Power Grid: Australia

Plays: 6Px1.

I own many expansion maps of Power Grid, but in recent years I have stopped buying because I don't play Power Grid often. I don't own the Australia / India expansion, but I had a chance to try it when Ivan brought it to Boardgamecafe.net. The cities on the Australian map look like this.

One cheeky thing about this map is the cities are drawn upside down, because Australia is "Down Under". The map has a few variant rules. One of them is that when you expand your network, you can spend $20 to establish presence in any city on the board. This is why those two isolated networks in the red area can exist.

Another rule change is related to nuclear plants. Nuclear plants are not allowed in Australia. However uranium is mined in Australia and exported. When you play this map, the nuclear plants represent uranium mines instead. During the bureaucracy stage, instead of powering cities for you, they earn you cash directly based on the uranium price at the time. Every time a player sells uranium, the price drops. At the end of every round, the price recovers, based on the resource replenishment table - that row in pink.

The third main rule change is in Stage 3 of the game. Resource prices jump up due to a new tax. In this photo you can see the resource market being split into two sections, the shorter section currently being empty. This section is only used in Stage 3 when resources become more expensive.

This photo was taken in the early game. We had six players, and five were crowded in eastern and south eastern Australia. I (green) started in Brisbane and Gold Coast. The two main cities Sydney and Melbourne each have two halves, each half being treated as an individual city, with no connection cost between them. This is attractive to players.

Sinbad was blue. He started in Perth. There were only 5 cities in this area, so once a player started here, nobody else wanted to come because it would be suicide to crowd into such a small area in the early game.

Ivan (I think) was yellow and started in Sydney, and got surrounded by Allen (red). He had to spend the $20 to jump to South Australia. I (green) expanded peacefully in Queensland.

Jeff (black) wouldn't leave me alone and jumped to Queensland to mess with my expansion. He needed to escape the south eastern corner anyhow because it was crowded. It was just a question of where to jump to. Purple had jumped to the Northern Territory. Sinbad (blue) had filled up Western Australia, and had now jumped to Tasmania.

Despite the few rule changes, Power Grid is still Power Grid. The basic principles and strategies still apply. This is a game won and lost on dollars and cents. Every Elektro (the currency in the game) counts. I was a little sloppy and by late game could not catch up with the rest. I was a little wasteful. I probably spent more than I should have when bidding for power plants. I wasn't meticulous enough in my planning. One thing I like about Power Grid is how every time I lose, I can look back and see exactly why I lost. This shows how strategic the game is, and how much my decisions matter. Players who like Power Grid will like this map. When we played, we used the expansion power plants (they have green borders). Ivan and Jeff said this power plant deck is better balanced. I'm not yet at the skill level to be able to appreciate this balance myself.

This photo was taken when we entered the 3rd Stage. The moment Stage 3 began, we had to move the 6 cheapest resources of each type to the $9 and $10 spots, i.e. the smaller section of the resource market. From that point on, resources would cost at least $3. The $1 and $2 spots were no longer in use. Our eventual winner was Ivan. He powered the exact number of cities required to win. No others could reach that in the same round as him, so there was no need for a tiebreaker. In Power Grid, players often tie in the number of cities powered, so money often comes into play as the tiebreaker. Uranium mines (nuclear plants) play an important role in Australia because in the last round, they still generate income, and that additional money can often mean win or lose.

boardgaming in photos: Lost Cities

6 Jul 2016. I played Machi Koro with the children. This is one of their favourite games. Chen Rui (9) doesn't have a strategic mind yet, and makes decisions on a whim, mostly depending on which buildings she finds interesting. She plays the way which makes her happy, not the way which makes her win. Maybe there's something to learn from this. Shee Yun (11) understands the strategy and makes her decisions which lead her to a final goal. She identifies synergies between cards. It pleases me to see her think strategically.

Chen Rui made a mini pyramid out of the Renovation markers.

The kids still try to gang up on me. However we play the advanced rules using the ever-changing market system, so it's hard to collaborate against another player. The cards don't always come up the way you hope they will. I won again this time.

We still mix together all the cards from the base game, the Harbour expansion and the Millionaire's Row expansion. It's not a good way to play, because the cards are too diluted. It's hard to focus on any specific strategy. We really should spend some time creating a smaller set to play with.

This time I constructed many blue buildings, which allowed me to earn money on any player's turn.

7 Jul 2016. Lost Cities is an oldie. Back in the day (well, about 10 - 12 years ago) this was the spouse game. Nowadays I don't hear it being mentioned much. I suspect many gamers new to the hobby haven't even heard about it, which is a shame. It is still as delicious as I remember it. Michelle and I played briskly. Play-and-draw, discard-and-draw, play-and-pick-up. It was like synchronised sparring. Yet there are quite a few tricky decisions to be made along the way, and gambles to make. Sometimes the game takes an unexpected turn.

