Unboxing: Pandemic Legacy Season 0

The long awaited Pandemic Legacy Season 0 is finally here. Unfortunately for me the COVID-19 situation in Malaysia is pretty bad now, and the government has imposed a strict Movement Control Order. That means my friends who did Season 1 and 2 with me cannot come to play. Given the high-risk situation we have now, it isn't a good idea to do any meet-up anyway. We can never be sure we are not infected, and we certainly do not want to spread the virus to our friends. For now I can only read the rules and fiddle with the components lovingly, while waiting to bring this game to the table. 

Season 0 rewinds time to the 1960's when the Cold War raged. You are freshly trained spies from the CIA (USA). The CIA suspects that the USSR is developing a bioweapon and needs to investigate. Doing this requires in-depth knowledge of viruses. Rather than teaching spies biology, the CIA has decided to teach scientists spyology instead. That's where you come in. You are scientists with deep knowledge of viruses. Your country needs you. You have just completed your training and the CIA is sending you out into the wild. Good luck. 

The first thing that caught my eyes upon opening the box was the sticker sheets. This is like the paper doll dress up game popular with girls when I was in primary school. In Season 0, each player may have up to three different identities. You get to disguise yourself using these stickers. Cosplay time! 

The rulebook and other documents are designed tastefully with a Cold War era style. 

The game supports up to 4 players. The three vans in the foreground are field teams you get to assemble during play. You need these teams to complete missions for you. In this game, countries around the world are categorised as being Allied, Neutral, or Soviet. Teams you assemble will specialise in operating in either Allied, Neutral or Soviet cities. Depending on where you need to complete a mission, you need a team with a specialisation matching the city. The van with the red icon is a Soviet team. The blue icon means Allied team, and grey icon means Neutral team. The red figurines on the right are the Soviet spies. They will keep popping up. They are the equivalent of infection cubes in the base game. You need to keep them under control, otherwise they will trigger incidents, i.e. those markers with exclamation marks behind them. Incidents are bad. Too many incidents result in you losing the game. Those structures in the back row are safehouses. You need safehouses to assemble teams, and safehouses also protect you from surveillance. 

The two decks on the left are the legacy decks. They drive the story throughout the campaign. I'm not exactly sure what the operations deck does yet. I have not started playing. 

Upon opening the box, this is what you will see. Similar to previous instalments, there are 8 mystery boxes. They all look like safety deposit boxes. This is so tempting! 

The map is divided into six regions. The graphic design is in a retro style. I love that coffee mug on the right. 

At each city, the icon at the top left indicates whether it is Allied (blue), Neutral (grey) or Soviet (red). The red eye icons mean Soviet surveillance. You want to avoid these, because they can cause you to take permanent disabilities or completely blow one of your cover identities. You can build a safehouse to neutralise the effects of surveillance. Moscow being the USSR capital has the tightest surveillance.  

At the start of the campaign, you will already have a safehouse in Washington. Cuba (where Havana is) is under Soviet influence. 

Season 0 shares the same format as Seasons 1 and 2. The campaign is played from January to December, and each month will be played once or twice, depending on how successful you are. That means you will play between 12 and 24 campaign games, i.e. excluding the prologue game, which you can play as many times as you want. These two cards above are mission cards. Whether you win a game depends on whether you complete enough missions. You have to complete at least half. 

Completing a mission usually involves assembling a team with a specific affiliation (Allied, Neutral or Soviet) and sending it to a specific city of that same affiliation. Some missions tell you exactly which city you need to send the team to to complete the mission. In other cases, you only know it is a city within a certain region, and you need to work out which exact city it is. At the start of the game, you remove an unknown city card from the player deck and put it under the mission card. During play, as you draw player cards depicting other cities of the target region, you will narrow down the possibilities through the process of elimination. You do not necessarily have to know the exact target city before attempting to complete the mission. If you are down to just a few possibilities, you can deploy multiple teams to multiple possible cities, then attempt to complete the mission. You reveal the city card under the mission. If you do happen to have a team in that city, the mission is successful. Regardless of whether the mission is successful, you will read the Debrief manual to advance the story. 

The prologue game and the January to April games have two missions. From May onwards you get three missions. 

This little reference chart on the game board lists the number of Allied, Neutral and Soviet cities on the map. There is also a breakdown of the number of cities in each region. 

Player boards are presented in the form of a passport, which is nice. You can have up to three different identities in your passport, one each for Allied, Neutral and Soviet affiliations. I'm not sure exactly how they work yet. The prologue rules don't mention these multiple identities. I will only find out when I start playing the campaign. You will get to add stickers to your identities in the passport. Some will be special abilities. Some will be disabilities. That row of grey circles at the bottom left can be scratched off. If you start a turn in a city with Soviet surveillance, you will need to scratch circles off. If they reveal an icon, bad things will happen to you. For example gaining disabilities, or even completely blowing your cover, and thus losing an identity permanently. 

The passports are pretty cool! Me gusta. 

These are the player cards. They work in a similar way as basic Pandemic. They are mostly cities on the map. The second card in the bottom row is an event card, which can be played at any time without spending an action point. The card on the right is an Escalation card, which works like the Epidemic cards. They cause the Threat card discard pile to be reshuffled back to the draw deck, which means Threats which have appeared will resurface soon. 

These are the Threat cards and they work like the Infection cards. At the bottom of each card you can see an incident described. These are various bad things that can happen to you when you draw an Escalation card. This part works differently from basic Pandemic. 

Despite having a completely different setting, many elements in Season 0 are immediately familiar. In fact I think it is more similar to the base game compared to Season 2. The map is open information and you don't need to explore and reveal it in stages. You no longer have 4 different diseases. You only have one type of "cube" - the Soviet spies. This is similar to how you only have goods cubes in Season 2, but goods cubes are a good thing and not a bad thing. This is also similar to Pandemic: Rising Tide (the Netherlands) where the only cube type is water. 

Assembling a team requires 5 cards of the same affiliation, so this is similar to discovering a cure in the base game. You also need to have a safehouse in a city of that specific affiliation. Once a team is assembled, you still need to send it to the right place before attempting to complete a mission. This requires a bit more work than discovering cures in the base game. 

Hopefully the (real-life) pandemic situation in Malaysia comes under better control soon. I can't wait to start playing this!