We lost our first game! We each played the same characters as the March campaign: the quarantine specialist, operations expert, dispatcher, and scientist. Starting out the game the objectives were the same as the last one, accomplish two out of the three objectives. The objectives were cure the three diseases, make military bases in every region, or eradicate one disease. This game was especially harder than the previous ones though for us.
When we got to the second epidemic the city that Don’s character was in, I believe it was Johannesburg, outbroke so he had to take a scar. The operations specialist has the first scar since we started playing legacy. He chose the scar that would make him discard a card whenever an epidemic card is pulled.
During the second epidemic card we were instructed to pull the next legacy card. This one told us that the yellow disease which is c0da has mutated even more. Basically from the description it sounds like this disease creates zombies. The cities that are infected with the yellow disease are called faded cities now. They get a faded sticker and instead of yellow cubes they get faded markers, which look like little zombie figures. Faded cities are bad because if they outbreak they spread to the surrounding cities even if the surrounding cities are of other colors. They work just like the regular cubes in that if you run out of them and can’t put anymore on the board you lose the game. Also if you are in a city that becomes faded your character takes a scar. Basically the only way to control the faded cities are to keep quarantines on the yellow cities.
We were going through the cards and we were realizing we were not close to any of the objectives. We made a plan of how to get the cures but the blue cure was complicated. This game as well as the last game I found myself struggling as the scientist to get enough cards to create cures. It should be easy for me to cure because I need one less card than everyone else, but instead I am struggling to get cities of the same color. I am wondering if this is because we are not using the researcher. Maybe we should switch it up next time by taking out the scientist and putting in the researcher.
We were no where near getting military bases up so we opted to try to eradicate the black disease because it had already been cured. Things seemed to be going on track and I would be able to cure blue on my turn. We failed to realize though that the red disease was getting out of control and on Ian’s turn, right before mine, red exploded twice and we ran out of red cubes, meaning we lost the game. It was very disappointing. I think even if we found the cure for blue in the next turn we still would have struggled to eradicate black. Eradication of diseases is one of the hardest things to do in pandemic so next time I think we are focusing on military bases. Even though we lost we will be able to replay April’s campaign one more time before we have to move on.
Since we lost we got to add 2 to our funding, meaning we will get event cards in the next game. This will be nice. And even in losing, you are able to pick 2 upgrades. I believe for our upgrades we chose to keep 2 military bases to be in every game. This will help us accomplish our goal in the next game.
