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Hello Survivor! Welcome to the Pandemic Legacy Season 2 discussion thread and potential SPOILER ZONE. Before you continue, know this thread will contain spoilers for all of Pandemic Legacy Season 1 without holding anything back. It will also contain spoilers for all of Season 2, in time, hopefully hidden behind helpful spoiler tags, like this: (MONTH) SPOILER S2 is also split up into 12 months with no more than 2 games per month. This is your first Season 2 spoiler! This OP will contain spoilers relating to all of Season 1 as well as information from the unmodified game manual as it appears in a fresh copy of Season 2. You can find those manuals here: Black Edition Yellow Edition  THE WORLD ALMOST ENDED 71 YEARS AGO quote:The plague came out of nowhere and ravaged the world. Fever, cough, sores, and death – once infected, most died within a week. Nothing could stop it. The world did its best. It wasn’t good enough. Pandemic Legacy Season 2 is a story continuation of Pandemic Legacy Season 1, the much-beloved and oft-abandoned legacy style game. Your band of survivors is tasked with holding together a world left disconnected and fragile after the events of Season 1.  SUGGESTED SUPPLIES
FAQ Do I need to have played Season 1 first? Nope. The world caught a terrible plague named CoDA. Zombies or something. That's basically all you need to know. If you played S1, nothing from your playthrough carries over. S2 begins fresh with the world in pretty bad shape, making the "pretty bad" ending canon. Do I really need to destroy all this stuff and mess my board up to play the game? The long answer is maybe not if you are crazy careful and diligent about ... perhaps 100 different variables for every game. The short (and correct) answer is do not sweat it. Do what the game tells you, embrace the chaos, leave your mark, and know that personalization and finality are the big selling points of the game. Just do it. Most people who finished and LOVED S1 had no appetite for more of it. Once you are done you will be sated and fully happy with having traveled the path of DESTRUCTION. I promise. What is the difference between the yellow and black versions? Nothing important. Some coloring. The two versions exist to help you run two games concurrently and tell your games apart at a glance. Buy whichever will look better on your shelf when you're done.  How well does the game play at X player count? Can my partner and I each play two characters? All player counts are supported up to 4. It's an open-information co-operative game, and you will be fine however you set it up. Keep in mind, while swapping people in and out of your playgroup is possible, keeping the same people in every game greatly enhances the experience. There are rules tweaks for 2–4 characters, and some people think the game is a bit too easy with just two characters. If you are playing 2p with a partner, feel free to mix it up and find the difficulty that's right for you. My partner and I played 18 games of Season 1 almost entirely with two characters, and we both consider it our all-time favorite two-player game experience. So this is just vanilla Pandemic with some legacy elements slapped on top? No! You could describe Season 1 that way a little bit, but the gameplay for Season 2 has been changed. It will still feel familiar to Pandemic vets, as the gameplay uses many of the same elements, just in slightly modified ways. Knowing Season 2 is a new experience, they have helpfully included a set of objectives for "Prologue" games, essentially running you through the new systems sans any legacy elements. Prologue games are repeatable as many times as you need. What's exciting about Season 2, then? Season 2 features an improved character system and an exploration system. Rather than start with a full world, humanity begins with a vastly reduced world, which will expand alongside our capabilities to help people. This is hard, we keep losing and our world is a complete disaster.  Make sure you are doing the end-of-game stuff correctly (you get boons after every GAME not just every month, also your Rationing will change every game). Not knowing any specifics about the game yet it's tough to give concrete advice, but chances are some base Pandemic tips and tricks will be applicable. And at the end of the day remember, things going badly is what makes Legacy FUN. A 12-month Season of Pandemic where everything gets cleaned up and nothing goes wrong would be boring. Embrace things going very badly and snowballing. Laugh at your misfortune and recognize the game is designed to hurt sometimes. Season 1 really sprung that whole scoring thing on us at the end and gave us a serious case of the feel-bads. Season 2 also has a scoring system, though this time they tell you about it upfront. Here is its (still pretty vague) description in the manual: END OF THE CAMPAIGN The campaign will end after you finish December (win or lose!). At that point, you will be scored on your final results. Your score will largely be based on how many months you won (winning in the earlier part of the month is better). The population of the grid will have a (lesser) impact on your score. There will be other criteria that will also add to or subtract from your score. COMMONLY OVERLOOKED RULES (As noted in the unmodified manual) • You do not draw a replacement card after drawing an Epidemic card. • On your turn, with the Share Knowledge action, you may take a card from another player if you are both in the city that matches the card. • Your hand limit applies at all times. • Locations can contain any number of Supply cubes (The population of a location does affect how many Supply cubes can be added with the Produce Supplies action, however.) Huxley fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Oct 27, 2017 |
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Oct 23, 2017 20:23
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I've played up through August so if people have questions once they get going I'm happy to answer them. FWIW there was only one thing that we didn't figure out pretty easily from the rulebook, and even that was correct RAW, just felt too friendly to be right.