I fared horribly in this particular game. I had drawn all three of the yellow handshake cards early in the game, but not other yellow numbered cards. Michelle discarded a yellow card early in the game, so I thought she must have few such cards to be able to decide so early that she was giving up on yellow. I decided I should go for yellow and make a killing. I played the three handshake cards, and waited to draw more yellow cards. To my dismay, Michelle picked up the yellow card she had discarded, and proceeded to start her own yellow expedition. That was not a good sign. She drew more and more yellow cards, and I drew pitifully few. It was a disaster. I had started the red, green and blue expeditions, but they were just for buying time hoping to draw yellow cards. Most of these side quests just broke even. Instead of yellow cards, I drew lots of white cards. Now (at the time of this photo), the draw deck was running out, and I was stuck in an unenviable position of having not enough yellow cards to play, and too many white cards and not quite enough time to play them.

I played Ticket To Ride: The Card Game with the family. I bought this when Michelle and I were still very much into the Ticket To Ride series. However I didn't really fancy it, and seldom played. I brought this out because the children hadn't tried it. They are familiar with the Ticket To Ride series, but this was new to them. They liked it, and they did much better than us. I wonder whether they liked it because they beat us.

There is some aggression in this game. You need to collect train cards. To do that, you need to first play them onto the table, and then on later turns move them to your safe storage pile. While the train cards are still on the table, they are vulnerable. If other players play cards of the same colour as yours, your cards will be discarded. Thus the aggression. A few elements look familiar, but this is quite a different game from Ticket To Ride.

Twilight Struggle on iOS

When I first heard that GMT and Playdek were going to make an iOS version of Twilight Struggle, I was quite excited. I supported the Kickstarter campaign with no hesitation. Playdek had always delivered good products (Ascension, Summoner Wars and Agricola on iOS), so I had high confidence. I only pledged for the iOS version and not other items like the PC version or the physical items for the boardgame. The iOS version was originally scheduled to release in Mar 2015, 9 months after successful funding. It was eventually released in Jun 2016, much later than expected. Thankfully I wasn't actively waiting for it. It was a fire-and-forget decision for me. Otherwise I would have been frustrated by the long wait. Now that it's here and I've played a few games, I'm happy with it, and glad to have supported making it a success.

It is not easy to transfer such a complex boardgame onto the small iPad screen. I must admit I took some malignant pleasure in thinking about how Playdek was going to do it. Now that they have done it, I must say they did a pretty good job. The user interface is intuitive. I can easily see information that I need, or if it is not immediately visible, I can easily find it. When fully zoomed out, I can see 90% of the world map, which is nice. I can zoom in to specific regions. At the lower left and lower right corners (see screenshot above), the square buttons let you do this. CA means zooming in to Central America, SA means South America, and so on. Near the top left and top right corners, the symbols in squares are events which are in effect. If you press one of the symbols, the relevant card comes up.

Each region has a little meter to let you know how well you and your opponent are doing. The Europe meter is near the left edge of this screenshot. The left half being filled with blue means USA has achieved Domination in Europe. A quarter on the right being filled with red means USSR has Presence. If you tap the meter, you'll be shown a detailed breakdown of how the region will score. See next screenshot below.

This is the scoring details screen for Asia. How many points each side will score are shown in the two columns on both sides. The big red 05 in the middle means USSR will net gain 5VP if the Asia scoring card is played. The Twilight Struggle scoring is a zero sum game where only one side will have points. If the other side scores, the former needs to lose points first, until it reaches zero, before the latter starts gaining points. The 06 in the red box at the top means USSR is currently in the lead by 6VP.

This is the space race. USA (blue frame) is at Step 2 and USSR (red frame) is still at Step 0.

This is Central America. In this screenshot I have opened up the game log details. These allow you to see what has happened throughout the game. Other than the game log, you can also easily check which cards are in the discard pile (it is especially important to know which scoring cards have been played and which are still to come) and which cards have been permanently removed from the game.

The Help button on the left (the green circle with a question mark) is very useful. It is context-sensitive. When I press it, it shows me the rules relevant to the action or screen I am executing or viewing. This saves me much trouble in searching through the rule book. One thing I don't like though is the tutorial. Twilight Struggle is a complex game and it is not easy to make a rulebook-for-dummies. I tried reading through the tutorial and I didn't have patience to complete it in one sitting. Later when I came back, I found that I had to start from scratch and I could not continue from where I left off. Eventually I decided to skip the tutorial and just went ahead to play. Since I had played the physical boardgame before I still had a general idea of what I was supposed to do.

