Pandemic Legacy: Season 0

4th June 2021

It's Friday evening and we're logged into Tabletopia.
This evening we will be playing the first part of Pandemic Legacy: season 0. Time to battle the Soviets to save the world during the height of the 60's cold war.

---

Caveat: we've only played this game digitally online.
Caveat No. 2: This is a legacy game and we only played the prologue, so I'm not going to blog about it at length.

What's in a game?
Season 0 is a prequel to the other Pandemic Legacy games, none of which I've played.
If you've ever played a Pandemic style game before, then a lot of this will be familiar to you.

• Game board: Depicts a number of interconnected cities and population centres across the globe. Unlike the traditional Pandemic board, all locations here are divided into Allied, Neutral or Soviet. Locations may also contain surveillance symbols.
  The Board also has spaces for the threat deck and the player deck as well as a threat level track.
• Threat deck: All the Locations from the board will appear on cards in this deck and it's used to manage the influence of the Soviet agent network.
  Threat cards each also have a incident printed on the bottom which can adversely affect the players, more on this below.
• Location cards: These cards form the majority of the player deck. Location cards have a region and a allied, neutral, Soviet affiliation as well as a location.
• Event cards: These are also added to the player deck, event cards can be used in any player's turn and do not cost action points. Event cards always confer some kind of benefit.
  Escalation cards: These are shuffled into to the player deck, when a escaltion card is revealed, it means bad news for the players.
• Alias cards: These give each player an individual role to play.
• Agent figures: These are placed on the board to represent Soviet agents.
• Safehouse models: Can be constructed by the players.
• Team models: Teams can be assembled by the players, they have 1 of 3 types of 'cover' they use, Allied, Neutral and Soviet.
• Incident markers: Used to track incidents, which are explained below.

The game has plethora of other components including passports, the physical game even includes stickers to place in passports to create aliases.
There's also a lot of components to deal with the legacy element of the game.

---

An alias.

Event & location cards.

Jakarta filled with agents, a safehouse & team nearby.

An agent appears in L.A., also notice the level 3 surveillance in Moscow.

---

How's it play?
Setup
The setup for Pandemic Legacy: season 0 will differ for each scenario as they have their won objectives, but will include the following:

• Aliases: Each player creates their alias as required.
• Player deck: Create the player deck and deal 4 cards to each player, then add escalation cards to the deck as required. This deck will contain a mixture of location, event and escalation cards.
• Threat deck: Shuffle the threat deck and deal 3 cards, place 3 agents in the locations revealed by the threat cards. Reveal 3 more cards and add 2 agents to those locations and finally, reveal 3 more cards and add 1 agent to those.

On to play
Players of other Pandemic games will recognise most of the play mechanics. There are some other elements, but mostly during their turn, the active player will have 4 actions points to spend and their turn goes as follows:

• Check Surveillance: This is unique to Pandemic Legacy: Season 0, if a player's character is in a city with a surveillance symbol at the start of their turn, then it affects their cover, which can be blown, which in turn will have ramifications.
• Spend action points: The active player will have 4 actions points to spend on the following actions.
  Move: The active player may move their character to a linked adjacent location for an action point.
  Use location card: They may reveal a allied location card to move to that location, or discard a neutral card to move to its location, this cannot be done with Soviet city. Finally, if the active player has a location card that matches their current location, then it can be discarded to move to any location, including Soviet locations.
  Neutralise agent: For an action point, the active player may remove a Soviet agent figure from their current location.
  Share cards: The active player may give a card to or take a card from another player in the same location as them, provided the card's location also matches their location.
  Build safehouse: The active player can discard the location card for their current location to build a safehouse, a safehouse is required for a couple of other actions.
  Identify target city: When at a safehouse, the active player can discard 3 location cards with regions that match the current region to identify a target city, this is required to complete objectives.
  Create team: There are allied, neutral and Soviet teams, these represent their cover and which respective affiliated locations they can be active in.
  To create a team, the active player must be at a safehouse, to create a allied team they must discard 5 allied cards, for a neutral team 5 neutral cards and for a Soviet team, 5 Soviet cards.
  Move team: The active player may move a team to an adjacent location.
  Acquire target: An active team may acquire a target in their location as per the mission's requirements and may meet objectives.
• Mop up: Active teams automatically remove all Soviet agents from their current location.
• Draw 2 player cards: If location or event cards are drawn, then it's all good. However, if a escalation card is drawn, several actions occur, the threat level is increased, a new threat location is introduced and discarded threat cards are shuffled back on the top threat deck.
• Draw threat cards: The number of threat cards drawn is dependant on the threat level.
  When a threat card is drawn, add a Soviet agent to it's location, if there are already 3 agents on the location, then do not add another agent, instead an incident will occur.
  Incident: Draw a card from the bottom of the threat deck and carry out the incident printed on it.

Play then progresses to the player to the left and continues until the endgame is triggered.

Endgame
Each mission will have it's own unique objectives to complete, when they are all either completed or failed, the mission immediately ends.
Missions will also immediately end if the following criteria is met:
Cards cannot be drawn from the player deck.
There are no more agent figures that can be used.
There are no more incident markers that can be used. 
If the mission ends and there are any incomplete objectives, they are marked as failed.
Then players will be rated as succeeding, adequate or failing, this will have an affect on later missions.
Incidents that occurred during a mission will impact the board for later missions as well.

There are 12 missions played over a period of 12 months, making it a busy year. There will also be numerous other actions will occur with regard to further missions, this being a legacy game.

---

Game board at start.

Example of the game's branching narrative.

---

Overall
I'll start by saying that I know some people gush over legacy games, but I've not really played much of any legacy games and I'm pretty ambivalent towards them.
I understand the appeal of an evolving game where player decisions have an impact on further games over time. At the same time, I'm so sure about a game where you have to play it 12 or 20 times to get the most out of it.
Anyway; since I've not played the legacy components of Season 0, I'm not really going to blog about them, instead I can write my thoughts about the general mechanics of the game.

​If you've played a Pandemic style game, then a lot of this will be familiar. It has the same, recognisable gameplay elements of racing against time and having to make difficult meaningful decisions to balance completing objectives with firefighting the spread of in this particular incarnation, Soviet agents.
Like all cooperative games I've played, mitigating bad luck is a key component to succeeding.

Reskinning Pandemic's mechanics for Season 0 could have been lazy and bad, but actually, they work and fit the theme pretty well, the changes introduce interesting concepts, although some of the changes only apply to long term play.
The addition of teams is an inspired change, instead of running around and doing actions myself, I could instruct teams of agents to do it, provided they had the correct aliases of course. Not only did it give players and extra decision to manage, it made me feel more of a spymaster than a spy, which I found quite appealing, it gave the impression that more was going on at any one time, it made the game feel bigger and that's good.
These changes differentiate Season 0 from Pandemic, but is it enough of a change to justify owning both? For me, as an owner of the original Pandemic; I'd say no. Would I play someone else's copy? Probably.
I have to say it would cool to have seen the agent mechanics employed in a standard spy-themed Pandemic game.
If you're a big player of legacy games and can commit to them, it's definitely worth a look. If you're also a fan of Pandemic, it might also be for you.