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Oct 24, 2017 00:44
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Buy a sharpie and id also suggest a ruler
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Oct 25, 2017 12:13
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Pocky In My Pocket posted:Buy a sharpie and id also suggest a ruler Have you played an early copy? I can't think of anything I would want a ruler for in Season 1. Intrigue! I'll add a chunk to OP.
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Oct 25, 2017 15:13
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I've only played January. I'd also say the differences in how it plays means you should play a tutorial game first (there is support for one in the box) even if you're familiar with pandemic
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Oct 26, 2017 14:40
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I love this thread title 
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Oct 26, 2017 22:35
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For anyone that's played this game, how unreasonable would it be to try and play this game over the internet? I don't want to spoil myself either so it's not like I want to open everything and scan it. Is this just a terrible idea? Maybe a webcam? It's not like you hide your hands from the other players. I don't really have a way to play in person but I'm buying a copy to try and do this.
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Oct 27, 2017 09:08
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TacMan posted:For anyone that's played this game, how unreasonable would it be to try and play this game over the internet? I don't want to spoil myself either so it's not like I want to open everything and scan it. Is this just a terrible idea? Maybe a webcam? It's not like you hide your hands from the other players. I don't really have a way to play in person but I'm buying a copy to try and do this. It would definitely be tough, maybe not impossible. Would be a lot easier with a webcam hovering over the board plus their hand. Stelas ran quite a few play-by-mail Mage Knight games that were really helpful for me learning that game, but thinking back it's also a good example of PBM done right. The games aren't similar enough to make a 1:1 comparison (in MK you have fewer turns but they're much more involved, there's less board talk, and the board itself is a lot more static than Pandemic), but if you want an idea of how much work CAN go into this kind of thing, his newbie game is a good place to start. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3720265 We played the prologue a couple times last night but my wife really lit up at the opportunity to name the Havens and the characters. As much time as I spent reading the rulebook, she spent debating over character creation and optimal job pairing. We ended up with Andy, April, Leslie, Ron, and Jerry and our Havens named Pawnee, Eagleton, and The Pit. Pairs up nicely with our S1 where she decided on a Always Sunny theme, featuring the diseases named Night Man, Day Man, Kitten Mittens, and whatever the 4th one we had planned that turned into CoDA.
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Oct 27, 2017 14:46
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Just picked this up from my FLGS, and will have my first game of it one Sunday. Are there any gotcha rules like the first game had? (Specifically, the small rule that you couldn't select a positive mutation for a disease if you didn't cure it tripped up my group until we caught it)
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Oct 27, 2017 18:34
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Two I've seen pop up (as I understand the rules from the prologue): 1. You can always move 1 cube to your character sheet from the supply as an action, but you can only use the Produce Supplies card at a Haven or Supply Center. (You can add a supply to yr character for one action and spend an action to drop any number of supplies) 2. A city can have as many supply cubes on it as you want, but when you use Produce Supplies it only produces UP TO its population. So if a city has a population of 5, it can hold 10 supply cubes, but using the Produce Supplies card there wouldn't do anything, since it can only bring it up to a maximum of 5. Huxley fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Oct 28, 2017 |
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Oct 27, 2017 18:49
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Getting mine after work, and already looking forward to the first gutpunch like the "You've been played" reveal. I literally called up my friend I knew was ahead of me in the game afterwards, telling him about how we lost our most decorated colonel who was singlehandedly keeping the faded in line, and he just cackled.
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Oct 27, 2017 18:52
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Huxley posted:Two I've seen pop up (as I understand the rules from the prologue): 1 is misleading. You can add a supply to yr character for one action and spend an action to drop any number of supplies
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Oct 28, 2017 00:11
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Thanks, I clarified the post.
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Oct 28, 2017 00:56
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I jumped the gun and bought this in preparation for when most of my group from the first game is back in the country (like, January). Now I get to stare at the box and rulebook and tantalise myself for three months.
