Pandemic Legacy: Session 2

In our second session of Pandemic Legacy we replayed January and went on to February.

We let the Scientist stay home this time, since she had developed PTSD apparently triggered by all of North America, and instead brought in the Researcher, Lucy Carlton, who proved to be a great asset to the team.

This game was incredibly short and simple - with extra government funding and researching powers we cured the three curable diseases, eradicating yellow (thanks to the no-research-station-necessary upgrade) and eradicating red as well.

In the end we upgraded Snotty to it's second upgrade - we now do not even need to spend an action to cure, if a player just gathers five yellow cards it's instantly cured!

We also upgraded red to the no-research-station-necessary status.

The was one casualty though - A CROOKED STICKER!

All upgraded and looking good.

So. Feeling good about the world we moved on to February. And it appears Snapper Rocks Pox (blue) just got worse - now it's beyond incurable but is now untreatable! No treat action will affect blue at all.

But on the plus side we are introduced to the Quarantiner - who's name is Tina Quaran (obviously). and quarantining abilities. Yay, now we can control the blue problems and cure the rest of the world.
Except first round we had a dilemma - get the medic to Europe to place a quarantine token on blue and control the area before it breaks out early, or Africa to fight the threat there.
We chose to control blue, and of course Africa broke out straight away. A few turns later South America was breaking out in multiple places and in next to no time we lost by number of outbreaks.
Not a single thing was cured that day.

 Rioting has been spreading. Still nothing worse than level 2 (only just) but it seems to be a common thing along the Atlantic.

The team returns home, slightly embarrassed, but determined with new tactics for February part 2.

Score so far:
Jan LOSS

Jan WIN

Feb LOSS

But in the end the main thing is, though some stickers were stuck this time, no cards were harmed in this session. A box was opened and some new cards and tokens added. And we got to scratch the scratchable thing. It was terrifying knowing there could have been a feature that we never knew about.

Oh and relationships! Our quarantiner and researcher have suddenly realised they're related. They now gain an extra action when they start in the same location. This seemed to be more work to attempt than anything, and a new rule to remember. But still something more good than bad.

Onwards to second attempt at February - and yet another risk of losing out on the scratchable :-/

Pandemic Legacy - January

Welcome to Pandemic Legacy.

If you've played Pandemic you'll know it's one of the hardest games to master, and even when you're good at it you might win 50% at best.
Pandemic Legacy takes it one step further with the Legacy system - every game you play affects future games. Everything has consequences.

I'd been looking forward to this for a long time, but as fun as it is it is equally excruciating. And I mean physically cringe-worthy.
The reason is for every permanent effect that comes into play you enact it. Permanently. There are stickers to be placed on the board and cards, you write on the board and cards, and worst of all, there are times when you are instructed to rip cards in half.

So I am looking forward to playing this more, and I'll be writing all about it. I'm just glad I'm not the one that owns it. I'd be divising intricate methods of not defacing the board, writing up lookup tables and journals requiring hours of revision before each game all in the name of keeping the game in it's original condition. I was the kid that would photocopy Cluedo pads so that no one would ever touch the originals.

Finally - if you ever plan on playing Pandemic Legacy DO NOT READ PAST THIS SECTION. This game includes real, actual, deadly spoilers. There are pre-determined events in the game. Even in the first game if we had have known what a certain event card coming was we would have played differently, and it would be hard not to. So if you don't think you'll be playing it in the memorable future, read on and share the horror of Pandemic Legacy with us:

Spoilers and traumatic Card-tearing below

This is Pandemic Legacy:

It looks innocent enough, but it is far from it.
This is the final photo of it in it's prisitne condition.
Note the eight black boxes. These contain unkown elements to the game which we do not even know what is in there, but we speculate extra cards, characters, buildings and maybe even diseases.

