WARNING: I don’t do spoiler-free reviews. If you want spoiler-free, this is not the blog for you.
I did it, everyone. I finished a legacy game. And let me tell you, it was quite the roller coaster ride! Boring one minute, frustrating the next — I never knew what to expect! I now totally understand the appeal of stopping in the middle of a game to fiddle around with stickers and scratch-offs and to punch out new components. And I totally understand the appeal of having to read new rules every time I play a game. And I TOTALLY understand the appeal of having to undo all the work I did in previous games because of a TOTALLY epic plot twist. Ah, Legacy! A revolution in tabletop gaming! Surely, much has been said about the gamification of the boring parts of life, the chores. But Legacy games are the truly brilliant inverse of that: the chorification of games! Genius, I tell you! Genius!
Alright, now that that’s out of my system — and likely the majority of the folks reading this are incensed — let’s get real. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is not a good board game. At best, I would consider it competent. It “works”, I suppose. Never before in gaming has a contrived narrative structure and gimmicky mechanical bait-and-switches led to such undeserved adulation as this. I mean, according to the users of Board Game Geek (which seems to be about 95% of the board game enthusiasts in the world), this is the second best game of all-time. Preposterous! Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 isn’t even as good as Pandemic! This is your classic example of “more is less” in every sense of the phrase, and the game exposes and exacerbates all the weaknesses in Pandemic‘s core system in its attempt to build on top of it.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 takes place over the course of a year, from January to December, and spans anywhere from 12 games (if you’re amazing) to 24 (if you’re horrible). It starts out more or less like vanilla Pandemic, so if you need a refresher please read my review on that. The only real additions at the outset are the persistent effects of outbreaks (you apply stickers to the board when they happen to indicate this), character scars (negative effects that permanently alter your character’s behavior), and the game-end upgrade choices (new character powers, event cards, etc.). But minor though these changes seem, there’s a significant problem with them. Pandemic is already an admin-heavy system (most co-ops are), and the addition of having to slap stickers on the board or choose scars mid-game does not do its cadence any favors. At first this increase in admin is not that bad, and players can mostly enjoy the game as if it’s good ol’ Pandemic. However, mid-way through your first play one of the pathogens becomes incurable. Oh, no! And in the games after, many more elements are added to the Pandemic formula: characters can now have “Relationships” with other characters, giving them additional powers. You can now “Quarantine” cities to manage this incurable disease and build “Military Bases” to facilitate board navigation with unlocked military characters. Then in April, it happens. Zombies. Ah, now all the critical acclaim makes sense! Peeps be suckers for zomboids. Anyway, the game calls them the “Faded”, and they replace the incurable disease entirely. Crap! Then more new mechanisms follow: building “Roadblocks”, “Equipping” location cards, etc. It’s all well and good, but it just feels like Pandemic with a bunch of additional rules overhead that makes the game clumsier. After a handful of plays it starts getting pretty old.
July is when the “Search” mechanism is introduced, and this is when the game goes from uninspired to flat out obnoxious. Now to progress the story you have to get to a specified location on the board and spend cards to perform the “Search” action, and every time an Epidemic is drawn the search gets harder. If too many Epidemics are drawn before you’ve spent enough cards searching, you fail the search for the rest of the game. This idea stinks. Pandemic‘s system is already overly reliant on attrition and luck and basically boils down to “survive until you draw the cards you need”, which is not a great core concept. To add a secondary system that is even MORE dependent on the luck of the draw is simply bad design. For as much randomness as there is in Pandemic, you don’t actually lose the game until the deck completely runs out. Which means if you do a good job managing the diseases you will have a chance to draw every card in the game. This does not hold true for searches, because you will fail a search significantly before then. See why that’s a problem? I hate it. And these searches become a staple of the latter half of the games, introducing new ones in 5 of the 6 final months. The final search in December is a total slog, forcing you to collect singles and pairs of all four colors of location cards and deposit them in a single measly location. It makes the entire game of Pandemic feel like an overly-complicated timer for random card draws (which it kinda already is). It is easily the worst objective in the game and ends the campaign on its lowest note.