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Oct 28, 2017 09:16
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Spoilers for months 1 and 2: ...So... how about that supply tracker slowly ticking down until a big, ominous zero in December, huh? And everyone looking a lot more Post Apoc Chic? It's a hell of a trip. The new mechanics of kinda playing reverse Pandemic feel so different, even though I recognize that the game is pretty similar. And MAN did we underestimate just how hard things were going to be without labs to fly us around the map. Even the super nerfed Dispatcher (AKA the administrator) feels like a miracle worker some of the time. Also, spoiler for box 1 We didn't manage to recon anything else yet, but we did link up two more cities to the grid. We were so close to getting South America, but we realized we'd be one card short on the last turn. Summary: I think the game is better than Season 1, and it'd have to really screw up to change that. Go get the game.
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Oct 31, 2017 00:20
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Can you add Supply cubes to a city after it becomes infected to keep it from getting more infected cubes?
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Oct 31, 2017 01:54
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Huxley posted:Can you add Supply cubes to a city after it becomes infected to keep it from getting more infected cubes? Yes.
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Oct 31, 2017 03:35
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Yeah, but if you start your turn there, you'll eat some exposure, so drop and run.g
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Oct 31, 2017 12:18
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Or have your Administrator extricate you before your turn comes around.
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Oct 31, 2017 14:06
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Thanks! It somehow never came up as being strategically necessary in our 3 Prologue games. But we got a traditional Pandemic bad beat (and I'm almost positive we would have lost anyway). We did learn one real neat thing re: character cards and scars: One character built a Supply Center and Produced Supplies, then flipped Epidemic into that same city, then double flipped it on Infect. We couldn't move her, so she took an Exposure. We assumed every exposure was either a scar or a skull, but some are just blank. It makes sense looking back, as there are more Exposure spaces than scar slots on each character card, but it was a nice surprise to dodge a bullet.
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Oct 31, 2017 14:34
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SettingSun posted:Or have your Administrator extricate you before your turn comes around. Or, as came up last night, win the game before it comes to your turn again. The rationed events are so tantalizing, but my group is really efficient, so we almost never get to play with them.
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Oct 31, 2017 14:58
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Edit: Nm, I'm dumb.
Caros fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Nov 1, 2017 |
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Nov 1, 2017 08:06
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Man the middle of March can Go gently caress itself. We added two new epidemics to the deck at the end of game and will be adding another before the start of April. I get that it smooths things out, but I can't even imagine how we are supposed to deal with things once we are drawing five cards per infect step. Overall I'm really surprised with how hectic things are. We basically decided to sacrifice the first half of March, even knowing that we could win, in an attempt to equalize our rationing and expand our grid, but holy hell does the game not make it easy to survive while doing both.
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Nov 4, 2017 10:52
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I don't really feel like this needs spoiler tags, but you gotta hang in there. My group hit that sense of defeat but things get better, try to stick to your objectives.
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Nov 5, 2017 08:09
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We finished Friday around 4am. Whole thing in three sessions, 18 games. Ended up with a score in the 2nd highest bracket, so pretty happy with that! Loved the whole experience. I've got a 2nd copy to play with my wife and her friends too. Just finished September in our Season 1 game with them today.
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Nov 6, 2017 03:31
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Just played January and February. We one-shot both so I'm assuming there's some rule we missed. No specific spoilers but some general rules questions, is there a limit to how many jobs a character can have? And the end of game bonuses are amount of cities on the grid (not including havens?) +1 if you won the month? We got like 12 points our first month so we took some jobs (from game end upgrades) and added them to our characters, at the end of February we now have some characters with 3 jobs/abilities. Also for reconing places that require unique cards (ABCD) I'm assuming it's referring to cities right? So there is no way that we can recon in Cairo cause we need 4 different black cities and there are only 3 on the board right now. And do you have to recon in that specific city? Or just that general region?
lummawks fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Nov 6, 2017 |
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Nov 6, 2017 08:07
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lummawks posted:Just played January and February. We one-shot both so I'm assuming there's some rule we missed. No specific spoilers but some general rules questions, is there a limit to how many jobs a character can have? And the end of game bonuses are amount of cities on the grid (not including havens?) +1 if you won the month? We got like 12 points our first month so we took some jobs (from game end upgrades) and added them to our characters, at the end of February we now have some characters with 3 jobs/abilities. Also for reconing places that require unique cards (ABCD) I'm assuming it's referring to cities right? So there is no way that we can recon in Cairo cause we need 4 different black cities and there are only 3 on the board right now. And do you have to recon in that specific city? Or just that general region? You did this totally wrong; jobs are one per character. you can purchase additional upgrades. You get upgrade points based on the number of cities in a bracket, not raw number of cities. So you should get, I think, at most 5 points in February. not 12.
