This blog contains minor spoilers for base mechanics in Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, but nothing that isn't in the core rules of the game.
When I texted my roommate, "what if we became board game people..." I didn't think it would come to this: two board games purchased to start and then, a week later, two more on the way and an all-consuming obsession with Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 that has resulted in playing 13 games in a little over a week. There is a lesson to be learned here about YouTube rabbit holes that see you watching hours of British men reviewing board games, but it's already too late to interrogate.
Pandemic Legacy is a game set in the worst year in CDC history, which hits a little differently now than when the game was published in 2015. It takes the base elements of Pandemic—a cooperative board game by Matt Leacock in which you fly around the globe to cure four fictional diseases—and adds a degree of permanence to your actions as you play through 12 different months and things progressively get worse. And worse. But as the game progresses, you also get to open little doors and boxes and receive new mechanics that make the game play just a bit differently each time. It's like treats, if treats came in the form of [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS] highly infectious diseases. Every group's game will tell a different story. For example, my roommate, who works in a cancer biology lab, lovingly curated a list of real life viruses we could use to name the fictional diseases. Unfortunately she ran out of ideas at the end, and so we also have rabies going around.
The fine folks at BoardGameGeek.com have Pandemic Legacy algorithmically ranked as the second-best board game of all time, and oh boy, I can believe it. The issue with playing a board game with your roommate is that it is too easy to coordinate schedules. The game arrived last Friday. We played two games then, and another game on Saturday, and then agreed that we had to ration it a little bit. Then last Sunday, we stayed up late to watch the Australian Grand Prix, woke up at 11 a.m., went out to grab coffee, came back and played two games of Pandemic Legacy, went out to happy hour and didn't get drinks because we needed to be of sober mind to lock in for Pandemic Legacy, spent half the lunch discussing our Pandemic Legacy characters' various traumas, rested for an hour, went out to get a little treat, and then came back and played another game of Pandemic Legacy.
We text each other things like, "pandemic tonite queen?" and "we should pandemic tonight" and "if we go out to dinner we might not have enough time to pandemic tonight" which comes with the side effect of making us sound like particularly chipper bioterrorists. While playing the game, we say things like "Oh, no, Santiago," and "Rabies is looking so bad right now," and "Fuck Santiago," and "Oh no, Santiago," and [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS], and "This is just like COVID-19..." and "How can you be sitting down at a time like this?" We are perhaps overly emotionally attached to our characters, whom you get to name and carry over from game to game; notable among them, Stevie and Darwin are family!
After a string of bad losses in which we lost literally one turn before we could have won, we finally managed to succeed with Stevie and Darwin on a seemingly impossible mission, and were so euphoric we got up and hugged. On Tuesday, we finished a game (a tight victory that could've gone much worse than it had) and conducted no fewer than three separate debriefs in the next two hours. This pattern unfortunately remained for subsequent playthroughs. We have Pandemic Legacy–related dreams. Last night, I had difficulty falling asleep because we ended our third (third!) game played yesterday on a bad loss, and I couldn't stop thinking about strategies for our next try.
Vanilla Pandemic is a board game that is famously good for beginner board gamers: intricately balanced, difficult but very learnable. It's worth playing the base game a few times before taking on the legacy version, which you can do with the legacy board (the only change is Santiago, though that was not why we were so distressed about Santiago), before you start putting stickers all over it. It almost feels unethical to recommend a game that has so thoroughly consumed my life, but it has brought tenfold more joy than dismay. The sad thing is that it will eventually have to end—then again, as my roommate wisely said, "We can't keep on living like this." This is true. We cannot. Which is why when we are done, we will be taking a short break for other games before returning for Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 and Season 0.
