WARNING: This blog post contains shameless spoilers for Pandemic Legacy Season 2. Reading this blog post if you have not yet played the game will impair your enjoyment should you decide to play it in the future.
Previously, on Pandemic Legacy…
- We induced the Hollow Men to defect
- We unlocked the Finch Reef haven
- We lost both attempts at October
November (First Attempt)
It’s been six months since we last played. As you can imagine, there was a lot of reacclimatisation required before we could even begin to play a game. We needed to remind ourselves of all the various rule changes, the recent twists and turns, our preferred strategies, and our goals.
Uncovering the top card of the legacy deck, we receive the unsurprising news that our objectives have changed. Building supply centres, which has been the mandatory objective of every game so far, is now no longer required. We now have a single mandatory objective, which is to perform four recon actions in Shanghai in order to unlock the plan to enter Utopia. These four recons do not all need to happen in the same game – if we only achieve partial success in the first attempt, then our progress will carry over to the second attempt.
Our single mandatory objective – to complete the plan
The first objective is going to be particularly challenging, as the player deck is now very large, and there are relatively few red cards in it.
The exact details of the recon actions that are required. Challenging!
During setup, we made a bit of a miscalculation during placing our initial supplies, and forgot to put a cube on Lagos. This sadly proved a problem when Lagos came up in the initial infection stage, and as of this point the city has been rechristened Plagos.
Plague cube in Lagos. Plagos. Do you get it? Honestly, if I have to explain this to you, I’ll be very disappointed.
We chose the same characters as in the previous game, and it was Gammidgy’s turn to start.
- Gammidgy – Maggot (Farmer)
- Susan – Lucius (Administrator)
- Karen – Ophelia (Instructor)
- Pete – Peron Peron (Immunologist)
First Turn
To start with, we just wanted to fix up some of the locations that were in a precarious way. Gammidgy moved to Ripley’s Hole from where he could resupply the adjacent location of Antananarivo, then hopped to the supply centre in Tehran to make some more supplies. Susan used her turn to move to London and perform the monitor action, averting a first epidemic. However, the frequency scanner card is now all used up, and the monitor action is therefore no longer available to us. Sad news, we’ve really appreciated that strategy. We also realised that we’d neglected to properly protect Jacksonville, and so another plague cube popped up there as well.
On her turn, Karen (who’d been summoned to London by Susan, on her turn) sat tight while Pete played an event card to make 6 supply cubes magically appear at her feet.
A rationed event card to make supplies appear from nowhere
Karen was then able to go to Jakarta and build a satellite tower there, which will be useful for helping people transfer their red city cards into the hands of one individual who would then have the responsibility for gathering enough to do the recon in Shanghai. She then built a sea lane to Bangkok, adding that city into the grid, before finishing her turn back in the comfort of Finch Reef.
A new satellite tower in Jakarta (sea lane to Bangkok soon to follow)
Pete used his turn to travel to Osaka via Finch Reef, from where he built a sea lane to Seoul, adding that location into the grid as well. Our first epidemic occured on this turn, result in Hollow Men showing up in St Petersburg and New York.
Hello and welcome to the population of Seoul. Good to have you with us.
Second Turn
Gammidgy was holding a “produce supplies” card with one more “systemwide production” action left, so we decided to play it. We lose the card as a result, but at this stage in the season, it’s time to start burning the furniture. He travels to Osaka to build a sea lane to Shanghai, which means that we can now get to Shanghai from Finch Reef in two actions. This feels like a useful investment for the future. On the subject of the illegal sea lane from Finch Reef to Osaka, we’ve decided that no punishment is appropriate, and we’re going to allow ourselves to continue to use it. We figure that there have probably been plenty of occasions when we’ve overlooked a rule to our detriment, so on this rare occasion that a rule omission works in our favour, we’re embracing it. Susan also played an out-of-turn action card to place 3 shelters for free.
Free shelters! Note that this is a one time only card, and is no longer available for future games
New sea lanes and shelters
Susan now has the requisite number of blue city cards in her hand, so zips over to Shanghai and completes one of the four necessary recon actions. Note that her character has an upgrade that allows recon with one fewer card, so only two are needed here.
Containment units: Prepared
Karen uses her ability to grab Johannesburg from the player card discard pile, as yellow cards are useful to us right now. She zooms over to Shanghai and gives it to Susan, thanks to her ability that allows her to transfer any city card to another player in her location, even if they’re not in that specific city. With a remaining action to spend and no good plan for it, she makes a little bit of supplies.
Pete establishes a sea lane to Tokyo so that we have that city in the grid, and then heads to Shanghai to do a little searching there. The result is disappointing – just a bit of lore.
Look at this lovely sea lane to Tokyo!
Look at this pointless search card in Shanghai!
A plague cube plops into Paris, and we all make sad faces.
Third Turn
Gammidgy travels to Shanghai with a pocket full of yellow city cards and devises a devious distraction before retiring back to Finch Reef. More plague cubes come out, this time in Johannesburg and Tripoli. The incident tracker is now up to 5, which is not fantastic.
A distraction so devious that I can’t even tell you what it is. Oooh, squirrel!
Susan goes to Cairo so that she can use the satellite tower there to send some black city cards to Gammidgy. Gammidgy takes this opportunity to play an out-of-turn event card to skip the infection step.
