The Year We Fell: July

The Year We Fell is a Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 game diary. The previous entry was June.

The end of the school year was on the horizon. I looked out at that horizon.

On the second weekend of July, my daughter was due to be away on a school trip. On the third weekend, I was in Wales. The fourth weekend was getting kind of late… so it meant there was no other option.

It was Saturday, July 1. Sorry kids, I said, I’ve cancelled TV night because we’re off to stop a global pandemic. Again.

REMEMBER, SPOILERS FOR PANDEMIC LEGACY FOLLOW

THE BLUES

Technically, Pandemic Legacy didn’t get harder in July. I say technically because it added a new optional task, one that didn’t need to be finished in the month but obviously needed to be done at some point. We had to track down a virologist that had been searching for a cure to COdA, having gone missing at a research station in a Faded city.

Opening box 5 to obtain new tokens suggests “searches” are going to become a new mechanic: inside there were four search tokens and four target tokens. In case you missed the italicised word, I said four.

The search mechanic goes like this. Searches start at zero and have to reach a specified target on the track. To move the search forward, your characters have to perform a specific task, but every epidemic moves the target forward. If the target reaches the end of the track, the trail goes cold and you can’t complete the search in this game – maybe the next one.

Now to find the virologist, we have to cash in blue city cards at a research station… in a Faded city. Expending one card moves the search forward one step; if the city is simultaneously quarantined, we’d get an extra bonus step. Even better, if you have the City card of the station you’re searching, you would earn a whopping three steps on the track.

This felt like “tutorial month” for the search mechanic. Finding the virologist also became an additional optional objective – if we found her, we could give up one of the objectives we usually aimed for, like eradicating a disease. But that’s a kind of gamble, right? If you ignore your other objectives you really have to bring home the virologist bacon.

Our initial thoughts were to convene the team in Atlanta so the first person on point would quarantine the city and then whoever had blue cards could execute searches in their first turn. Except…

The initial Infection draw was jaw-dropping. Six Faded cities were in the hole. San Francisco, Tokyo, Manila took three Faded each. Paris and Atlanta, two. New York, one.

We all agreed, staring at the board in paralysing horror, that this was Not Good™.

FADE TO BLACK

The board was stained with 14 Faded figures. With so many Faded cities in the initial Infections, this was certain to be a Faded-heavy game. We had to change tack. We couldn’t execute our usual game of “managing zoms with quarantines”. And that Atlanta search plan was dead in the water as it could result in multiple characters acquiring scars.

It took us a full hour to figure out the search mechanic and crystallise around an alternative strategy.

Cast your mind back to June. We ran with the Medic, the Quarantine Specialist, the Dispatcher and the Operations Expert. We decided the Medic was going to be less important in a Faded-heavy game: so long and thanks for all the fish. We also chose to dismiss the Operations Expert as there were plenty of bases on the map already. That left two character slots to fill, but we didn’t have to make our decision just yet.

Dealing Player cards came first and two red City cards had landed in my lap. My son then received Paris, also known as the Grenade Belt we made last month.

We needed someone good at dealing with Faded and that someone was the Soldier who we scoffed at last month because he couldn’t cure for toffee. But he’s not just immune to Faded scars. He also has a brilliant little ability which, we’ve come to conclude is really brilliant. Our Soldier, Niles Jackson, can pick equipment back up from the Player discards. That means he can use the Grenade Belt and then use an action to snatch that Grenade Belt back from the discards. He can keep doing this, over and over. The Soldier with a Grenade Belt can effectively “treat Faded” like cubes. And as one of our number had already acquired the Grenade Belt, it was clear that my son had to man up and assume the role of Soldier Boy.

We judged that eradication and cures could be done fairly quickly as the board was focused on the Faded, so we finally pulled the Scientist into our game. The Scientist, some of you might know, can concoct cures with one less card. In our game, that meant the Scientist could purge the red virus with just three City cards. As I had two red cards already, guess who was fingered for the Scientist role…

We then sweated over the appropriate Relationships for our new characters. We gave the Scientist a Family association with the Dispatcher – which meant they would have five actions if they started in the same city as the other.

Like the Colonel, we wanted to create a coworker relationship with the non-curing Soldier so he could dish out cards easily – we decided to make him a coworker of the Scientist. The original coworker plan was to implement a Scientist/Researcher relationship because that was a powerful combo. We were halfway through the campaign, had survived without it, and I knew it just wasn’t going to happen. We stopped hoping for the impossible and committed to the Scientist/Soldier partnership.