This is the overview screen. It tells you which Turn you are in, how many Action Rounds there are in the current Turn, and which cards have been played in previous Action Rounds.

So far I have played against the AI four times, and I'm now in my 3rd game against Han. I found that I am lousy at managing the DEFCON level. The DEFCON concept in Twilight Struggle determines how close the world is to nuclear war. The DEFCON level starts at 5, which is the best and safest level. Each time a player initiates a military coup, the DEFCON level drops. Some card plays also affect DEFCON. If DEFCON hits 1, nuclear war breaks out and the world is destroyed. The game ends, and the player whose turn it is is the loser. In my first three games against the AI, I lost all three because of DEFCON (screenshot above). In one game, I played a card which required both sides to roll a die to determine who gained points. The card also allowed the victor to adjust the DEFCON level. I had misunderstood and thought the active player was to decide how to adjust the DEFCON. The AI won the die roll, and since it was the victor, it decided to lower the DEFCON, which was already at Level 2 when I played the card. Nuclear war broke out, and I was blamed because I was the active player at the time. In another game, I played a card which gave the AI 1 operation point when DEFCON was at Level 2. I had neglected that the AI could use this paltry 1 ops point to start a coup, which it did. DEFCON went to 1, and I was blamed again for destroying the world. I was schooled by the AI! I now appreciate much better the intricacies in managing DEFCON.

Now finally, one game that I did win against the AI. I played USA and I managed to reach 20VP for an instant victory. In my 4 games against the AI so far, it seems the AI doesn't put much emphasis on the space race. In this screenshot you can see my USA is already at Step 5 of the space race, but the AI's USSR is still at Step 1.

Before the iOS version was released, I hadn't played Twilight Struggle for quite some time, despite owning a physical copy of the game. It is good that the iOS version got me playing this great game again. I enjoyed my plays. It felt good getting to know the game again, appreciating the beauty in its design and the tactics required to win. In the past, I had never got to learn this game well because usually there was a long gap between each play. By the time I played again, I had already forgotten the tricks I learned from my previous game. The iOS version helped me learn and enjoy the game much better.

As with all digital implementations of boardgames, there is a risk of burnout due to playing too much within too short a time. I feel this a little with Twilight Struggle. With a physical boardgame, you can't avoid the "work" required in managing the components and in doing calculations in your head. Despite calling these "work", they are part of the fun too. Digital implementations remove these. It is good in that you save time and you get straight to the crux of the game. However it can also be bad in that the experience is too blunt, too condensed and too naked. Suddenly you feel you have seen all there is to it, because the trappings of playing a physical boardgame have disappeared. I find that I am now intentionally not playing Twilight Struggle too much so that I don't burn out on it.

One thing I like about the digital implementation is before you roll the die for an important move, your odds of success are shown. So you can always change your mind before you commit to your move. With this, I don't need to memorise the rules related to calculating odds. I just need to have a rough idea of the factors which affect my odds. This is very convenient.

One thing I notice is I rarely get to the Late War stage. It might be because I keep losing by DEFCON heh heh... This is a pity because I don't get to experience what the Late War is like. There is a Late War variant scenario which comes with the iOS version, which I think is meant to address this problem. It starts the game in Turn 8 (of 10). Han and I are trying this now. It seems to be very tough for USSR though.

Update 17 Jul 2016: I just realised I had misunderstood the rules for the Late War scenario. I had played two complete games assuming the victory condition was the same as the standard game. I lost the first game due to DEFCON and never got to the end of Turn 10. In the second game, I did get to the end of Turn 10 and the final scoring. Han played USA and he had around 5VP after the final scoring. However the app said I won. I was puzzled. I had to look up the rules before realising that the victory condition was based on USA having 20VP. USA needed to have more than 20VP after the final scoring to win the game. Victory was no longer based on 0VP. No wonder when I played USSR it felt so impossible. I didn't realise I was actually doing well keeping USA from reaching 20VP. I had thought I really sucked at this game. Embarrassing...

The AI that comes with the digital version is decent enough, but it is not as interesting as a human opponent. It is sufficient if you want to learn the game or if you want to play a relaxed and casual game. Once you know the game well, it probably won't be much of a challenge. Despite my blunders with the DEFCON level when I played against the AI, I generally managed to outscore it because I played more efficiently. If I had lasted long enough, I'm sure I would have won eventually.

If Twilight Struggle is a game that interests you, the iOS (or PC) implementation is a good way to get into it.