Also (let’s back up a few months), remember how you earned new military characters and were building military bases to help win the game in previous months? Well too bad, dingus! The military was evil and created the Faded on purpose! That character you’ve been playing as and relying on is a traitor, tear up his character sheet and throw it away! Also, you need to destroy the military bases you previously built! What a twist! Seriously, who thought undoing work you previously did was a good idea for a game objective? I suppose this could work in a video game with a strong narrative incentive and enough mechanical variation to not make it feel like lazy padding, but here it’s clearly just a way to squeeze another couple of games out of these unexciting mechanisms. It’s not as if your previous choices in how you expanded your military network really come back and haunt you and you have to contend with the actions you undertook in the throes of your naiveté; it’s just busy work. Eventually, a few games after this “twist”, you unlock “Vaccination” and set about your final objective of curing the world of the Faded. This is an extremely simple “pick up and deliver” mechanism and is clearly implemented in a way to be as unobtrusive as possible so as not to add a further layer of complication and annoyance to an already encumbered system (remember the December search I was complaining about?). Anyhow, after the campaign finally ends you tally your score, read a single sentence epilogue based on your performance, then breathe a sigh of relief that you can finally play something different on the next game night.
As far as Pandemic Legacy: Season 1‘s story goes, let me just say this: anyone that thinks this game has a good story is out of their minds. Go play The Last Of Us and get back to me. Pandemic Legacy‘s story, in the entirety of its depth and nuance, could be communicated through a pair of tweets. Now typically, I understand that shouldn’t matter. Great tabletop games facilitate and conjure mechanical narratives through evocative decision trees and social narratives via the meta of their players. But it matters here, because Pandemic Legacy doesn’t succeed in these ways either. Mechanically, it doesn’t progress as much as it sort of splays out horizontally — allowing you to ignore half of its new mechanisms and still do fairly well — and socially, its meta is no more interesting than Pandemic‘s. Perhaps even less so, as the social puzzle solving which is the central attraction of these games is in many ways hampered by the added admin of managing the legacy components and additional rules overhead. A hallmark of any great game is that it pulls you into its system, that the rules disappear and you begin exploring its possibility space with natural intuition and an unencumbered mind. That’s very hard to do in a game that by its very genre definition is constantly doling out new rules, components, and mechanisms. I am not condemning legacy as a whole (not yet anyhow), but Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, as far as I’m concerned, is a poor argument in its favor.
The allure of a tabletop campaign is undeniable. To take part in an epic journey, to make long-lasting decisions that shape your future games, to create characters and live through their eyes in worlds of fantasy and science fiction, it’s part of what gaming is all about. What I object to is a campaign that is comprised solely of playing the same scenario over and over again with minor rules changes that is built upon (and worsens!) a system that is only really good enough for an occasional play or two with inexperienced players. The introduction of new systems and components mid-campaign is an enticing concept that undoubtedly has a lot of mileage left on it, but there’s nothing to praise about its particular implementation in the case of Pandemic Legacy. I just don’t understand how travelling the world and successfully curing diseases only to have them all come back next game as if nothing ever happened is supposed to be satisfying or intriguing. To me, this is just a bad game that I have to play X number of times before I can consider it “complete”. The only reason I even bothered finishing it is because I wanted to give the game the fairest possible shake for this review. It took years (so many other games I’d rather play!), but I slogged through. Setting up each game felt like mustering the energy to to repaint a room. But precedent has been set, and now with Betrayal Legacy, Ultimate Werewolf Legacy, and Machi Koro Legacy let loose on the world we are seeing all sorts of designs have campaigns foisted upon them that lack the structural integrity to properly act as foundations to such experiences. Nevertheless, Legacy games remain incredibly popular. It appears many groups actually enjoy the process of playing a game X amount of times in order to “complete” it. But in a world that already contains more great designs than I will ever be able to play in my lifetime, I simply don’t see the value in exploring incremental iterations over mediocre ones. Many see the “Legacy” treatment as the enhancement of a previously established game that has lost some of its initial luster, but I personally see it as something a lot less exciting: their chorification.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.