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…
Pandemic is widely considered a modern classic and deservedly so. When it emerged on the scene in 2008 there was very little like it. Its triple threat of social puzzle solving, clever mechanisms, and fresh theming were, to forgive the pun, infectious. Melding co-operative hand management, variable player powers, point-to-point movement, and set collection to create a fast-paced game of disaster mitigation was a truly groundbreaking accomplishment. There had been co-operative games before, sure, but none that presented its players with such an immediately accessible and tantalizing scenario to overcome. That an entire game of Pandemic took less than a single hour was but the period at the end of the sentence declaring Pandemic a bona fide smash hit, an achievement that would be foolish to claim it did not deserve. But looking past its reputation, influence, and accessibility, is it truly a great game? A game that immerses its players in its system, that forges an intoxicating social contract around the table that demands to be returned to again and again? No, I regret to say that it is not. For every mechanical innovation or brilliant idea it brings to the table, there is another aspect of it that is overly random, clumsy, or tedious. And though Pandemic is undoubtedly an important work in the pantheon of tabletop games, it is also one that is hard to muster up the desire to play very often due to its multitude of issues. Pandemic is a game about treating and containing the simultaneous outbreaks of 4…
Pandemic is not half as fecund a core design as it may initially seem. Its social puzzle approach to co-operative gaming and fresh theme were groundbreaking, don’t get me wrong, but its mechanical innovations were simply not foundational enough to be successfully transposed wholesale betwixt systems like Puerto Rico‘s and Dominion‘s were. Apparently, its designer Matt Leacock seemed to be the only one who didn’t notice this and Pandemic‘s two follow-ups, Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert, burst onto the scene a short while after it like no big thang. Forbidden Island is basically babby’s first Pandemic, which is all that needs to (or can) be said about it. Forbidden Desert, while a significant improvement, is still nowhere near unique or interesting enough an experience to stand on its own in its predecessor’s wake. It doesn’t help that both games are simple to the point of mindlessness. Now I get it, these are children’s games, basically just toys, and I probably shouldn’t even bother reviewing them. On the other hand I’ve played games with lower age ratings that I consider masterpieces, so let’s do this! Let’s start with Forbidden Island, a game about hunting for treasure on a sinking island. I’m going to forego my usual structural/mechanical overview and instead paint this one in broad, abstracted terms. This will only work if you’ve played Pandemic. If you haven’t then I’m not sure why you’re even reading this, but hey, you do you. Forbidden Island is often described as Pandemic-lite (notably by Leacock himself), but to me it feels more like Pandemic-minus (minus…