by dodonna
Our group is midway through April, and I'm ready to call it: I hate Season 2.We're all experienced Pandemic players who played through the Season 1 campaign, and we have won one game (January #1) out of six. We thought that we had barely beaten March #2, but no, I noticed that we'd actually placed the 8th plague cube without advancing the counter.
In part it's the swinginess that others have noted. Drawing multiples of the same city card in a single player turn sucks, especially with an ever-diminishing number of supply cubes to cover more and more locations. Original Pandemic isn't easy, but at least you usually have a chance to react to a possible outbreak.
Part of the fun of Season 1 was starting with a standard game of Pandemic and watching it degrade and mutate into a different experience. Even the partial victory that we eked out after December came with a sense of accomplishment.
Here, we're starting with a sliver of the previous board, and much of the expected gameplay is inverted. Expanding the map seems to be the goal, but doing so saddles us with more and weaker cities to defend. It feels as if the world would be better off if we stuck to the initial map, even if it meant losing every game. (Granted, we've very nearly achieved that win/loss record.)
In the end, I'm just not having a good time. I don't feel I'm accomplishing anything, and after playing nearly a third of the campaign nothing resembling a storyline has emerged. I see no good reason to continue.