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introducing boardgames

Wed 22 Jun 2016 was a public holiday right in the middle of the week. It was difficult to plan anything elaborate for such an odd off day in the week, so I invited some colleagues over to play boardgames. Most of them have played some boardgames, but none are hobbyists like me. There are still many games they have not tried, so there are plenty of new-to-them games I can bring out. I have not been doing such a thing for quite a while - introducing boardgames to new (or relatively new) players. In recent years I mainly play with fellow boardgame hobbyists. It was only since starting a new job last year that I began playing games with non-gamers again - my colleagues. It is nice to play the role of experienced guide again, because I get to teach and play lighter games which I have not played for some time.

Escape: Curse of the Temple was probably the noisiest game we played that day. We made three attempts and failed at all three (it's a cooperative game). I wonder whether it was because we had five players, and the game is harder with five. I didn't join the first two games and only played the third because my friends wanted to see "how the expert did it". We still lost, but I'd argue at least we were closer to winning. We did get to the exit, but we didn't roll enough key symbols to allow everyone to leave safely. The real reason of the loss was not so much that we couldn't roll enough keys at that critical moment. In fact we shouldn't have put ourselves in such a situation in the first place. Earlier in the game we should have removed more gems from the gem pile so that we wouldn't need to roll that many key symbols to exit. It was frantic and fun, and we hadn't even started using any of the advanced rules or expansions.

Bohnanza was Uwe Rosenberg's magnus opus before he came up with the unusual idea called Agricola. It was a game I bought in the early days of entering the hobby. Bohnanza is a game of trading and negotiations.

When I taught the game, I told my friends the most important rule was you are never allowed to rearrange your hand. At the start of your turn, you must plant (i.e. play) the first card in your hand. Often doing this will disrupt your plans because that card is not the right card you want to play at that time. The whole idea of this game is trading away cards that will disrupt your flow, and getting cards that you want.

There are many types of beans. If you happen to be the only player planting a particular type of bean, it will be easier for you to collect that bean type because nobody else wants it. Normally your opponents won't allow you such a profitable monopoly for long though. In this game you can even donate cards that you don't want, provided the recipient is willing to accept them (he may choose not). "Donation" jokes abounded when we played (you'll need to know Malaysian politics to appreciate them).

Bohnanza works well with large groups. I think it plays best with 5 to 7 players.

I didn't join Funny Friends since it only supported six players. This is an adult-only game of life. I introduced the game by saying it was a game of promiscuity. In this game you are going in and out of relationships with the other players and also NPC's (non-player characters). To win, you must achieve 5 life goals. Each life goal is defined by a set of personal characteristics, e.g. to be enlightened you need to achieve Level 3 in religiousness and Level 2 in intelligence. You have a player board which tracks all your characteristics, e.g. how much you drink, how fat you are, how much drugs you take, how depressed you are. To adjust your characteristics you compete with other players in bidding for life style cards. E.g. if you win the chain smoking life style card, your smoking stat will hit the roof and so will your sickliness stat.

The player board also keeps track of who your friends are, your current and past partners, and your children. Your one night stands are recorded here too.

revisiting Lord of the Rings

My gaming group of colleagues likes cooperative games. Now that we have completed Pandemic Legacy, we still have quite a few cooperative games lined up to play next, e.g. Lord of the Rings, Forbidden Island, Pandemic: The Cure, the various expansions of Pandemic, and Robinson Crusoe. They wanted to try Lord of the Rings next. So far we have played three games, twice playing just the base game, and once adding the Friends & Foes expansion.

24 Jun 2016. This was the first time I played with this group. Benz (green - Pippin) and I (blue - Merry) died first, and we were soon followed by Ruby (orange - Fatty). When I explained the game, I said the track represented how good or bad the characters were. The hobbits would gradually turn bad. When we had hobbits falling beyond the Sauron position, my friends interpreted it as "you're worse than Sauron!". I guess I still have room for improvement in explaining the game mechanisms in a way that makes sense to new players. In addition to this, I had also explained one of the player actions as praying. When you pray, you become a better man - so you take one step towards the good end of the track. So far my friends are buying it, although this may not make sense in all situations.

The other two hobbits in this game were Xiao Zhu (yellow - Frodo) and Edwin (red - Sam). They didn't last much longer than the rest of us. Sauron soon caught up with them. Sauron reached the #1 position, when they were at positions #1 and #2, killing both at the same time. I think this was the first time ever I had Sauron at the #1 position. I don't remember having lost so spectacularly before. So Xiao Zhu and Edwin had to take a commemorative photo with Lord Sauron. All hail the new boss!

