“Mutating diseases are spreading around the world – can your team save humanity?”
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/161936/pandemic-legacy-season-1
Playing Time: 60 mins
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Cooperative Disease Control Legacy Game
Designer: Rob Daviau, Matt Leacock
Players: 2-4
You play cooperatively with other players as a team of dedicated researchers, attempting to stop a worldwide pandemic – four of them, actually – which you will do by gathering and exchanging ‘research’ cards and traversing the globe to administer aid. Each player has a ludicrously strong special ability, and you’ll need to work together to use every one optimally, as the end of each turn results in new towns becoming infected, and sometimes those infections chain uncontrollably across the world.
Pandemic is a stone-cold classic and one of the most influential board games ever made. It is one of the all-time great games, in the pantheon of godlike predecessors like Dominion and Catan that enabled the whole hobby, and you really can’t go wrong with any Pandemic title. But this one is better. The difference is ‘legacy’.
A legacy game is one that’s played over several sessions, so the true Pandemic Legacy experience will take form over at least 12 games representing each disastrous month in one 2020-style year (or more – failed months are repeated). Along the way, players will encounter new story beats, unlock new rules, gain new weapons they can use against the fight, and even encounter newer, more deadly diseases. Representing the truly one-way nature of the game, their game will get disfigured. You’ll occasionally be asked to destroy cards or cross out benefits on the map. A particularly destructive April in Moscow can result in that city being a smoking, uninhabitable crater for the remainder of the game. A legacy game is a board game CAMPAIGN, and Pandemic Legacy is such a great one that it’s not uncommon for players to literally frame their game boards once they are completed.
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