Pandemic is one of the most acclaimed board games of all time. Released in 2008, it casts players as a team of medics fighting deadly diseases around the globe, and its combination of cooperative gameplay and steadily mounting tension made massive hit with fans and critics.
Over the years it has spawned an ever-expanding line of spin-offs, with one recent entry standing out above the rest: 2015's Pandemic Legacy: Season 1. Legacy takes the original game’s blueprint and adds a story-driven campaign mode where your successes and failures permanently alter the game. Cities are lost, scrubbed from the game board. Cards are torn up. Co-created by design partners Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau, its twisting episodic plot sees characters suffer trauma and death. Many players have called it the greatest board game ever made.
Now its creators are back with a hotly anticipated sequel. I caught up with them at the annual Essen Spiel board game show in Germany to find out what fans can expect from Pandemic Legacy: Season 2, shipping now, and what it’s like to be in the unique position to create a direct sequel to… a board game.
Initially, Pandemic Legacy’s creators had a hard time getting their heads around the success of their first collaboration.
“It just doesn’t seem real,” says Leacock. “I look at online rankings and see it in the number one spot and it just doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Yeah,” adds Daviau. “I just think: ‘Why is that number one? I did that!’ But it made my career, so I’m obviously very happy with it.”
Thanks to the long lead time required in the tabletop world, the two have been hard at work on a sequel to their narrative-driven game since before the first edition was even released, and there are some big changes in store for fans of the previous installment. Where the events of Season 1 took place in a modern-day setting, the follow-up is a direct continuation (that can also stand on its own), imagining a bleak future for humanity in a world ravaged by disease.
“When the game starts there are three havens in the world, which are sort of the last bastions of human civilization,” Daviau explains. “Every year the leaders of the havens get together and go on a kind of business retreat, then they come back and reallocate resources and give an update to their people. Then one year they just don’t come back.
“So the people in the havens are waiting and waiting, and they’re like: ‘Should we look for them?’ Then a few people step up and say: ‘Well I guess we’re in charge now,’ and that’s who the main characters are.
“You don’t start as these big important people. You start as an everyperson, you’re thrust into a role you weren’t prepared for, and you’re really left with a mess on your hands because there aren’t enough supplies and all the people who actually know what they’re doing are gone.”
If Season 2’s storyline is a departure from its predecessor, and there are also some big changes to the game’s mechanical core. It raises some interesting questions about what it means to make a sequel to a board game - a medium that is no stranger to expansions, new editions, and other extensions, but one in which a true sequel is remarkably rare. If Pandemic Legacy Season 2 is no longer about racing around the globe to cure disease, is it still Pandemic? Would players still be interested?
Daviau says he and Leacock realised the importance of giving fans a new experience after Season 1’s lengthy campaign.
“We realised that if you’ve played Season 1, you’ve played 15 to 18 games which were a variation on basic Pandemic, so we wanted to make sure that when people played this season it was a fresh beginning for them,” he says.
“We really questioned a lot of our assumptions and asked whether the opposite would lead to an interesting design space. So in Pandemic, cubes on the board are bad. We said: ‘What if cubes on the board are good?’ Now instead of clearing them off the board, you’re trying to deliver supplies to the last remaining cities to help keep them alive.”
"Instead of this finite moment, it creates dozens of little moments..."
Other changes are designed to ramp up the game’s sense of drama and uncertainty. Where Season 1 saw characters dying after suffering three injuries, the new game uses a hidden system that looks like a lottery scratchcard. Players scratch off a box whenever their characters get stuck in infected cities. It means there’s no way of knowing whether a risky move will have fatal consequences.
“Each of the character cards has scratch-off material where you can suffer scars or even die when you’re exposed to disease,” says Leacock.
“Yeah,” Daviau chips in. “In Season 1 you knew that after two scars, you would die. That meant you could predict it, you could have a noble death and a big heroic moment. But this time you don’t know how much time you have left, and it really increases the tension.
“Instead of this finite moment, it creates dozens of little moments where you’re like: ‘Gyaaaaah, oh, I’m okay!’ or you get a scar and you’re a little messed up, or the inevitable, you’re just dead.”
Another major change is the game’s map. Where Season 1’s board showed a world full of interconnected cities, Season 2’s starts out almost entirely blank. Players discover new regions as they play, revealing areas of the world over the course of their campaign.
“It’s all about that sense of wonder and discovery,” says Daviau.
“The more you don’t see, the more compelling it is and you the more you speculate about what it could be. We took that approach and applied it to the board. So you know you’re going to see more of it than when you start, but you don’t know what’s going to be there.
