Choose Your Own Mistakes:
Pandemic Legacy, Game #1

It’s tough, being a germ scientist. If you are doing your job right, much of your work is taken for granted, becoming part of the new normal. If you are doing your job wrong, and your name will be cursed in the streets for failing society. It seems sometimes like a no win situation, as outbreaks of diseases mutate and crop up in new, unpredictable ways, and you are left scrambling to do damage control, all while being yelled at for not stopping it before it started.

Remember the Ebola crisis just last year? Doctors were being quarantined, even with a full bill of health, when they tried to return home. Panic spread, hours of news coverage blocked out normal programming, and calls to close borders started to be heard a continent away. The disease was deadly, but the chaos and panic felt worse; paranoia and fear get in the way, taking a bad situation and making it worse. The heroes of a germ crisis go almost completely without being thanked, as they tirelessly work double shifts with the sick, while others look for a cure.

Pandemic Legacy captures this feeling. Suddenly in charge of saving the world from disease, there is a sense of dread, of intensity as you open the box, and stare at ‘top secret’ sealed rules. I understood that our jump down this rabbit hole wouldn’t last one simple game, but twelve games or more. That my actions wouldn’t be erased at the end of the night, but instead haunt us in the rounds to come. It was only get worse before it could get better.

I couldn’t wait to play.

What is Pandemic?

For those of you that don’t know about Pandemic, it’s a board game based around cooperation and panic; you take the role of a disease control team, like the CDC or WHO, rushing around the world to stop the newest outbreaks of disease before they can take hold. Infections happen every turn, and thanks to the epidemics hiding among the cards players must draw, there is always a chance that the game will escalate suddenly, causing a city to become filled to the top with infection, before the chances sky-rocket that cities that have already been infected will be hit again.

When a city is filled with disease (marked by 3 cubes), and more cubes would be put there, an outbreak occurs, and the cubes are sent to all connecting cities instead. Of course, if the cities nearby are also full, this can create another outbreak, spreading the disease further…and further… and…

Pandemic is meant to capture the fear of a bad thing spiraling out of control. Eight outbreaks mean you lose, or if you simply run out of cubes of a particular disease (marked by four colors) to put on the board, you also lose. Or if you run out of player cards to draw, you also lose. Let’s not forget, of course, of the epidemic cards that are hidden within that deck of player cards, waiting to go off like mines among the material you need to try and win.

You have to coordinate, to cooperate, completely and fully with the players around you to both try and discover cures, but also cut off the chance for things spiraling out of control. The epidemic cards and constant infection happening at the end of every player's turn makes it almost impossible to cut off disease entirely, but it is up to your team to stop things from getting ever worse.

What is a Legacy game?

Rob Daviau, a long time game designer who has worked with companies like Hasbro and Z-Man games, created Risk Legacy back in 2011 as his pet project, his sort of Avant Garde art piece in game design. I was lucky enough to be at a talk he gave on SUNY New Paltz campus, where he openly admitted that he wasn’t sure that this Legacy format was going to be met with any praise or success.

It was met with success though, selling well, and inspiring very, very heated conversations about what exactly board game parameters are supposed to be. The reason why it was so controversial could perhaps be summarized with what the game asked you to do right as you opened the box: sign the bottom of the board with your other players, as a token act in taking responsibility for the destruction that would soon take place.

Every board came with a stamped-in number, marking the world as a unique place, an alternative dimension that these various factions were fighting over. The Risk Legacy board was designed to be a blank slate, where you didn’t play just once, but fifteen times. During these games, winners could name the continents, while all players were given chances to build bunkers, or permanently deplete a region of defensible resources. Some locations could become five times as valuable to control, while others could become irradiated enough that just staying there would kill your troops. The first time you chose a faction to play in the box, you could give them a unique special power for the rest of the game; you ripped up the other one.

You play, and sign the board every time you win, hoping to claim enough total victories to say you are the true master of this world. It adds wild new levels of gameplay, where suddenly your friend who won games 3 and 4 through back stabbing and misleading other players, is ganged up on by the rest to make sure they don’t get too far ahead. A player who becomes too reliant on Australia for their fortress might find it being targeted for destruction by the rest.

