Review Summary: The world has managed to barely survive, and it falls upon you to save it. Minor detail: you are not a doctor.

Blurb from the Publisher: 'The world almost ended 71 years ago...

The plague came out of nowhere and ravaged the world. Most died within a week. Nothing could stop it. The world did its best. It wasn't good enough.

For three generations, we, the last fragments of humanity, have lived on the seas, on floating stations called 'havens'. Far from the plague, we are able to provided supplies to the mainland to keep them (and us) from succumbing completely.

We've managed to keep a network of the largest known cities in the world alive. Things have been tough the past few years. Cities far away from the havens have fallen off our grid...

Tomorrow, a small group of us head out into what's left of the world. We don't know what we'll find.

Create your own character! Discover the world! Help populations survive!

Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 is an epic cooperative game for 2 to 4 players. Unlike most other games, this one is working against you. What's more, some of the actions you take in Pandemic Legacy will carry over to future games. No two worlds will ever be alike!'

What you get: Your USD 69,99 or equivalent will buy you Pandemic Legacy - Season 2 (henceforth PL-S2), a co-operative game that accommodates from two to four players in around an hour. In the short time since its release, it skyrocketed on the top-50 of BGG. Its predecessor, Pandemic Legacy - Season 1 was the game that dethroned Twilight Struggle from the first place it had held for almost five years.

In addition to the English rulebook that can be found on the publisher's website free of charge, the game also contains the following: one Board, 10 Character cards, 4 Pawns, 53 Player cards, (36 City cards, 5 Epidemic cards, 4 Rationed Event cards, 8 Produce Supplies cards), 8 Reference Cards, 27 Infection Cards, 82 Legacy Cards, 4 Haven Worker cards, 2 Prologue cards, 6 Dossiers, 2 Sticker sheets, one Infection Rate marker, one Incident marker, 9 Supply Centers, 3 Tracking tokens, 8 Plague cubes, 36 Supply cubes and one Board. At its beginning, the game also hosts 8 numbered packages with additional components and instructions that will be revealed as the game progresses.

The game was published with two differently coloured covers, one black and one yellow. There is absolutely no difference between the contents in the two boxes, save from the art. For the present review I received the yellow box.

Note: I finished a full campaign of PL-S2 before writing this review. It contains spoilers about the backstory and the rules changes that are slowly introduced in the game depending on your progress. Seeing how it is not an RPG, I don't believe the spoilers will diminish your entertainment in the least. If you feel however that reading about what happens could spoil the fun, you might wish to stop reading now.

Gameplay: PL-S2 is both a stand-alone game as well as a campaign for up to four players built upon the extremely successful Pandemic franchise and its Legacy iteration. The backstory continues a few years after PL-S1 left it. A plague eradicates the global population in under a week (something that you might or might not have experienced depending on how you ended that game). More than half a century later, fragments of humanity still hold on, but won't be able to do so for long. The leadership of the havens, remote platforms in the ocean, met to discuss how to proceed... and never returned. The remaining citizens of the havens try to keep the grid (the surviving known cities on the globe) connected, and push back the 'Hollow Men', while at the same time they explore more of the desolate landscape. They will find out that their leadership actively deserted them, and that they have to fend for themselves, uncovering the lore of secret labs around the planet. The revelation of the campaign is when the players realise that all this time they play the Faded, and not standard humans, and that being on the havens in the first place was an imposed quarantine. Depending on how the campaign fares, the players may manage to save all of humanity (faded, non-faded and hollow men), utterly fail to save anybody, or something in-between.

The players control characters with different abilities. In contrast to the previous iterations of the franchise, a character card is blank and fully customizable at the beginning of the game. There are five jobs to choose from: Instructor, Labourer, Farmer, Radio Operator, and Administrator. The Administrator moves a character to where another character is, while a Farmer delivers supplies free of charge. The images however per role are not fixed, neither are the characters' starting havens, which are chosen by the players. Each character also gets a name and age, according to the wishes of the player. Depending on the number of players, each gets a number of cards. Each card depicts a city on the board. In contrast to the other incarnations of the game, a city here is repeated multiple times. A player may hold a maximum of seven cards, always open for the other players to see. Before starting the campaign, the players are instructed to play the Prologue as many times as needed in order to feel comfortable with the mechanics. The Prologue is a game that does not bring forth any changes on the board. At the beginning of the campaign, only nine cities and two havens are visible. At the beginning of the game, the grid is supplied, i.e. cities gain supply cubes from the stockpile according to the wishes of the players. Cities are then infected randomly, with supplies being eliminated from the city and moved back to the stockpile.

The game ends once the necessary number of objectives is completed, mandatory objectives included. Alternatively, it may end when a losing condition is triggered. As an example, the Prologue's only objective is to build 3 Supply Centers.

