Season 1 of Pandemic Legacy was a revelation. Building on the signature cooperative germ-fighting gameplay of Pandemic by adding gameplay elements that made many of your choices have lasting ramifications, the end result was a riveting experience where carrying the weight of the world was equal parts glorious and soul-crushing.
Having already added so much to the game, how does one tackle the challenge of improving an already phenomenal game? Based on having played the prologue and 25% of the campaign, the answer might be to turn the whole thing on its head.
NOTE: The rest of this post will contain mild spoilers relating to the way the game is set up. Not much more than what you would get from the back of the box. If you do not want spoilers of any kind, skip this one!
Season 2 takes place decades after its predecessor. Following the events of the first game, the world was hit by a plague that mankind couldn’t cure. Over 70 years later, what’s left of mankind resides on one of three havens located in the Atlantic Ocean, as well as a handful of ports that border the body of water. The rest of the world has been cut off due to the presence of an anarchist faction that has ravaged everything it touches.
Because of this, the leaders of the new world have decided that the top priority is to keep many people alive as possible by supplying its small network of cities with supplies. However, after they all mysteriously disappear during a regular gathering, you and your rag-tag group of citizens decide to take it upon yourselves to keep the supply lines going while pushing deeper into the lost lands. Each play represents one month of the year with the game lasting one year of in-game time.
This dystopian reality is immediately reflected on the game’s components. All you get on the board at the start is a fraction of what the world used to be. Instead of the high-profile CDC jobs that you played as in the first game, your avatars look like extras from a Mad Max movie. Most jarringly for experienced Pandemic players, the four iconic disease cubes are nowhere to be found at the start. Instead, you get supply cubes, which work as an inverse of the original disease cube gameplay concept.
At the start, you will distribute the supply cubes to each of the cities and havens as you see fit. Your general goal is to keep the cities filled while also building supply centres to help keep these port cities stocked. As you progress through the campaign, other objectives will arise that you’ll need to take care of.
Unlike classic Pandemic, where the goal of the game is to remove disease cubes off the board, your goal in season 2 is to keep supply cubes on the the board. At the end of each player’s turn, the infection deck will attack cities, causing supply cubes to be removed from the board. If an infection card is drawn for an empty city, a plague cube is placed there, moving the incidents track one step closer to a game over state, while permanently reducing its population.
It sounds fundamentally different, but it really isn’t. Instead of preventing the numbers from going up, you’re trying to stop them from going down. Once you wrap your head around that, it’s not hard to get into the game’s rhythm. Where the game really shakes things up is with its exploration elements. Over the course of the campaign, you will perform specific actions that will unlock unexplored areas of the map. Without going further into spoiler-territory, I will say that the game gives you a lot of exciting reasons to venture into new territory while giving players even more opportunities to make permanent changes to the game.
Having said that, our group ran into a particular roadblock early on that caused us to lose four straight games. There is something you’re supposed to trigger that makes things much easier, but we didn’t discover it until the halfway point of our fourth losing game. The game doesn’t really guide you to this point, so unless you stumbled upon it by happenstance, the first quarter of the game can seem unreasonably tough.
One quarter of the way in, we’re pretty bummed out. Not because Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 is a bad game. It’s actually great. However, the four-game losing streak really hurt our morale. Hopefully this breakthrough discovery we made will turn the tides on our floundering campaign!
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