Now seat ordering and the initial Player card draw meant my daughter had to become Lockdown Girl and she was… she was less than joyous about this. She had already played the Quarantine Specialist in the second game of June and didn’t want to be typecast. After explaining the only way to fix this was to swap cards over or change our positions around the table, what really melted her heart was my promise to watch some TV after we were done, regardless of the time we finished. I’m bringing every heavy weapon to this fight against a global zom plague.

And one final task remained. We had forgotten to name the black virus which we had eradicated for the first time in June. I assigned it the moniker Black Fog fairly quickly. I didn’t want to hang around for five hours shooting down ideas like Fluffybum or Turnip Breath. I’m a writer, goddamnit.

CATASTROPHE RISING

Here was the plan.

Soldier Boy would tackle the Faded and possibly conduct searches for the virologist. We would forget about bases, assume the virologist search would be successful and concentrate on eradication which was going to be much easier with this Faded-heavy outlay. And, hey, we were to ensure our little girl was involved.

After last month, I offered her the chance to leave, but she wouldn’t take it. She didn’t want to be an outsider; perhaps she felt she would be judged unkindly for dropping out. I’ll probably find out in ten years when she confesses about the trauma we put her through. Nonetheless, our job would be to keep reminding her she was responsible for tokens, cubes and Faded. It wasn’t going to be easy. But nothing in this game was.

It was time to set sail… but I did not have high expectations. Things looked grim.

We began in Taipei. There was real danger here as we were next door to three-Faded-strong Manila which could get us all – as well as spreading the Faded across Asia. And there was a potential chain reaction outbreak via San Fran. Whoever was up first had to quarantine Manila, no doubt.

Soldier Boy was on point. He stormed over, threw in his Parisian grenade belt and retrieved it from the discard pile immediately to take the fight to San Francisco. It felt like he had lots of extra moves because belting the Faded does not cost an action – only retrieval of the Belt itself.

The end of his turn saw another two Faded cities tingle; he picked up Chicago in the Player cards (remember blue Player card means a bonus Faded figure added to the board) and Los Angeles was in the Infections. Just in case you’ve already lost count, this was now eight cities teeming with Faded activity.

Dispatcher Mum was next. She travelled to dangerous Tokyo, quarantined it, added a roadblock to Shanghai and Seoul just in case then, with her bonus move she acquired from her relationship with good-looking Sci Dad, dispatched herself back to Taipei. All of the critical Faded cities had now been subdued.

But of course, it was time for the Nation’s Favourite plot twist, the Epidemic card. Yes, Dispatcher Mum yoinked one of these babies from the Player deck: it fell upon Baghdad which was fairly isolated. And no surprises in the Infections – no Faded.

Lockdown Girl, our quick fixer, took the stand. Foresight revealed the next two cards were Faded: LA and NY which would rise to two Faded each but nothing requiring us to run around. She threw a remote lockdown onto Baghdad and, having an extra move, she equipped a Tehran card with a Hazmat suit, before moving onto Manila and quarantining it. The plan was to dispatch her out before her turn but she had a Hazmat Suit available as backup, a fallback plan just in case the Dispatcher needed the turn for something else.

Then it was Sci Dad’s first turn of the game. The secret reason that Lockdown Girl was in Manila was to negotiate a red card exchange – I travelled there, grabbed the card and cured the Crimson Fever with my three red City cards. I then tried to eradicate red as its cubes were currently few. I had five turns because Dispatcher Mum had returned to Taipei, so I just had enough turns to fix one of the two cities in the red region: Bangkok. Four turns, one cure done. Manila leapt out of the Infections but Girl held the quarantine there. I love it when I write QH (Quarantine Hold) in my game log.

Soldier Boy was then ordered to keep belting the Faded. San Fran and Tokyo were both reduced to one Faded but, surprise, he picked up SF in his Player card draw – pushing it back up to two. Thanks a lot, cards. Infections then pumped Paris up to three Faded and  Shanghai – the only infected red city – up to two cubes.