The Legacy part of a game makes you see things through. You have to live with your choices, for better or worse.

So, as my friend Jesse and I opened up the box to Pandemic Legacy for the first time, you might understand the creeping sense of anticipation, and of anxiety that we experienced. Here was a game, fully co-operative, where we got to unleash our full potential against the game. How would it try to screw us?

Game #1, January – Just a Routine Sweep For Flu…

Your first game like any other game of standard Pandemic: you pick a character for each player, you start in Atlanta, and the board starts with cubes of disease in nine different locations. Your objective is to cure all four of the diseases on the board; this doesn’t mean you have to remove all the disease cubes from the board, but it’s beneficial to try at times, since that makes a particular disease unable to come back during later infections.

The hint that everything wasn’t as it seemed was in the Legacy deck, a card deck that dictates when new events and effects jump into the game. It gave us our flavor text, of how we had done these things before, but not mutation seemed to be speeding up. We also could see how the deck said only to keep drawing for instructions when two epidemics went off in the game, if we weren’t able to win quick enough. I’ve played Risk Legacy before – there were packets in that game that would be revealed mid-game, sealed compartments that once opened, could totally change the dynamic of the board.

Time to get to work, and fast. Did I mention that Jesse and I had never played Pandemic ?

The Game Begins – Be Warned, Spoilers To The Game Start Here

The game hadn’t been changed yet, but we were already nervous for what would happen if we worked too slowly. We spent some time plotting out our first moves, and where to try and cure first. We went with a ‘control and crush’ theory, where we would control the cities that started with disease by removing some cubes as to avoid immediate outbreak, but really try to absolutely eradicate one or two diseases, as to lessen the chances for being spread out to multiple zones later.

We had to choose heroes, and we went with the Sprites and Dice staff for our characters: Jesse chose the specialist, who gets an extra action a turn, and I chose the scientist, who needs less cards of a color to start curing disease. It seemed like a safe way, as one would be good in all situations, and the other could make sure we completed the objective.

The blue section, which is North America and some of Europe, had only Montreal as a problem, but it was already at max disease. Meanwhile, the yellow section, which was South America and southern Africa, had multiple locations affected, including the other two max-disease locations. The black section, which was north Africa and most of Europe, had a smattering of moderate problems, but was manageable, and the red section which was Asia and Australia had the same sort of small scattering of problems.

Both of us were able to draw 4 cards, and we came up with a lot of yellow and black. Given what we saw, we split up, the faster generalist taking a flight Johannesburg to cure the worst problems there, while I would take the slower route by walking through Montreal (cleaning it up in the process), shipping then overseas into Europe, where we would meet up to Share Knowledge - meaning share our city cards in that location – and remove one of the four diseases as a problem early.

All According to Plan…

It went smoothly, maybe too smoothly. Jesse and I were new to the game, and were trying an untested theory. While she managed to spend time curing yellow cubes one at a time, I hoofed slowly across the Atlantic, both of us worried about using up our precious player cards. You need player cards to discover cures, but they are also your ticket to fly around faster and perform time-saving tricks. We played cautiously, trying to build full card hands to set up for later victory. Montreal was partially cured, to remove immediate threat, and by the time I got to Bagdahd, Jesse was able to hand me the last card I needed.

On the next turn, I was going to be able to cure a disease, and we had taken time to make sure that illness was only in one black-cubed city. It would be a slam dunk to cure the problem, and then eradicate the disease immediately, giving us an advantage both now – and according to the legacy rules, get a ‘positive mutation’ for the rest of the upcoming games. We had ignored the minor patches of diseases scattering around the world each turn, because nothing yet was again at that margin for outbreak – three cubes in a city.

Of course, that’s when we got our first epidemic; we watched as Tokyo suddenly blossomed into a fully infected city, then got nervous as South America cities like Lima got up to three cubes. Sure, the disease we had focused on was almost under control, but other sections of the world were showing real problems now. We started to decide to use plane travel more often, discarding cards with the hope to get more through draw later.

