Tag Archives: Pandemic Legacy Season 2

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Pandemic Legacy 2: December

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Let me start off by saying this game is completely crazy. December did not turn out how any of us thought it would. When we started the month our journal entry reminded us that our supplies were almost gone and that we needed to reach Lake Baikal to find the PEARL Lab. Once we get there we would get whatever cure they had and bring it to Johannesburg.

We made it to Lake Baikal within the first round of the game and what we found out was really unexpected. The cure was here but it would be too dangerous to carry it out in the open so we had to inject massive amounts of it and carry it in our bodies. This dosage would kill the carrier. We only have 4 doses. In order to win this game we would have to kill characters.

Our goal now was to build a supply center in Johannesburg and Self-Infect at the PEARL Lab in Lake Baikal. To self-infect we had to scratch off exposures until we found a scar or died. If we found a scar we had to add the carrier sticker to our character card. This carrier sticker would cover character abilities and once your a carrier life gets even harder. As a carrier you can only move by doing the drive or ferry action and once you enter a city you have to discard a card matching its color. Finally, once the game is over, win or lose, the character is destroyed! We realized it would be impossible to win this game because we didn’t have the cards in order for a carrier to move to Johannesburg and our plague cubes were out of control. We decided it wouldn’t be worth it to infect anyone, but to work on a building a couple of new routes to make it easier and build a satellite tower we could keep. We were able to accomplish this but this next game just seems impossible. It also just feels awful that this is the way its ending. None of us expected that we would have to kill off characters to win. Yeah, it’s the last month, but still, they couldn’t find a more satisfying way to end the game?

During our second game in December we actually managed to pull off a win. I have no idea how this happened but we did it! Somehow we were able to manage plague cubes, build the supply center in Johannesburg and successfully deliver the sample. Claire, being the Laborer and Architect, was able to make the supply center in Johannesburg early on. She did receive her first scar of the game in the process but it had to be done. The scar she chose was called “weak”. This scar meant that Claire could only hold 3 supply cubes on her character card and that seemed ok because we didn’t see a need for carrying cubes anymore.

Aofie was the character we decided should self-inflect because she had room on her character card to carry the scars. Also her most useful job as an Administrator would not be helpful in moving the carrier. We were able to build a broadcast station in the red area to give her cards. Once she had the majority of the cards she self-inflicted.

The game couldn’t have been won without Goods. He was essential in managing stockpiles in cities. His Courier action which allowed him to deliver supplies to an adjacent city was huge. Goods was also a Smuggler which helped us out a few times because he could discard a card to move a supply cube from the reserve to the city that was discarded.

Once Aofie was infected and had moved herself towards Newt he was able to move her on his turn all of the way to Johannesburg. He did this because he was a Coordinator and as a free action he could move a pawn to his location if they were in an adjacent location. We thought this was the only way a special ability could move the carrier because it was still a drive/ferry and Aofie had all of the cards necessary to discard to enter the city.

After winning we were able to draw the final legacy cards. We thought they were a bit anticlimactic. I don’t know what we really expected but it just seemed like after spending a year on this game the whole ending was not what we expected. We learned that the world now belonged to the Faded and non-Faded. We tallied up our score and got 719. With this score we found that we had persevered and saved some cities. There are hopes that the Faded, non-Faded, and Hollow Men can co-exist.

Even though we felt the first season was better we are anxiously awaiting season 3.

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Pandemic Legacy 2: October and November

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This game is getting hard. October was weird because we were now able to use the satellite towers to communicate with the Hollow Men. We had to move the Hollow Men into 3 different havens to win October. The objective of building 3 supply centers was also still there. We thought that by moving the Hollow Men into the havens we could get them on our side and it would also help us move around the world more freely.

We were able to complete October with a win on the first try and to be honest I didn’t keep many notes about the game so I’m not going to say much.

