The Year We Fell: May

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

May normally offers two public holidays but this year there were three. That’s three weekends we could schedule in Pandemic Legacy. Such riches.

I let the first one slide as I had only just published the April diary and writing one of these is tantamount to playing the game. Just give me one weekend, I thought. A holiday from the cerebral workout of Legacy. We scheduled it for the second long weekend, Saturday May 8. Nothing else was happening that day.

Except for the Coronation.

AS USUAL, PANDEMIC LEGACY SPOILERS FOLLOW

SURPRISE

As is customary with each new month, there’s often a new rule or two to disturb our delicate understanding of the existing Legacy regime. Considering the massive changes in April, I suspected Legacy would give us a clean month to train up rather than start giving us new tools.

Hoo boy, I am no longer this naive.

I was gobsmacked that Legacy had more bad news for us. Apparently, there’s no public holiday in the Legacy world.

Every time we drew a blue Player card going forward – you know, those harmless City cards – we had to place a Faded figure on the card’s city. This is because zombie COdA was spreading “faster than we thought”. This was more like a light dusting of the board: these increases were not permitted to cause an outbreak or smash a quarantine themselves, but they would obviously pump up the probability of Super Fun Times as the game rolled on.

On the bright side, it handed the designers the excuse they needed to gift us another tool: the roadblock.

Characters could now put down roadblocks on some or all of the routes out of a City as an action, giving us the power to contain the new Faded spread. Roadblocks prevent cubes or Faded spreading to neighbouring cities when an outbreak occurs. You could even cut off a City entirely and it would silently outbreak to collapse. But… if any character needs to squeeze through a roadblock, they’ll need to throw away a City card for the pleasure.

Narratively, it’s grim stuff. Legacy’s mechanics had now shifted towards a “save what you can” structure. It’s far too dangerous to tour the Faded cities of Europe and America in our game – your characters receive a scar if they start their turn with Faded for company – so we’re likely to let the West collapse while trying to preserve everything else.

Legacy also proffered a new character: the Colonel. He can nip through roadblocks, cost free. Plus, if he’s in a region with a military base, he can spend his actions blasting away the Faded. That doesn’t mean he’s safe sleeping between turns in a Faded city, of course. He’s just as at risk as everyone else.

The downside is that the Colonel is terrible at science. He wouldn’t know a cure if he was handed a syringe with the phrase “THIS IS THE FUCKING CURE” printed on it. He needs seven cards to cure any disease. SEVEN.

There was one other twist. Going forward, we now had to complete three objectives every month. As usual, curing the red, yellow and black was mandatory. But we also have to complete two of the following: a military base in every region, eradicate a disease or quarantine seven Faded cities. Decisions, decisions.

After we had absorbed all this information, I had to make an announcement.

RALLY THE TROOPS 101

“We’re probably going to lose this game.”

We were playing with a new rule set which was both unfamiliar and aggressive. In a way, I had learnt something important from that feral March game. I didn’t want us to feel like “failures” if we lost again – and my gut told me Legacy really wanted us to fail. Mysterious Package 8, which you only open if you lose four games, is meant to be opened. You’re meant to fail catastrophically. You’re meant to burn tragedy onto the board.

However, if you set sub-basement expectations, you’re likely to beat them. And so this game played out a lot better than the gloom suggested.

The team for our May game was Builder Mum, Dispatcher Girl, Lockdown Dad and Colonel Boy. We’d rolled in the Colonel, thinking he might be useful, and given him a coworker relationship with Builder Mum, which makes it easier to exchange City cards. This would be useful considering the Colonel couldn’t science the Hell out of this.

You might notice the return of the Dispatcher, whose role is to move other characters around the board. You see, since the Faded erupted in the May game, I figured out the Dispatcher could be critical. If we needed to send anyone into a Faded city to stay, the Dispatcher could move them out before their turn started and save them from scars.

