So @Lordof1 and I have been playing Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 on Tabletop Simulator. (He’d played before with a physical copy, but he avoided giving me any hints about what might happen. I have a variety of reasons for disliking the legacy game approach and TTS solves them for me.) Our first game was on 3 January 2021; last one was tonight. I will avoid spoilers.
My overall reaction was… well, it was OK. I did get rid of my copy of Pandemic some years ago after I’d discovered Flash Point Fire Rescue, which obviously works in broadly the same coop framework but which I simply enjoy much more. So I didn’t go in loving the game, but nor did I hate it; I did like what the Legacy game did to it, in giving us a setup for game X that was clearly influenced by what we’d done in game X-1, and in giving a bit of mechanical variety while still building out from the base game rather than bringing in something entirely new.
But my main objection, particularly towards the end, is to the extent to which it relies on randomness for tension. Of the four games we lost, two or three we were already pretty sure we’d lost once the initial infections had come out. After that point there’s quite a bit you can do to mitigate the infection cards, both in terms of stuff that works in baseline Pandemic (look at the places that are already in the discard because they won’t come up again as soon as the ones that are already infected but aren’t in the discard; remain aware of when you’re in a potential epidemic turn) and with things that Legacy adds. That’s great. But there is nothing you can do to affect your own hands of cards and card draws: if those reds don’t come up, you ain’t curing red, and no matter how well you play you can’t keep ahead of it without a cure. Draw the right cards, you win; draw the wrong ones, you lose.
(That may vary a bit at higher player counts; we didn’t end up doing a lot of Sharing Knowledge until the last game, and of course with just two of us we spent more time moving than a larger group might have.)
(This is something I’ve noticed with other random-setup coop games – for example in The Crew the same mission can be trivially easy or nearly impossible depending on which specific target cards are associated with which goals. So when we’ve “beaten mission 10 after 3 tries” or whatever, it doesn’t feel as if we’ve improved enough to beat it as much as that we got an easy iteration this time. I get that a lot less with Flash Point because the setups are more consistent.)
As for the writing, well, I guessed when the initial CoDA thing happened basically what the course of the plot would be, and I was right, to the extent that I was always trying to avoid setting up military bases. I could have done with something a bit less clichéd and predictable.
I’ve just gone back and watched Quinns’ review, and I can’t say he’s wrong (except in terms of “everyone’s copy will be different” – technically true, but basically the same things are going to happen in each campaign, just in different places), but it really didn’t grab me the way it clearly did him. This isn’t familiarity with Legacy games; this is the only Legacy game I’ve played. Maybe put it down to my clinkered black heart, or lower-case-p pandemic fatigue.