There are three steps in a given round: Do Four Actions, Draw Two Player cards, and Infections.

Players have four actions each at their disposal at the beginning of the game, and they can mix and match them as they wish. Movement can be subdivided in three different types depending on whether a card is discarded, what that card depicts (the city the player is at or the city he is going to) or whether the player just follows the lines on the board between the cities. Only one structure can be built in each city; at the beginning only Supply Centers are available. While in a haven or a Supply Center, a player can Produce Supplies, taking one supply cube from the stockpile onto his character card. Produce Supplies on the other hand requires a card to be played. This can either refill a city with Supply Cubes, or refill all havens and Supply Centers on the grid with Supply Cubes. The downturn of the second option is that it literally eliminates this card from the game forever. Delivering Supplies means putting them from your card to the city you are currently into. Sharing Knowledge is about exchanging city cards with other players when they are both in the same location. Finally, Recon is about exploring the parts of the world that were lost following the plague. One can only Recon from a city with a Supply Center. Depending on the case, Recon requires the discarding of cards. At times they might only need to belong to a certain colour, or they might need to be unique cities in that colour. There are additionally two free actions that a player can undertake: exchange supplies with other players on the same location, or pick supplies from the location he is in.

On Draw Two Player cards the top two cards are drawn from the Player Deck. If that gets exhausted, the game is over. There is a hand limit of seven cards per player. If an Epidemic card is drawn, two actions are taken: the Infection Rate on the relevant track is increased, something that at some point will make infections more dangerous. Then a card from the bottom of the deck is drawn. The city that is depicted will lose all its Supply Cubes, which get transferred to the stockpile. Finally, the cards in the Infection Discard Pile are reshuffled and placed on top of the Infection Deck.

Under Infections a player draws as many cards from the top of the Infection Deck as the current Infection rate (the number starts from 2 and can go up to 5). The card dictates the city that will lose a Supply Cube.

If a city has no Supply Cubes left, a Plague cube is placed and an Incident is recorded. An incident track keeps record of the Incidents that have already taken place. The game can take up to seven incidents; on the eighth one the game ends in defeat. Up to three Plague Cubes can be placed on a city. From the fourth onwards, the plague outbreaks and consumes one resource from every city adjacent to ground zero. Just like in standard Pandemic, outbreaks can lead to chain reactions. Players that start their turn on a city with plague cubes get exposed. This might lead to the development of scars. These nine conditions (including obsessed, insomniac and regretful) will further complicate a character's efforts, and even more so because they might negate his abilities or even his actual job.

As is expected from a Legacy game, results from one game are transferred to the next within the context of a campaign, while the game parameters and the backstory keep progressing. A campaign will be comprised from a number of games ranging from 12 to 24, in other words one or two games corresponding to a given month of the (fictional) game year. If the first game of a month is lost, a second game is played for that particular month. If the first game is won, the next game will refer to the following month. Players are not obliged to keep the same characters game after game, even though with the skills they keep accumulating they might want to do so.

Depending on whether a game was won or lost, the players will see their rationing increase or decrease. Irrespective of victory or defeat, the number of cities on the grid can lead to upgrades. Characters may gain abilities like Architect, Broker or Runner, while cities can get improvements like Foundations or Infrastructure. Infection cards can also get improvements, making it easier to counter them. The population may also increase (or decrease).

Each game will not have the same objective, nor the same means to accomplish it. Later games will see objectives stacking up and older objectives being eliminated. Seemingly irrelevant objectives will also pop up. What the players can do also changes. At the beginning, only Supply Centers can be built. Later there will be a quite a few things added in the mix, including Satellite Antennas.

All these effects take place through a physical alteration of the game's components. One does not simply write in a notebook what has changed. Rules for all the scenarios are not written in the rulebook in the vein of games like Descent 2nd edition. On the contrary, they are hidden on cards, panels, stickers and boxes which need to be manipulated at the right time in order to activate their effects. When a character dies, his card is destroyed. Stickers will be placed on the board, permanently altering the landscape. They will also be placed on different cards, changing their functions, adding preconditions and so on and so forth. After each game, and provided that components are physically altered, it will not be that easy to play the game again with the exact same ruleset as before. By the end of the campaign, the game will physically bear all the marks of your campaign and will be practically impossible to use again outside a particular game mode. This is a one-campaign game, and explains the reasoning behind publishing the game with two different covers: Those running two different campaigns at the same time should be able to distinguish the box of each.

