Our First Attempt at Pandemic Legacy

For Christmas, Bryan and I got Pandemic: Legacy.  We're both fans of the original game, and Bryan had actually been playing this with his friends when we first started dating.  Last night, we finally dived into our first session with my best friend and her husband.  It was definitely a long, stressful night.

Before diving into the night's activities, I first want to talk about what is Pandemic and what is a legacy game.  Pandemic is a wonderful, cooperative board game.  Instead of competing against the people playing with you, you instead all work together to stop diseases from spreading throughout the world.  Each person has a different job that has different skills that will be helpful in stopping the diseases.  Like many cooperative games, there are many ways to lose but only one way to win: cure all the diseases by collecting the appropriate number of city cards and traveling to a research station.  It all sounds fairly straightforward, but it's actually far more complicated.  Now, a legacy game is a game you return to and play over time.  With regular Pandemic, you play a game, and whatever happens in that game has no effect on the next game you play.  In Pandemic Legacy, however, if there's an outbreak in a city, you add a sticker to the board and that stickers stays there for the rest of the time you play (there are 12 sessions in total).  This means the game becomes more difficult as you play.  On the other hand, you have upgrades you add to your characters, the board, etc, which help you in the long run.  It was definitely an adjustment, because if you really lose, then it will make the next game more challenging.  Each month, the game is slightly different, as you have different objectives to complete, some more challenging than others, and they depend on what happened in the previous game.

Our first step was picking our characters.  While we can switch later on, you tend to stick with the same character or role for the entire year.  I picked the medic, which means I can clear all the disease out of the city with one action, which can definitely help when cities are starting to get really bad.  I didn't name my character, although I probably should at some point.  We also didn't name the diseases, but we can do that next month also.

The first game is fairly simple: it's just like regular Pandemic, for the most part.  We did terribly and lost by running out of red cubes (each cube represents the severity of the disease in a given city).  So that pretty much means Asia was overrun with disease.  We weren't happy, and it was made more complicated by the fact that since we lost, we could no longer cure the red disease, ever.  Okay, fine, we can't cure it, but we still had to keep it from breaking out.  We had a new objective, cure the three remaining diseases while simultaneously making sure red didn't get too bad.  Somehow, we managed to win the second time around, thereby completing the January mission.  We decided to play catch-up and do February as well since we had time.

Bryan warned us that things can and will get worse, and he was definitely right.  In the February game, we couldn't cure or even pick up red disease cubes.  You might be asking yourself, then how in the world did we keep things from getting too bad?  Well, we now have these wonderful little quarantine markers we can put down whenever we pass through a city, and instead of putting a red cube down in that city, we simply have to pick up the quarantine marker.  It's not exactly ideal, but it's better than nothing.

We managed to win our February game, although it was cutting it a bit close at times.  If we had played for a little while longer, I honestly don't think we would have won, as we had had several outbreaks, and if you have eight, then you lose (we were at about five).  Things were getting tense, and it was a little funny because Bryan was getting stressed.  You might as yourself why this is so funny, but Bryan is such a laid back guy, it's rare that even I see him stressed, let alone our friends.

Overall, I had an absolute blast playing Pandemic Legacy last night.  It's the perfect excuse for the four of us to get together once a month for a quick dinner and a fun, albeit somewhat stressful game.  What I loved most about Pandemic Legacy was the amount of changes you can make to the game.  There are little boxes that you open in certain scenarios, and, honestly, it feels like Christmas opening one of the boxes (and hopefully it's something good inside).  There's a bit of excitement as you wonder what in the world is in the little box.  There are also file folder looking pieces with little doors that you open with stickers inside.  You put those stickers on your character card or on the board, and those are permanent changes, which can definitely be exciting, especially as the game continues to get more difficult.  We've already picked our date to play in March, and we're all excited to play again.  Plus, it was great just hanging out the four of us, which is something we haven't done in a while either.