The Year We Fell: June

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

I learnt last month that my wife’s favourite board game of all time was getting a legacy version. That’s right, Ticket To Ride: Legends of the West is due out in November and I am left to ponder – is this the game we should follow Pandemic Legacy with? Would it be softer on our time?

Because on Sunday, 11 June, I lost my temper. I don’t know if it was because it was a hot day, which it was, with the temperature rising to 30°C (86°F). But I knew that a Pandemic Legacy game took us around three hours and no one was helping me set up.

While I’m making tea for everyone – always one fruit tea, one green tea and two trad teas – the gang is normally shuffling cards and organising the board. Today, I was having problems getting my offspring to the table and when they arrived I kept having to direct them. Please get out the cubes. Please get the bowls for the cubes. Yes, also, please get the cards out. Maybe you would like to try shuffling them.

We were already running half an hour late and I snapped.

Snapping is always associated with regret. A board game is meant to be enjoyable and Legacy teetered on the edge of that definition sometimes. Some of these games had been stressful. Some of them had eaten more time than they deserved. And now Dad opened a session with a bit of shouty.

So, yes, I did wonder if Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West would be an easier option for a different year.

SPOILERS FOR PANDEMIC LEGACY FOLLOW

I wrapped things up so quickly last month, I never told you about the May Win Bonus or upgrades. May was the month of roadblocks, so we were offered extra upgrades of making three roadblocks permanent and the Win Bonus was to add three roadblocks at the start of the June game. We chose to deploy the eradication against the red virus again, making it curable with just four cards, and added a military base to Ho Chi Minh. I know I just wrote this all up in a single paragraph but it wasn’t a slam dunk decision: we spent over five minutes in agonising debate.

So, welcome to June. What new horrors awaited us this month? You’ll be surprised. It didn’t get worse at all. In fact, the Legacy designers decided to be nice to us. June is when “Equipment” arrives – accompanied by the now-familiar confusion around new rules.

At any base, you can spend an action to acquire an Equipment sticker and attach it to a City card in your hand. It’s effectively an extension of the Unfunded Event system. These cards can be used as a City card or as Equipment. They can be used any time but Equipment is more personal than Events. The Hazmat Suit, which you can pick up at research stations, protects the player carrying it from sustaining a scar in a Faded city. The Grenade Belt, available from military bases, can be used by a player to eliminate one Faded figure in their current city.

There were a lot of blue City cards in our initial draw which made our son happy; the more blue cards in the opening draw, the less available in the player deck to sprinkle in additional Faded. But it delays cures, no?

Legacy also gave us the Soldier character who doesn’t get Faded scars and can retrieve Equipment from the discard pile but… can’t cure for shit. We thought he might be useful for quarantining Faded cities but decided against him. We also dropped the Colonel and elected to bring the Medic back into the fray.

What about our optional objectives? We had to decide again on whether it was better to focus on quarantining the Faded or establishing military bases. There were a lot of Faded cities on the board, so quarantining it felt more viable as a goal this time, but we still felt short of bases so Omar Jelani, our Operations Expert, was kept on the team.

Finally, we deployed the bonus roadblocks along a fault line between Europe and Asia/Africa to curtail Faded spread.

As we were about to start, I had this sudden idea about Legacy’s endgame in December, that we’d bring back all those beautiful blue cubes as our own plague to wipe out the Faded. In an unexpected Pandemic twist, the team has to spread cubes to save the world!

Well, it was a nice idea. But for now–

GET ON WITH IT

We started out in Delhi as the black region was cube-heavy – Tehran and Algiers were on three cubes each. We were also keen to eradicate black and bag an upgrade bonus for the black cure. It was the only disease we hadn’t named or upgraded – meaning we still had to attend a research station to rustle up a cure.

However, we were faced with an additional decision. As we were all at a research station, did it make sense to start piling Equipment onto our City cards? Dispatcher Boy went first and he acquired “Induced pluripotent stem cells” which I’ll refer to henceforth as the cure wildcard – it will fill in for any colour you need in a cure. He put it on his Madrid card because we’re unlikely to need to travel to Madrid for any reason. Ever since the Faded outbreak, the Spanish tourist industry has never been quite the same.

But after that it was to Tehran with him and squelch some cubes. He picked up the Istanbul Player card at the end of this turn – and we were a tad excited to realise he had three pieces of the black cure already. Starting card Moscow, newcomer Istanbul and the Madrid wildcard.