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Nov 6, 2017 08:57
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Also Havens don’t count as cities for that count. So you start the game with a 9 count
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Nov 6, 2017 09:27
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TacMan is probably right about the jobs and definitely right about upgrade points, there's a table on the board, next to the infection deck the Game End card-space. Also you MUST recon in the indicated city (with a supply centre in it, of course). Look on the bright side! You discovered your accidental cheating early, and not in July, like my group did in S1.
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Nov 6, 2017 09:29
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TacMan posted:You did this totally wrong; jobs are one per character. you can purchase additional upgrades. You get upgrade points based on the number of cities in a bracket, not raw number of cities. So you should get, I think, at most 5 points in February. not 12. Oh that makes a lot more sense. But you can buy the game end upgrades for characters with the points right? So my character started with the job Instructor, and then use a game end upgrade to add Courier as well, or does the Courier overwrite the Instructor (provided we have the points to buy it)? Krazyface posted:TacMan is probably right about the jobs and definitely right about upgrade points, there's a table on the board, next to the infection deck the Game End card-space. Looks like we'll either put the character upgrades back if we can somehow peel off the stickers, or just go a couple months without game end upgrades.
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Nov 6, 2017 12:56
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On the other hand my group didn't realize you can perform the 'make supplies' action anywhere, and not just at a supply center, until April. Maybe that's why we lost 40% of our games until then. you can spend points on character upgrades, yes. it doesn't override your starting jobs, just that jobs =! upgrades.
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Nov 6, 2017 15:53
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lummawks posted:Oh that makes a lot more sense. But you can buy the game end upgrades for characters with the points right? So my character started with the job Instructor, and then use a game end upgrade to add Courier as well, or does the Courier overwrite the Instructor (provided we have the points to buy it)? I don't have the sticker sheet in front of me but I know there are only five jobs to start. Everything else is a character upgrade, so it gets its own slot on the sheet. Unless of course I too read the rules wrong. Also, another small rule that I nearly missed: you're supposed to make all 5 starter characters before you start your first game.
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Nov 6, 2017 17:03
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SettingSun posted:I don't have the sticker sheet in front of me but I know there are only five jobs to start. Everything else is a character upgrade, so it gets its own slot on the sheet. Unless of course I too read the rules wrong. So there's no limit to the amount of character upgrades you can have? (apart from the available slots, and the fact that you can't put one over a scar or an existing job or character ability)
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Nov 6, 2017 21:25
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So, fun recon based pro-tip for everyone. Spoilers of course, but I'd read it if you don't want to completely gently caress your game like I did. Don't loving recon Cairo until you have to. We've been playing my home game and we did a lot of early recons, North and South america in Jan, then in Feb we decided to recon from Cairo. Now I want to die. We've played three games since then without being able to afford a single upgrade due to the Hollow men Mechanic. We get six to seven points at endgame, and ever single one of them has to get spent keeping our population from dropping due to Hollow Men, even in games we are otherwise winning easily, because there is no way to mitigate or control them, they just show up and hit your population over and over. On a slightly less pissed off note, I do have one question: Am I reading the scientist right? Destroy an infection card? There are 58 cards in our discard, meaning I can put 30 into inoculation and have her wipe the others out in about 4~ish games. What exactly happens when you have no infection deck?
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Nov 7, 2017 06:37
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How did you manage to recon Cairo that early when you need 4 black cities to open it and you only have 3 at the start of the game. Unless opening South America reveals a black city. Also from my own experience being able to recon two areas in January is crazy fast: you were able to build supply centres in Sao Paolo and Washington and recon there and still win the game?
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Nov 7, 2017 08:49
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Tekopo posted:How did you manage to recon Cairo that early when you need 4 black cities to open it and you only have 3 at the start of the game. Unless opening South America reveals a black city. Also from my own experience being able to recon two areas in January is crazy fast: you were able to build supply centres in Sao Paolo and Washington and recon there and still win the game? Spoilers for one of the packages. South America comes with an upgrade that allows you to recon with one fewer city cards than necessary, bringing the required number down to three. As for the double recon, it was skin of the teeth, but it is possible. Put down your first two supply centers in Washington and Sao Paolo then run the cards around to the person with the most remaining cards. It isn't something that can happen everytime. We tried with our second box and that didn't go well at all. Edit: also ran into another 'fun' issue in the back half of April. We will physically cannot win this game. We have found a lost haven (both actually) so we lost that objective. We have one remaining city to search and one city still to connect to the grid, with nowhere left to recon. We have to complete three objectives, and have only one objective that is possible to complete. Whoops. Caros fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Nov 7, 2017 |
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Nov 7, 2017 21:23
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We're in mod march and it feels like things are not going well. That mid march rulrchange is brutal as well.