“It’s about making people wonder what comes next. I think very few people would guess exactly what you find out there.”
"It gave us the freedom to do things that we couldn't do in Season 1."
The designers have worked to bake this air of suspense into almost every aspect of the game. In fact, Leacock says they approached its development almost like writing a mystery novel.
“With Season 1 we started with basic Pandemic - the Pandemic that you get off the shelf - and took it in a different direction,” he says. “This one was interesting, because we planned out a lot of the end state of the game and then worked backward, so it got richer and richer as we kept making progress on it.”
For Daviau, the approach offered a chance to focus on the creative aspects of building a new and immersive in-game world.
“My business card says: ‘World Builder,’” he says. “My mother kept asking me: ‘Do people who would hire you know what that means?’ But yeah, I love making up stories and worlds, so given the chance to speculate on a world that doesn’t yet exist, it’s just a lot of fun because we get to make up the rules.
“It gave us the freedom to do things that we couldn’t do in Season 1, because that just wasn’t the way the world worked. It pushed new boundaries for us.”
With Season 1 proving such a hit, it’s tempting to assume that its successor could be something of a ‘difficult second album,’ with fans’ expectations weighing heavily on the designers. But in fact, Leacock says the response from players was instrumental in honing in on areas to improve the second time around.
"We tried to give people more control over the narrative."
“Once Season 1 hit the market we could pore over the feedback,” he says. “You get so many people playing it and you hear things, and we could incorporate that into the second season. We changed some really subtle stuff. We played a bit with motivation, the way you steer people and provide incentives.”
“We tried to give people more control over the narrative,” adds Daviau.
“Like in this game the way you explore the world is a little more in your control. And chances are you’re not going to see everything on your first time through. You’ll see 80-90% of it, but you’ll have to make certain decisions and say: ‘We don’t have time for that,’ or: ‘We can’t take care of that issue.’ So I think people will have more widely divergent experiences than with the first game, because one of the things we noticed was that people wanted a little more say over how their world went.”
While it may be two years since the first season of Pandemic Legacy hit store shelves, it remains one of few board games to incorporate such a pronounced narrative element. And while it might seem surprising that few other designers have tried to emulate its success, Leacock argues that it’s largely down to the difficult process of making these kinds of games.
“This is like designing 12 different sequential games,” he says. “And you want to give the players the freedom to move this way or that way so that the 12 games aren’t the same. There are balance issues, and if you want it to be really compelling then you need a good story. If you want to make something grand like this, it does require quite a bit of investment and design.”
“I suspect that a number of people toyed around with it,” says Daviau.
“And then they came to their senses and said: ‘Wait, I can do, like, five games in the time it takes to do one of these.’ Because as Matt said, there’s a lot of things you have to think of. You can give too many rules right away and confuse people, you can give not enough rules and people end up playing three games in a row that are just the same.
“I would love to see more. I expected a few more, but I’m very happy to have this little corner of the world to ourselves.”
But while similar legacy-style games are thin on the ground, other designers have experimented with some similar ideas. Near And Far, from creator Ryan Laukut, comes with a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style book with events that trigger across multiple linked scenarios, while the EXIT series by designers Inka and Marcus Brand reveal new information as players solve problems in an escape room style puzzle.
For Leacock, the community of designers coming up with innovative ideas like these goes a long way towards explaining the surge of interest in tabletop games, and he argues that as a social experience, board games have an advantage over their PC and console-based counterparts.
"Board games do a lot of things well that video games don’t, and video games do a lot of things well that board games don’t."
“I think you get a deeper personal interaction across the table,” he says.
“Especially with cooperative games where you’re having these heated discussions and the stakes are so high. You can look into the other players’ eyes and really argue things out in a way you can’t do with a computer mediating it. You have the interpersonal connection and the ability to really hash things out.”
“Yeah, it’s a different experience,” Daviau adds. “It’s like a book versus a movie in some ways. Some people might like one more than the other, but they’re both trying to effectively tell a story.
“I think board games do a lot of things well that video games don’t, and video games do a lot of things well that board games don’t. I always say a video game is like a photograph, and a board game is like an impressionist painting. We have to pick the things we’re going to focus on and let all the other details fall away, and you just end up with a different feel.
“I’m not going to grab someone by the neck and make them play a board game if they don’t want to, but I think there’s an increasing spectrum just of gaming as a hobby where the two will blend into one another. Maybe not today, but over time.”
Disclosure: Matt Leacock previously paid for the use of author Owen Duffy’s photography.
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