The strong points: I don't know how Matt Leacock keeps on doing it, but here we are again: this is a totally new Pandemic, with a profoundly different feeling. There are no diseases to be fought; there are supplies to be provided. You are not removing cubes from the board; you are adding cubes to the board, and even more so, from a pool that keeps continuously shrinking game after game. There are only 11 locations on the board at the beginning of the game, they can however expand to 52 by the end of the campaign. There are no four types of cubes; there is only one. That's something that we already saw in Pandemic: Rising Tide, that however still followed the principle of removing things from the board (water), as opposed to adding them. In any event, and seeing how both in that game as well as that one the characters are not part of the medical profession, it appears that being a doctor is no longer the rage it used to be.

All these twists succeed in providing an experience that are as Pandemic as it gets (there is practically no difference in the actions in a turn, or how a game is lost), while at the same time refreshing the game in surprisingly pleasant ways. The core of the game remains the same: create the best possible output out of the least possible actions. The action point allowance mechanism (which is amplified due to character asymmetry) is still what makes Pandemic tick. The same action executed by different characters will yield better or worse results, since each character excels at one thing and is average in all the rest. The most common problem is that the most skilled character for the occasion is on the other side of the map, thus an action will not have the profound effect that the players would want it to have. If it is any consolation, the globe, at least at the beginning, is much, much smaller.

The deck movement from both the top as well as the bottom is also retained. This gives the time to the players to prioritize and start implementing their plans towards achieving their objectives. Choices are hard and meaningful. Planning is essential, and it actually works up to a certain extent. The random draw of the deck each turn is there to complicate the players' lives, yet organising the team provides strong mitigation towards problems present and future. Sometimes you get unlucky and disaster strikes in nearby cities. There's no sugarcoating this: some games will be won, or will be lost, simply because of a bad draw.

The asymmetry is well-executed. There is initially one more character than the maximum number of players, this however changes later on when more characters are brought into the fray. Warning: if a character of a certain type dies you cannot bring him back with a different name like you could in an RPG. Make sure your characters live throughout the campaign. With all their accumulated abilities, losing them means losing access to an important part of your arsenal at a time that might be critical.

The gaming experience from one game to the other is not vastly different, yet the alterations start piling up after a certain point. By far the most impressive is the map. It all feels nice and cosy at the beginning, once it starts being revealed however players realise that they have a lot of work to do with diminishing resources. The scratch patterns on the Player cards are an excellent idea. To make a long story short, you do not know when your character will receive a scar due to exposure, and when he will die. Even better, that is an aspect of the game that can be statistically reconstituted through analysis, should one decide to rerun the campaign after having finished it the first time. I also enjoyed how the scars and the abilities play into the game, and how they may interact with one another.

I presume that by now Legacy games are rather known: the board and the game changes with you. Once a campaign is completed, the game cannot be meaningfully played again at a particular stage, because of the altered elements. The results of your interactions with the board and cards will be visible for your group, and for others, to see. It is highly unlikely for two boxes to look similar once the campaign has been concluded.

Just like PL-S1, PL-S2 is addictive. Again, however, I do not recommend gulping it all down in just a couple of sessions. Relax, take it easy and enjoy the ride. When somebody plays the same engaging game for 12 or more times in a row, he is bound to get tired, bored, or even annoyed at times. Of course you will want to see what happens next or to retry (once only) when you fail. Do not however force it.

Just like every other Pandemic game, this one is extremely easy to teach. Only a few rules change from game to game, with a learning curve that is rather easy to understand. Not everybody needs to memorize the campaign rules, which, at the end of the day, are only a page long. The game remains complex and interesting even during the middle months of the campaign, where things are bound to become stale. That's where the first revelation takes place, showing the players who they really are (the bad guys from PL-S1). Style-wise I enjoyed the steady pace, the substantially less cartoonish revelations, and the departure from the right-wing conspiracy theories. No matter who you are, in PL-S2 you are out to save the world. The game nails its post-apocalyptic premise with its slow build up and at times desperate approach. I wish Season 1 were as tight as this has been story-wise. Being tight however doesn't mean that the game is railroady. On the contrary, PL-S2 is more of a sandbox than its predecessor ever was. This is both a blessing and a curse; at times it is not obvious what course of action is more beneficial, leading to rather poor choices in the grand scheme of things. I am also wondering how the designer balanced things out. Having the opportunity of pursuing certain courses of action at many different points in the game implies a very stable algorithm behind the game.

I enjoyed how the campaign becomes progressively easier when you fail and sort of harder if you keep on succeeding. One could have expected the opposite (more rewards upon success, more pain upon failure), yet I am afraid that this could have lead to an unsolvable game. This is the same approach that PL-S1 had also opted for, and which, counterintuitive as it might be, makes total sense.

