Pandemic Legacy. Season 1, September

What a game, so much happening and an unexpected ending.

As Hannes was absent, Kobe played the Quarantine Specialist, Leander the Dispatcher (as usual), I played the Medic and Tarek insisted on playing the Soldier (John J. Rambo). he would regret that later in the game. We debated using at least one other character to play this game, but decided we needed these 4 to have at least a shot at winning this game.

First of we got a new objective : find a deranged soldier who's been telling conspiracy theories about the origin of the COdA-virus (yellow in our game). So a new search track to find this guy.

When we marked the infected cities on the board we had a lot of faded cities targeted (I think 2 with 3 figures, 2 with 2 figures and 1 with 1 figure), so not a great start.

We managed to find the 'crazy' soldier fairly quick (I think in the first two rounds or so), but then the game exploded, because we had to open package 6 and the whole game changed :
- The COdA-virus was engineered (no surprise there), and released intentionally on the world by the Zodiac group
- We found the Virus Development Records we need to find a cure for COdA (got it from a Sgt. who repented his actions on releasing the virus on the world
- So it seems we have been fighting (partly) on the wrong side of the battle. We are now being asked to destroy the paramilitary apparatus we have set up ourselves (destroy the military bases), because they are going to prevent us from vaccinating (when we find a vaccine) effectively
- The 'have a military base in each of the six major regions of the world'-objective is destroyed
- We have a new objective : destroy 2 military bases (you need the city-card of this base to do so)
- We have a traitor in our midst : the character with the paramilitary escort character upgrade. Which of course is our Soldier John J. Rambo (code-name Sagittarius a member of the Zodiac group). He has now disappeared. His character card is destroyed (and Tarek needs to play a civilian for the rest of this game)

At this point we didn't see a way to win the game, because everything was set up against us :  a lot of faded figures, the red virus expanding a bit (but not much), the black virus expanding a lot, and the blue virus finally appearing on the board.

But we had to play on, so we decided to go for the following objectives :
- Place a Quarantine marker on 7 faded cities (as we cannot cure faded cities, we always place as much Quarantine markers there as possible, so we just had to keep this up
- We already found the 'crazy' soldier (so that objective was done)
- The hardest : find a cure for the three other diseases

Normally we try to cure one disease and try to eradicate it, so we get some breathing room. That was not an option this time around, because we simply did not have the time to do so. So on each ones turn we debated what was the best action to take to 1. get the faded figures under control as much as we could (without soldier, but with Quarantine markers) 2. get the right cards to the right person so we could cure these diseases.
There were some things that worked to our advantage here :
- the first epidemic had fallen fairly quick, the second very late and the next two very quick again. In the beginning of the game we had a lot of faded cities in the infected discard pile, but because we got the epidemics quickly in a row at the end, there were not a lot of faded cities that got worse at the end.
- We had the Medic to control those other viruses a little bit (he can do only so much)
- We had the Dispatcher to move us around to get the right card to the right person

We made it with first me curing the red disease and the next turn first Kobe curing the blue disease and Leander the black disease. Tarek (as a civilian) did not do much anymore, but placed enough Quarantine markers to get that objective to

We did not expect to win this game, but were very glad to do so. It was a very close call though

We now have:
- Stickers for Sabotaged military bases
- New Equipment : C4 (discard to sabotage a military base) x2, Riot gear (show to not get a scar in a faded city) x3, Parachute (show to charter to a rioting or collapsing city). For this last one I think you still need the original card to get there though
- Some new character game end upgrades : Shady background (play any card matching the color of the city you are in to perform the sabotage action), Hero (you may do self sacrifice at any time, no action), Multiple identities (you may take the shuttle flight action to travel between any two structures)

We had a problem for our game end upgrades :
- The soldier was destroyed
- The Quarantine specialist and the Medic had no more space left for a character upgrade
- The Dispatcher had one space left for a character upgrade
- All our other Game end upgrades were depleted
- So we chose to get the new equipment in the game and selected 2x C4, 2x Riot gear and 2x Parachute (as 1 game end upgrade is 3 equipment cards)

Can't wait for the next game