Legacy

[Disclaimer: There are no spoilers for Pandemic Legacy in this little love letter to the game.]



We don’t go to Lima anymore.

In a single month the city tore itself apart in a furious panic. Panic turned to riots, riots full of people, people just waiting to become infected. As September came to a close the riots exploded, the Peruvian government fell and the city went with it.

In a makeshift hospital in Karachi I injected patient after patient and watch helplessly until the stations went dark and the call came through:

We don’t go to Lima anymore.

Pandemic Legacy is a game about consequence.

Regular Pandemic will have you raging across the world, racing the clock and virulent strains to prevent outbreaks and cure four contagions of varying colours before they get beyond the point of control. You grab your character and rush around the world building matching sets of cards and curing disease wherever you can until you draw the wrong cards in the wrong order and everything goes straight out the window.

It is a game with one path to victory and six to defeat. It is incredible fun.

Legacy takes this fun game and adopts the permanent changes that rejuvenated Risk for its own Legacy release. When you open the box you are greeted by black numbered boxes and dossier pages full of advent calendar-esque doors which dispense various flavours of bullshit instead of chocolate.

Alongside these are all manner of stickers, the first of which you are instructed to remove and place directly onto Box 8.

“Open this box after you have lost 4 consecutive games.” It declares, ominously.

Once attached it is never removed. Much like the stickers which track each city’s rising panic level as it suffers outbreaks. Don’t protect a city and it will suffer outbreak after outbreak, until you struggle to enter and leave without losing precious resources.

We don’t go to Lima anymore.

The game begins in January, and each win advances you to the next month, edging you closer to the finale in December. Lose and you get a second chance to salvage the month, but fail again and you will have to press on regardless. Win or lose you slowly burn through a deck of cards in sequence that reveals the twists and turns of your battle to keep the world from being ravaged by plague.

It is this deck that makes the game, one that tells Pandemic Legacy’s story. It gives, it takes away, it makes you cheer or scream bloody murder. To reveal anything about what it contains would be to rob you of the singular joy of experiencing it for yourself, let me say only this:

If you have ever wanted to live through an HBO series, Pandemic Legacy is the game for you.

My own group is finally at December. Playing once a week religiously. We have war stories, we have scars and friendships forged in the fires of rioting cities. Our map is scarred and marked from dozens of stickers that tell the story of our battle against the illnesses. We’ve played games and left them punching the air and cheering.

Then we lost both of our games in September and sat in stunned silence, crushed as city after city suffered brutal outbreaks that shredded our plans just short of triumph.

We don’t go to Lima anymore.

If there is one complaint of Pandemic Legacy, aside from the fact that you can discuss so little without spoiling it, it’s that the game still suffers from the same ‘quarterbacking’ issue that Pandemic has always suffered from. Quarterbacking refers to one player deciding another’s move for them. It’s a common problem in cooperative games and doubly-so in something as high stakes as Pandemic Legacy, where dropping the ball can cost you the entire game.

Ironically, there’s no real cure for this and whilst it might serve the group to have the ‘hive mind’ able to help coordinate moves, it can also be frustrating to just be following the group's script when it comes to your turn.

This is a small niggle though, and one that generally shouldn’t undercut one of the finest board games ever made. Pandemic Legacy, it’s a bit good.