This led to a big discussion about the seat positioning of the Dispatcher versus the Quarantine Specialist. It was difficult to explain a subtle suggestion to the point that Mum got a trifle cross with Dad, who she believed was talking nonsense. Here’s the thing. If you can keep the Quarantine Specialist sitting on a city they’ve quarantined, the quarantine will never break and you stop new disease cubes spawning there. This is roughly the same for the Faded with one problem.

If you’re using the Quarantine Specialist to contain the Faded, the character will get a scar as soon as their next turn begins. We could use the Dispatcher to get them out of trouble. But what you really want is to keep them there as long as possible, to maximise the time they hold a quarantine in place. Thus, you want the Dispatcher to be in the seat just before the Quarantine Specialist.

I then picked up the Annoying Husband character card, because I would not even accept Mum folding with “oh, whatever, let’s just start the game” I eventually figured out how to explain it. Fortunately, no divorce necessary this turn.

FOR THE KING

Once again, Legacy blew any attempts to make the game shorter with its opening salvo. It took us 50 minutes from opening the box to our first turn. And, in that time, we had already lost our daughter to the King. She was interested in all the pomp and we… well, we were saving the world, right?

The initial infections were reasonable. Chicago got two Faded but Tokyo, now a Faded city as a result of April’s endgame debacle, acquired three. We chose to start at Taipei, to give us a chance at shutting down Tokyo before it poured Faded all across Asia.  And, anyway, Atlanta is dead to us. As the blue region spawns Faded, it’s just far too dangerous to start the game there anymore.

We considered shooting all of the Faded in Tokyo dead. I was not keen because it would cost Colonel Boy two whole turns to pull it off. A session lasts around 15-25 turns which means a two-turn plan in a four-player game could take half the game to execute. We still sent him in, but not to blow everyone away. He established roadblocks, blasted one Faded and Dispatcher Girl pulled him out on his next turn. It’s only now, as I write this, I realise this was a rule buster. The Dispatcher moves other characters as if they were the Dispatcher – the Colonel can move through roadblocks easily, but not the Dispatcher. Whoops. We were supposed to throw away a City card to facilitate the movement.

We realised the ‘quarantine seven Faded cities’ optional objective was a bust at this point. We still didn’t have that many Faded cities on the board – many of the blue cities remained officially blue until one of the Faded popped up there. We really wanted to throw quarantines onto inert cities – not be forced to go back and repair broken quarantines every few turns because, oops, it sprung from the Infection deck again.

The first epidemic came at us after four turns, blowing up Mexico City. The second was after seven, taking New York. And I hope you Manhattanites are happy, we sent in Colonel Boy to shoot a bunch of Faded dead and rescue the situation. I apologise that one of them was probably someone’s beloved grandpa.

The game kept ticking forward nicely and we felt we had things under control. The Faded spread was contained. Cures grew gradually. And our entire strategy was underpinned by the Dispatcher, putting everyone together when necessary and getting everyone out of dodge. Occasionally, I would fret that we had forgotten rules. For example, Colonel Boy can only shoot Faded if there’s a supporting military base in the region – when we took down New York, I had a pang of panic a couple of turns later when I realised I hadn’t checked if we had a base! (We did and Colonel Boy had checked.)

Let me tell you about a separate anxiety that sits at the back of my mind. There’s an additional space on the Infection Rate track that we cannot reach because there aren’t enough Epidemic cards to get us there. So, why is it there? I’m convinced there’s an additional Epidemic card hidden in the Legacy deck which will eventually emerge like a shit butterfly from a shit cocoon to make every game more… entertaining.

Anyway, before I forget, I should mention the game finished in turn 14. We lost.

WAIT WHAT

So on turn 11, I scribbled the note “not working on cure?”

That wasn’t really what went wrong. We had become quite good at keeping the Faded down but it had been at the expense of cube control. Basically, that classic Pandemic mistake: get mesmerised by one problem while another one stabs you in the back of the head five times.