The team of heroes  that were working to save the world in the first month:

These actually get written on the character cards *shudder*
INFECT0R (or Kevin Wang to his Mother) - the Dispatcher. A 1337 hax0r who really knows how to sit behind a computer and tell people what to do.

Roger Williams - The Medic, very passionate about medicine and chemistry, has his own chemistry set for recreational chemistrying.

Ruby Condick - the Scientist. Expert in Snapper Rocks Pox (see below) and generally expert in all manner of diseases transmitted through intimate contact.

Jane Doe - the Generalist. She's recently woken up from a coma and doesn't know who she is or anything about herself other than she is destined for great things so she might as well save the world.

 Meet the diseases. Yes, we had to name these ourselves. The names stick for every game from now on. *shudder*

Snotty - spreading across South America and Africa is the globulous, mucus firing horror that is Snotty.

Planking - the virus that seemed harmless enough at first, but soon enough it became apparent that not only did it spread visually and made use of the Internet to spread from Asia across the world, but it leaves it's victims completely paralyzed in the most awkward positions and locales.
Snapper Rocks Pox. Thought to be an urban legend from Coolangatta, Australia when a Swedish backpacker face-planted into a rocky patch one fateful day. The details are unclear of what exactly happened to him but the facts are clear. On his return journey to Sweden the disease spread itself across North America and then to Europe. It is rumored that the backpacker in question met with Scientist Ruby Condick along the way.

And finally - the Devil's Ball Bags. You don't want to know.


So the game started off well, we coordinated, spread out. Snotty was looking quite serious and we had a few yellow cards between us so with the aid of our dispatching friend we consolidated our resources and discovered the cure quickly. With the medic close at hand it wasn't long until the mucus was all wiped up and Snotty was eradicated.

It was at this point that the first trigger for the Legacy deck occurred. The Legacy Deck is the story element of the game - pre-determined cards in a set order which stays inside the box with instructions on the back (top) to tell you when to draw the card.
So after the second Epidemic card was resolved we flip the card, and this happens:

*shudder*

 Rip up the objective card. Physically rip it in half. The card is gone.
You'd think that was horrifying enough but instead, the disease with the most cubes on the board is now incurable and takes an extra action to treat. Permanently. For the rest of the game. Put a sticker on the board just to rub it in. *shudder*
Snapper Rocks Pox (blue) was the obvious contender for this. It already had multiple points on the brink of outbreaking. So now it's incurable and harder to treat.
Then - new objective: Cure three diseases. Gee, Thanks.

Despite this we continued on well. Our Scientist, instead of collecting coloured cards managed to collect more goverment grants and the ocasional epeidemic, But put a huge effort into the daunting European effort, and was joined later by the Medic to help control the issue.
Meanwhile Dispatcher and Generalist were flying around the world quelling outbreaks before they happened and gathering resources. They were about to cure planking (and possibly eradicate it) on the very next turn when the worst epidemic broke out in the middle of Europe, triggering multiple outbreaks and losing the game by all blue cubes on the board.
We were all so confident too.

Endgame - the cause of our demise.

Not only did we lose but some of the cities have begun to panic. See the yellow numbers on Madrid and New York there - they're levels of unrest. it rises whenever there is an outbreak here and makes it harder to get to the city. At level 4 the city falls and is gone. These numbers are stickers. They are permanent *shudder* the Northern Atlantic crossing may soon become unusable! Also, because the Scientist was in a city which had an outbreak she takes a scar - this is a sticker you place on your character card *shudder* with an additional rule, which is selected by the player. Ruby now has a distrust of North America and loses an action for starting there.

On the plus side we gained a new starting Research station in central Asia, and because we eradicated Snotty we can apply a positive mutation for next time it emerges (next game), and forever onwards (it's a sticker for the board *shudder* ) - we no longer need a research station to cure this disease.

The winning team.

So the game continues with the described permanent effects - upgraded and downgraded  diseases, rioting cities, new research station and traumatised scientist, as well as extra funding for more government grant cards.