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Nov 8, 2017 23:40
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Bit of an update, spoilers through to October: Depending on how you play, the game bogs the gently caress down from April-June. We played as though the search and connect objectives didn't exist, because without new areas to recon we physically couldn't win the game if we didn't, which seems like bad game design. The game gets sort of crappy in those three months, at least for us, because there was nothing new apart from a few small post mission upgrades. The game is clearly paced under the assumption that you'd be unlocking roughly one new continent each month, so if you unlock them all in the first couple of months it doesn't know what to do, and you just sort of sit there for three months waiting for it to catch up. That said, it picks up a bit after that. The introduction of shelters finally gut the hollow men problem we'd been sitting with since feb (better late than never) and we got a laugh out of the fact that we completed the July and september objectives before we even started the respective months. Once it starts adding stuff again the game flows pretty well. Overall, I have to just question why they didn't gate the mechanics, or at least the hollow men, in the first few months. Everything after August appears to be gated by the legacy deck, and it is just strange that they let you run face first into a crippling wall, but hold you back from progressing in the latter half. Still a good game, the change to epidemics in the latter months is neat as well. I'm also getting a snicker out of the slow reveal out of the blatantly obvious fact that the Haven dwellers are the faded, something that is obvious just looking at the character art.
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Nov 10, 2017 10:26
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Post-December spoilers: What was going on in India? The stickers carved out a perfect little rectangle in the map, surrounded by a purple glow. Was it supposed to just be a mystery, or did we miss something? On the whole, I appreciated the narrative design of the game. So much of the early game was about building up and preserving what you made, a pretty cool feeling expressed by the mechanics. Inoculations helped to push us organically across the map from west to east, as we just tucked all the blue and yellow infection cards in out of the way areas. That the inoculation pile would become relevant wasn’t a huge surprise, but it was a fun way to keep the pressure on. I’ll admit I didn’t catch on to the Faded twist until they revealed it, but the clues were all there. Complaints: between inoculation and the character from Johannesburg, infections stopped being a real threat, so long as we did the requisite bookkeeping. And there was a lot of that - some places were permanently safe from infection, while others were just inoculated. We ended up using little clear discs to mark safe locations. We also played several games in a row. If we were playing only a game a night, it’d have been a much bigger pain in the rear end to track. On the whole, my wife and I had a great time. Not as twisty as Season 1, but the themes worked well with the mechanics.
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Nov 20, 2017 18:02
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Prairie Bus posted:Post-December spoilers: What was going on in India? The stickers carved out a perfect little rectangle in the map, surrounded by a purple glow. Was it supposed to just be a mystery, or did we miss something? Endgame stuff One of the journal entries referenced radiation. Given the position, my best guess was a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan happened at some point during the initial outbreak. The faded twist seems to be hit or miss. My girlfriend and I figured it out when we opened the box (bone white is the dominant color on a lot of faces, and on the ones where it isn't, are all visibly facepaint) but our second group still hasn't come close to figuring it out. It really gets knocked home the second you find alternate characters since they are clearly normal people. Overall, yeah, I think it was a good game, certain worth playing. If I had one complaint it is that they really didn't do anything at all with population. We spent the game upgrading population, and ended the game without a single 1 anywhere on the board, thinking that there would be some sort of bonus for it (similar to the rioting, collapsing, fallen stuff from season 1) but apart from produce and population 1 cities being a pain if they got infected, there is zero difference between the various cities. I think they would have been better off giving bonuses for higher level cities, allowing special types of travel, bonus production or other effects in places that were doing better. Actually, come to think of it, the whole 'produce supplies' cards seemed to be a sort of meh mechanic. I was really intrigued by the tradeoff between system wide production vs local production when we played our first game or two, but I think we only produced system wide maybe three times the whole game, and those were mostly as a result of finding the lost havens. There just never seems to be enough cubes in the stockpile to make a system wide production worthwhile.
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Nov 21, 2017 01:41
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