We had to start thinking about the virologist and embarked on a long discussion about how this might work. We needed someone to punch blue City cards into a Faded city research station computer. Soldier Boy was best placed for this because he could keep retrieving the Paris card from the pile, as it doubled as equipment. The most cunning plan involved creating a Paris research station, retrieving the card back from the discards then using the card again as a boosted search.

It was Dispatcher Mum who eradicated red. Six turns, one cure, one objective complete. Fortunately she had time to pull Lockdown Girl out of Manila as well. Even more Faded drooled out from the Infections – SF and Atlanta were now at critical levels, three Faded each. Yikes.

I worried we were starting to lose control. In the next turn, Tokyo and Baghdad broke quarantine and we were left with the following cities on three Faded or cubes each: Paris, San Francisco, Karachi, Baghdad and Atlanta (under quarantine).

CRISIS MANAGEMENT

My turn as Sci Dad was next and the plan had been to research the yellow cure – but with the scent of danger in the air, I took a moment out of my busy schedule to help fix the world’s problems. I zipped over to Karachi and brought its cubes down to one. But no good deed goes unpunished as I then picked up New York in the Player cards, ratcheting the city up to three Faded. At least a yellow Player card pickup got me to half a yellow cure. I’ve always said one good turn deserves a lucky break.

Now, having been some time since the first epidemic, we had finally veered into uncharted infection territory, seeing fresh cities emerge from the Infections deck. Still, we were at turn 9 and expecting that second epidemic at any moment. Soldier Boy did his thang, belting San Francisco down to two, moving to Paris and, instead of belting, he quarantined. I’ll explain the reasoning for this later. Paris was our big play, as the virologist search would leave the starting blocks in Soldier Boy’s next turn. But while Soldier Boy was immune to Faded scars he was not immune to an outbreak scar. With Paris brimming with Faded, he was still at risk.

Do you know what the worst thing is about the equipment? These equipment “non-actions” ruin my game log. I had no space to write them in. God knows, I thought, how I was going to remember all this had happened. Maybe I’ll write a paragraph explaining “the worst thing about the equipment” to cover myself.

To be honest, during this game, the board seemed very fair; it might have been trying to slash open your femoral artery but it also offered sweeties while it did it. For example, when yet another Faded city, St Petersburg, popped out of the Infection deck, its companion infection was Hong Kong, which led to the usual “ignore-infection-because-it-is-totes-eradicated” Mexican wave around the table.

Dispatcher Mum continued to help manage the ongoing crisis and the second epidemic was a damp squib: it hit red Shanghai which meant no cubes on the board thanks to eradication. But I suppose you’re wondering if we gave a damn about curing the Black Fog. Don’t worry, Lockdown Girl had you covered. With some fancy footwork, we got four black City cards into her hands in Turn 11 and she cured it. Turn 11 scorecard: one objective, two cures, two epidemics, no outbreaks.

She also had a turn left over to remote quarantine New York, which was still overrun with three shambling Faded. With the black cure in the bag, it made it easier to take control of the black cubes on the table. And then Lockdown Girl also equipped another Grenade Belt on the London City card for the future.

But the board refused to relent on the Faded pressure. New York broke quarantine immediately and Los Angeles rose to two Faded. God, there was still a lot of Faded on the board.

THE SEARCH

It was my turn as Sci Dad in turn 12.

We’d had a yellow cure strategy which involved hiking through LatAm cities, using the coworker relationship to grab some of Soldier Boy’s yellow cards. The plan was behind schedule due to crisis management, but now I had a moment to make my play. I flew to Santiago and picked up the first yellow card from Soldier Boy; I only needed one more card to make my set of four. The Player card draw at the end of my turn didn’t oblige although I picked up the Essen/Airstrike card and we bombed LA immediately down to two Faded. The Infections? Two red cities. Mexican wave.

At this point, I could see a potential game end on my next turn. I had enough actions to cure yellow then fly to a Faded research station and do my own virologist search, completing the objective.

But let’s not forget Soldier Boy, who was in Paris ready to get the search going. The reason we quarantined Paris instead of belting was to get the search boost ready. If we had belted, it meant the search would have been put back one action. We, instead, quarantined early and hoped the quarantine did not break so we could launch straight into searching for Soldier Boy’s next turn. Honestly, this is what everything comes down to in Legacy, play compression. With enough opportunities exploited, you can achieve anything. We planned this four turns ago.