November was a different story. In November we were told to destroy the objectives of building 3 new supply centers and get hollow men to defect. Now we had only one new objective to complete: complete the plan. The plan was we had to recon in Shanghai with 4 different recon missions. The nice thing about this was we didn’t need a supply center in Shanghai to recon. We had to Locate Hidden Entrance with 5 different red cards, Decode Access Key with 4 different black cards, Devise Distraction with 3 different yellow cards, and Prepare Containment Units with 3 different blue cards.

We knew this objective would be impossible because we didn’t have 5 different red cards yet. So we worked hard and completed 3 out of 4 recons and we accessed new red cities like crazy. With our game end upgrades we made sure to upgrade city cards to make them red cards. Even though we lost it still felt like a win and productive.

The second half of November was pretty hard. We are struggling now with keeping supply cubes on cities to avoid plague cubes. Things were not feeling great but all of the sudden the cards fell into place. We had one of the cards that could be any color and another card that could either be it’s original yellow or red. We even got lucky and on our way to complete the plan we drew another red card and was able to recon Jarkarta. Luckily Claire has the ability to recon without a supply center. With the recon we found another lost haven. We were told the haven was in ruins and we named it Assie (because all of our havens begin with A and this is in Australia). We are able to recon here if we get the opportunity. It felt good to win this game.

By completing the plan we accessed Utopia. Things seemed to get crazy when we did this though, we now have 8 Utopia infections cards and 4 more Hollow Men cards.

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Pandemic Legacy 2-June-The Hollow Men Arrive

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So in May when we reconned the Middle East we got some terrible news that the Hollow Men were there. We got 4 Hollow Men Gather cards and a bunch of little Hollow Men figurines. This was not looking good, so what did it mean? Well now at the beginning of the game the 4 Hollow Men Gather Cards are to be placed in the infection discard pile, meaning they won’t go into play until after the first epidemic. These cards do not count as an infection card draw, what happens is when you draw one the next city card you draw from the infection pile gets a Hollow Man added to it. Hollow Men in a city are terrible because if your character leaves a location with them there they gain an exposure. Hollow Men also decrease the population of a city by 1 at the end of the game. They can also decrease the population of a city in the middle of the game if a city already has 3 Hollow Men and the card is drawn again, instead of adding a 4th the population is decreased by 1.

We started June with the same characters (Aofie-Administrator, Claire-Laborer, Goods-Farmer, & Newt-Radio Operator). Our journal entry for June talked about Utopia again. It said our leaders went there and it’s a place that’s secure enough to resist the plague and Hollow Men. There’s suggestion that there might be a cure there, but we also don’t know where it is. The journal entry made it sound like it might be in the far east. It also tells us if we get there it is believed we would be helped but others also believe we would be killed on sight.

Going into this game we had a problem, how do we get out of cities that have Hollow Men without being exposed? According to the rule book if you try to leave a city with Hollow Men you are “cornered” and you cannot leave by the drive/ferry, sail, charter boat, or shuttle flight action without being exposed. So we decided that other means of leaving the city like being airlifted out of there or being transported by Aofie the Administrator would be ok.

This game was extremely difficult. We were not getting the cards we needed to make supply centers and Hollow Men were popping up everywhere. Plague cubes were also a problem. It was becoming clear that we would probably not win this game but we should try to recon Africa because Newt had the cards to get it. Before reconning Africa we were able to build a road to Frankfurt. We also thought about taking cards out of the game by using the free action of inoculation. We decided that if a city has a permanent supply center we could basically make it into a haven if we took this city card out of the infection discard. We are still hesitant to use this action because we are unsure if it will come back to haunt us later, but we did end up taking out 2 Washington and 2 Lagos.

Newt was able to recon Africa and the board was looking pretty ugly but we did get good news out of doing this. We found the ability to broadcast information to each other by building broadcast towers. We could build a broadcast tower in our city by using 2 supply cubes. Now while at the broadcast tower we could give another player a city card that matched the color of the city the tower was in. This player could be anywhere in the world, so it’s huge for moving cards around. With the use of the broadcast tower we were able to come up with a plan to be able to win the game, but this meant we would have to go a round a half to win. There was hope in sight but we were also 2 plague cubes away from losing.

