Game: Pandemic

Pandemic is the original co-operative board game that launched a thousand sickly imitators. It's winning combination of being easy to learn, difficult to beat, and lacking competition made it brilliant family fare; a hobby title that's bled into the mainstream. But of course co-operative games also work well played solo, and now you can play it both ways on your iPad.The players control a team of specialists trying to cure four lethal diseases before the game triggers one of a terrifyingly broad range of fail conditions. Each player has a hand of cards, corresponding to a color and a city on the board. You can move slowly from city to city, maybe spending precious actions to remove disease cubes as you go, or play a card to fly directly to the matching city. If you're lucky enough to accumulate five cards in the same color and can get to a research station, you can cure the disease of that colour."What makes the game special, and absolutely terrifying, is its simple yet brilliant infection mechanics. After a player takes a go, city cards are drawn from a different deck and disease cubes are added to those locations. But if one already has three cubes, an outbreak occurs: a chain reaction which also infects all neighbouring cities. If one of them has three cubes, it sets off another outbreak. This means the situation can go from calm control to complete chaos in the blink of an eye.