Soldier Boy retrieved the Paris belt from the discards and re-discarded it immediately to create a research station. He then retrieved Paris again, and submitted it and a Chicago card to the search. That gave us a total search score of 6. In fact, if you’re following the rules closely, it actually gives you a search score of 5. The reason is you count the quarantine once per search action and not per card. If you’re wondering where the virologist was on the track, she was at 8.

Then, of course, Paris broke quarantine, putting Soldier Boy in the firing line if an epidemic came around. Paris had three Faded; an outbreak was possible.

See, this is exactly why we had Dispatcher Mum in the game. She walked Soldier Boy to Madrid, to keep him safe. That wasn’t the end of all the dispatching. She moved Sci Dad and herself to Buenos Aires to accelerate the victory plan in my next turn.

I then made a bold statement but it wasn’t triumphalist, it was a statement of fact. It was now clear, I said, that victory was assured – but the question was how much would it cost us? How much damage would we have to ignore in the next couple of turns to get us to the end?

Lockdown Girl then announced, “I just noticed, we haven’t had any outbreaks in this game!”

I was not baiting the board with my recognition of victory, but Lockdown Girl certainly did. In that moment, the cards re-arranged themselves in the past to deliver penance for her hubris. The other players chastised her, all of us aware the cards had now been hexed.

So, yeah, Mum picked up the third epidemic (Johannesburg) and the Infections blew out New York. Our first outbreak, literally seconds after Lockdown Girl’s announcement. Let this be a lesson to you all. The board listens.

In what we were convinced was the penultimate turn of the game, Lockdown Girl was up and her one job was to keep us out of trouble. Two quarantines broke in the Infections but it was too little, too late. The board had lost the struggle. The table was victorious.

In the final turn, Sci Dad took a Buenos Aires card from Dispatcher Mum, cured yellow, travelled to Atlanta via the Buenos Aires research station, then ran a search using the NY and Milan city cards while an Atlanta quarantine was in force. This earned us 4 search points (but, ahem, actually 3) and we won. We won a game that seemed preordained to be a defeat. All that Faded on the board – I was ecstatic. Such nights are the stuff of legends.

SUMMER OF LOVE

Except for one minor detail. I’ve punched in the numbers since and discovered we didn’t make the virologist search target. We counted two points in error due to misreading the quarantine bonus and we were one point short.

I’ve thoroughly reviewed the game log and come to the conclusion that we would have likely made the search on the next turn, which was Soldier Boy’s. He would have popped back into Paris, retrieved the Paris card and entered it into the search computer which would have netted us an additonal three points. Game over, again. Still, who knows what bad news the cards might have delivered at the end of my turn? It slightly sours the victory but there would have been a victory regardless.

We took one important lesson from this game. We had acquired tools that could help manage the Faded. Containing COdA had been a problem since February and it felt like the tide had finally turned. Which meant, of course, Legacy was likely to post an envelope of excrement through our letterbox any day now.

Slightly disappointingly, the virologist turned out to be a purely “narrative item” at this point, letting us know we needed to locate an immunologist. There was no indication of any game impact. Yet.

A stunning character upgrade turned up, the Paramilitary Escort. It would delete one Faded from any city the upgraded character left. That was definitely our kind of upgrade and we equipped it for the Soldier. I found out later we missed the real masterstroke here, upgrading the Dispatcher. The rules say whenever the Dispatcher moves a character, they move as if they’re the Dispatcher. Which means you can share the Escort with everyone. Everybody loves a slice of the paramilitary cake.

And, for the first time in months, we did not take the eradication upgrade. We could have picked up the final upgrade “Suppression” for the Crimson Fever, which means everyone gets to act like the medic – you can swipe all of the red cubes away with a single action even if it’s not cured. There was only one Suppression upgrade available so as red had already lost a few cities to the Faded, it seemed better to save that final eradication upgrade for a more deserving, uh… colour. Jesus, that sounds racist.

So for our second upgrade, we, at long last, applied those perma-roadblocks along the European faultline.

Roll on August… which we’re probably going to attempt in July. More on that. In August.

But for now, we enjoyed the moment. It had been a great game devoid of argument and my daughter had been more involved. I fired up the television as promised and the studio audience requested an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I’m not a big fan of DS9, so I hoped it was a good– oh, The House of Quark. “This week, Quark meets the second Na’Toth that no one liked.”

Next: August