Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 (2017)

How to Play Pandemic Legacy: Season 2

Pandemic Legacy takes place over the course of a year, with each month being one game. Your aims will evolve each month, but ultimately you will be spending your time delivering supplies to the remaining cities and managing the continued spread of the plague.

The story evolves through the legacy deck, which dictates your objectives and other changes to the game.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I’ll try to explain the basic rules of your first game. Although these may change as the year goes by…

Setting up

To begin, infect the board by placing the plague cubes in their specified locations. Then deal city cards to all players before building the player deck, made up of city cards, event cards, and five epidemic cards.

Next, read the legacy deck to learn your objectives for the month and choose your characters, placing their pawns at their home haven. In the first game, you’ll get to create them from scratch!

Taking Turns

Turns work a lot like they did in the original Pandemic, but with one extra step:

1. Check exposure

If your pawn is in a city with a plague cube, deal one damage.

2. Take four actions

You can now take any combination of available actions. These include:

• Move – either go directly to an adjacent location, or use a city card to go to the destination on the card, or, if you’re in the location named on the card, go to any destination you like.
• Make supplies – take a supply cube.
• Deliver supplies – put supply cubes on a location.
• Share knowledge – give a city card that matches the city you’re in to a player at the same location.
• Build a supply center – discard five cards matching your current city’s color and build a supply center there.
• Recon – explore unknown parts of the map. To do so, you’ll usually need a supply center nearby and various combinations of city cards.

Your characters may also have other abilities/actions depending on their role, while you could unlock other actions throughout the game, too.

3. Draw two Player Cards

Alongside replenishing your deck, this is when you could draw an epidemic card. If you’re unfortunate enough to do so, then follow these three steps:

• Increase – Move the Infection Rate one space up the Infection Rate track.
• Infect – Draw the bottom card from the Infection deck and remove all supply cubes from that city. Add that card to the infection discard pile.
• Intensify – shuffle the discard pile and put it back on top of the Infection Deck

4. Infect cities

Flip over as many infection cards from the top of the Infection Deck as the infection rate marker shows and add them to the discard pile. Remove a supply cube from that city. If it doesn’t have a supply cube, add a plague cube and move the incident marker one space up the track.

If a location already has three plague cubes, an outbreak occurs. In this instance, remove a supply cube from all connected cities, or add a plague cube if they have none. Move the incident marker one space up the track for each plague cube placed.

Once a player finishes step four, move on to the next player.

Winning And Losing

You move through the game trying to complete your objectives. If the player deck runs out or if you reach the end of the track then your team loses. If you achieve your objectives without meeting either of those two conditions, you win and move on to the next game!

Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 Review

“As someone that rates Pandemic among my favorite gaming experiences ever, and also loves the concept of legacy games, you’ll not be surprised to learn I strongly recommend getting a copy of this game if you can get a group together.

The strength of the narrative makes it one of the best story-driven co-operative games on the market, while the level of personalization and evolution of the rules throughout the game put it up there as one of the best legacy interpretations of a game, too.”

Joe Jones, gamecows.com

“Neither season’s pacing is better or worse than the other; they’re simply different. Season 1 is more structured, which can make it feel like the players have less overall impact on the story, but most months remain interesting. Ss 2 is less structured, which makes the players feel like they have more impact on the story, but this can also lead to some less interesting months if players aren’t able to accomplish much.

Season 2 outshines Season 1 in lore, artwork, and player story-building. However, due to the nature of some mechanics feeling less novel, Season 2 falls short of Season 1 in satisfying twists and turns and pacing. The physical components in both are stellar. It is immensely satisfying to uncover and maneuver around the map.”

Spencer Patterson, geeksundergrace.com

“Pandemic Legacy Season 2 does a good job of making an addictive experience out of a world recovering from a global plague. There is a little too much RNG at times and the ending leaves much to be desired but the actual meat of the game is fun and addicting, and is framed by an interesting story whether you’ve played the previous season or not. Just make sure that you don’t care too much about how well the stickers stay down and you’ll probably end up having a good time. At least until the world is destroyed.”

William Worrall, techraptor.net

The content of this article is originally from Board Game Geek and gamecows.com. For more information and a better understanding of the game, you can watch the videos below.