Reply: Pandemic Legacy: Season 1:: Rules:: Re: Relationship rules (mild relationship spoiler)

by rmsgrey

dugman wrote:

Sorry I'm simply not buying this argument. You don't need relationships at all to make players paranoid about the Legacy deck, all you need is the first Legacy card in January that suddenly makes a disease incurable which happens even before relationships are available in the first place! If that isn't enough of a kick to get players thinking outside the box so to speak then I'm sure the things that happen in the next three months will kickstart them as well.

So no, I don't think any additional penalty is necessary to make the game feel artificially punishing. The Legacy deck itself already does that job, as does the loss of funding when you win. And this happens right from the start of the game, there's no "waiting until August" for things to get interesting.

Mid-January neither rewards nor punishes "good" play particularly. There's no trap there for the unwary to walk into.

Adding relationships in February and not letting them be created between characters that already exist does punish "good" play in January - or at least creates a situation where people say they'd play differently in January if they knew what was coming. That's a "gotcha!" moment from the Legacy deck.

Losing funding when you win isn't a "gotcha!" - you know it's coming, and the consensus appears to be that it's still worth winning as much as possible rather than trying to build up funding for later.

There are only a few twists in the game where you have reason to actively regret having made a particular "obvious" choice previously - not being able to co-worker Researcher and Scientist is the first. Without it, you could easily reach August still believing that the Legacy Deck is fair, and that doing the obviously best thing in the short-term is always going to work out.