Spoiler-Free Tips for Pandemic Legacy
Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau’s Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is one of the most eagerly awaited tabletop games of recent years. Over a year of game time (and 12 to 24 games), new rules and components are introduced, and you make permanent changes to cities, characters and diseases based on what happens in your games. Understandably, people excited about playing it want to avoid all spoilers, so I thought I’d assemble a few tips for new players that don’t give anything away.
This guide is intended to help new players avoid basic mistakes when they start playing, though the tips are useful for all players. If you’re already playing the game and have questions about specific rules, I recommend the spoiler-protected FAQ at BoardGameGeek.com. It’s set up so you can view questions only about the bits you’ve already played. (Most changes happen during a specific month of the game year, so it’s easy to know where you’re up to.)
2020 update: I’m finally playing Pandemic Legacy: Season 2! Season 2 is a separate game, and while the basics are very similar, there are many significant changes from the original. Much of what’s below still applies. Watch for a separate article for Season 2 soon — and hopefully one for the recently revealed and soon to be released Season 0 in future, as well!
If you want the experience to be entirely a surprise — if you’ve never played any version of Pandemic, for example — then look away, but I promise to only talk about the basic rules explained in the rulebook at the start of the game. I’ve played the game through twice, and I’ll add more tips if I think of them.
The first few tips below are useful for regular Pandemic, too!
Let each player be in charge of their own turn
Pandemic, like a lot of collaborative games, can be derailed by “quarterbacking” — more experienced (or pushy) players telling someone else what to do with their turn. While the instructor means well, being given orders can really ruin the experience by making a player feel they might as well not be there. It’s fine to share ideas and plans — it’s a team game after all — but let the person who’s turn it is lead that discussion, ask if they want your advice before offering it, and leave the final decision of how to spend their actions to them. It’ll make the experience better for everyone, not least because people will feel comfortable asking for advice when they need it!
Discuss strategy between turns
As alluded above, lengthy discussions are part of the Pandemic experience, and are only heightened by the increased stakes of Legacy. We’ve found it best to have them before someone takes their actions, rather than during their turn, and to wait until they’ve drawn cards and infected cities to start up again. Otherwise it’s all too easy to start strategising in response to their card draw and lose track of the infection step — or even whose turn it is!
(On a related note, be careful to keep track of the turn and progress through the infection step if you’re letting the player closest to the deck do it, instead of players doing it themselves on their own turn. It’s a big board and that’s often easier, but it’s another way you can get yourself confused.)
Understand the “Share Knowledge” action
“Share Knowledge” is the action that allows you to move cards between players. This is the rule in Pandemic that I’ve seen consistently trip people up, and there are several characters and cards who mess with it, so it’s really useful to be sure of the base rule (which is explained on page 8). The most common mistake is to forget that both players must have their pawns not just in the same city, but in the city that matches the card they want to exchange. So if I want to give another player the Sydney card, both our pawns have to be in Sydney. This means you will usually only be able to exchange one card per turn. That might seem harsh, but Share Knowledge is intentionally difficult: trading cards is very powerful in Pandemic.
Also remember that Share Knowledge works for giving or taking a card. So on my turn, I can use an action to give the Sydney card to my friend who is also in Sydney; or, on their turn, they can use an action to take the Sydney card from me.
The main exception to this rule is the Researcher character. The Researcher can give any card to a player whose pawn is in the same city with them. That means they can potentially give four cards to other players on their turn! This ability works on other player’s turns too, but only when cards move from the Researcher to another player. So if I’m the Researcher, I can give that Sydney card away to another player if we’re both in Essen, and they can take it from me on their turn if we’re both in Essen, but if I want to take the Sydney card from someone else or they want to give it to me on their turn, we both need to be in Sydney as normal.
Know when to look at the Legacy Deck
This is the deck of cards that reveal the story and changes in gameplay. The rules do say this, but it can’t be emphasised enough: the top-most Legacy card tells you when you need to look through them, and this could be at any time: the start of a game, the end of a game, or when something specific happens in between. Read the trigger on top of the next card and make a note, or just look at it at the start of each turn to remind yourselves.
Don’t do anything else while looking through the Legacy Deck
The Legacy Deck introduces new rules and often gives you new stuff, but don’t get distracted. Read through all the cards and follow their instructions until you’re told to stop, and don’t do anything else until then. It’s easy to get excited (or terrified) by new options and restrictions, but take the time to see them all before you move on. This is usually most important for Legacy Deck steps that happen before setup of the next game.
