Pandemic Legacy – Mid-Season Review – No Spoilers

Overhyped or one of the best board games of all times?

This is July, both in real time and in the game.
We have stopped at a point where we’ve had four wins in a row (quite many things were favorable to us!).
The excitement felt when revealing the first packages, secrets, stickers and other surprises has faded a little, since all this has been repetitive, each time in a different way …

The story of the game unfolds with some reversals which have been laid pretty well and prevent you from losing interest. This is the exact same thing that happens with the different seasons of TV series and their characters.

I haven’t played Risk Legacy, so I can’t make a comparison or express a more general point of view, but I have the feeling that I would prefer a longer story to keep me alert and make me feel the tension of this whole thing to a greater extent, so that I can’t wait to move on and play through the next month, even choose to stay at home and play, instead of going out with friends.

This is what I had in mind when I bought this game and this is the feeling I expected from that kind of game; having a story that would be longer than just a paragraph that describes what happens.

The game features really good mechanisms, it is very well-designed and balanced, with a good amount of luck, but I think that if you strip down the Legacy part, it is actually the classic Pandemic, where you place and remove those small cubes, with different difficulty levels, restrictions and abilities throughout the season of the game.

What I’m trying to say is that I would like to have a more immersive story to push me into playing and create an atmosphere that will make me wanna play all 12 months (the average games are 18 till the end of the season). I mean, how many games have you actually played 18 times within a really short period of time? Yes, it’s not the same game, since several things happen and it evolves, but I feel that what happens in the game follows a similar pattern and it gets repetitive at many points! The only difference is the way in which this happens.

It’s not my intention to say that this is not a good game, that you shouldn’t buy it or that it is overhyped. It’s just that I would prefer a more story driven game, with more gripping things taking place, because sometimes it seems to me that the story is like a flavor text, just in order to justify its progress.

I have no idea how the story unfolds from now on and whether it gets more interesting later on (I have tried to avoid all kind of spoilers), but I hope that it will prove me wrong and that it will reverse all my doubts about whether this is an unforgettable experience that everyone should live once in a lifetime!