#oneaday Day 120: Legacy

I've owned a copy of board game Pandemic Legacy for some time now, but have only just recently started actually playing it with my semi-regular board gaming friends. And we've been having a great time so far.

For the unfamiliar, a "Legacy" board game is one that you are intended to play multiple times over a long period, making permanent changes to the game as you go. And when I say "permanent", I mean permanent — you apply stickers to the board and cards, you tear up cards that are no longer relevant, you scratch off things to reveal secret things, you open sealed boxes and all manner of other exciting stuff. Over time, the game experience gradually changes so that it is still recognisable as the thing that it is based on, but now has a variety of other interesting elements that are at least partially the result of the way you and your friends have played.

Pandemic, meanwhile, is a game themed around the outbreak of disease around the globe. Working as a team, players must make use of their characters' special abilities to collect sets of cards, discover cures for the four diseases, treat outbreaks and ensure the world doesn't get overrun or fall into anarchic panic. I'm sure you can imagine how the "Legacy" elements build on this: disease mutations, cities falling into chaos after epidemics, the military getting involved… it's all very exciting.

So far my friends and I have played as far as March in the in-game year, and already a number of interesting elements have entered the mix. I'm loathe to spoil to many of these lest you want to play the game for yourself — the surprise really is part of the fun — but suffice to say, there's a really cool feeling of an ongoing "story" of your efforts to fight back against these deadly diseases, as well as a gradual escalation of both overall complexity and difficulty.

I shudder to think how chaotic December's games are going to get… things have been going reasonably well so far, but a lot can change in a month…!