Even though it is not advertised as such in order not to tone down the cooperative aspect, the game can be clearly played in solo mode. Just pick two (or three or four) characters and knock yourself out. You will lose the excitement of discussing and trying to persuade others on what to do and how to deal with things, but hell, you can show everybody how a strong central planning can lead to success.

The box is sturdy and will keep all your components safely tucked, even though at the beginning of the campaign they are hiding in eight different boxed compartments and six sheets of cardboard. The components themselves are well-designed. Z-Man Games keeps on the good practice of providing everything in resealable bags. You might not get to play the game a million times due to its nature, but at least you won't lose its contents before you finish the campaign. The colour of the box doesn't change anything in the gaming experience, even though the feel the two boxes exude is very different. The black one feels grim and gritty, and has a very modern look. The yellow one, the one I have, emphasizes the post-apocalyptic aspects and the mysteries that the players are likely to face. Whatever you pick, it is the right choice.

My opinion of PL-S1 is no secret when it comes to the dreadful backstory. Yet, I do recommend playing and finishing that campaign before tackling this one. Not everything will make sense, but many things will, both story-wise as well as design-wise. It is nice to observe the evolution of a game and the design choices that went into it from the get go.

The weak points: Anybody who has played Pandemic at least once knows that no matter what you do, a devastating set up and some tough luck can lose you the game. This is still valid in PL-S2. My playtests led to a fairly satisfactory result (with the sample being delivered), yet all this is statistically irrelevant. My opinion of the game would be the same irrespective of outcome. What is important is that the choices during the game are meaningful, and that picking one over the other will not doom a group in ways that could not be foreseen.

The story keeps on jumping at times in ways that not everybody would like. This resembles watching a series. You would expect major events to happen during screen time. When they do not, but instead get imposed on you during the interludes you start wondering what is going on. Unfortunately, this happens rather often here. In addition to what you do, the game is bound to do its own thing without prompt or asking for your permission.

My opinion of the Legacy aspect has not particularly changed, even though seeing it on top of a well-crafted story makes a lot of difference. Blame it on my role-playing background; I find it a pointless waste of resources. I wish to replay the campaign, and I would have loved a calendar or sheet to formally keep track of progress. Here, I am just using up a game as I go. Just like its predecessor, PL-S2 can be played a finite amount of times, between 12 and 24 as I already said. The clock does not turn back, the rules you used before might not apply again. If you made mistakes, the rulebook unceremoniously proclaims that 'in most cases, it won't matter'. I am sorry, but it does matter. Enormously. Maybe you liked one of the set ups, and you want to repeat it with different courses of action. Maybe you want to go for a 'what if' scenario, and branch out. Maybe there are rules from different points in the game that you would like to combine; that would have been possible with a campaign book of sorts. It is not possible here. Even more so, if you hate the game and you wish to sell it, you cannot if you have already started it. The game has no value in the secondary market once it has been tampered with, and the only place it can go to is paper recycling and waste disposal. Throwing good stuff in the bin feels irresponsible and immoral, and especially for the RPG fans amongst us. There is no need for me to repeat what I wrote on the PL-S1 review, I will however repeat this: I hope the Legacy aspect remains a fad. I hope it never catches up, even though a handful of games like the present one might strike it big. Disposable games cannot possibly be the future of our hobby. That's as bleak a thought as the starting point of the present game's backstory. I shudder just thinking about it.

All this having been said, with a bit of organisation and effort PL-S2 can be tricked and played as a campaign with its elements intact. Sure, you will need to scratch a few things here and there to understand what is going on, having done that however, and if you are determined enough with the bookkeeping, note-taking, and a few resealable bags and post-its, you will be able to play and deconstruct the game to your heart's desire. The board will have a rougher, home-made quality to it near the later stages of the campaign, yet the advantages will be obvious: you will be able to play the campaign again, and again, and again.

When it comes to coop games, there is always the alpha gamer issue to be addressed. The same sort of warning can be also addressed to those who dislike coop games. Depending on the group, the experience can mutate into decision-making by committee irrespective of whose turn it is. As much as luck alleviates the problem of someone deciding for everybody, players will always tilt towards consensual decisions. The odd disagreement and different courses of action might cause unneeded friction. You know your gaming group better than I do.

Conclusion: No matter how I see it, Pandemic Legacy - Season 2 is by far superior to its predecessor. The mechanics are fresh; many of them are never seen before. The story line is substantially improved, with a more tight and focused feeling. I still dislike the Legacy idea, yet seeing it implemented on a good game with a strong story, makes it appear less offending than before. That having been said, a manual for running this campaign (or selected scenarios) multiple times without buying the same box again is long overdue. Now, bring on Season 3.

For more info on Pandemic Legacy - Season 2 and Z-Man Games visit their website at http://www.zmangames.com.

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