Jesse had set up a research facility in Tehran, and so on my turn, I ran over, cured the disease, and totally cured Moscow right after. On Jesse’s next turn, all she had to do was cure one more city, and one disease would be entirely removed for the rest of the game. We had full hands of cards, and plenty of cards towards curing red.

At the end of my turn, we pulled the Second Epidemic.

Failure to Control, and The Birth of the COdA Virus

Epidemics are bad, not only because they drop a city ready to burst onto the board, but because they shuffle back in cards already drawn in infection back to the top of the deck; this insanely increases your chances to draw a city that was just infected, sending it over the tipping point. We had just had two of these back to back, and so the odds were certainly not in our favor now.

Khartoum, a city located in modern Sudan, was our first outbreak. It had been drawn three times this game now, and the two of us just simply couldn’t deal with that pressure. We watched as Lima got dangerously close to the brink. London had been brought up to 3 cubes as well, but we couldn’t worry about that, simply because we were too busy opening up the top secret files in the game. The second Epidemic had happened, and nothing could be done.

…Here is where the ‘Legacy’ portion of the game rose up to show its teeth. The Pandemic Legacy box comes with a set of red sheets of paper labelled ‘top secret’, and have sections marked off like advent calendars might…except, these are new rules, cards, stickers. Things that could and would permanently change things going forward. I can safely say that Jesse and I were swearing a lot and going for another round of drinks as we opened some of these packets for the first time.

We were expecting change, but we weren’t expecting soul-crushing evolution. The game hadn’t been kidding about the idea of fast-acting mutation. Our completely savaged yellow section of the board was deemed, as per the card effects, the COdA-403a virus, a drug resistant strain. We had to put on the board the new rules, saying we could no longer cure it. Ever. As we sat there in shock, with panic setting in along the southern hemisphere, we had to also come to terms with how any yellow cubes on the board would take 2 actions to treat, not just one.

I was also stunned while trying to take in how absolutely crushing outbreaks could be; not only could they end the game, or cause more out-of-control action, but in this Legacy version, outbreaks didn’t exactly go away entirely. We were forced to put a sticker on Khartoum, showing that the city was now in unrest. Unrest was one thing, but any more outbreaks there for the rest of the games we played would create rioting, an effect where we could no longer build research centers there, much less fly into or out of the city.

Looking around, we now had an incurable disease to the south, and a dangerously sick eastern population, we ourselves were trying not to panic.

Damage Control and Damaged Reputations

We split up, the faster Generalist moving to treat Khartoum while the Scientist flew into Tokyo directly, praying to get there in time to remove disease cubes. We had lots of red cards, so we would meet up there, trade as needed, and cure there, before meeting back in Atlanta to fix blue. Our saving grace was that our new objective was to only cure three of the four, our consolation prize for being given a much more difficult board to maintain.

We had mixed results – while Jesse managed to bring cities back to 2 cubes of disease then keep moving. Meanwhile, I learned what many military rulers had before me, that Asia is just too damn big a place to be everywhere at once. While I made sure Tokyo, Beijing, and Seoul weren’t breaking out in deadly contagions, Jakarta – the capital of Indonesia – suffered an outbreak, putting disease cubes back in many cities I had tried to save while waiting for Jesse to fly in to give me the last few cards she needed. We were winning battles, but losing the war. It was easy to imagine what the newspapers in Asia were saying about our efforts.

We cured red, but it was an event filled with more relief, than celebration. There were too many cities in red for us to do an easy eradication. Lima had, while we were busy in Asia, had an outbreak, and was bringing Los Angeles to a dangerous tipping point far too close to Atlanta for our liking. We also had enough blue cards between us to win in just a few turns.

Could we afford to stay and clean up cities like Sydney, or should we go for the win, to try and stop a losing battle of escalation?

Outbreaks, Outbreaks Everywhere

We lost control. Jesse flew immediately to South America, willing to use up yellow cards for flight since we couldn’t cure that part of the world anymore. She honorably spent a lot of time helping the people down there, and while she spent almost the rest of the game mired in the time sink of two actions-per-treatment, we didn’t have any more outbreaks in that location of the world. We were lucky enough to draw a funded event card for removing additional disease, which we gladly used to stop an outbreak that was growing yet again in Jakarta. It bought time for me to use a card to fly into New York, where illness had finally struck, as well as London and Essen. It was almost to a tipping point.

