A Season to Remember

I've played through a few Legacy games (and I'm currently playing several more), but until recently, I'd never completed the one many gamers consider the best of all -- Pandemic Legacy: Season 1.

A Legacy board game, if you're not in the know, asks the same group of players to play multiple times. Some events that happen during one play become permanent -- through stickers, marks you make to the game components, materials you add to or remove from the game, and more. If a good board game is a book you love enough to read again and again, a Legacy game is like a series of books you read all the way through.

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 was not the first such game, though it made the big splash that introduced most gamers to the concept. Based on the existing board game Pandemic, it brings players together as a cooperative team to prevent the spread of a worldwide dangerous disease. The Legacy elements unfold over a game "year," with unique scenarios assigned to each month.

Our experience -- a team of me, my husband, and two good friends -- actually took a year (and then some!). We'd play most times we got together for our standing monthly dinner, sometimes more than once. But sometimes we wouldn't be in the mood, or we'd postpone for one reason or another, or we'd lose a particular "month" of the game and have to play it again. So our final play of Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (that took place on our weekend getaway to Steamboat Springs) came some 15 months after our first play.

Not many games hold our group's attention even half as long these days, which I think is a testament to how engrossed we became with this experience. That's possible, though, as it's a very clever design. It has a nice story arc with some surprising twists along the way. The game really does grow over time, switching out goals and rules so that you're not really just playing the same game time after time. And the Legacy elements are quite impactful and satisfying -- successes you fight for in one play become permanent benefits you can draw on later, while the scars of past defeats can come back to bite you.

The reputation Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 has in the gamer community is well deserved. Still, I have a few small issues with it that keep me from enshrining it as my single favorite game as many others have. One is an element of the original stand-alone Pandemic game on which it's based; random chance can be especially harsh at times. When an "Epidemic" breaks out, bad luck can grow that into catastrophe literally before any player has a chance to do anything about it. And while I appreciate that a good cooperative game should be challenging and not just always "let you win," this particular confluence of circumstances never stops feeling unfair when it comes up.

My other small quibble is with an aspect unique to this Legacy version. In the middle of the campaign, a particular system is introduced that then figures heavily for several games. There's a particular time pressure involved, it turns out -- but you're not sufficiently warned about that before the deadline passes. Failure to complete one of the tasks winds up having a substantial impact on how the entire campaign is scored in the end, though, and that's the real issue. The stakes could be high with warning, or more surprising with less on the line. Blindsided and penalized is a demoralizing combination. Fortunately, the overall experience is plenty satisfying, and I really don't think an arbitrary score total for your campaign changes that fact all that much. Still, the FAQ for the game mentions a change to how this particular element should be scored in the end -- a sign that my group was hardly the first to feel betrayed.

Nevertheless, the overall experience of Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 was wonderful. Everyone had great fun with its ups and downs. I would do it again if I could. And I can! The same group of four of us has begun the next game in the series, Pandemic Legacy: Season 2. And if we maintain the same relaxed pace, enjoying it over the course of an actual year rather than rushing through it, who knows? There might be a Pandemic Legacy: Season 3 for us to move on to after that.

I give Season 1 an A-. Any board game enthusiasts who haven't tried it out should really do themselves a favor and experience the hype for themselves.