I'll be looking forward to playing the next game - Late January. If you lose you play the month again. Losing a second time the game moves forward.
It feels like we're off to a pretty dramatic start, but we're determined to win this. The fate of the world - and every delicate paper thin card in the box depends on us.

I'll just be having nightmares of tearing noises and stickers everywhere...

Arrow - early impressions

Finally watching Arrow, enjoying it. I'm up to episode 8.

I find that I'm picking at it more and more though... So many things annoy me in the show, but I want to keep watching because of the overall story arc is intriguing - the twists and deepening mysteries always keep me hooked in shows like this.

Things that annoy me:
* He has been practicing survival skills and been training with various weapons and fighting styles for five years... and this lets him dodge machine gun bullets?

Just one set of 10,000 bullets dodged in this episode alone.

* He can talk in a husky voice and his ex-girlfriend doesn't recognise him. She can see his face from the nose down and in one episode his eyes when he wore a balaclava and still doesn't recognise him.

No one will recognise my trademark freshly unshaven look!

* You'd think even at the beginning of the first moment when Oliver was attacked DI Lance's superior would know the history and put someone else on the case... but instead he's in every case that involves Oliver and The Hood.

Actually I'm starting to understand what my daughters see in you...

* The makeup - he can apply green eyeshadow to his face in an emergency... ok I'll let that go - but he can also get back into his suit straight afterwards and (ep 2 I believe) his face is perfectly clean and he can talk to the detective and friends without any issues. He's rich and has access to amazing technology, yes... maybe there is a wondermakeup that doesn't rub off when you're fighting bad guys or sweating but comes off beautifully with a patented wonderwipe... but where does he keep the kit - he'd need hundreds of tubes of this stuff, plus a cleanser, applicators, wipes, and of course a mirror. Also somewhere to dispose of it all.

seconds before almost being caught by the police and ziplining from one building to the next after a fierce shootout...

It would take the police 5, maybe 10 minutes to rush from one building to the next?
Plenty of time to get changed and clean up!

* No interesting characters. Oliver is maybe interesting but only because of the whole "what happened on the island" arc. I partly expect all Superhero / Masked Vigalante stories to have colourful characters everywhere. But I like a show to have at least one character in every odd episode that has some quirk... This has none so far.

Hi it's me! Spoiled Rich Guy #2!

I think I'm putting it down to a situation where the writing team are great at the mystery / intrigue aspects, but have no character writing skills. Or at least not for this type of show. In 7 episodes we've seen lovers break up and get back together again multiple times. It would make a mediocre soap opera (which is a pretty high ranking for soap opera).
It reminds me of my feelings of Once Upon A Time by season 2 - but the difference there was all of the main characters were horribly dull but the side characters were fun and interesting. I gave up on that during season 3 after much endurance - even though the Pan storyline was possibly one of the best, I could no longer tolerate the likes of Charming and Snow.

Lastly two actors I like have been in the show so far:
John Barrowman of course - Love him in Doctor Who and Torchwood. Got excited when I learned he was a bad guy in this. Always love the villains... and he's the most vanilla villain ever. Even after the new information in episode 7 (no spoilers) it wasn't that much of a big insight into his character... John Barrowman is great, for this most of all I blame the writers.
Tahmoh Penikett - yeah I had to look his name up - Helo from Battlestar Galactica. Was never one of my favourite characters in BSG but I thought he played his character well there... maybe he's imprinted as too much of a goody goody - of all the characters in BSG he was the most moral, so to have him as a ruthless bad guy in Arrow was fairly unbelievable.
I'll also add an extra mention to Colin Salmon who plays Walter - of all characters I think I might like him the best... but again there's not much to him. But I also recognised him immediately from Doctor Who as Dr Moon... just really hope he gets to say something about forgetting...

But after all this rant I'm looking forward to the next episode... I can't explain it. Part of the mystery of the show maybe...