Playing Lord of the Rings again after such a long time reaffirmed how much I like it. Each time you need to draw a tile, it is a nervous moment. You are often caught in dilemmas. You want to collect the many powerful cards on a scenario board, but can you afford to risk the events (almost all bad) occurring? You have the right cards to rush to the end of the scenario board, but you are still missing some life tokens (without which you will be corrupted). Do you rush or do you stay and gamble, hoping to grab a few more life tokens before events destroy you? I find that new players tend to worry more about the missing life tokens. I am usually more concerned about escaping the events and finishing a scenario board as soon as possible. I don't know for sure whether I am right. Maybe I'm just conservative so I'd rather accept the corruption damage that is knowable than risk getting hit by an unknown number of additional events.

Before I taught my friends Lord of the Rings, I was a little concerned whether they would like it. The previous game we played together was Pandemic Legacy, where most of the game elements were easily relatable. The game mechanisms in Lord of the Rings are more abstract. There is no map. The ideas of friendship, traveling, fighting and hiding are implemented in a rather abstract way. Thankfully they did like the game.

At times when we played we became rather superstitious. Sometimes we had incredible stretches of bad luck, and we'd say the active player had a cursed hand. Sometimes he or she would switch to using the left hand instead, hoping to change fate. Sometimes when one player offered to reveal the next tile for another, the active player would be alarmed and would yell "hell no your hand is crap!" You can say we were really immersed.

I am thankful I had bought all the expansions to Lord of the Rings. My copy of the base game is the old version. The new base game has a different design which doesn't match the old expansions. So far I haven't heard anything about expansions being released for the new base game.

There is one thing in the Friends & Foes expansion which I don't like. In this expansion foes are introduced. If the first tile you draw on your turn is a good tile, a foe will appear. This means regardless of whether the tile you draw is good or bad, something bad will happen. For me, this eliminates the warm I-feel-lucky-today feeling which I get in the base game. If I think rationally, I can understand this is necessary in order to balance the game. The expansion does not just add foes and other new challenges. It also provides more tools to help the hobbits complete their mission. For me, preferring the base game over the expansion is the heart talking and not the brain. I do like the additional locations and characters that come with the expansion. I wish I could have them without this bad-is-guaranteed situation. I am perfectly happy to play just the base game, if I only play Lord of the Rings once in a while. If I play it more frequently, then I will be adding the expansion, for the variety.

We still need to beat Friends & Foes. After we manage that, we may move on to the Battlefields expansion, and then maybe the Sauron expansion. The latter will be a little different, because it's no longer fully cooperative. It is one (Sauron) against the rest (the hobbits).

Pandemic: Legacy

Plays: 4P x 17.

I need to use a different format to write about Pandemic: Legacy, because there will be spoilers, and I don't want to spoil the game for those who have not yet played it, or have not yet completed it. I will split my post into two halves. The first half will describe the game to those who have not played it and include what I think about it. In the second half I will share my story with those who have also completed the game. If you have not finished the game, I recommend skipping the second half.

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Part 1

The Game

Let's start with talking about the original Pandemic, a cooperative game first released in 2008. At the time there weren't many cooperative games, and it was well received. The idea is that four diseases are rampaging around the world, and the players need to work together to treat the sick, to prevent outbreaks, and ultimately to find cures to all four diseases. Pandemic: Legacy is based on the same premise, with the addition of the Legacy concept and story. The Legacy concept first appeared in Risk: Legacy (2011), the idea being that each time you play, the game board, the game components and the game rules may change, and these changes are permanent. You play an evolving game. Your decisions, or events that occur in the game, have permanent effects which apply to all future games you play. You discover the story bit by bit.

When you open up Pandemic: Legacy, one of the first things you'll see is a stack of large cardboards with many little windows. These are your top secret documents. You only open specific windows when explicitly instructed to do so. There is a thick deck of Legacy cards which drive the game. There are 8 sealed boxes which contain additional game components. Pandemic: Legacy is a long campaign to be played over 12 in-game months. You play at most two games per month. Whenever you win a game, you proceed to the next month the next time you play. If you lose both attempts at a particular month, next time you proceed to the next month. Each month there are new Legacy cards you have to read. They are the next installment of the story, and they introduce new rules and new components. If you win every single time, you'll be playing 12 times. If you really suck, you'll get to play 24 times. After you complete December, you won't be able to play again, since the story has ended, and the gameboard and game rules will have changed to a point that it won't be balanced to try to continue from there. You can still play the basic Pandemic game, ignoring whatever changes you've made throughout the campaign, but I think having gone through the Legacy experience, the basic game will feel bland.

You can play basic Pandemic using the Legacy version. I did this with my children before I played the Legacy rules.

The artwork and components have changed. My copy of Pandemic is the very old first edition. Compared to that version, the new components are much smaller and less obstructive. It's easier to read city names on the board. I'm not sure how they compare with the newer versions of Pandemic though.