During the recon we also connected Kinshasa to the grid and we got the Topaz Experimental Vaccine Unrationed Event Card.  This card will allow us to discard 1 epidemic card without any effect. Shortly after coming up with our extraordinary plan to win this game that we had no hope earlier of winning we had to place our final plague cube and the game ended in a loss.

Even though we lost the first game in June some good things came out of it like reconning Africa, but also a few bad things happened. Goods gained an exposure while leaving a city with Hollow Men in it, luckily it was just an exposure and no scar. We also had population problems. We had to postpone Newt’s character upgrade of the Helmsman again to use all of our 5 game end upgrades on controlling populations. We used the upgrades to keep Chicago, NY, Moscow, Baghdad and Buenos Aires at a population of 2.

While reading the legacy deck at the end of the game we did obtain 2 new characters: Rock a 30 year old Sanitation Officer from Albatross and Sparrow a 47 year old Captain from Albatross. The captain can discard a city card from any port location to move to any other port location on the grid if a sea route can be traced. This is a free action. The sanitation officer can discard 2 player cards to take a city or produce supplies card from the discard pile as a free action. This was the first time we had received new characters so that was cool; we were told they were volunteers from the Havens.

June Loss

Going into our second game in June we had no more areas on the map to recon so all we had to focus on was building the 3 supply stations, connecting 2 news cities to the grid with roads, and performing 2 search actions. We decided to use the same characters as previously. Since we lost the last game we gained 2 rationed events. We used the One Quiet Night and Drastic Measures. From the beginning Goods had Drastic Measures so this was good because it allowed us to remove 2 plague cubes from the grid.

Luckily this game went pretty smoothly. There were tense moments when 3 of us (Claire, Aofie, & Newt) ended up in New York and we struggled with should we remove the New York infection cards or let it ride. Of course we got an epidemic at this point and this meant we could all be exposed if Hollow Men showed up or if we lost all the cubes. Luckily neither happened. Fortunately, Claire obtained the Paris companion card which made it super easy for her to build 2 supply centers due to her being the Laborer and Architect. Goods was able to build the 3rd supply center. Newt built a road to Atlanta and Claire searched Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires we found the OPAL lab. OPAL lab is one of the four labs that are looking for a cure. Here another person joined us, a new character from Buenos Aires who was an immunologist. Paulo the immunologist can take the supply cubes from the reserve instead of the stockpile.

In finding the OPAL lab we learned that we would get a special ability when finding labs. OPAL allows us to take an additional supply cube if we make supplies in a haven or supply center. We were also able to put Lake Baikal on the map. This is Northeast of Delhi but there is no way to connect to it yet. We are told this is where the primary lab was located and if there was a cure it would come from here. Of course no one has heard from Lake Baikal for decades. Finding the lab was really cool and we were excited. It was even more exciting when Aofie was able to end the game on her turn by searching Baghdad and building a road to Riyadh. When searching Baghdad she gained 2 extra actions so she built another road to Moscow to make an easier way to access everything. The game ended here and Goods used her Drastic Measures card to remove the only plague cube from the map that would effect the population. For our game end upgrades, Newt finally received his Helmsman ability and we increased the population in Frankfurt and Kinshasa.

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Pandemic Legacy 2-May

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It had been awhile since our last Legacy game so we were excited to start May. We used the same team (Aofie-Administrator, Claire-Laborer, Newt-Radio Operator, & Goods-Farmer) From the journal entry before the game we found out that the Hollow Men were moving from the Americas into Europe and Africa. It also said we learned where our leaders went and why we’re still here, which none of us really got.  From the archives we learned about a place called Utopia. Other than that we really didn’t know much going into May other than we had to finish 3 objectives out of our 4. The objectives haven’t changed they were: connect 2 new cities to the grid, complete 2 searches, recon an unknown region, and the mandatory objective of building 3 new supply centers.

