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Embark on an epic adventure to bring humanity back from the brink of extinction in this standalone follow-up to the acclaimed Pandemic Legacy: Season 1. Black and Yellow Editions have variant covers game contents are the same.
143245
9/10 on exploration 2/10 on enjoyment. tldr: Season 1 was a much better game. My chief complaints are as such: A) Tying single use actions to end game scoring (e.g. searching cards and scratching that off) creates an incentive that hinders actual progress in the game given that you need to search to actually make progress in what you can do. If it looked like we were going to win, we would search to push us over the top. If we were going to lose and wanted to conserve the greatest potential to achieve victory conditions for a future game, we didn't. Mixing search results of "stuff I need long term" with "stuff I only can only use this game" doesn't help drive that incentive structure as it gives you no ability to make a value judgement on when you should search an area. There isn't anything that says "search anything and everything regardless of whether it wins you the game otherwise you're doomed in the second half of the year." B) There is zero tension, we either curbstomp the game and win before the 3rd epidemic, or we lose horribly by the time the second one comes up (which isn't long given that we're up to 8 now...). There is no "oh, we almost ran out of cards in the player deck and we were one turn away from winning." It's virtually always "we were not even close" or "we could have screwed off for another full round or two easily." In either game in June, we didn't build a single supply center and not for lack of trying. We didn't draw enough city cards to get to that point, two players had two turns and one player got exactly 1 turn that game... I literally don't care because I have no agency to drive the story forward. In educational research on feedback loops, this has too many amplifiers of bad results, not enough governors to return to an expected outcome. Why does the game pull you ahead and open new regions (and thus add cards to the player deck) when to succeed I need to find a specific card in the deck and search against it, but it won't say "if in June you haven't already found this, pull this card out of the player deck and scratch it off" to play catch-up? It just buries you. People can say "oh, pay close attention to the hints" but we're back to point number one. Unless you just happened to pick the right starting character combo and play exactly the optimum way of searching heavily instead of connecting lots of cities, it's entirely possible to lose the ONE card that will actually really help you into the player deck for game after game.
Akado
Incredibly tense, and the "your fate depends on the shuffle" element of vanilla pandemic is everpresent and even magnified. The overall idea and narrative is great, but some of the details are problematic. Overall, I enjoyed the play and would possibly recommend it to others (but not blindly), but there were some real annoyances while playing that could be dealbreakers. There are definitely points in the game where the outcome is completely out of your hands, due to the game not having many ways to mitigate luck of the draw, and the steep death spiral starts (and ends) quickly. There are ways to mitigate the luck, but that depends on how well your group is doing and it's possible to exhaust those methods, leaving future months more random. Oddly enough, I'm not sure that "fun" is the word I would use to describe it, because it feels almost like push-your-luck in trying to rack up achievements before time runs out. That being said, there are lots of fun moments talking about how Washington is threatening to infect the whole country.
andersed
More random than season 1 and much more random than normal pandemic. Weak mechanics and balance. I miss the narrative structure from season 1.