An epidemic came, but we managed, thanks to having the European disease eradicated already. Red cities were again brought back up to full, and now it was Sydney, the city that was too far away for us to travel to easily, that had an outbreak. It’s outbreak spread to Jakarta, which then tipped over again in a chain reaction. Rioting started, as it became obvious that our disease response team just couldn’t get this situation under control.

We met in Atlanta, and traded cards. This time, it was Jesse who was ready to make a cure, but she ran out of action points just before being able to hit the button. We would have to wait one more full round before ending the game. We held our breath.

…We got our fourth epidemic. London burst into chaos, outbreaking into New York and Essen, cities that were barely under control from my shuttling back and forth just the last turn. Tokyo broke out as well, now filling Asia with red disease; as Jesse won the game for us, we had suffered seven outbreaks, and had used every red disease cube that came in the box.

We had won, but barely. Just barely.

January’s Aftermath: An Angry, Bitter, Saved World

The only real good thing that came out of this was that we had managed to eradicate Europe’s disease in this first game, allowing us to name it (we chose DICE-20, following our nerdy theme), and making it easier to cure in future games, hopefully getting us an advantage. Besides that, our victory felt like were keeping peace in the world just barely by our fingernails. Asia had been ready to revolt in terrible ways, and South America now had an incurable disease inside its borders.

As per Legacy games, we were able to put down end-game stickers onto the board, to affect later gameplay. We put down a new starting research center in Delhi, letting us fly across the world faster in the future. We also expanded the Scientist’s hand size, so they had a better chance of scoring outright cures without having to trade. These helped us feel like we had some control, but the stickers of unrest stared up at us from the board. What were we going to go next game with an incurable disease on the board?

February 2016: Month #2 Of Unstoppable Contagion

We opened the next set of the legacy deck as we prepared for game #2 next week, wanting to have an idea of what might come next. What we found was enough to make us both swear loudly: COdA had mutated, the original problem getting worse. Now, for our next game, we couldn’t even treat the disease in a standard fashion, meaning that any yellow disease cubes that touched the table would stay there for the rest of the game.

We also were given a stop gap solution, revealed in one of the compartments sealed in the box: a new hero, a Quarantine Specialist, along with a new token for quarantining. A hero could, while in that city, put up a token that shows the city has been sealed off temporarily. When disease would next be put there, it instead removes that token. A stop gap measure, meant to buy you time while attempting to save the world.

Something else was revealed, in the rule for character relationships; new characters being made can be given a sticker on their card of their choice, and then match it to one of the already created characters in the box. It means those two characters can have advantages while working with each other in future games, hopefully helping create more synergy as your disease response team gets more and more stressed by worsening conditions in the world.

Jesse and I just stared at what new rules we had been given. We didn’t have it in us to play again that day, as we were just too stunned by the intensity and the fun that the first game had given us. We had barely survived the first round, and now the world had thrown at us challenges that you would never imagine seeing in the base game. In some ways, Pandemic Legacy had handed us a situation in which failure has already occurred, and disease now ravaged the earth in a way that would leave economies crippled and governments shattered by the event. While we looked at the board, both of us kept imagining what it must be like, trying to be these government agents, scrambling to salvage the situation. Both of us couldn’t stop imagining how terrible it must be to live in Jakarta, after this first game.

Neither of us can wait to play again this week. We know it’s only a matter of time until we lose a round, but we’re just having too much fun to care. We only hope that, by the end of it, there’s at least one city still standing.

What should we name our Quarantine Specialist, and what character should they have a relationship bonus with? Is it wise to keep trying to keep the black section of the board entirely clean, or should we make sure Asia doesn’t fall into total disarray? Let us know if you think we did a good job protecting the world in the comments, or check out our Facebook page and tell us there! Stay tuned for later articles as we continue to play the game, and see what’s in store for our terrible diseased world. Feel free to comment, and to tell us what to do next in the game: we will listen to at least one comment in each article feature we do on our attempt to stop the next black plague!