To start the game we had no rationed events to help us out because we won the last game. We still had the unrationed event of Strategic Reserves which would move 8 supply cubes from the reserve to the stockpile. With the help of the of the companion we found in Paris it was fairly easy for Claire to build supply centers. One supply center we made was in Lagos because we planned to use a game end upgrade to keep it there to make reconning Africa easier. We were able to search two cities: Moscow and Lima. Aofie searched Moscow and found a card that would allow her to give another player a player card. She gave Goods a card to allow her to make a supply center.  Goods searched Lima and found a companion that would allow a plague cube to be removed from her location. It could be played at any time. We were able to end the game by reconning the Middle East region. This was not the happiest recon because we found out the Hollow Men were here. We also learned the Hollow Men transport rats to release them into cites to make them infested. There were already infested cities on this new part of the map! We also heard about satellite towers here that picked up transmissions but who were they from? There was a hint that hopefully in August we could be able to fine tune our equipment to pick up their transmissions. We also learned we had no way of reconning further east yet.

In this recon we connected Baghdad to the grid. We got 4 Hollow Men Gather cards that went into the infection discard pile. We also got the Renewel  unrationed event. This card will allow us to place a character ability worth 2 or less on a character card currently in play. The cool thing about it is we can place it over a scar.

Luckily, this ended our game in May with a win and we didn’t have to deal with the new Hollow Men aspect of the game.  For our game end upgrades we had 5 points and we wanted to use 3 of these to keep our supply center in Lagos. This created some drama because we realized we had no more permanent supply center stickers. So we decided to upgrade Newt the Radio Operator to a Helmsman which would allow him to do a free Drive/Ferry action each turn, essentially giving him an extra action. Then we were trying to decide what to do with the other 2 points when I realized that we hadn’t read from the legacy deck at the end of the game like we were supposed to. Guess what was in the Legacy deck? More permanent supply centers. So now we had a dilemma do we not go with the supply center in Lagos and keep Newt’s upgrade or do we keep his upgrade and go with 2 others? We had already stuck the sticker on the character card. We eventually decided we needed the permanent supply center in Lagos so we used that and with the other 2 points after much consideration we gave Goods the Smuggler character upgrade. The smuggler can discard a city card to take a supply cube from the reserve and put it in the matching  city card. We decided that we would keep the Helmsman sticker on Newt’s character card but it could not be used until after the next game when we could hopefully purchase it.

Overall we felt pretty good how the May game went, but we were in for some trouble coming in June.

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Pandemic Legacy Season 2-April

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Just like March, April was freaken hard. Our very first shot at April started with a series of unfortunate events caused by SOMEBODY (that somebody being me) shuffling the cards terribly.  Don was busy so I thought I would give a shot at getting the game ready and shuffling the cards. I have never done it before (adding the epidemic cards) and I will never do it again!

We had to read some Legacy cards before beginning our game. Our first card instructed us to scratch off a card if we had not re-conned South America yet. We had already discovered South America though so this card was not needed. We got a journal entry that told us that although the lead laboratory was lost there were 3 laboratories supposedly still operating in the Southern Hemisphere. Now we need to find them to see if they have made any progress. We also got a report from year 42 that said the Pacific Haven was not reporting.

We played the same characters as before (farmer, laborer,administrator, and radio operator). This game did not last long for us because it was clear I did not shuffle well at all. We had 3 epidemics in a row. Plague cubes were being put all over the board and Goods received her first exposure. Luckily, her first exposure was nothing. We also used up one of our Produce Supply Cards. Things were going terribly and none of us felt we were in the right state of mind. We decided that since we had barely made it through round 2 of this game and it was such a shit show we would abandon ship. This left the question of what do we do about the permanent stuff we did like the exposure and the wasted produce supplies card?

Hilariously, as we were all debating what to do–should we quit? should we keep going? should we keep the permanent damage done?–Ian was working on a solution. He had been walking around and had made little squares of electrical tape to put over the stuff we had scratched off on cards. This creativity pretty much convinced us all we should restart and have Don shuffle.