Set up for a game exactly as instructed
This is an easy one to get wrong because of a definite flaw in the layout of the setup rules — step four is listed on the opposite page and seems out of sequence. But refer to the setup and do it step by step for your first couple of games so you don’t put yourself at a disadvantage. Probably most important to remember is that the initial infection of cities happens before you choose funded event cards, and that you get dealt your first hand of cards before you have to choose characters, so you can let the initial setup of the game (and any pre-game Legacy Deck changes) influence your decisions. Later in the game there may be other things that happen “after setup and before the first turn”, too.
Character choice is not permanent
While Pandemic Legacy is a persistent, ongoing experience, like a role-playing game, you don’t have to play the same character all the time. You can choose any available character each time you play. If no-one has played that character before, you “create” them by giving them a name. The character creation rules are on page 5 and only refer to creating characters in your first game, but it can (and probably will) happen in later games too. Some rules refer to an already created character — that’s any character who’s been played already, i.e. they have a name. As mentioned above, you get to see the layout of the game — including which cities start infected, and which cards you’ve been dealt — before you choose which characters to play.
It’s okay to have a favourite, of course, and switching between too many different characters can make it harder to remember how they work. Characters who participate in more games have a better chance to acquire upgrades —see the next tip for more about that — though they also have a better chance to acquire scars, so don’t get too attached! If a character gets too many scars, or is in a city when it falls, they are Lost forever and you’ll have to tear up their card, never to see them again. It’s a dangerous business, saving the world.
Look at your character card every turn
As you get through games it’s likely the options available to a character will change: additional or improved actions from Character Upgrades, or specific restrictions from Scars. That means it’s possible that even playing the same character two games in a row, the things you can do on your turn will be different. Forgetting these is easy and you’ll kick yourself if you forget something which could have won you the game — or means you accidentally cheated! — so check your character card often.
The game is harder with more players
You’re not imaging it: Pandemic is hard! And it gets harder the more players you have. Sure, you have more characters and so more special abilities, but you also start with fewer cards each and draw fewer cards per player over the course of a game, making it harder to collect sets for cures. Plus there are more turns — and thus more things that can go wrong — before a specific player gets to act again. This is to balance against the extra brain power available at the table, but of course you will also have more people trying to decide what to do. Embrace losing! The story will progress even so, and the budget rules mean that you will hopefully get a bit of a break in your next game by getting extra Events (and, since you’ll be playing more games overall, more upgrades too). It all becomes part of your unique Legacy story, and hopefully you can turn things around later in the year.
(In the end I played nearly forty games of Pandemic Legacy, across two different boards and always with three or four players. The win ratio for our three player team was 55%, though we lost three out of four of the games where we had a fourth guest player join us. Our four player team finished with bang on 50% (and the one game we played with one of us missing, we won). I’ll try and gather some more numbers from other players and see what I can work out stats wise; if you’d like to contribute your results, get in touch!)
Don’t give up prematurely — play things out to the end
It’s tempting to “do the maths” in your head when the chips are down and you’ve pulled seemingly the worst possible card, and decide that you’re doomed. But it’s easy to get this wrong, especially a few months down the line when there are lots of things that might save you. We were sure we’d lost when an outbreak hit South America and was going to trigger two more; in our heads we were sure we’d run out of yellow cubes. But we luckily decided to count it all out, and it turned out we’d missed something — there were exactly enough cubes to let us survive to the next turn and win the game. Even if you’re right about losing, you still need to play out your loss to the end; in Legacy, you lose immediately when you meet a loss condition, but until then you need to track every outbreak and count out every cube, because they will have ongoing effects on the board.
Play events early, often, and between infections
Events — unfunded ones you get from your budget, or funded ones you add to regular cards in the player deck — do not count as actions, and in most cases can be played at any time, even during other player’s turns. The important caveat is that you can’t play an event between drawing a card and making the change on the board that the card triggers, e.g. you can’t draw an infection card, then use an event to do something about it before placing a cube on that city. But you can play events in between infection cards; so if that first infection makes things look really bad, you can totally play an event to improve matters before you draw the next one. One other tip: my experience is that using events early (when possible and beneficial) is better than hanging on to them until everything is going terribly and it’s too late!
Don’t sweat it if you make a mistake
It seems a bit nerve-wracking to play a board game where you are going to make permanent changes based on how you play. You’re bound to make a mistake somewhere. But don’t stress! Just keep going. In Legacy there’s no going back. The rule book includes a simple way to adjust the next game if you think you accidentally made things easier or more difficult for yourself, so follow those guidelines, make a decision as a group, and move on. Human error makes a great part of your story.
That’s it for now! I’ll still update this if I come across any other good advice, and I revisit it and edit it a bit every now and then. Let me know if you have tips to add!