Lockdown Mum then entered the fray and remotely quarantined Algiers – so our black region cube triplets were sorted for now – and headed down to LatAm to take care of the final three cuber, Sao Paolo. Lockdown Mum had five turns, due to her relationship with Medic Boy, which gave her more latitude and more attitude. She picked up the Essen/Airstrike card from the Player deck which, if you recall, can remove one Faded figure for the price of a flat white.

Medic Girl’s job was to hose down the black cubes and there was a nice use of our Medic’s adjacent treatment upgrade to wipe out cubes at Riyadh without having to tramp there and back. She ended her journey at Chennai, to set up a black City card exchange.

I, Builder Dad, completed our opening set of turns. I established a military base at Delhi to sit beside our research station as this was permissible. You know, we’re expecting one more type of building to turn up as there remains one more rules sticker gap in the section about structures…

I made a card exchange with Dispatcher Boy at Tehran bringing him up to four out of five black cure cards. Perhaps I make these decisions sound rapid however they are anything but. Each turn involved reviewing all options, wargaming what might play out over subsequent turns and seeking out tactical edge cases that can lay hidden in the patchwork of rules and cards before us. Think. Think again. Think some more.

I drew a blue City card, Milan, which heated the city to three Faded. Hmm. An epidemic was expected soon. Milan could blow at any time. We prepared ourselves to launch the Airstrike.

The fifth turn gave us hope. Dispatcher Boy dispatched himself to Medic Girl at Chennai, picked up her Chennai card then glided back to the Delhi research station to cure the black virus. How about that? A cure in five turns.

We forwent tidying up the Faded and cubes to get the cure done. And, absolutely, that’s when the board stuck the knife in: the first Epidemic card was drawn. It hit Shanghai. We wondered whether to drop the Airstrike on Milan, but took a calculated risk to wait. So we shuffled the Infection discards, dropping Shanghai into the mix as you do, and then turned over the first Infection card.

Shang-the-fuck-hai. Really? There were 15 fucking cards in that pile and the board delivered the worst one, an outbreak which is almost impossible to avoid. Shanghai is deeply connected in Asia and it shat red cubes everywhere.

Still, we kept our nerve. We calmly proceeded to assemble the red cure – and we cured it a couple of turns later during Medic Girl’s Player card draw as we no longer needed an action to cure it. Thank the Lord Himself for positive mutation upgrades. Seven turns down, two cures down.

How many black cubes remained on the board at this point? Tehran, 2. Algiers, 3. Delhi, 1. It was still possible to eradicate. And looking at the broader picture, we’ve only had to put one military base down and assemble another cure and we would be done. We were basking in a warm glow. It felt like… happiness?

And then Lockdown Mum said it. She absolutely fucking said it.

“We could finish this game so quickly.”

There is an immediate and instinctive outpouring of scorn, mingled with grief, from Dispatcher Boy and myself. Why would you tempt fate like that? It felt like those seven simple words pushed our potential victory out to sea. We all knew, you see. We knew the board listens. The board always listens.

Shortly after I picked up the second epidemic; it hit Essen. That would have been fine but we’d already dropped a single cube there when we picked up that lovely, lucky Essen/Airstrike card. Instant outbreak. We flew in the Airstrike immediately to reduce it to two Faded as we had no interest in risking another outbreak in the subsequent Infection draw.

The first Infection we turned over was Essen.

Can you believe our shockingly bad luck? Two epidemics in a row in which the Epidemic city was in the first Infection draw! Thank CHRIST we deployed the Airstrike there.

We suspected that this was all Mum’s fault.

THE BOARD LISTENS

Turns passed.

In a high five moment, Medic Girl eradicated black for the first time in our Legacy campaign. Still, Essen haunted us and we threw some roadblocks around it. If it blew then at least it wouldn’t spread the fire and fuel cascading outbreaks.

At this point, we had to decide who should cure yellow. It was a particularly fraught and intensive strategizing session. We originally thought it might be Lockdown Mum (on three yellow cards at this point) but as Medic Girl had snapped up the cure wildcard via the Dispatcher/Medic Rivals relationship, she could actually pull off the cure in her next turn instead of forcing us to survive another round to get to Lockdown Mum again.

Then I drew the third epidemic. Santiago. We had a research base there and one more outbreak would destroy it. We were quite terrified of this Infection draw. It defied all rationality that Legacy would somehow fuck us over a third time by spitting out Santiago.

