by Wentu
This sessions' report is full of SPOILERS for the game Pandemic Legacy Season 1. Don't read if you don't want to be spoiled about the many great surprises.We bought the game in late December 2015. We are in four, all of us colleagues in a small-to-medium sized software firm in Parma, Italy.
I am the most experienced player of the group but we all enjoy board games. We usually play light and short games during our rest hour after lunch.
As soon as I read about Pandemic Legacy I tried to convince my fellow players to try this completely new (for us) experience and they very soon accepted, even if there is this scaring thing that PL1 is a game you can only play at most 24 times.
Since I was the only one with some long lost Pandemic experience we started by playing a few warming up games to understand the basic mechanics. The enthusiasm about the game was alrady great: the original game is indeed enough to be considered one of the best cooperative games around (togheter, IMO, with Flash Point).
After Christmas vacations we decided it was high time to start playing the real thing.
So here we are with a medium-detailed description of what is happening in our campaign.
The Warm DecemberWait, what?? what is that supposed to mean? December? Aren't we supposed to start from January?
We have a long tradition of getting the wrong rules while playing a game for the first time.
No matter how long I read the game rules, I always manage to forget something or misinterpret the rulebook. I was sure my preparation for PL1 was sound enough but as usual I was wrong.
If there is ONE thing I have to criticize so far about the game is this:
in the all-important Legacy Deck you have these cards with a big [STOP] sign on them, that are supposed to guide you through the gaming experience. Well, I knew I had to be very careful not to shuffle the deck and to follow its instructions. When we had to prepare our first game I started with the cards but when I met the second [STOP] (the first after the initial card that covers the deck) I stopped immediately to read and I didn't go on.
Therefore, we completely missed the whole point of the January game, the COdA!
We just played another warming up game without knowing it. Let's call it "the Warm December".
We choose to remove the Scientists as a role in order to be able to immediately give the Generalist some advance because we perceive the Generalist as the weaker role.
Lineup:
Wentu: Dispatcher
Canta: Medic (he falls victim of delusion of omnipotence when walking through cities while curing everyone by his mere presence. This seems the only fixed role we have so far)
Landi: Researcher
Rugge: Generalist
The Blue diseases starts quite dangerous in the norther Athlantic while the rest of the world is somewhat evenly spread with the rest of the cubes.
By the time the 3rd epidemic is out (remember we DON'T know what happens truly at the second Epidemic) the Dispatcher cures the first disease, the Yellow one and I have the honour of naming it.
Of course our team needs to find names related to what we have in common, and the work place is an obvious source. Here are the names we gave to the 4 diseases during our January 0th game:
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iSfluenza: in english that would be iSflu/iSfluence), from the name of our firm, iSolutions. This is the Yellow disease
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Reperibillo: it is a mix of "Reperibilità" (that is , "being on call") and "Morbillo" (italian for "Measles"). This is the Red disease, discovered by the Generalist
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Cantaratta: another mesh up of the last name of one of us, the current Medic, and the clouding of the eye, Cataract, in italian "Cataratta". This is the black disease, discovered by the Researcher.
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Cubalgia: named while I was away from the gaming room, is the cross of "Cube", from OLAP cubes I am working on with much pain, and "-algia", greek for pain. Moreover, it sound extremely similar to "pubalgia", same word in italian and english. This is the Blue Disease, first cured by the Dispatcher.
Shortly after, the Medic has this card, Cairo, that I insist he uses to build our first research facility, based on an influential scientific paper by doctor Johannes Wentu on the Journal of Useless Mathmatics where he explains and demonstrates that the correct order to follow to build research centers, in order to minimize the average distance of any city to the nearest RS, is given by: Atlanta, Cairo, Hong Kong, San Paulo, Essen, Delhi.
Now I know we can do it.
Now Cubalgia is still the strongest menace in northern Athlantic while Reperibillo is confined to Sydney and Cantaratta is growing fast.
After the third Epidemic, iSfluenza, the only cured disease, is growing out of control in the Americas but three of us are holding an important meeting in Teheran in order to exchange precious cards.
The Teheran Summit of Warm December allows us to find soon the cure for Reperibillo in the Cairo Labs.
Unfortunately, while Cubalgia is strngthening in North America and Europe, we have our first city falling into Panic for iSfluenza: Miami. This is our first Outburst and we dutifully mark this on the map.
After the fourth Epidemic strucks our Researcher in Atlandta discovers a cure for Cantaratta. We now know he was bloody wrong, but this is another story. We still need three people in the Americas to keep iSfluenza at bay though because 8 cities are at risk for the 5th Epidemic.
Only when time is running up and we only have 1 turn remaining we flock back to Atlant to discover the cure for Cubalgia.
Our victory fills us with joy! Only Miami has reached level 1 and our characters are still intact. Almost a perfect job.
We decide to have a permanent Research Facility in Cairo but, contrary to our first plan, we don't give any special power to the generalist: we prefer a positive mutation that allows us to cure iSfluenza wherever we are.
It's time to prepare another game and I start reading the rest of the STOP card. And doubts creep into the room. We ask Ximena, who follows our adventure, to read the cards ahead while we exit the room and the shocking truth emerge. I read the card and interpreted it in the wrong way.
We are flabbergasted! We were so overjoyed and now it seems like we just had a dream. Nothing of what we did was "the real thing!".
It was only, a Warm December.
January 1We decide to play January again, first game, considering what just happened just another waming game. We write with a pencil a small "0" on the Miami sticker that goes back to normality and we ignore the stickers for the RC in Cairo and for the positive mutation of iSfluenza.
We pay attention to have the card "place a RS where you want" so that we can be sure to place it again in Cairo and we agree that we will also choose again the positive mutation for the yellow disease, no matter what, just because it is already on the map.
We also think that, to make things right, we should leave Miami go into panic again after we calmed it down at the beginning of the year.
Lineup:
Wentu: Dispatcher
Canta: Medic
Landi: Researcher
Rugge: Scientist
January 2Lineup:
Wentu: Researcher
Canta: Medic
Landi: Dispatcher
Rugge: Scientist
February 1Lineup:
Wentu: Researcher
Canta: Medic
Landi: Dispatcher
Rugge: Quarantine Specialist
March 1Lineup:
Wentu: Researcher
Canta: Medic
Landi: Dispatcher
Rugge: Quarantine Specialist