It had gone south very quickly, but we had thoroughly laid the groundwork for it to happen allowing disease cubes to congregate and have parties. Turn 11 saw an outbreak at Ho Chi Minh. Turn 12, an outbreak at Osaka. Turn 13, two outbreaks at Chennai and New York. And in turn 14, a cascading outbreak at Karachi plunged us through the bottom of the Outbreak track. Remember the “save what you can” mentality: if you don’t play the way Pandemic Legacy is chaperoning you towards, you’re going to suffer. Ride the wave otherwise you’ll end up underwater.

It would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Player deck’s contribution to the defeat. We were mighty pleased for the first few turns when blue City cards didn’t turn up, so we didn’t get any of those worrying “accelerated incubation” Faded figures. But then the Player deck was infested with them. We just kept getting blue cards for several turns, meaning cures went on pause. In the last five turns, we turned up two epidemics and five blue City cards – meaning we only picked up three cards that could support cures. And one of those cards turned up in the final turn!

We were happy the game was over because when the outbreaks came thick and fast, we knew we were done. The end was swift. Merciful, even. It avoided an additional hour of cautious, yet doomed, play.

It took no time to choose our end of game upgrades: permanent military bases to speed along one of the additional objectives. But I misread the Legacy deck card we drew at the end: you were supposed to reveal the new end of the game upgrades, permanent roadblocks, so you could have deployed them at the end of the game. It didn’t matter. We were comfortable with our choice.

However, I had almost made an additional, more serious mistake. There’s a circled 8 at the bottom of the card which looks just like the package 8 – the one that says open if you fail four games in a row. Yes, I almost got the little lady to open the apocalypse box. Phew. It remained sealed. For now.

THE SOPHOMORE ALBUM

Does anyone want to play Pandemic Legacy: Season 2?

Considering how difficult these games were, how fractious they sometimes became and how tough they were to schedule, I assumed the table would be against another year in Legacy.

Although he acknowledges Legacy is stressful, my son was all for another year; Pandemic is his favourite board game. My wife wasn’t against it, either. Although playing a game is exhausting, the downtime between matches makes the prospect of playing a new session exciting. And what of my daughter, mostly a passenger on our journey? Once I mentioned there was a completely different board for Season 2 she wanted in.

So the person who finds the prospect least enticing is… me.

Writing in-game notes, taking photos, scheduling the games… it is more work than entertainment, like watching the second series of Picard. Every month, this diary feels like a self-inflicted curse. I’m not quite eating and sleeping Legacy, but it haunts the edges of my free time, wailing from the gloom.

But without this diary providing rhythm, it might take us several years to finish – if at all. In each episode, I always shine some focus on the shocking moments of the game – part of it is the need to project strong emotion to engage readers. But I think it’s also a way to vent my own frustration.

Having to dedicate the Coronation public holiday to Legacy – just two days later – wiped out my holiday weekend mood. I had planned to do Electron Dance video editing on this extra day off work but Legacy consumed it. However, it had to be done because I run this campaign. My job is to keep everyone on board, keep the momentum alive. Without Electron Dance, this game would not be happening.

I unfolded the board.

I shook the cubes out of their tiny body bags.

I set up the lighting and grabbed my camera.

I assembled the team.

The show must go on.

EVENTFUL BEGINNING

We rebooted the Legacy computer and used the same characters as before, although the seat assignments were different: Lockdown Boy, Colonel Mum, Builder Girl, Dispatcher Dad.

And this time we had an extra helping hand: we were permitted to introduce two Funded Event cards to the Player deck. We had already given the Events some thought at the end of the Saturday game and it didn’t take too long to finalise the decisions: Resilient Population (remove one card from the Infection discard pile) and Remote Outpost (add a military base for free).

Legacy gave us three Faded at Montreal and two at both Essen and Paris. We used our Win Bonus to massage Montreal down to two Faded.