There were a million Infection cards in there, a million. Just to avoid a repeat of the shafting experience of the previous two epidemics, Lockdown Mum shuffled the Infection discards then passed them to lucky-handed Medic Girl to add more chaos to the shuffle.

Santiago wasn’t going to turn up. It wasn’t going to happen. Chill out everybody. Calm the fuck down.

Okay, is everyone ready? I’m going to turn the card over now. It can’t be–

OH BUT IT COULD

And that was the story of how we lost our first research station.

Well. The board listens, does it not?

ALL IN THE CARDS

Our extreme focus on cures and eradication meant the Faded were now quite numerous across Europe. But we could see the end of the game. In three turns, we could win.

However, Lockdown Mum had been keeping a little Infection diary. It revealed that Essen, Chicago, Madrid and Sydney were still in the Infection cards to come and each one of these was ready to outbreak. If all four went, we were dead. Failure in two, victory in three. Sigh. We had to push the cure back a turn to create a bubble of safety.

Dispatcher Boy had a lot of work to do but had to focus on the cure to the exclusion of everything else, otherwises the cure wouldn’t happen for several more turns and that was probably not survivable.

We realised our Achilles heel was our dependency on military bases for travel because two of our players, Medic Girl and Dispatcher Boy, could not use them. This was a serious problem during the anxious endgame.

At the end of Dispatcher Boy’s turn, the first of our four deadly outbreaks occurred: Madrid.

Then it was Lockdown Mum, who did the work to support the cure but also threw a remote quarantine over Chicago. This was the vital move that allowed us to survive a little longer. Chicago, Sydney and Essen burst out of the Infections; the quarantine held in Chicago as Lockdown Mum was in residence but we were now up to our outbreak threshold.

With options thinning, Medic Girl’s turn was make or break. If we survived her turn, victory would be ours in the 16th turn of the game as Builder Dad would create the military base we needed. Medic Girl cured yellow and, having five turns from her relationship with Lockdown Mum, she strode through Latin America wiping out yellow cubes.

There were only two cards which could kill us now. Milan. Or an epidemic. The odds were in our favour – which is why you totally should have expected her to draw the next epidemic.

It landed on Kolkata but, as black was eradicated, nothing bad happened. Ha ha! Can’t fuck us over the same way in our fourth epidemic, now, can you board? IN YOUR FACE.

The cards were shuffled. Mum started writing down the Infection cities – and I told her to just stop. There was no point. We live or die together, here and now. It was all in the cards.

We crossed our fingers. We said some prayers. We promised to be good.

We flipped over the first of three Infection cards.

It was Sydney, which already had three cubes. And we were dead.

“We could finish this game so quickly,” came a distant echo.

GRIT

We were no longer the same Pandemic players that started in January.

We were veritable snowflakes back then, fearful of any board damage. We stressed over a single outbreak.

But now we’d become hard-boiled veterans. Failure was character building. Sometimes we could learn from it, other times all we could do was stick a finger up at Lady Muck-Luck and get ready to reshuffle the decks. You couldn’t win them all.

Disintegrating cities are part of this journey. I do worry about what this is inevitably doing to our game down the line and we’re starting to have problems moving around a rusted board, so a character like the Dispatcher seems vital.

The truth is, we played this game pretty well but had some crazy bad luck with three epidemics hitting epidemic cities. Perhaps our most serious flaw was leaving the Faded spread too much, but our objective game was top-notch. That was some fast, no-nonsense play.

It was another knife-edge ending but this time it went badly for us. Still, we wore the defeat like a badge of pride. Really, the worst consequence was having to schedule another game which, BLOODY HELL, was not going to be easy.

POWERING UP

Once again, Legacy dangled a new upgrade bonus in front of us. Going forward, we could add equipment to any three cards as an upgrade. We didn’t really do much with the equipment in the first June game apart from the cure wildcard, although that did turn out to be useful.

Our upgrade decision didn’t require too much thought. We had considered putting down perma-roadblocks along the European/Asia faultline, but with another June game on the cards, we could do that at the end of the second game. We made our Algiers military base permanent and deployed the positive mutation upgrade against our eradicated black virus. This meant all three cures could now be done outside of research stations.

I lined up the second match on Sunday, 18 June, the day after sports day at my children’s Japanese school, just after my son had finished his end of year exams but before my daughter had started hers. He was going on a school trip, she was not. This was the only remaining day to play a second game this month. After all, Pandemic Legacy is nothing but hard choices, right?

Did we mix things up for our second game? Did we bring the Soldier in, who could work on the optional objective of quarantining Faded cities? No. We, er, soldiered on with our existing gang but with some of the roles moved around.