Those boxes in the lower right are the objective boxes. Unlike basic Pandemic, you will have multiple objectives. You need to complete a certain number of objectives to win the game, depending on which month you are playing. Finding cures is just one of them. Sometimes you may have more objective cards than the number required to win. Then you can choose which ones to do. You can pick your characters and the government funding cards (event cards) to support your strategy.

Your HQ is still the CDC in Atlanta, but this may change as you play. You may choose to build new permanent research labs. In future games, the cities with such permanent research labs will get a lab at the start, you can you choose such a lab to be your starting location.

In this photo Hong Kong has a white house-shaped sticker next to it. This is your permanent research lab.

Those stickers with numbers (1's in white circles, 2's in yellow explosions) indicate cities which have had outbreaks. Upon each outbreak, the panic level increases, and you paste a sticker next to the city. This is permanent. In future months the city starts with this panic level. At Level 1, there is no impact. From Level 2 onwards, the people start rioting. Any research lab is destroyed and you can't build any new one. The airport is closed so you can't take a direct flight in or a chartered flight out. You have to get in or out by land, from or to a neighbouring city. At Levels 4 and 5, the situation gets so bad that to get in, you need to discard cards of the same colour as the city. Due to this escalating panic level where there is no turning back, you need to be extra careful with outbreaks. It is quite scary. Every game you play will be tougher than before because the panic level can only worsen. However, to balance things out, at the end of every game, regardless of win or lose, you get to pick two upgrades which will help you in all future games. Upgrades include additional abilities for characters, breakthroughs which make diseases easier to cure, new permanent buildings on the board and additional powers for player cards.

On the character card on the left, the white stickers are relationship stickers. You can establish such relationships between characters, e.g. they become colleagues, family members or even rivals. Such relationships give additional abilities to both characters involved. This is another area to make use of.

Outbreaks increase the panic level of a city. They also harm characters who are on site, leaving scars. Scars are disabilities which reduce the efficiency of the characters permanently. The character cards only have spaces for two scars. If you need to take a third scar, your character dies. You are supposed to tear up the character card, so that you will never be able to use that character again in future games. The friends who played with me tended to stick to the same characters, while I preferred to experiment with different characters. I usually check the objectives of the current game and the board situation, and agree on a general strategy with my teammates, before picking my character. My friends were much more attached to their characters than me. We had a big shock in one game when Ruby's character Kawasaki died due to getting a third scar. He died in Lagos, and we were truly pained to lose him. After he died, whenever we passed by Lagos we would say we were visiting his grave. Whenever we were lucky with our card draws, we said he was watching over us from above. Whenever we ran into a situation where his abilities would have been handy, we were reminded how much we missed our fallen comrade.

As the in-game months went by, more and more rules and new gameplay elements were added. Individually none of them were complex, but as these additions piled up, there were quite many details to remember. We often had to remind one another.

I played all my 17 games with the same bunch of friends. Throughout our games we established our quirks and in-jokes. One of these was how we renamed some of the cities (e.g. due to misreading when it's upside down). Montreal became Monorail. St Petersburg became Sri Petaling, a suburb near our office. Essen became Eason (the Hong Kong singer). Sometimes when a player took a wrong route, taking a longer way than necessary and thus wasting actions, the others would start teasing him about his malfunctioning Waze (navigation system). This happened the most with Xiao Zhu, and I was the one who nagged him the most for poor navigation.

The Thoughts

If I consider Pandemic: Legacy from a traditional, game mechanism angle, I don't find it particularly clever or awe-inspiring. It works well enough, but it doesn't give me that masterpiece wow factor feeling. However if I am to measure how good the design is by how much fun I had with it, then this is a top grade design. Pandemic: Legacy is a truly memorable game. It doesn't just tell you a story, it makes you live the story. You are part of that story, and you are doing your best to give it a happy ending. Playing this long campaign is like following a good TV series. You keep looking forward to what is in store for you next.

This is a play-once game. You do get to play multiple games, but once you complete the campaign, you are done with the game. This is much like TIME Stories and Tragedy Looper. You can't unknow what you already know. This is not a problem, just a statement. I got 17 plays out of the game, so I say it was well worth it.

This game should be played with the same group of friends from beginning to end, January to December. Rules are added from time to time, so if someone joins halfway, it can be a pain for him to catch up. More importantly, this game is all about a shared experience. It is much more meaningful if everyone goes through the whole story together. You share all the surprises, the pains, the glory, the elation, and all sorts of emotions. You build a strong comradeship. If you keep swapping players from one game to the next, much of the pleasure of a shared experience will be lost. I was lucky to have a group of loyal players. We were five (the game supports at most four). Benz usually played support, helping us with managing some of the game elements and participating in our discussions on strategy. When one of the others couldn't play, he stepped in. We spent two and a half months playing through the campaign. It felt like we had gone on a long trip together. We brought back many shared memories, shared jokes, anecdotes which only we would appreciate, and of course - group photos!