The opening draw set Builder Girl up with two red City cards: Manila and Jakarta. There were other red cards too. Lockdown Boy had Tokyo but considering Tokyo was now Faded town, that was unlikely to be a card exchange anyone was interested in. But Dispatcher Dad held Ho Chi Minh. We decided to start in Taipei again and get to work setting up Builder Girl with the red cure. It’s rare that we consider assembling a cure in the first turn.

I was first so I headed down to Ho Chi Minh, grabbed Builder Girl with my Dispatcher Powers and slammed the Ho Chi Minh City card into her hand. She only needed two more cards for the red cure. I then picked up Atlanta which, if you recall, doubles as the Grassroots Program card. Cool. And my second card was an epidemic.

FFS.

The epidemic exploded in Cairo. The danger, however, was that we were in line for an outbreak. Montreal had been defanged, but Bogota, Seoul and now Cairo were ticking timebombs. There were ten cards in the Infection discards meaning there was roughly a 55% chance of an outbreak right now. And in case you’ve forgotten, this was the first turn.

We made the decision to play Grassroots Program immediately, expending my remaining City card, Tehran, to siphon off one of the Cairo cubes and reduce the outbreak probability to just over 40%.

I drew the two Infections from the reshuffled discards. Colonel Mum started to jot down every card we saw in the Infection deck, to help predict the future. I was also doing it for my diary.

The infections were Karachi and Paris. Bullet dodged… for now.

Lockdown boy was up, used his Foresight skill to check the next two infections and saw Essen and Johannesburg. He remote quarantined Essen to keep it sweet, although it would obviously break quarantine immediately. Paris was now on three Faded figures but that wouldn’t be a worry until the next epidemic which we hoped would be some time away. He quarantined Seoul, one of our two remaining timebombs.

We sent Colonel Mum down to Beijing so she could hand her Beijing card to her coworker, Builder Girl, without her physically being there. We were determined to cure the red virus as rapidly as possible, no fucking ifs and no fucking buts. Colonel Mum’s infections turned up Seoul but our good friend Lockdown Boy kept the quarantine in place. We had to keep red under control if we wanted to eradicate it.

And then it was Builder Girl’s first turn. We constructed a beautifully efficient move. She took Colonel Mum’s Beijing card, and made a military base in Ho Chi Minh and flew via military flight straight to our permanent base in Bogota. There she defused the Bogota three cube timebomb. Some great synchronicities were playing out in this game. Maybe we had a chance. Maybe.

Here’s a good moment to convey why Pandemic Legacy is such a tough game and why it will send your Monopoly crowd screaming. First, all of these little edge case rules and upgrades are useful, but had to be exploited opportunistically. You couldn’t organise an entire game around say, Colonel Mum’s coworking relationship with Builder Girl. Every turn, you had to keep every small-print rule present in your mind because each one is vital to save a turn or two – and once an opportunity presented itself, you had to pounce on it.

Second, we’re having to juggle three different objectives, all operating in parallel, while maintaining order. What were we doing at this point in the game? Developing the red cure in Builder Girl’s hand, preparing the Crimson Fever to be eradicated, protecting cities across the world against outbreaks and establishing military bases. I mean, isn’t this insane and incredible? Finally, we’re all playing four-dimensional chess.

In Builder Girl’s Player card draw, she picked up a fifth red City card, Hong Kong. She had the full cure. Due to our upgrades, she didn’t need to spend an action to cure the red virus – but could she cure the virus even though her turn was over? We checked the rules. Yes.

We cured the red virus in four turns. Bloody Hell. What a rush.

THE BOARD FIGHTS BACK

We continued to juggle our tasks. From quarantines on cities with Faded figures to squashing the occasional disease cube. Builder Girl had been appointed to build the yellow cure because of providence – she ended up in a good position to receive cards from other players.