I realised that the equipment was Legacy’s remedy for the slow degradation of our City cards – as cities get more panicky, you can no longer use the corresponding City cards as direct flights. And there are some places you don’t even want to visit anymore, like Faded Tokyo. Equipment is a counterbalance to all this, injecting more life into these dying cards.

Having failed a game, we could take two Events with us back into the fray. We went with Resilient Population (remove one card from the Infection discards) and Local Initiative (two free quarantines). We had mulled over the Remote Outpost for a free military base but we already had enough on the board. and we were going to wheel out ol’ Omar with his base-building ability again.

This time there was a lot of red in the starting mix. Neighbours Taipei and Osaka both carried three red cubes and we elected to start at our research station at Taipei to deal with the red menace right off the bat. We planted the roadblock Win Bonus along the same European faultline as before. The initial Player card draw was interesting as it auto-assigned two characters to cures: Dispatcher Mum had two yellow cards and I, Builder Dad, had two black cards. I guess I’m Mr. Black. Everybody wants to be Mr. Black.

I went first.

We took a risk that Osaka wouldn’t blow due to an epidemic at the end of the first turn, so I snatched away a single cube from Taipei to make it safer for all of the characters. There was an outside risk that Taipei would be hit by an epidemic and the impact would be a shitshow with three scarred characters. Although, if you really want to live in constant anxiety, note that we hadn’t eliminated the small possibility of a turn-one epidemic feeding us Osaka then Taipei which would have exactly the same result.

But only burning one cube freed up the rest of my turn to accelerate our military base objective; I dropped them on research stations at Taipei and Delhi.

The reason we took “The Osaka Risk” was because I was followed by Medic Boy who was armed with a cube vacuum cleaner. Having five moves, due to his character’s relationship with Lockdown Girl – all the red cubes in Osaka, Taipei, Shanghai and Seoul were zapped. There were no red cubes left on the board. He then picked up the Resilient Population event; nice.

We got to Dispatcher Mum and had a strange problem. The cards were not motioning us towards any particular strategy and Dispatcher Mum was all dressed up with nowhere to go. In the end, the decision was made to dispatch Medic Boy to Builder Dad at Delhi for a card exchange and then dispatch Lockdown Girl there as well just to give her five actions when her turn came around. Mum went on to quarantine Taipei, just to help keep one city away from being re-infected and placed a Hazmat Suit on a Miami card. It’s this desperation to do something with the remaining actions that had us drop equipment onto a decent City card. But it might be useful in a pinch?

Lockdown Mum drew our first epidemic, always worth a groan, which rained down on Chennai. Washington had carried three Faded since the start of the game so we utilised the Resilient Population event to kick it out of the discard pile. One less Faded city to worry about is always good news.

Still, one of the Infection cards which turned up was Taipei, which made us happy that we quarantined it just because! Always use your actions…

Lockdown Girl set off from Delhi and was able to deploy three quarantines using her five moves and remote quarantine special ability. Milan, Paris and Chennai were all covered. She hung out in Paris for the night but the plan was for Dispatcher Mum to get her out in the next turn to avoid any potential scar. She then drew Madrid from the Player deck – a blue city, so it acquired a free Faded figure – but it was also our cure wildcard. The other draw was the blue city Milan which stripped it of the quarantine she had just put on it. At least the quarantines were doing their job.

Then it was Builder Dad again. I replaced our beloved-but-buried Santiago station with a shiny new base at Buenos Aires and ended up with four black City cards. I held a little hope that I might be the one to concoct the first cure! The cards were being quite kind to us; I drew the Local Initiative card with its two free quarantines. We paused, wondering if we should deploy them immediately? We held back… and then the Infections boosted Milan to three Faded.

Medic Boy couldn’t really do anything about Milan in his turn without derailing our plans. And  our plan was to curb several infections. Starting at Delhi, he remote-treated Chennai’s cubes to zero then grabbed a Grenade Belt for the Paris card then hot-footed it to Buenos Aires to deal with a couple of yellow cubes there.

He drew Paris from the Infections but Lockdown Girl was there, holding onto the quarantine for dear life, so no Faded got added. It’s always nice to see these kinds of should we/shouldn’t we decisions working in our favour. We had been successfully placing quarantines ahead of infections and keeping Lockdown Girl in a dangerous Faded city was paying dividends.

