Review: Pan Am (Funko Games)

I grew up listening to my dad’s stores stories about working for Pan Am as a mechanic and then a pilot, so when a board game with the Pan Am globe appeared on the scene, I knew we had to give it a try. And I’m so glad we did.

Pan Am, from Funko Games, is a tremendously fresh and easy to learn game experience. But “easy to learn” doesn’t mean “simple,” as Pan Am delivers a surprising amount of player choices and strategic options.

Let’s look at the top five things you need to know before taking off with Pan Am.

All Eyes on the Board

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The most striking — and somewhat unsettling — thing about Pan Am is the map. Nothing is where you expect it to be.

North and South America go from the lower right corner toward the center, and Asia and Europe circle around the upper left and top.

Although the board takes some getting used to, that’s part of what makes the game feel so fresh.

Spaces for Everything

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The board layout organizes the airplanes and various card decks.

The Event deck drives each game turn. During setup, you use just one of the four event cards numbered for each turn. This gives you plenty of replay value because you never know what the deck will contain.

The Destination deck has two cards for each city on map. You use these cards to gain landing rights when you claim a route. These come up randomly, forcing you to be flexible when selecting routes.

The Directive deck gives you incredibly powerful one-shot cards to use either during a round or at game end. Nothing bad comes out of this deck.

Placing Your Engineers

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Each round, your engineers take actions on the board. Depending on the number of players, you get between three (four players) and five (two players) engineers.

Players take turns assigning one engineer at a time to one of the five action areas. Some actions make you bid for something (airport, destination card, or new planes), while others are free but mark the order that the players placed their engineers.

In an interesting twist, engineers claiming a card from the powerful Directive deck get first placement “priority” for the next turn.

Claiming Routes

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A big part of the game involves claiming routes by using destination cards and placing airplanes.

To claim a route, you need landing rights in both airports. That’s where Destination cards come in. If you have the cards for both cities on your route and a plane with enough range to connect them, then you’re good to go. Claim the route and add the length to your income.

Owning an airport in a city automatically gives you landing rights. You can also get them by discarding one card from the same region or a pair of cards from a different region, but then the cards are gone so you need to use an engineer to get more.

Pan Am Takes Over

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Each player runs a small regional airline serving different routes around the world — routes that Pan Am may want to own.

At the end of each turn, you roll the Pan Am die. It’s a custom die with five sides showing one or two route symbols and the sixth emblazoned with the Pan Am logo. The turn’s event card tells you how many times to roll.

If route symbols come up, then Pan Am claims the next route on that line. If you own the route, you get cash based on the route’s length. Otherwise, Pan Am just expands for free.

When the Pan Am symbol appears, all players can sell one of their routes. Longer routes mean a bigger windfall, but also a bigger bite out of each turn’s cash flow.

Use your cash to buy Pan Am stock, which varies in price throughout the game. In the end, the player with the most stock wins.

Verdict

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With a combination of worker placement, bidding, route building, stock acquisition, and fleet management, Pan Am offers something for everyone.

The event deck and directive cards take the game’s flexibility to another level. In one of our tests, the final event card, combined with a handful of directives, turned a crushing defeat into a very narrow victory. We were both impressed with the close scoring for each game.

Pan Am is one of the best board games we played in the last year — and that’s saying something, because a lot of games hit our table. We highly recommend it.