One childish pleasure I get from the game is stickering. There are many stickers in the game. When an outbreak occurs, you need to add a sticker to increase the panic level. All of the upgrades in the game are stickers. New rules come in the form of stickers to be pasted into the rulebook.

The surprises that come with the game are fun. We were always eager to start a new month and see what was going to happen. There were new legacy cards to read, new secret document windows to open, new game components and rules to be introduced.

One advice: take note that the legacy cards will only tell you to open windows on the secret document sheets, and not the sealed boxes. When I played, I accidentally opened a box too early, because it had the same number as a window. That confused us quite a bit until we realised our mistake.

I also made a mistake with the disease research upgrades. They must be upgraded in a particular order. You can't have a level 2 upgrade without the level 1 upgrade. I missed the numbering system and jumped straight to the stronger upgrades. That gave us an unfair advantage. This was offset somewhat later due to a situation which occurred in one particular game. Thankfully the mistakes we made did not unbalance the game too much. We still had great fun. That's what's important.

I heartily recommend Pandemic: Legacy.

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Part 2

If you have not played the game, or have not completed the game, I recommend stopping here. Proceed at your own risk. Spoilers ahead!

The Play

I played Pandemic: Legacy with a fixed group - Benz, Ruby, Xiao Zhu and Edwin. I have taught them basic Pandemic before, and they liked it. Pandemic: Legacy supports up to four players. Usually Benz was the one who played support while the rest of us were the official players. Since this is a cooperative game, he could participate and enjoy despite not controlling any character. Sometimes when one of us could not play, he stepped in to play. We played at the office, on Fridays at the end of the day. It had become an unspoken arrangement. We all tried to get our work done quickly so that we could sit down to play. Sometimes other colleagues came to watch us play.

The mutating disease in our game was the black disease. When the first Faded appeared (patients with transparent skin and violent behaviour) and I announced it to my teammates, their first reaction to this name was "you mean they're fat?" We speak Mandarin, and "Faded" sounds like "the fat ones" in Mandarin (肥的). Since then all our encounters with and discussions about the Faded became discussions about the fat ones. Silly fat jokes abounded. "No way I'm not going there I don't want to get fat", "Who says I'm fat?", "You're already fat so you don't need to fear them anymore."

Xiao Zhu's favourite character was Shirley Jones the scientist. She played a very important role in our games because she was almost always the one finding cures. Her ability allowed us to find cures using one card less. We also made upgrades to two of the diseases so that they required one card less. That means for two of the diseases Xiao Zhu only needed three cards to find a cure. He kept calling her the doctor though (because of her white robe), and I kept telling him no she's a scientist dammit.

Ruby's favourite character was Kawasaki, the dispatcher. His ability was very handy too. We used it frequently to allow one player to meet up with another. Sometimes it was to allow them to pass cards. Sometimes it was to simply to help them move about more efficiently. When Kawasaki died in Lagos, my teammates were very tempted to just pretend he hadn't died, so that we could continue using him. However I was quite insistent on following rules and playing according to the spirit of the game. So Kawasaki stayed dead. It was painful, but that was what made the experience so memorable.

I didn't have a favourite character. I played whomever I thought would help the current game the most. I named this character Jon Sanders, because he was a colonel, and I thought it would be funny to have KFC in the game.

Edwin's favourite character was Ellie the generalist. She was the most used character. After Ruby's Kawasaki (the dispatcher) died, she was forced to pick other characters. Xiao Zhu used Shirley the scientist a lot, but he had picked other characters too. Ellie gained some scars quite early in our games, so we gave her an upgrade which prevented her from taking more scars. This meant she became invincible. Since she had entered god mode, the rest of us kept encouraging Edwin to pick her. He was more than happy to oblige. When the Faded crisis erupted, she was often the one expected to go deep into Faded territory, because she was not afraid of getting injured. She could live with the fat ones. Once, she came very close to being lost. When the traitor incident happened, if I hadn't picked the quarantine expert that game, we would have found her to be the traitor. Instead, we lost the quarantine expert. That was painful too, because her power was very handy. She was one of the characters I liked better.

We called these semi-transparent patients the fat ones. Thankfully we managed to seal off the Faded (black) region from the rest of the world using permanent road blocks. We didn't have any Faded outside of the originally black cities.

