The games being built off of the Pandemic system are getting harder and harder to spot. Since 2017’s Pandemic: Rising Tide, the word Pandemic has been scrubbed from the title of all the games that reimplement this iconic cooperative system. Fall of Rome, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King at least all have a logo on the cover of the box, showcasing that the game contained within is using the Pandemic system. The most recent game utilizing this system, The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship has omitted it from the cover all together.

I’m already off-topic. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King was designed by Justin Kemppainen, Todd Michlitsch, Alexandar Ortloff-Tang, and Michael Sanfilippo, and published by Z-Man Games in 2021. In World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, you and the other players are cooperatively journeying through the frozen continent of Northrend to face the armies of the Lich King. You each take on the mantle of one of the iconic heroes, such as Jaina Proudmoore or Thrall, and move through villages slaying ghouls and evading abominations while you take on quests before sidling up to The Lich King himself.

If you’re familiar with any Pandemic game, you’ll already feel right at home. On your turn, you take 4 actions, then draw two cards from the hero deck. Assuming you don’t draw any “The Scourge Rises”, then you’ll draw cards from the scourge deck and deploy one ghoul to each location you just drew. If you needed to add a 4th to a single location, you don’t do that, but instead move the despair token one space down on its track. Once ghouls have been summoned, the abominations each activate, which means moving one space closer to the closest hero, and dealing one damage if they manage to land on the same location as any hero.

The actions are simple. Move to an adjacent location, battle (which is just rolling two dice and dealing hits based on the result, and taking one shot of damage if anything is left standing after your attack), Quest, which I’ll get back to in a second, and Rest, which has you roll the dice and heal damage equal to the number of successes you rolled.

The quests, are established at the start of the game. There’s 3 to overcome, one in each of the 3 regions of the board. To complete a quest, you’ll need to move your character mini to the location where the quest is located, then take the quest action. You roll the two dice, and move a token along a track for every success you rolled. You can also reveal (not discard) a card from your hand to move an extra space, if the card type matches the space on the track. As a raiding bonus, every character pawn in that quest location can reveal one card, encouraging you to party up to overcome the threats.

After a quest action, generally, bad things happen. Most will deal 2 or 3 damage to whomever initiated the quest, and others will spawn ghouls on your location, or negate some of your successes. Either way, you’ll quest over and over again until the token reaches the end of the track. A reward will be given to the player who initiated the successful quest, and the quest is removed from the game. Complete 3 quests, and the final quest, the siege of Icecrown Citadel becomes available. Complete that quest, and you’ve won the game!

Most coop games have a variety of losing conditions. In World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, the only thing that really matters is the despair track. That goes down one space every time you need to add a 4th ghoul to a location, and it drops by 2 spaces anytime a player character dies (which they discard their hand of cards, then simply respawn at their starting location).

Eagle-eyed readers may have already noticed that there’s quite a bit omitted from the core Pandemic experience. Firstly, there’s no trading mechanism. The cards aren’t used to build strongholds or collecting sets to cure diseases, nor are they used to zip around the map, addressing the critical outbreaks as they flare up. Instead, cards are just held in your hand until you want to use their ability, like moving a few extra spaces, adding extra successes to an attack, or defending from hits.

Another simplification is there are only 3 regions instead of 4, but the real change is in the ghouls. There’s only one type of mob that goes all over the map. When the Scourge rises, another Abomination is added to the map, but you’re able to kill those by dealing 3 hits to it in a single action. The ghouls also don’t outbreak, should you need to put a 4th ghoul into a location, you just drop one on the despair track. No longer are you then adding one to every adjacent location.

The result is the easiest and least interesting Pandemic experience I’ve had so far. I do like that there is some variability in the character powers you’ll play with, and the different quests, but nothing about World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King makes me want to come back and play it some more. While I’m not a WoW fan, I am a Pandemic fan, and I enjoyed Warcraft III quite a bit back in the day. I like the world, I like the minis of the characters and the abominations quite a bit.

The titular Lich King himself was quite underutilized. He has his own, hefty mini, but he’s relegated to just standing watch over a region for most of the game, dealing out a single extra hit when you’re questing to battling in his region. The final confrontation? You turn his castle over, put him on top, and then there’s just another track to run through. Sure, it’s slightly longer than the other quests, but it’s not particularly punishing. Also, there’s only one final quest in the game, so that track will never change. It makes me wonder why it was a card and not just printed right on the board in the first place? Perhaps an expansion hook that never came to fruition.

The dice mechanics does give the game a bit of a push your luck element. You can roll the dice and hope to smite all the baddies from a single location, and should you fail, well, you’ll probably have the cards to make you succeed anyways, or the cards to prevent anything bad from happening.

The gameplay does devolve into a repetitive loop of move and combating if ghouls are nearby or spawning too many, then squatting on the quest marker and just “quest, quest, quest, quest” until the track is finished. Sometimes you might move off the quest marker to rest, but it’s a very repetitive game. It’s kind of funny because in base Pandemic, it’s largely the same. “move, cure, move cure”, but that system has so many more interconnected layers that where you choose to move, which locations you cure are vastly more interesting that what this game has to offer.

I think the biggest problem with World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, is that every other Pandemic variant does it better. Fall of Rome does dice combat, but also has a much more interesting marching mechanic. If you have diehard WoW fans in your life, this might convince them to spend an evening away from their keyboards and around the table with you, but it lacks any excitement that might make them want to stay. I have to imagine that if you love the theme, you’ll love seeing the characters you play as, all the art on the cards, and playing with the minis. But this is a Pandemic game worth skipping.