Designers: Rob Daviau, Matt Leacock

The players are all a crack response team, responding to a worldwide epidemic. Based on the original Pandemic ruleset, Pandemic Legacy is a legacy game, meaning that your failures leave a lasting mark in the world. There is one scenario per month of the year, and by the time December rolls around, it’s very likely whole continents are smoking rubble as a testament to your failure.

Here’s how awesome Pandemic Legacy is:  It is not uncommon for players, at the end of a season, to frame the game board.

Pandemic Legacy also has serious narrative moments in the game. At key events in the game, players add new rules to the game, and open new boxes of entirely new characters, disease vectors and other game components. By the end, you’re playing an entirely different game.

 Interesting Mechanic: Destroy This Card. When some guys say ‘destroy a card’ they mean ‘throw it into the discard pile’ or some other namby pamby bullshit. In Pandemic Legacy, you actually pick up the card and rip it in half. The first one of these happens in month one of Pandemic Legacy, and it immediately communicates to players the permanence of their decisions.

The original Pandemic is a classic, but I’d played it so many times that I felt I was pretty much done with the game. Pandemic: Legacy takes the classic game formula and completely revitalizes it. I can’t wait to try Season 2.

Image result for pandemic legacy season 1 red

(Photo Credit: Cool Stuff Inc)