So we now officially started April. April gets harder because you only have 27 supply cubes to start. Things were not easy. We had to accomplish 3 out of 5 objectives. There was still the mandatory objective of building 3 new supply centers. Then we could either access a lost haven, connect 2 new cities to the grid, complete 2 searches or recon 1 unknown region. We really wanted to try to recon Africa because we still didn’t have enough cities to recon India. Things didn’t go as planned though. We just couldn’t get a good combination of cards and we couldn’t contain plague cubes and we ending up losing our first game in April. This is where we came up with the phrase “we gotta lose some to win some”. Maybe that is what we have to do? Things we did accomplish in this game though were: completing 2 searches and connecting Lima to the grid.

Our search in Santiago was not so great as it told us this town was haunted. We learned this city was plagued by infected rats. We learned our characters would gain an exposure if they began a turn in an infested city. Santiago became our first infested city, but we are unclear how this infestation spreads. We have stickers to make more cities infested.

Our search in St. Petersburg was much better. It allows a player to do the search action for free if they have this card in their hand.

During our population adjustment at the end of our first game in April we discovered we had our first forsaken city, Santiago. Forsaken cities are cities with a population of zero. This made us use our Turning Point #1. Now we learned how cities became infested because forsaken cities become immediately infested. Whenever you pull a forsaken city during the infection phase you put that card in the game end area and draw another card. Forsaken cities also do not count as cities on the grid for the game in production points.

We were bummed we had our first forsaken city but it really could not have occurred in a better city. Santiago is pretty secluded and it was already infested. We decided to just leave it forsaken and up the population in Istanbul, Cairo, and Tripoli. We used our last 2 production points to up the population in Chicago and NY because they were going to go down due to plague cubes.

Our loss in April-Pandemic Legacy Season 2

Another loss. This game is challenging! We wanted to beat April though so we tried again. This time with success. We used the same characters as previously and we also had a lot of good things happen (besides one exposure). Aofie received her first exposure but luckily it was nothing.

We were able to build 3 supply centers in London, St. Petersburg, and Cairo. At the end of our game we used a game end upgrade to keep a permanent supply center in Cairo. This will make it easier for us to recon that area.

We completed 2 searches, one in Lima and one in St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg told us about smugglers in the area that wanted to help so we were able to draw a sea lane from St. Petersburg to another city. We drew a sea lane from St. Petersburg to New York. Our search in Lima was very interesting, it told us we learned the location of a new haven but we had not yet accessed it.

Since Goods was already in Lima we were able to discover the lost haven. We named it Albatross (keeping with the A-named havens and after the bird in the Galapagos).  When we accessed the haven we were able to open package 6. Package 6 gave us some pretty awesome stuff. It told us about some experimental medicines that were being used to inoculate populations. The inoculated cities would remain inoculated for months to buy us some time. It also informed us a cache of supplies were found and we were able to add 15 supply cubes to the stockpile. Even more cool, as of now, from now on we will be able to add 15 more supply cubes at the start of the game.

We got 3 portable antiviral lab cards which allow us when making supplies to discard this card and add 3 more supply cubes to our character card. So that is pretty cool. We also received a new free action to inoculate. When we inoculate we can take a player card or an infection card from the discard pile matching our current city and put it in package 6. These cards stay in package 6 from game to game. We cannot take them out until instructed to do so, but we can look at them. We may not add any stickers to them. What’s crazy is we can add up to 30 player cards and 30 infection cards! All of these upgrades seem almost too good to be true. Don really wants to be cautious about putting cards into package 6 because he thinks it will come back to haunt us later. He is probably right, but it’s hard not to do it now and reap the benefits. So far we have a Tripoli and a Cairo infection card in package 6.

During this game we also connected Moscow to the grid. This was necessary to be able to recon this area since we needed more black cities on the grid. We used our other 2 game end upgrade points to up the population in Moscow and Lima. Lagos, NY, and Jacksonville took a population hit but they are still ok.

We were super pumped to win. Having funding for rationed events helped but were not necessary because we didn’t even draw Hidden Stockpile. We did use Drastic Measures which allowed us to remove 2 plague cubes from the grid. This helped with the population adjustment at the end. This game is really challenging and really makes you think. We can’t wait for the May game!

April Win! Pandemic Legacy Season 2