IT’S NOT NEW…BUT PANDEMIC LEGACY IS WAY FUN.
I haven’t had an uninterrupted night’s sleep in at least eight months and two weeks (the age of my third son). I often look forward to hanging out with my hubby after we put the kids to bed. But, by 8:30pm, I’m nearly drooling on myself. Exhaustion takes over and the sandman calls. (Queue Metallica. Or is it “cue”? Too tired to look it up. Anywho…). Notwithstanding the current state of affairs, when we pulled out our game of Pandemic (at 9pm armed with wine and snacks) a few weeks ago, I was reminded of how time stops and the adrenaline flows when I’m in the throes of saving the planet. Two hours went by without a single yawn or slow blink. Good times.
Technically, what we are playing is Pandemic Legacy (Season One), Blue Edition. It’s a collaborative game, which means all players are working together to win. This my favorite type of game hands down! In the game, your characters are fighting to contain four diseases creating chaos in the world. Sounds like a downer, but it more strategy than gruesome sci-fi. Before I explain how the game works, here is an example of Sean and me in full disease-fighting mania to pique your interest.
Ok, I won’t go into too much detail…don’t want to ruin any surprises. But, here are the basics. You play a series of Pandemic Legacy games across a fictional year. The first game you play starts in January. If you meet the required objectives to win, you move to February. If you don’t, you play the month again. Each month is only played twice. (So I suppose if you really suck at the game, you can play it 24 times. Otherwise, it will be less than that.) As you progress through the year, the game play evolves because you are drawing cards, opening new parts of the game and making choices that affect how the rest of your games will be played. You’re also tearing up things along the way. It’s pretty amazing for a board game.
At the start of each game, you set up the board per the instructions, which are somewhat elaborate, and each player picks a character with special attributes. You spend the game traveling around the world together curing and eradicating diseases. However, at the conclusion of each turn, you draw cards to determine which cities will be infected with more disease. If you draw an Epidemic card during your turn, you have to shuffle the discard pile of cities (already infected with disease) and put it back on the top of the deck. This is how things get worse and worse for this sad fictional version of our planet. On your next turns you’ll be turning over the same cards yet again and infecting cities with more disease, causing potential outbreaks. It’s all very stressful in that fun, gaming sort of way!
Pro tip: Start Pandemic Legacy with enough time to play through the whole game (two hours?) unless you can leave the game out until you can resume. You’re keeping track of wins and losses, so you don’t really want to stop a game unfinished. It once took Sean and me thirty minutes to set up a game…debating which two characters would work best together, what special cards to put in the deck, etc. We’ve had a streak of wins; so maybe that planning has paid off. Or maybe we are big nerds that are too competitive. In any event, as a warning, an hour may not do it. Unless you’re really bad at the game.
There are a lot of rules in the game and the planning and strategy can get kind of elaborate. Do not let this deter you. Sean and I hadn’t played the game for almost a year when we picked it up again at the beginning of October. You might forget some of strategy, but who cares. Just play and do the best you can. If Atlanta and Hong Kong start rioting…so be it.
Now, if the concept of Pandemic Legacy is appealing but the commitment-level is not quite your speed, let me suggest
Forbidden Island to start you off. In this cooperative game, the players are on an island and must get four treasures and fly off the island as a group before it sinks. Sounds nothing like Pandemic Legacy, but (trust me) at a very high level it is totally the same game without as many intricate rules. In fact, this one is simple enough to play with my 9 and 5 year olds, especially since everyone strategizes to beat the game together.
I’m such a fan of cooperative games. The teamwork adds to the fun. If you have kids or super competitive friends, it’s great because everyone wins or everyone loses. Either way, you just have a lot of fun playing together. At least until someone spills their juice all over the cards and hides one of the treasures because they wanted the blue one, and someone else is upset that he didn’t get to be the pilot and also somehow his turn got skipped. But, I’m sure that won’t happen at your house.