In this photo you can see that all the black cities have become green Faded cities. We were lucky to have kept Karachi stable. It never reached panic level 2, so our research lab cum airport remained safe. It was our gateway to Faded territory throughout the campaign.

This was the situation at the end of August (in-game August). The cure for the Faded had not yet been found, so we could only control it as best we could using quarantines. Riyadh in the Middle East had fallen - panic level 5. It was a pain to get into fallen cities, so we closed it off using permanent road blocks and completely gave up on it. At least if an outbreak occurred there, the road blocks would prevent the outbreak from spreading out.

When the cure for the Faded appeared, and drug factories and pills came into play, we all exclaimed "How cute!"

When we played, our preference was always to push the story forward as quickly as possible. Whenever a new search mission came up, we put our focus on it. Most of the time we completed the search in the same month it came up. We were keen to see what we would find.

Once the cure for the Faded was found, our games became very smooth. In fact, it felt easy. The pills were produced quickly. We were able to vaccinate the Faded cities quickly. From then on, black cards from the infection deck became a welcome sight. Most Faded cities were vaccinated so most black cards had no effect. Only two of the Faded cities which had fallen took us longer to vaccinate.

We built the drug factories in North America, near our new HQ Mexico City. We had rioting in Atlanta so our original research lab was destroyed and we had to move base. Sometimes when someone forgot and returned to Atlanta, we'd make fun of him and say "the office has moved, we're no longer in Puchong!" We are colleagues and our office in real life used to be in Puchong.

This was the situation in October. Chennai, Riyadh and Delhi had fallen (big red cross). However we were already vaccinating cities (orange stickers with a syringe).

This photo was taken before we started playing December. Eventually we had four fallen cities. The fourth one was Sao Paolo in South America. In this photo you can see only two Faded cities were left unvaccinated, Riyadh and Chennai. In December, all previous objective cards had to be destroyed, to be replaced with two new ones. (1) We had to vaccinate all remaining Faded cities, and (2) we had to hunt for a stash of new viruses hidden in Atlanta. December was very exciting. We decided up front that we would give up on finding cures, since it was not an objective anymore, and it would cost us cards which we needed for the other objectives. We should try to focus on at least getting one objective completed, even if we were going to lose the first game in December. That would help us win at the second attempt, assuming the worst case that we failed the first attempt. We had only two more cities to vaccinate, but it was quite difficult to do due to them being fallen and cordoned off by road blocks. We did manage to do it eventually, and then we were down to one last objective. Time was running out, because there weren't many cards left in the player deck. We forged onward. At one point, we counted the remaining cards in the player deck, and found that we still had one round plus one turn left. There were 9 cards left in the deck. Ruby would take the next turn, and by her following turn, we must complete the objective. Else she would draw the last card, and we would lose. We checked the cards we had in hand, and we did have enough, and in the hands of the right players, to complete the search for the new batch of viruses. However there was one big problem. We still had one Epidemic card in the player deck. Once we drew it, the search target would move to the cold trail position, and our search would fail immediately. That meant we could only win if the 5th Epidemic card happened to be the very last card in the deck. Our hopes sank as we came to this realisation. With heavy hearts we continued to play. Every time we had to draw a player card, it was like waiting for the death sentence. We were very nervous. When we drew a card, we did it quickly and cast it on the board. Every card draw was a nail-biting moment. Card after card was drawn, but the Epidemic card still didn't come. The feelings of both dread and hope intensified. When it was Edwin's turn to draw cards, there were only three left in the deck. Now throughout this game he had had very bad luck. Many of the previous Epidemic cards were drawn by him. We all said to him that he was going to be the one to lose the game for us (what horrible teammates we were!). To our surprise, both the cards he drew were not Epidemic cards! We screamed and we cheered. We laughed and we jumped. It was a 1 in 9 chance! We couldn't believe our luck. After we settled down, I noticed something on the map - we had four yellow cities connected to one another which were all on the verge of outbreaks. Edwin still had to draw infection cards. If any of these four cities got a new infection, it would trigger a chain reaction of outbreaks, and we would exceed the outbreak threshold and lose the game. In the end, Edwin lost us the game afterall. One of his infection card draws was one of those four cities. We had gone from hopelessness to exhilaration and then back to agony. What a rollercoaster ride! It was a spectacular loss.

Sao Paolo was what caused us to lose. It was right in the centre of the four cities on the verge of outbreak. If only it had one disease cube less...

For our second game in December, we only had one objective to complete - finding the stash of new viruses in Atlanta. Again, we ignored finding cures so that we could conserve cards for the search. We managed to find the stash, which brought the campaign to a perfect happy ending.

Feeling very blessed to have a group of friends to share this journey with me - me, Edwin, Benz, Ruby and Xiao Zhu.