Set in 1962, Pandemic Legacy Season 0 brings a Cold War spy vibe to the series' core gameplay. Instead of controlling and eradicating diseases, you assemble spy teams that travel the world keeping enemy agents in check. It sounded like a new and clever twist on the Pandemic gameplay: slightly familiar and yet slightly new. Unfortunately, by the time my group completed this installment, we all were disappointed by the experience.
Of course, a big thrill in Legacy games are the surprises twists -- in both story and game mechanics -- that you reveal along the way. I'll try to be somewhat cagey on the details here, but if you're planning to play Season 0 yourself, perhaps you'll just want to skip to the last paragraph of this post to completely avoid any spoilers.
If you're still here, then let be say that our sour experience with Season 0 stemmed largely from three things.
First was the concept of "aliases," an evolution of the characters you build in previous Pandemic Legacy games. (And something you basically know about from game 1, even though you don't really begin to develop it right away.) In all installments of the series, you essentially "level up" a character by stickering abilities on them that skirt the basic rules of the game; developing specialties for each player (and using them well) is a big part of the fun. Season 0 has you establish multiple different characters for each player, spy aliases you can switch between as an action during the game. It gives each player more options.
In practice, aliases seem too complicated, and they make cooperation with the other players terribly difficult. You can't just glance across the table and know what the other players can do... because part of what they can do is hidden on other pages of a passport book (which they have to flip to when switching to a new alias). If you go too long between games of the campaign, then each game essentially starts with a lengthy and overwhelming show-and-tell of everything each player's character can do.
Second -- and this is mildly spoilery -- the game foists "restrictions" on the players as the story unfolds. The story wrapper for this is that your group undergoes psychological evaluation by the CIA, your superiors don't like this or that aspect of the way you conduct yourselves, and then assigns you some kind of obstacle you have to work around during the game. There is arguably some fun in scheming to work around a given restriction, but the restrictions feel so arbitrary, so disconnected from your story choices, that they feel random and capricious.
Third -- and this is the most spoilery detail I'll share (yet arguably not a spoiler at all) -- is the way diseases ultimately show up in the campaign. It's probably no surprise that in a game called Pandemic, controlling the spread of viruses is ultimately going to be a thing. For me, the problem is that what starts out feeling substantially different from a "normal game of Pandemic" actually morphs to be too much like a "normal game of Pandemic" as the campaign unfolds. In fact, the worse you do (to bad luck or bad strategy) at key moments in campaign, the harder it swings into becoming like normal Pandemic.
There is an unassailable narrative logic in all this. This game is a prequel, and it's going to do what all prequel stories do and link up to the original story. I just don't think it's particularly fun from a gameplay perspective, though. I've played a hell of a lot of games of Pandemic -- most of them in the form of one Pandemic Legacy product or another. I was looking forward to a twist on the formula that threw new and unexpected challenges at me throughout a fresh campaign. Instead, Season 0 felt to me like it morphed gradually from something novel and new into something very close to classic Pandemic... just on some kind of Hard Mode. I've kind of "been there, done that," and didn't expect that I was signing up to do that again a dozen-or-so more times.
Pandemic Legacy Season 0 started out quite strongly for my group, and then the wheels came off the wagon with shocking speed. There was a period of time where it seemed like we might not actually finish the campaign. Certainly, we reached a point where continuing felt a bit like a chore -- we'd have fun moments within most games, but as a group, we really weren't having fun in a game overall. We did finish, but I honestly think that Season 0 is never quite as fun as it is in the first "Prologue" game you play before making any permanent alterations. I'd play that game again on someone's fresh, unplayed copy... but I would never consider replaying the campaign again (whereas I'm eager to one day play Season 2 again). Overall, I'd say that works out to a C for Pandemic Legacy Season 0.
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