We had another game of Pandemic Legacy this evening. If you're planning to play this, don't read this post! Part of the fun of a Legacy game is not knowing what's coming next.
Today we had our first full mission where the red disease "CodA" had been replaced by "The Faded" who are, let's face it, zombies. CodA was already incurable; its mutation into the obligatory zombie virus means that it's untreatable now, too, and any player character starting their turn in the same city as some zom… Faded will find themselves injured with a permanent scar. Take too many scars (usually taking a third when you already have two) and your character is permanently dead, out of the game. Lose all the characters with special abilities and you have to play as civilians, who have no abilities beyond the basic actions.
Today's mission was a challenging one. It looked like it was going well for a while, with the blue and yellow diseases eradicated particularly quickly thanks to the "positive" mutations we'd upgraded them with from previous victories. The black disease proved a bit more troublesome to deal with, however, and meanwhile Asia was building up with Faded until it pretty much reached breaking point; several locations burst their seams with outbreaks on multiple occasions, ultimately leading to our defeat.
There are ways to deal with the Faded, but they require a very different strategy to how you deal with the "normal" diseases in Pandemic. When the opportunity to build military bases and roadblocks first presented itself a few games ago, we didn't really see the point; now, however, both of those things are becoming very important for isolating the main "Faded" region — currently just East Asia — and ensuring the virus doesn't spread to the rest of the world. Despite our failure, we managed to keep it reasonably contained this time around, so we'll have another chance next time.
I really like how this game is building up. It's not necessarily making itself more complex from a rules perspective, but the addition of subtle new mechanics and ways of having to cope with situations means that it now "feels" quite different from the early hours of the campaign — but at the same time, it still feels authentically "Pandemic".
We're about halfway through the complete "season" now and I'm very intrigued to see how things develop from here. There are still lots of little boxes and windows to open… and I'm sure there's some surprises waiting somewhere, too!
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