At one point, Lockdown Boy wanted to use his Tokyo card to fast travel but it was now useless as Tokyo was a rioting city. No direct flights any more. It was the first time we experienced the slow disintegration of city stability robbing us of power. As a result, he had to throw away some actions because there was nothing he could do with them, far from everywhere and everyone.

We began to worry about the second epidemic card which seemed… overdue. The annoying thing was we still hadn’t eradicated the red virus which was one of our objectives. The Infection deck kept dishing out new red infections. Oh, look, now it’s Osaka. Great. The road to eradication kept stretching farther into the distance.

It was on the ninth turn of the game, the Epidemic turned up. That was Dispatcher Dad’s turn again, by the way. Once again, I was Lady Luck, attracting all the Epidemics… and Events. I also picked up Resilient Population! This meant I could drop one card from the Infections deck. We decided on Montreal as it was just too far away to deal with.

The epidemic hit Santiago where we had a research base. Guess what turned up in Infections? Santiago. Yes, our research base which had just got three cubes dumped on it then had an immediate outbreak. Swell. Cool beans.

Lockdown Boy followed me and, we kept him on task, passing another yellow City card to Builder Girl, but ensured he remote quarantined Santiago. Another outbreak there would destroy our research base. And still we couldn’t smite the red virus. It just kept popping up. The good news was, if we did eradicate it, it meant we might be able to coast through a shit-ton of red Infection cards.

However, this choice was at the expense of Karachi and Johannesburg. Karachi was on three cubes and could blow up. Johannesburg was only on two cubes but in a remote location; it was unlikely anyone would travel there to handle the cubes there. And, indeed, the Johannesburg Infection card turned up that turn. Now it was on three cubes.

At least, Lockdown Boy had turned up the Remote Outpost event we had added to the Player deck and we deployed in Johannesburg, in case anyone wanted to travel there through the military base network. Lockdown Boy wondered if the Airstrike event was going to turn up in the Player cards soon.

The board was tinged with danger. The red virus kept slipping away from us and we were about to move to a three-infections-per-turn world. It would only take one more epidemic to lose control.

It was time to make a decision to pursue red eradication with extreme prejudice or work on the black cure.

ERADICATE!

Dancing around the red virus couldn’t go on much longer with a higher inflation rate just around the corner – it was time to end this. Except…

Still, Colonel Mum wanted to tackle the outbreak danger at Johannesburg. She hopped down there and crushed its cubes to one – taking it right off the map of danger – and then picked up Lost Angeles, a Faded city, in the Player cards.  This was the last piece of the yellow cure we needed – if she could just get this card to Builder Girl, we’d clinch the cure.

It was Builder Girl’s turn but Lockdown Boy was mired in danger. He was sleeping in Sydney, a city carrying three cubes. She could cure yellow this turn, provided she passed through Faded Angeles quickly – but, after some discussion, we couldn’t accept the risk to Lockdown Boy. Builder Girl still grabbed the yellow card via the coworking relationship but postponed curing to her next turn. She moved from LA to Sydney and cleaned away the red cubes in one fell swoop as we already had the cure. It kept Lockdown Boy safe and, I suppose, kept us on the mission to eradicate red.

Fortuitously, she actually pulled the Sydney player card as her turn closed, which could be incredibly useful considering where she was, and yellow Johannesburg in Player cards. Now she had, uhhh, six yellow cards. Glad she made the effort to pick up Faded Angeles to complete the cure. You just never know when the Player deck will bless you. Or spit on you.

The red plague was finally eradicated in the 13th turn of the game. I dedicated my whole move travelling from Osaka to Bangkok to fire the last red cube on the board into the sun. One objective done, neutralising every red Infection card in the deck. After this, every red card we drew from Infections would elicit an immediate cheer from the table. I drew red Osaka – the table cheered – and blue Washington. Boo.

In Lockdown Boy’s turn we made good opportunistic use of the Sydney card. He took the card from Builder Girl and used it to travel to Karachi to quarantine it, because it had been on three cubes for four turns. Honestly, it was about time we headed to the black Cities as the cure needed to be prepared.

