Pandemic Legacy: Season 1

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is a co-operative campaign game that unfolds over 12 to 24 sessions, depending on how well your team performs. You start with the familiar core of classic Pandemic: your team of disease-fighting specialists races against the clock to travel the world, treating hot spots and researching cures for four plagues before they spiral out of control.

On your turn, you have four actions — you can move around the globe in different ways (sometimes discarding a card), build research stations, treat diseases (removing one cube; if all cubes of a color are gone, that disease is eradicated), trade cards with other players, or find a cure by discarding five cards of the same color while at a research station. Each player has a unique role with special abilities to help. After your actions, you draw two cards — these can include epidemic cards, which add new disease cubes and can trigger outbreaks, spreading cubes further. Outbreaks also raise a city’s panic level, making travel there more expensive.

Each in-game month gives you two chances to achieve the month’s objectives. Succeed, and you move on to the next month. Fail, and you get a second attempt with extra funding for beneficial event cards. As the campaign progresses, new rules and components are introduced — and you’ll have to permanently alter the game by writing on cards, ripping them up, and placing stickers on components. Your characters can gain new skills or suffer detrimental effects. A character can even be lost entirely, never to be used again. This is part of the acclaimed Pandemic series, but with a legacy twist that makes every decision matter.