Pandemic Legacy, Episode 1

Spoilers for Pandemic Legacy, Early January

I was advised by a friend that I needed to play Pandemic Legacy. This was not for purposes of fun, but my friend felt that, as a game designer, I needed to understand what this game does. Tonight was the first game.

I've played regular Pandemic twice before this. Two of the other three players had played it once.

The rulebook is extremely unhelpful in guiding you for your first game (more on this later). There's a lot of pieces and I was scared that I was going to look at something I shouldn't. I figured out I was supposed to look at the first card of the legacy deck, but only indirectly. I could find nothing that actually told me to look at that card before the start of the first game.

The initial seeding was all red/black/blue viruses, all about evenly distributed. No yellow. I thought that would make treating the viruses convenient travel-wise, but it ended up being very bad.

I was the scientist Farnsworth and started with two black cards, but went fourth in turn order (after generalist George Clooney, medic Luke Skywalker, and dispatcher Morpheus). Was handed a third black card by someone before my turn, and would draw the fourth at the end of my first turn. However, right before my second turn, we had our second epidemic. There was a massive amount of black cubes on the board, which made black uncurable literally right before I would have cured it.

At that point we were waiting for death. Black was uncurable and difficult to treat. I (the scientist) had a hand full of useless black cards. A third epidemic showed up shortly and we got a bunch of cascading outbreaks. Game was over just before I would have taken my third turn because of 8 outbreaks. The medic got scarred(!) in the process and now doesn't like flying. One city is at level 3, one at level 2, and three at level 1 (all black cities). So, I can't imagine a setup more perfectly designed to make the game unwinnable from now on. Most of the black cities have had outbreaks, and the black virus is forever uncurable.

For our upgrades, we put a research station in Delhi (something tells me we'll need to send people there from time to time) and game the medic the ability to treat from next door.

At least everyone went home in time for an early dinner.

The rulebook is also bad at telling me what to do between games 1 and 2. Since we lost, do I still use the January legacy cards? All of them? Or just the last objective? Or will a second disease become uncurable?

Also, holy hell did this game not meet difficulty expectations. I expected game 1 in the series to be relatively easy, but we got trashed. This was way harder than regular Pandemic.

Has anyone else had a game 1 that made the series completely unwinnable? I seriously could not think of a way to construct the post-game 1 state to make things worse. Black cities rioting and the black virus mutated to ensure that it will be impossible to keep off the board. Every game from now on is going to be lost to chained outbreaks in black cities.

Part of me thinks we played wrong, but I can't look at an FAQ for fear of spoilers. Can anyone answer these questions without spoiling anything past the first game?

If an epidemic card is drawn, does the infection still happen for that same turn with the shuffled cards on top? (we played yes)

Do chained outbreaks each move the outbreak counter up one? (we played yes)

Anyway, not the most positive first experience for any of us with the legacy mechanic.

@vhgames it's actually a copy of Monopoly with a Pandemic box.

— Who What Why? (@WhoWhatWhyCast) February 2, 2016

Not as long as Monopoly, but almost as painful.