That’s when the next epidemic turned up, taking us to the higher infection rate of three per turn. It impacted red Jakarta – table cheered – but broke quarantines we’d put in place at Santiago and Paris. Lockdown Boy still couldn’t believe we hadn’t found the Airstrike event in the Player cards yet.

We were still concerned with potential Faded spread from Europe; if Paris blew up, it would turn Algiers into a Faded city. It was Colonel Mum’s turn and she had an Algiers card in her hand. Time to use our new tools. Mum flew to Algiers and put down roadblocks to protect Algiers from Faded spread.

She also managed to delete a cube from Cairo’s set of three, pulling it back from the brink. This led to one of the happiest Infection draws of the game – red Sydney (cheers), red Seoul (cheers) and Cairo (even more cheers that Mum had saved the city from an outbreak).

We felt like we were doing well. Builder Girl cured the yellow plague, saved our research base Santiago from potential outbreak. Problems were coming up but we were either in place to deal with them or had already seen them off in an earlier turn. For example, when the fourth epidemic hit, Paris experienced an outbreak but the roadblock protected Algiers.

But in the 18th turn, Lockdown Boy used his foresight ability and foresaw something not so good. Chennai was in the next two Infection cards – and Chennai already had three cubes. This would spread black cubes everywhere. But he was supposed to head to Mumbai for a card exchange and if he didn’t it would be a wasted chance to organise the black cure. And we also needed him to remote quarantine Washington which was at three Faded figures. Hmm… we opted for a roadblock instead, to at least stop the outbreak cubes spilling into Mumbai.

At the end of the turn, he had four black City cards. The Chennai outbreak played out – but the third Infection card, which he couldn’t see, was Kinshasa which already carried three yellow cubes. Outbreak. But this then caused a cascade outbreak at Johannesburg. No, no, no. We were now at five outbreaks. Three more outbreaks and the game would end. End badly. And I’ve got to say there were a lot of Faded on the board at this point.

Colonel Mum worked fire suppression and rushed to Kinshasa, another location on three cubes, and wiped them all – thank God yellow was cured by this point. Now we already had a plan to finish our third cure and put in place the last military bases. The game could be won on Lockdown Boy’s next turn. But would the Infections let us win?

You couldn’t trust the board. You could never trust the board.

In turn 20, Builder Girl completed the military base objective. She picked up Essen/Airstrike from the Player cards – Lockdown Boy leapt for joy – and it was deployed immediately to Paris, probably toppling the Eiffel Tower while reducing the Faded figures from 3 to 2.

Turn 21 was the turn which would decide if we were going to make it. The fate of the game, the fate of May, would be decided here and now.

And there was little that could be done to nudge the odds any more in our favour. I was in Cairo and needed to move Lockdown Boy and Builder Girl there, so he could do a final card exchange with her in the next turn. I took a cube from Cairo and that was it.

It was all in the cards now. The truth, the future, was all in the cards.

I shit you not, I drew the fifth fucking Epidemic card. It would accelerate the game to four Infection cards per turn. Would it be our annihilation?

The epidemic hit red Ho Chi Minh which was a cheering moment. But then I had to draw, painfully, four Infection cards. The board was screaming with the possibility of cascading outbreaks. We didn’t spend any time debating where the danger was as there was nothing we could do.

I drew the cards and hoped we would survive them. The first card…

…was Santiago. It rose from one to two cubes. The second card…

…was Karachi. Outbreak, no cascade. The third card…

…Cairo. This was fine, we had just been cleaning up the city. And the final card?

Chennai. An outbreak but no cascade.

Are you counting how many outbreaks we had so far? I can tell you it was seven. And that meant we were still breathing – and victorious. Lockdown Boy took the Cairo card, flew to Chicago, walked to Atlanta and cured the black plague.

My son has described this as his favourite game of the campaign so far. And, my God, what a game it was.

Next: June