Karen joins Gammidgy in Finch Reef and hands him another black city card. We might as well have a crack at decoding the access key, but it’s feeling mostly futile. To use up her remaining actions, and offer us a slender chance at surviving another few minutes, she travels to Riyadh and places some supplies. Plague cubes in St Petersburg and Johannesburg, and the incident tracker is nearly at the bottom. One more plague cube will be the end.
Pete has a couple of red city cards, so travels to the popular resort of Finch Reef to do the recon there. This unlocks the Topaz laboratory, which gives us the ability to avert the removal of a supply cube from a city by playing a city card of the same colour. Might be useful, more likely we’ll completely forget about it.
Wellington being added to the board. Note the lovely nails.
There’s also a new character being added to the game, whose ability is to add a shelter to their location. This is pretty weaksauce compared to what our current characters offer, so this is probably not going to get used.
Vector Control Expert? Staying In The Box Expert, more like
The rest of the Topazzy blurb
Inevitably, a plague cube occurs in Tripoli, and it’s gg folks.
End of Game
I don’t generally report when a Hollow Man gets added to a location, because it doesn’t affect the incident tracker, but in this game Mexico City fell to “forsaken” status because of a Hollow Man there (and having started at population 1).
With our production units we spend 3 on a permanent satellite tower in Jakarta, and 2 each on permanent shelters in Shanghai and Osaka. The first two of these are going to be very useful, the last one less so but we’re really not sure what else to spend our production units on. In hindsight, boosting a couple of locations from population 1 to population 2 would have been good, but we didn’t think of that at the time.
November (Second Attempt)
We set up with the same characters and had another crack. While we have two of the components required towards the objective, it cannot be ignored that they are the two easier ones.
First Turn
Susan travelled to Cairo to resupply there after the initial infections left it devoid of supplies. There’s a Plague cube in Jacksonville. Great.
Karen travelled to Johannesburg to resupply there and innoculate it as well. At this point we would previous have played a monitor action to hopefully avert the first epidemic, but we can no longer utilise that strategy. We have a plague cube in Dar es Salaam. Great.
Pete did some supply makery, resupplied Sao Paulo next door. Here’s that epidemic, and we have a second plague cube in Dar es Salaam. Great.
Gammidgy got briefly distracted by Pete asking him to share his feelings on an unrelated topic. Gammidgy doesn’t like sharing feelings. After we all laughed at the awkward situation of Pete’s creation, we got back to the game, and Gammidgy went to Paris to resupply there. A plague cube in Tokyo brings the incident tracker to 4. We’re already halfway to losing this game. Great.
Second Turn
Susan went to Tripoli, used her ability to summon Pete and then take the Tripoli card from him. Might as well have a crack at getting three black cards into her hand, but it’s looking desperate already. Oh look, more plague cubes in Jacksonville and Washington. This is turning out to be the quickest game we’ve ever played.
Karen was able to use her turn to resupply Jacksonville and Washington, though this did require her to end her turn in Washington, leaving her in danger of exposure if we last as long as her next turn. Lasting that long is not looking like a certainty, at this point.
Speedrunning “Losing At Pandemic Legacy”
Pete travels to Dar es Salaam to resupply. It’s barely 20 minutes since we started this game. This sounds like a long time, but in the previous game it took us twice as long to reach this point. We’re not needing to take a long time to think through our turns because honestly what’s the point?
Jacksonville needs resupplying again so Gammidgy travels there to do that, before retreating to Helm’s Deep. Another plague cube in Sao Paulo leaves us with just one more incident left.
Third Turn
Susan has the requisite black city cards to go to Shanghai and complete one more recon. Our suspicion is that there’s not really much point to this – if we were able to complete all four recons, there’d be some reward, but just getting three of them is no better than getting none. But hey, if we can do it, we might as well.
The access key is decoded and turns out to be “hunter2”
Karen starts her turn in Washington so picks up a scar. It’s not going to be particularly punishing to have to discard a card after searching, and indeed it’s unlikely to affect her at all, but it does take up one space on her character card.
Ophelia has a new scar but it just makes her look tougher
Using her actions, she travels to Shanghai to give a red card to Susan (might as well) but it’s all in vain as we get an epidemic in Cairo that finishes us off.
End of Game
We’ve lost four games in a row, so we can finally scratch off the “turning point” card that has taunted us since we started the season. It will give us a few bonus supplies in the next couple of games. I can’t decide if this is going to be useful or of minimal impact.
A small handicap to compensate for our recent and continual failures
It’s been a bad game for our low-population cities. Los Angeles, Washington, Paris, Kinshasa, New Mumbai and Tokyo were all at population 1 at the start of this game, and thanks to plague cubes and/or Hollow Men are now forsaken. With a reduced number of cities in the grid, we only get 6 production units to spend this time, so we use them all on boosting the population of New York, Hong Kong, Osaka, Tripoli, Dar es Salaam and Sao Paulo from 1 to 2, in the hope of avoiding them falling to forsaken during our first attempt at December.
We’re hoping to have our final play session in early September, which will allow us to put Pandemic Legacy Season 2 to bed, and maybe get back to playing some normal board games for a while.