Dispatcher Mum was up at the seventh turn of the game, still at Taipei, but she was due to leave for Buenos Aires, hop over to Johannesburg, and then summon Lockdown Girl so she can set up a City card exchange to improve her yellow card haul to four. We were making nice progress but remained concerned about two cities, Milan and Kinshasa, which both were at critical infection levels.

But in a twist we did not see coming, Dispatcher Mum pulled the second epidemic which hit… Johannesburg! Both Dispatcher Mum and Lockdown Girl were there right now and this was a dangerous moment. If Johannesburg turned up after the Infection discards were shuffled, we’d have an outbreak and it would be scar season for the girls. There was little question about what to do. We issued the Local Initiative immediately to quarantine both Johannesburg and Milan. We left Kinshasa naked and crossed our fingers.

So what were the eventual Infections we drew after this epidemic? Mexico City and Sao Paolo. Phew.

Again, we then re-asserted control over the board, taking nothing for granted, while setting up card exchanges. It sounds routine but our tactics are always bespoke and well-considered. Lockdown Girl ended up hovering over Kinshasa to keep it under quarantine and I set up a research base at Baghdad to make it easier for Medic Boy to move around as he doesn’t have access to soldier planes.

Dispatcher Mum cured the yellow plague on turn 11 but I was disturbed that our first cure was assembled late. Wasn’t this too late? As if to answer that question, Milan then broke quarantine.

Turn 12 belonged to Lockdown Girl and after her actions she drew the Tokyo card from the Player deck, which gave her the three red City cards. And it was at this juncture it realised we had a serious problem with Lockdown Girl being unable to feel like part of the team.

She’d been receding ever further into a private world of sketches and fidget toys with each new Legacy session to the point where she was no longer handing out cubes or tokens and was entirely disengaged from her own turn. We had already noticed that she’d twice forgotten to use her foresight upgrade (to see the next two Infection cards). The truth is, at the end of the day, we still rely on individual players to promote important information that the table might miss.

And that’s how we almost wrapped up her latest turn without realising she had the cure wildcard in her possession which meant we could cure the red virus right now. A great discovery but she hadn’t noticed she could be a hero in her turn.

“A board game is meant to be enjoyable and Legacy teetered on the edge of that definition sometimes.” We’re halfway through the campaign and I think we need to explore the question, “Do we continue Legacy with four characters but three players?” A discussion for another time.

Curing the red virus dovetailed nicely with turn 13, where I was able to cure black at Baghdad on my first move and– wait, what?

HALFWAY IS HALF DONE

Uh… were we seeing things?

Here is what we saw.

My second action would be to remove the one black cube which was also in Baghdad, this is something you might have heard before called “eradication”. And you know what else was in Baghdad? A research station. That meant I could fly to Atlanta as my third action. And then my fourth and final action would be building a military base there.

And do you know what this is called? This is called victory. This is called the end of the game.

It is called other things too. It is called the shortest victory of the campaign so far with 13 turns. It is called the quickest game, done and dusted in half the time as usual, 90 minutes. It is called the cleanest victory with zero outbreaks.

Wow, wow, wow. Holy shitcakes, Batman.

But a miasma of disbelief descended over the table. Was the board lying to us? That bastard, deceitful board? I stared hard, checking the military bases in each region looking for something we’d overlooked but, no, everything was in place. That smidgen of luck at the end of Lockdown Girl’s turn had saved us three turns of waiting and ended the game early.

BANG GOES THE FUNDING AGAIN

The Funded Events were helpful as usual, but we won’t be getting those cool babies in our next game, of course. In some ways, it was a lucky game – Baghdad serving up that triple alignment for my final turn was awesome: a research station, a black card exchange and the last black cube. But we made sure we exploited every opportunity. Nothing was wasted. (Except for Lockdown Girl’s foresight power, right?)

It turned out the Win Bonus this time was a bit of retread! Three roadblocks or one piece of equipment. Because of that, we decided not to make our European faultline permanent in the upgrades yet again. Instead, we made our replacement LatAm lab at Buenos Aires permanent and used another positive mutation upgrade for black: curing black would no longer be an action.

I suspect the game is going to push back again in July. And I had another scary thought about the strangely over-long Infection Rate track. Instead of an extra Epidemic card, maybe Legacy would give us a sticker to seal up the first space on the track. That is, instead of more epidemics, we are cursed with a shorter time in the “slow” Infection Rate zone. Yikes. I really have to stop working through the nightmare scenarios and get some sleep.

I should just let July tell its story instead of trying to guess what happens next.

Next: July