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.

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An Exciting Christmas Adventure

I know, I know I'm late, but even though it's winter break, it's been anything but a break.  I feel like I've been going and going without too much of a break.  Better late than never though, I can finally talk about our wonderful Christmas together.

In my family, Christmas starts on Christmas Eve.  According to Byzantine Catholic customs, we don't eat meat or dairy on Christmas Eve, which pretty much means I starve.  Growing up, we all piled into my grandparents' house where we ate fish, tater tots, pirogis, and steamed vegetables.  Since I don't like fish or pirogis, I usually ate tater tots.  Afterwards, we'd all part ways and go to our respective churches for liturgy, after all getting changed at my grandparents' house, which was always chaos.  For the past ten or so years, my grandparents have been too old to cook dinner for 14 people, so my aunt took over for them, and we all went to her house instead.  Around that time, we also decided we should also go to church together at St. Rose of Lima, the local Roman Catholic Church about five minutes from my house.

While Bryan joined us for dinner since our first Christmas together, last year and this year, he also joined us at St. Rose for Mass.  This had me absolutely over the moon, as he's part of the family and should be with us.  Unfortunately, the new medication my dad is on had him not feeling too well, so my mom took him home after dinner so he could rest, and she stayed with him.  They were greatly missed, although it was wonderful to have most of the family together.  I even got a picture of Bryan and I to prove he dressed up.

Typically, Bryan and I spend Christmas dinner with my family before heading over to his oldest brother's house for dessert and presents.  This time, however, we flip flopped the plans and went to his oldest brother's first for brunch, presents and dinner.  Brunch was a delicious affair with Bryan's entire family there.  His five year old niece, of course, was beside herself and absolutely couldn't wait to open presents.  Usually by the time we get there, most of the presents are open, and she only has our presents to open.  This time, however, we got to watch her open all her presents.  His one year old nephew was getting more into Christmas also.  Last year he was only a month old, so he mostly slept through Christmas.  This year, he was able to open his presents and play with his toys.  After his niece opened what she thought were all her presents, Bryan surprised her with another one: a five foot tall teddy bear.  There's a bit of a story behind this.  For a few years after she was born, Bryan would get her a teddy bear, each one progressively bigger than the last.  Eventually, however, his sister-in-law said no more teddy bears until they got a bigger house.  Well, they got a bigger house this past summer, so we were able to get her a giant teddy bear.  This is the last one we're getting her, as it's absolutely huge.  Right now, it's in her bedroom with the rest of the giant teddy bears Bryan got her, although I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually moved to the basement.

After a delicious dinner with Bryan's family and his sister-in-law's family, we headed over to my house for dessert with my family.  Bryan's parents joined us too.  While they've met my parents before, this was the first time they'd met my extended family.  Everyone got along great, not that I was worried.  Typically after dinner, my brother, cousins and I settle down for a random movie.  I have no idea how this weird tradition started, but we've been doing it for quite some time now.  There's no rhyme or reason to the movie we pick, and the parents usually filter in at random moments to add their own commentary.  This year, however, we broke tradition and instead decided to play a board game.  They'd already played "Super Fight" before I got there, and we decided to play "Pandemic" when Bryan and I got there.

Unlike most board games, "Pandemic" is a cooperative game, meaning everyone works together and either you all win together or all lose together.  The premise is fairly straightforward: four different diseases are spreading all over the world, and you are part of a team determined to find the cure and stop the spread of the diseases.  While there are many ways to lose, there's only one way to win: discover the cure for all four diseases.  You do this by collecting cards of different colors and get to a research station to create the cure.  While you do this, the diseases spread at an increasingly rapid pace.  If there are too many outbreaks, you run out of cards or run out of the little cubes that represent how much of the disease is in a particular city, then you all lose the game.  Like I said, there are many ways to lose but only one way to win.  It's a great game to play; it seems overly complicated but really isn't.  Plus, you can explain as you play since you're all working together.  We ended up winning, although we were cutting it pretty close.  Everyone seemed to enjoy the game; even one of my aunts played while the other watched.  Hopefully this is the start of a new tradition after dinner on Christmas.

Even before my Pop-Pop passed away two and a half years ago, we started taking family pictures after dinner and dessert on Christmas.  This was pretty much the only holiday the entire family was together, so it was the perfect opportunity for all sorts of pictures.  Since Bryan's parents were there, we were even able to get a picture of the entire family.  Well, almost everyone.  Once again, Dad wasn't feeling well, so he rested upstairs.  Mom's talking about having another family gathering soon so we can do pictures all over again.  After family pictures were done, I dragged Bryan into the living room to get a nice picture of the two of us in front of the tree.  You can't really see the tree, but that's okay, I still think it's a wonderful picture.

After our first Christmas together, Bryan and I started opening our presents together just the two of us.  It's much more relaxed and peaceful.  We usually open a bottle of wine and take turns opening presents and simply enjoying each other's company.  It's the perfect way to end one of my favorite holidays.  We were able to spend time with both our families, plus plenty of time together too.  I couldn't have asked for more.

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