Pandemic Legacy January

pandemic legacy season 1

So if that image above isn't enough of a warning. SPOILER ALERT!! In my write up of last nights play through of Pandemic Legacy I may accidently disclose spoilers from the game. So please if spoilers deliberately given or not will ruin the game for you, please stop reading now, and I'll see you in my next post.

 

 

Right lets get on with the post…

Last night Mat, Debbie, Jonathan and myself met up to start our play through of the number one game on BGG, and many gamers game of the year for 2015 (no pressure on this game to live up to then) Pandemic Legacy Season 1.

Even before you start playing you are peeling off a sticker and putting it on a box! During setup we chose our characters from the five starting ones available. Debbie went with the researcher, Mat went with the dispatcher, I chose to be the sexy scientist, while Jonathan was left with choosing between the medic and generalist. With that wide selection to go with Jonathan chose the medic.

Characters chosen, time to choose our starting four funded event cards.

We got our mission brief and objective for the month of January from the legacy deck (above). The brief and objectives were on familiar ground. Cure the four diseases to win.
Sounds easy doesn't it? Regular Pandemic players know this is not the case though.
I shot across to Asia and Seoul (iirc) to avert a potential outbreak by removing a disease cube. Cool that bit went to plan.
Then Jonathan takes his go. For his two cards from the players deck he draws two epidemic cards! Bugger I'm in a city when an outbreak happens. Which means I'm taking a scar. Looking at the scar stickers is very demoralising, and basically like trying to decide which is the lesser of two evils. Do you want to lose a leg or an arm? From the selection of negative effects to chose from I went with Regretful. Which meant every time I wanted to leave a city that had three cubes of the same colour on it, I had to discard a card.
We did manage to cure one disease, yellow, before outbreaks and chaining outbreaks finished us off. Our chances of success were not helped by hitting two infection cards early on in the game.
Whether you win or lose the month you get to chose two upgrades. We all agreed to add two unfounded events.
Naturally because we got beaten silly by the diseases, we got extra funding! Which meant we could have two more funded events added to the player deck. Surely with six funded events, and two unfunded in our player deck our second attempt at the month of January would be successful?
But before we started the month of January again, we had to go back to the legacy deck. The disease with the most cubes on the board was just about to become incurable! And I got to destroy our first card of the game, our initial objective of the first game. The legacy card politely told us that another objective would be along shortly. Which it was. We now had to cure the three remaining diseases to win the month. Plus I got to put a sticker on the red disease naming it and telling us and the world this disease wasn't going anywhere. This would be a constant reminder from now on that we had failed.

This replay of January was going much much better. We cured the blue disease, not only that we eradicated it. The eradicated disease ended up being names C-ThachCam Major. Using one of the events at our disposal a second research centre was built in Lagos.

Our use of the event cards we had in hand was working, and having a positive affected.

Africa was getting loaded up with the yellow disease. We were starting to converge on the area to handle it. There was already the research station there.

But like the first game, outbreaks and chaining outbreaks but this time in Africa were our downfall.

With January played out, we have a few cities that are unstable, a handful that are rioting, and Johannesburg collapsing.

One of our upgrades this time was to turn the Lagos research centre into a starting research centre, and to take the last unfunded event.

Because we failed to win in January there is a legacy card that you reveal the panel of only if you win in January. However if you didn't win, it gets destroyed at the end of February!

Will we ever know the contents of this card? Why the delay in destroying it? Oh the mystery of not knowing, is just so annoying.

Wow! Despite losing both attempts at January, I had a blast. The game board is changing. The legacy deck is amazing. The tension when you are drawing cards is incredible. There are some nice touches in the way it works and the wording. Like saying a new objective will be along soon.

It's obvious from the legacy deck, without looking through it, that at some point we may possibly get new members to the team to choose from. Also I do believe that we are 50% of the way to opening the mysterious box eight. We don't want to open box eight.

So sorry world we didn't save you in January, we will do better in February.

 

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