by schleima
One thing that makes the game potentially harder (certainly more unpredictable) is following the epidemic card setup rules exactly.We used to divide the deck up exactly evenly into 5 piles, and place the epidemic cards in the middle, then restack. That's wrong.
You're supposed to eyeball the stack division, so some are thinner than others. Then you *shuffle* an epidemic card into reach pile. That means it's possible that card could come up first. Lastly, you restack the deck from thickest to thinnest. With thin stacks at the bottom, it means you're going to probably have more epidemics towards the end of the game.
Sometimes we've had really long time without an epidemic, and then we get two in back to back turns. And one time the epidemic was the absolute last card in the player deck, so that means effectively we were only playing with 4. We really enjoyed this extra layer of unpredictability in the game.