to do enough damage to a special system in the body to win, otherwise the body becomes immune and you lose.

Pathogenesis is Deck-building with a definite purpose, which I like.  I hate Deck-builders like Dominion & Trains where you're Deckbuilding just to Deckbuild.  Pathogenesis feels like a more thematic and pinpointed Marvel: Legendary.

Each round, you lay out more pathogens and augment them with traits, environments, or toxins to attack the human body.  The problem is that before you can attack, the human body's immune response system goes after the pathogens in a very effective way.

First, you go through the primary immune response system.  When the first Deck is gone, you combine it with the secondary immune response deck.  Once this combined deck runs out, the body has become fully immune to your pathogens and you lose.  You win if you can take enough damage tokens from one or more body systems before the body becomes immune.

I lost!!  I lost badly!!!

I think I only did about 9 damage to a system that I needed to do 60 damage to.

The game starts off easy easy, like"oh I got this..." Then rapidly degrades into a brutally difficult, yet quick game.

It was really fun though...

Now as I mentioned before, I'm not usually thrilled with deckbuilders, but this one captivated me with it's theme.  The science is spot on and you can tell that the developers went to great lengths to make the gameplay mimic the realities of pathogens.

The solo game was over much faster than I was ready for, soooo...

Let's clear it up and try it again and…

LEAVE IT ON THE TABLE!!